Rain slid down the side of the city like tears no one cared to wipe away.
It came every other evening—thin, gray, tasteless—and pooled between the broken bricks where Cael crouched with his hands deep in a rusted bin.
He was small enough to fit inside if he wanted, and often did when the wind turned sharp.
The smell didn't bother him anymore.
He'd learned to breathe through his mouth and keep his mind on the hunt: a bent spoon, a coin dulled to brown, the tin click of a lighter that still worked if you snapped it just right.
Everything went into his satchel—his collection.
A man once told him that junkyards were for trash, not treasure.
Cael had nodded and then, after the man left, found a pocketknife beneath a pile of soaked newspapers.
He polished it until it shone like a mirror and kept it wrapped in cloth.
It wasn't the knife he cared about—it was the feeling of having something that could be his.
He lived that way for years, scavenging and surviving in the city's forgotten corners.
He wasn't old enough to work, not lucky enough to be adopted, not cruel enough to steal from the living.
So he stole from what the living left behind.
At night he slept in a condemned apartment complex, third floor, window cracked just enough to hear the street.
His blanket was a patchwork of fabrics from different places: curtain silk, jacket lining, a piece of carpet.
He'd stitched them himself with fishing line.
Every piece had a story—some he made up, some he didn't remember making up at all.
Sometimes he'd watch the rich families pass under the streetlights: a mother's hand resting lightly on her child's shoulder, the flash of a gold bracelet.
They looked complete in a way that made his chest ache.
He didn't envy their warmth, only the certainty that the world belonged to them.
They owned their homes, their dinners, even their footsteps.
He wanted that.
Not to be loved, not to be saved—just to own something without fear of losing it.
One late evening he spotted a glint between the cobbles near the crosswalk—a coin, silver, polished by rain.
He stepped off the curb without thinking.
A shout, a blur of headlights, and then nothing but white.
The coin never stopped shining.
When he woke, the light was different—warm, sterile, humming faintly.
A ceiling lamp swung overhead.
The air smelled like disinfectant and flowers that didn't belong there.
He tried to sit up, but his arms felt new, smaller, softer.
Hands—tiny hands—rested on clean sheets.
Someone nearby whispered, "He's awake."
A woman leaned over him. She wore scrubs and a tired smile.
"Hey there, little one," she said. "You gave us a scare."
He blinked. The voice didn't match anything he remembered.
Her words sounded like English, but not quite the same—the accent clipped, modern, American.
"What—" His throat rasped. "Where…"
"You're at St. Mary's," she said. "Everything's fine. You're safe."
She thought he was a child, and maybe he was.
When she left, he turned his palms upward and stared.
Small. Smooth.
A second life.
The orphanage came later.
They said his parents had died in an accident, though nobody had paperwork to prove they'd ever existed.
He was placed in a squat building painted the color of oatmeal, its hallways echoing with footsteps and faint laughter.
He didn't laugh much.
Days became weeks, then years.
The calendar changed, but his habits stayed.
He lined his drawers with objects the others ignored—broken pens, torn movie tickets, bottle caps stamped with foreign names.
His bunkmate once teased him for it until he found the boy's missing watch and refused to give it back.
After that, everyone left him alone.
At twelve he was quiet but not shy, polite but detached.
He did chores early so he could spend afternoons alone in the storage room, sorting through donations before the caretakers noticed.
He liked the feel of old photographs—the gloss under his fingers, the faint smell of time.
Sometimes he'd close his eyes and imagine stepping into them: the ocean in one, the snow in another.
The thought always left his chest tight, like the world behind the paper was somehow closer to real than the one around him.
He grew quickly.
By fourteen his face had sharpened, his eyes a shade darker than amber, his hair refusing to stay combed.
The caretakers called him responsible; the younger kids called him weird.
He didn't mind.
He had a system, a rhythm—work, save, collect, catalog.
The same as before, only cleaner.
Yet the hunger never went away.
Every time he touched something new—a coin, a trinket, a photo—his pulse jumped as though claiming it filled a space nothing else could.
One afternoon he caught his reflection in the dorm mirror.
The boy staring back looked nothing like the one who had died in the street, but the eyes were the same: weighing, counting, already planning.
School was easy.
He memorized fast, wrote neatly, never drew attention.
The teachers liked him because he didn't cause trouble.
The other students ignored him because he didn't invite company.
He preferred it that way.
People were unpredictable; objects stayed put.
He began spending weekends downtown, walking through thrift stores and pawnshops.
The clerks thought he was running errands for the orphanage; he let them.
He'd buy small things—a compass, an old wristwatch, a pocket camera that still had film inside.
Each went into a small wooden box under his bed.
When the box filled, he started a second.
Sometimes, when the dorm lights went out, he'd pull the camera from the box and hold it up to the moonlight.
He liked how the lens caught reflections—how the world inverted inside it.
Looking through it felt like peeking into a place only he could see.
He was sweeping the storage room the night everything began to tilt.
The building was quiet; the others already asleep.
Dust motes floated through the beam of a single bulb.
He moved boxes aside, clearing a corner, when something thin slid out and landed at his feet—a photograph.
He crouched to pick it up.
The paper was old, the edges curled.
It showed a tower against a blue sky, iron lines crossing like a web.
He didn't recognize it, but a small caption on the back read Paris, 1999.
The image held his eyes too long.
The hum started faintly, like air conditioning far away, then deepened.
The floor trembled under his shoes.
Light bled from the photo's edges.
He blinked—and the air was gone.
Cold wind rushed around him, carrying the smell of metal and perfume and distant traffic.
When he opened his eyes, the tower stood before him, massive and glittering.
The ground beneath him was stone.
People walked past speaking French.
The photograph fluttered from his hand.
He stared, breathless.
The world felt real.
Every detail crisp, every sound distinct.
Then fear clawed in—how far had he gone?
Where was the orphanage?
He thought of his room, his bed, the boxes under it.
The air folded with a soft pop.
He was back in the storage room, gasping, heart hammering.
The photograph lay in his lap, unburnt, unchanged.
For a long time he didn't move.
When he finally did, it was to stand and check the corners, the walls, the floor.
Everything was solid, ordinary.
Only the faint smell of cold metal remained, like memory turned physical.
He locked the door and sat with his back against it, staring at the picture.
No dream felt like that.
No imagination carried the bite of winter air.
Slowly, a smile edged onto his face—the first in years.
If one picture could do that, what about the others?
He looked around the storage room: stacks of magazines, travel brochures, movie posters waiting to be sorted.
Thousands of images.
Thousands of doors.
His pulse quickened.
The hunger that had followed him from his first life stirred awake.
It was the same voice whispering through new walls: Take it. Own it. Make it yours.
That night, while the rest of the orphanage slept, Cael cleared the floor and spread the photographs out like a map.
Paris. Tokyo. Sahara. Venice.
He tried not to think of heaven or fate.
He thought of ownership.
If the world could be folded like a picture, then it could be collected, one frame at a time.
He didn't know how or why he'd been given this chance.
He only knew the rule he'd carried from one life into the next:
Everything worth having could be kept—if you reached for it fast enough.
He reached for the camera instead of the coin this time, adjusted the lens, and smiled at the inverted reflection of his own eyes.
"Let's start small."
Outside, the rain began again, tracing silver lines down the windowpane—each drop another world waiting to be touched.
Once he had nothing, now he shall have everything.