Falling shouldn't have room for thought.
There should be the drop, the scream, the impact. Clean.
Instead, the world stretched.
The floor vanished under my boots, and the muster hall tipped into the crack in the wall. Cadets, podium, instructor, ceiling—everything slid with me into a hard white glare.
Air hammered my ears. The sound of a hundred people trying to yell at once blurred into one long roar.
Then the fall glitched.
My body hung in mid-air. Weightless. Limbs frozen in whatever stupid flailing position they'd chosen.
My thoughts didn't stop.
In that slice of stillness, I saw the scene laid out around me like a paused feed:
Cadets suspended at different angles, hair and jackets frozen mid-swing. The instructor reaching out, teeth bared. The vertical wound in the wall behind her, frayed at the edges, spilling light.
Then the frame jumped.
Stone slammed into me from three directions. Shoulder, hip, knees—pain burst in staccato, then smeared into one long blur as I rolled. My ribs met something low and solid and decided that was enough.
The world went quiet.
Dust pressed against my tongue. My lungs forgot how to function for a second, then dragged in air in a ragged, painful gulp. It tasted like cold stone and a faint metallic tang that I was rapidly learning to associate with "physics has left the chat."
The muster hall was gone.
I pushed myself up onto my hands, then my knees.
I was in a courtyard.
The floor was made of square stone tiles, each one identical, laid in a grid so neat it felt like an error. No cracks, no stains, no chipped corners. It looked like a level designer had duplicated one tile a few thousand times and called it a day.
Three sides were hemmed in by high walls of the same stone. On the fourth, the floor ended in a jagged line and dropped into a pit of slow-churning fog. The fog rolled and folded, but it made no sound.
Above, the sky was wrong.
It wasn't open. It wasn't blue or gray. It was a low, smooth dome of colorless cloud, pressed close enough that if I'd stood on the wall, I might have touched it. Every so often, a ripple ran across it, as if something brushed past on the other side.
Around me, cadets shifted and groaned. Someone was swearing quietly. Someone else knelt with their head between their knees, fighting their stomach.
The shattered remains of the podium lay near one wall. The microphone stand had melted into a thin, quivering rod of metal that bent without really deciding which way.
My wristband was still on my arm. I lifted it.
The display spat static and went dark.
"Everyone who can move, sit up!" the instructor's voice cracked across the courtyard.
I turned.
She was on her feet already. There was a gash on her forehead, blood drying down one side of her face, and a layer of dust on her uniform, but she looked like the only part of the hall that had landed in the right orientation.
Her voice cut through the air with unnatural clarity. No echo. No rumble. The background sounds—the groans, the shuffling—felt oddly muffled beside her.
"If your neck hurts in a way that feels sharp, stay down and yell," she said. "If it doesn't, get upright. Now."
Bodies obeyed. First-aid lessons, PSAs, endless drills at school—everything they'd hammered into us about "post-incident procedure" rose out of the noise and ran on pure muscle memory.
I rolled onto my backside and pushed myself up. Every joint registered complaints, but nothing screamed in the "this is broken forever" way.
The sky rippled again overhead.
For half a second, the dome showed something else: fluorescent lights and a ceiling grid; then a blur of tunnel wall; then a glimpse of some other city's skyline, distant and strange. Then it all smoothed back to bland cloud.
The same wrong lurch I'd felt on the train crawled up my spine.
"We are in a Domain," the instructor said. "Not theory. Not simulation. Accept that first."
The word landed heavy.
"Roll call by rows. Name, Zone. If someone doesn't answer when they should, point at them."
Shaky voices started up, calling out. Ren, Jace, Zone 17–Lower. Other names. Other Zones. "Here." "Missing." "He's not waking up." The sound bounced around the courtyard and slid off the walls.
"Anyone can't feel their legs?" she demanded.
Silence.
Her shoulders loosened by half a centimeter.
"Good. Injured to the center. You, you, and you—tear that spare shirt into strips. Bandages, pressure, basic first aid. You—" she pointed at a tall cadet "—if anyone stops breathing, you yell until my ears bleed."
Her gaze flicked to me. "You. Name."
"Jace Ren," I said.
"Zone 17. You're vertical." Her chin jerked toward the left wall. "There's one down over there. Check if he's breathing. Don't move his neck. If he's not, scream."
Simple instructions were a blessing.
I got to my feet. The courtyard tilted once and steadied. The world had that brittle, too-sharp feeling it got before something else went wrong.
The cadet by the wall had landed badly. He was on his back, eyes half-open, chest rising and falling in fast, shallow pulls. Blood had matted his hair on one side, sticking it to the stone.
I crouched beside him.
"Hey," I said. "You with me?"
His eyes shifted toward me sluggishly. "Yeah," he breathed, voice thin. "Unfortunately."
"Breathing hurts?"
"Existing hurts."
"Good. Means it's happening."
His mouth twitched.
I held up my hands, fighting the urge to do anything useful with them. I wasn't a medic. The best I'd ever done was slap bandages on scraped knees and pretend they were proper battlefield dressings.
My fingers found the outline of something in my pocket.
I fished out the cheap coin. The fake Concord charm looked smaller in the courtyard's flat light. Its engraving had worn off years ago, leaving only a faint circle where the symbol had been.
I held it where he could see.
"Here," I said. "Squeeze this. As long as you're holding it, you're not allowed to die. I'm pretty sure that's how it works."
"Because… charm?" he muttered.
"Because I said so," I said. "Very official ruling."
He huffed weakly and curled his fingers around it until the tendons stood out.
"Name?" I asked.
"Arlen."
"Okay, Arlen. Keep breathing. It's obnoxious, but it beats the alternative."
Behind us, the instructor moved through the crowd, checking pupils, responses, limbs. Her voice came in short commands. Sit. Breathe. Look at me. Wiggle your fingers. Stay awake.
The walls didn't care.
A bulge swelled in the far right corner where stone met stone.
At first it just looked… wrong. The flat surface pushed inward like there was pressure building on the other side. Hairline cracks crawled out from the bulge, branching, pulsing faintly.
"Instructor," someone said. "Wall—"
"I see it," she said. "Everyone away from that corner. Center up. Move like you mean it."
Panic dug its heels in, then grudgingly followed orders. Cadets stumbled, limped, dragged each other toward the center of the courtyard. The scrape of boots on tile sounded muffled, like someone had put a layer of cotton over the world.
"Sorry," I told Arlen. "Relocation time."
I slid my arm under his shoulders and lifted as gently as I could. His face twisted, but his hand stayed locked around the coin.
We lurched toward the others. Every step made my shoulder complain in louder and more creative ways. The air thickened the closer we got to the middle, like the Domain didn't like us clustering.
The bulge tore.
Stone peeled back in curling layers, crumbling into dust before it hit the ground. Something pushed through the gap.
It crawled into the courtyard on four limbs that were just a bit too long in every direction. Its skin was thin and gray, stretched over bone in a way that made it look both flimsy and hard. Where its head should have been, there was only a smooth, rounded mass.
Each time it set a hand down, the grid lines between the tiles bent around it, warping, then snapping back.
My brain unhelpfully supplied every half-watched warning clip I'd ever seen. Stylized silhouettes. Labels like LOW-ORDER ENTITY. Do not approach. Do not engage.
The real thing was worse. The clips didn't show how the air seemed to tilt toward it.
"Instructor," someone breathed.
"Yes," she said. "That's a creature. Stay away from it. If it touches you, yell. If it opens anything else, yell louder."
She stepped between it and us, feet planting firmly, shoulders squared. Her hand went to her hip out of pure habit.
Her holster was empty.
She didn't swear. She just bent, grabbed a long chunk of podium, and tested its weight like she'd been born swinging improvised weapons at nightmare geometry.
The thing turned its smooth head toward her.
I couldn't see eyes, but I felt focus.
It moved forward, slow at first, limbs flowing rather than stepping. No sound from its hands on the stone, no rasp of breath. Every contact left a faint shimmer in the air that made my stomach pitch.
"Ren," the instructor snapped, not looking back. "Get him farther behind the others. Do not just stand there and wait to be interesting."
My legs wanted to lock. I forced them to work.
We staggered a few more steps back. Arlen's breath hitched against my shoulder. His hand crushed the coin.
The creature shifted its angle with us, adjusting without ever fully turning. It was keeping the instructor in the corner of its awareness… and heading for me.
A cold, precise fear slid into my ribs.
It gathered itself. Limbs coiled, muscles—or whatever it had instead of muscles—bunched under thin skin.
When it moved this time, it committed.
The distance between us closed in a handful of jerky heartbeats.
My body should have thrown itself sideways. It didn't. The moment stretched, again, a little too long.
If this were on a screen, this would be the frame before the protagonist gets—
A thought cut across the panic, clean and unnatural.
If that thing attacks me, something ridiculous is going to trip it.
The sentence slid into my mind like it belonged there.
The air shifted. Barely. Like the Domain had just nodded along with a new rule.
The creature lunged.
Three strides.
Two.
One—
Its front limb caught on a loop of fabric.
A cadet's dropped bag lay half-open between us, jostled there in the scramble. One strap had fallen across the tiles in a perfect, stupid arc.
The limb snagged. The creature's weight kept going.
Momentum did what fear couldn't.
It pitched forward in the ugliest fall I'd ever seen, faceless head smacking the stone with a wet, heavy sound. Its limbs scraped, claws gouging grooves into the tiles. It slid, shrieking in a noise like metal being dragged across its own spine.
Shock pinned me as effectively as terror had.
I hadn't moved. I hadn't spoken.
It had still fallen exactly the way that thought had demanded.
The pain hit a heartbeat later.
A spike drove through the middle of my head, behind my eyes, sharp and fast enough to blank everything else. The courtyard smeared, then snapped back into focus.
When the sting faded, something small and specific had gone with it.
I tried to picture the conscription letter in my room. I could see the paper pinned to the wall. I could see my own handwriting on the corner. But the exact text blurred like bad reception.
Cost, a quiet part of me said. For the thing that just obeyed you.
The creature thrashed, trying to fold its limbs under itself again. The instructor did not waste its humiliation.
She stepped in and brought the piece of podium down on the back of its neck. Once, twice, three times. Each hit sank into gray flesh that dented and rippled, trying to reassert its shape slower every time.
"Center of the yard!" she shouted between blows. "If it gets past me, you run until the walls stop!"
The tiles under my boots glowed.
A thin ring of pale light sketched itself around my feet, as clean and precise as a drawn circle. It hugged me, half a step out from my soles.
My heart lurched.
I shifted my weight back. The ring followed, staying centered.
The Domain's attention felt like it had narrowed to a point and that point was me.
Lines of light climbed my legs.
They moved fast and steady, tracing up over my clothes, along my ribs, over my shoulders, throat, jaw. It didn't burn. It didn't tingle. It felt like being outlined in a color no one else could see.
"Instructor—" I started.
My hands came together in front of my chest without my permission.
The clap cracked through the courtyard.
Sound cut off mid-screech. The creature froze half-rolled. Dust hung in the air as individual grains. The instructor's weapon hovered mid-swing, her expression still carved in motion.
Everything stopped.
Except me.
Light poured through my palms, then back into me, like someone had taken my silhouette, shaken it, and was now rearranging the pieces.
My bones shifted. It wasn't pain—more like the relief of stretching a cramped muscle, if you ignored the fact that the muscle in question was your entire skeleton.
My center of gravity slid lower and sideways. My hips recalibrated. The weight on my front changed. Lines I'd had my whole life redrew themselves in an instant.
Fabric cinched and loosened in different places as my clothes tried to keep up.
Hair brushed my neck and jaw.
The ring of light flashed once and went out.
Time lurched forward.
Dust hit the floor. The creature's limbs scraped. The instructor's improvised weapon connected with another crunching impact. Someone finished a scream they'd started a second ago and turned it up half an octave.
I stumbled, caught off-guard by my own balance. My stance was wrong by a few centimeters, and suddenly that mattered a lot.
I looked down.
Same boots. Same pants. Same jacket, a little tighter in new places.
Different body.
My legs were narrower. My waist pulled in more. My chest—
I stopped that line of observation before my brain decided to have a full existential discussion right there.
This isn't a trick, the thought came, clear and cold. This is still me. Just… a different version.
It felt like catching an unfamiliar reflection and realizing a second later that it was a mirror and not a window.
Behind me, the courtyard went weirdly quiet for a single shared heartbeat.
Dozens of people trying to understand what they were looking at in the same instant.
The instructor flicked a glance my way, eyes widening just enough to prove she'd noticed. Then she drove the podium shard down into the creature again. Priorities.
My own hands looked almost the same. Slightly slimmer. Same small scar along the thumb where I'd cut it on a broken mug when I was eleven.
"I really hope," I said under my breath, "this comes with a manual."
The creature twisted on the ground, making a final, vicious effort. One limb slammed down, shoving its torso up. Its smooth head turned.
It fixed on the brightest anomaly in the yard.
Me.
Of course it did.
Behind me, someone finally found their voice.
"Ren," they blurted, disbelief cracking the name in half, "why are you a girl?"
The creature surged off the tiles and launched itself straight at us.