The kitchen smelled like onions and something faintly luminous.
He'd followed the voices down a staircase and through a hallway that had the upkeep budget of an afterthought — cracked grout, damp baseboards, light fixtures that worked but hadn't been cleaned since whoever installed them stopped caring, which was apparently a while ago. The body moved through it on autopilot. Feet quiet, shoulders in, taking up as little space as a person can take up while still technically existing. He let it. The body knew this hallway better than he did. Muscle memory is honest in ways that people aren't.
Two women. Gray uniforms. The older one was stirring a pot with forearms that suggested a lifetime of carrying things heavier than pots. Mid-forties, square jaw, the face of someone who'd decided her opinions twenty years ago and hadn't seen a reason to update them. The younger one was cutting root vegetables with a knife that needed sharpening three sharpenings ago.
They didn't see him for three full seconds.
He counted. Three seconds of standing in a doorway at normal distance, in plain sight, before either of them looked up. That wasn't the Ether Suppression skill on his Panel. That was something the original Ren had spent years perfecting without a skill tree: the ability to be in a room without being in the room. Social invisibility. Negative presence. The thing you develop when you learn that being noticed is, on balance, worse than being furniture.
Useful. He filed it.
The older one looked up first. Her face did a small, fast thing — surprise, irritation, and then a hard reset to neutral, like a screen flickering and rebooting. She looked at the bridge of his nose instead of his eyes. People did that when they wanted to approximate eye contact without actually making it.
"Young Master Ren." The voice was polite the way a locked door is polite. "You're up."
"I am."
His voice still caught him off guard. He kept his face still.
The younger one glanced at the older one. Quick lateral eye movement, slight head tilt. The kind of silent exchange that people develop when they need to talk about someone in front of that someone without words. He read it instantly — either the Cold Read skill or the version of it he'd built himself over twenty-two years of watching people's faces for signs of what they actually meant.
The translation was: he never comes down here.
"I need water," he said. "And food, if there's any."
Another glance. He never asks for anything.
"There's broth left from staff lunch," the older one said, after a pause that was half a beat too long for hospitality. "I'll heat some."
"Thank you."
A pause. A real one this time. He never says that either.
She ladled broth into a bowl and set it at the far end of the kitchen table. The far end. Maximum distance from where the staff would sit. Not hostile — habitual. This was where Ren Ashford's food went: at the margin. In the space that said "technically included, practically somewhere else."
He sat. He ate.
The broth was thin. Onion, some root vegetable he didn't recognize, salt, and a bone stock that had a faint glow to it — barely visible, a shimmer at the bottom of the bowl like light caught in oil. Beast bone, probably. Something from the other side of a Gate that had been killed, processed, and turned into soup base. He was eating monster broth. It tasted fine.
The stomach accepted it carefully, the way a machine accepts fuel after a long shutdown. He ate slowly. Not by choice — the body couldn't handle fast.
While he ate, he listened.
The women went back to their conversation. They dropped their volume by maybe ten percent. Not enough. They'd spent years calibrating their privacy settings around a boy who didn't listen, didn't engage, didn't register input from the world around him. That boy wasn't here anymore.
"—said the Second Young Miss is coming for the quarterly inspection. With the Matriarch's adjutant."
"When?"
"Eight days. Nine, maybe."
"Stars. Last time she had the east wing staff replaced over dust on a railing."
"The east wing wasn't the problem. It was him." A tilt of the chin. Toward the staircase. Toward his room. Toward him. "She saw the state of his quarters and told the Patriarch it was an embarrassment. Patriarch said let it rot."
Let it rot.
Three words. He chewed a piece of root vegetable and considered them. Victor Ashford, seventh-ranked Hero in the nation, a man with enough power and influence to reshape the political landscape of an entire continent, had been informed that his youngest son was living in conditions bad enough to embarrass a visiting family member. His response had been two syllables and a verb.
The younger one said: "Maren—"
"He's not listening," Maren said. The older one. "He never listens."
He took another spoonful and didn't look up.
She was wrong. But she didn't need to know that yet.
— ✦ —
Back upstairs. The body wanted the bed the way a compass needle wants north — an automatic pull, grooved by habit, pointing toward the place where the previous occupant had spent most of his time lying still and staring at the ceiling he'd just been introduced to.
He ignored it. He sat at the desk and opened the top drawer.
The journal was underneath loose papers and a pen that had bled ink into the wood. Standard composition pages, hand-bound, the cover worn soft from handling. He opened it and looked at the handwriting.
It told him more than the words did.
Heavy pressure. The pen pushed hard enough to leave grooves in the paper. Inconsistent letter sizes — the kind you get when the hand keeps stopping and starting, unsure whether it has permission to continue. Ink blots at the beginnings of words, where the nib touched the page before the decision to write had finished committing.
He'd seen this handwriting before. On intake forms. In waiting rooms. The handwriting of someone documenting their own decline without expecting anyone to read the report.
— ✦ —
The original Ren Ashford had been meticulous about his misery.
Not emotional. Not reflective. He kept inventories. Status reports filed to no one, on no schedule, with no audience.
Day 187. Father did not respond to letter #6. Expected. Documenting for completeness.
Day 203. Clinic visit. Doctor assessed Core as "incomplete." His word: like a sentence missing its verb. No treatment offered. He did not schedule a follow-up. Neither did I.
Day 245. Damian's promotion to B-Rank announced on the Link feeds. Celebration at the main estate. I was not informed. Found out through a news aggregator. The comments section was enthusiastic.
Day 312. Father did not respond to letter #11. Adjusting expectations. There are no expectations left to adjust, so I'm not sure what I'm adjusting. Maybe the definition.
Day 331. The scar itches. Maren says it's healed. I don't think she's talking about the same wound.
Day 347. I don't know why I'm writing this. No one reads it. No one reads anything I write or anything I am.
Day 351.
Day 352.
Day 353.
The last three entries were blank. Three consecutive days of picking up the pen, touching it to paper, and putting it down. The ink dots were still there — tiny, dark, at the top of three empty pages. The nib had made contact. The mind behind it had found nothing to convert into words.
He closed the journal.
He didn't need the rest. The picture was clear enough.
A boy. Eight years old. Sent to a branch estate by a father who'd decided — for reasons the journal didn't explain — that his youngest son wasn't worth keeping close. Given a room, a staff, a quarterly allowance. Not given training. Not given instruction. Not given attention in any form that could be mistaken for care.
The boy had tried. The early entries — Day 1 through Day 180 or so — had the rhythm of someone still pushing. Letters to his father. Attempts to train alone. Questions to the staff about the main estate, about his brother Damian, about his sister Elena. The answers were short. The letters went unanswered. The training produced nothing, because you can't teach yourself to fight from a book, and you can't grow a broken Core by wanting it to grow.
Day 200. The clinic visit. The doctor who said "incomplete" and didn't schedule a follow-up.
The scar on the throat dated to somewhere around then.
He touched it. The thin ridge of tissue, healed, permanent. Right-handed cut. Left to right. Standing in front of a mirror. Deep enough to scar. Not deep enough to finish.
Either the blade was dull or the boy flinched. He'd never know which. The boy was gone. The Panel said so in that flat, tidy font: no longer present. Like a reservation that had been cancelled. Like a subscription that had lapsed.
He understood the math. Not abstractly — specifically. He'd run the same numbers in a different body and arrived at a different method and gotten a result the boy hadn't managed. Two people. Two attempts. One succeeded. One didn't.
And now the one who succeeded was sitting in the other's chair, reading his journal, wearing his scars.
He put the journal back in the drawer.
He didn't say anything to the empty room. There was nothing to say. "I'm sorry" was a sentence for people who believed it changed things. It didn't. Words don't retroactively fill an empty page.
He picked up the device on the desk.
— ✦ —
The Link was this world's phone. Cracked screen. Ether-powered — pulsing with a faint blue light that he was starting to associate with the ambient energy that saturated everything here. The interface was touch-based and intuitive enough. He figured it out in thirty seconds and spent the next ninety minutes reading.
News feeds: Gate Break in District 14, Class D, resolved. Hero Rank #3 condemns Unawakened protest movement. Quarterly rankings update — no Top 10 changes. A reality show called Titan's Arena premiering next week, featuring B-Rank guild leaders competing for sponsorship contracts.
Social platforms: Combat highlight reels. Fan rankings. An argument thread titled "Is Shadow the Worst Element?" with four thousand comments, most of which said yes.
Educational archives: the Fracture, explained. Ether, defined. Awakened classification, detailed. The Seven Great Families, profiled. Gate taxonomy. Beast rankings. The Hero Association.
The world assembled itself in his head the way a puzzle assembles when you find the edge pieces first. Not complete. Not even close. But the borders were visible.
Fifty-three years ago, a wound opened in the sky and poured energy into the planet. The energy changed people — about twelve percent of them — giving them powers that scaled from "slightly better than normal" to "walking natural disaster." Those twelve percent had spent the last half-century reorganizing civilization around themselves, because that's what power does regardless of what the constitution says.
The other eighty-eight percent watched. Worked. Voted in elections that the powerful tolerated the way an adult tolerates a child's opinion about bedtime.
Ren Ashford — the name on his Panel, the name on this body, the name that now apparently applied to him — was in the twelve percent. Barely. The lowest possible category. An F-Rank with a damaged Core in a family of continental-scale weapons, occupying a position roughly equivalent to a typo in an otherwise impressive document.
He closed the Link.
The room was getting dark. The light fixtures activated on their own — warm, steady, automatic. Considerate, in a way that nothing else about this place was.
He sat in the light and thought.
He was inside a game he'd never played. A world with a story, with characters, with a plot that had been structured and populated with people who had roles and arcs and scheduled deaths. Ren Ashford was one of those characters. The Panel had told him so: Chapter 47, Death of Ren Ashford, scheduled. A script with his name in it and a line through his part.
He didn't know the plot. He didn't know the hero. He didn't know which characters mattered and which ones were furniture and which ones were supposed to die at convenient moments to advance someone else's arc.
He knew he was one of the furniture ones.
And he knew — because the Panel had told him this too, in that careful, neutral font — that the story was aware of him. Narrative alignment in progress. The script was adjusting. Accommodating the fact that the actor had changed, the way a river accommodates a rock: by flowing around it, or over it, or through it.
He needed to move. Not tomorrow. Not after he'd recovered. Now. Somewhere with information, with resources, with people he could learn from and infrastructure he could use. Sitting in this room was what the script expected. Sitting in this room was what the original Ren had done, and the original Ren was a canceled reservation.
He opened the Link again and searched for Zenith Academy.
The admissions page loaded. Requirements: Age 15-20. Rank F minimum. Sponsorship from a registered guild, licensed Hero, or recognized institution. Entrance examination in eighteen days.
He met two of the three requirements. The third — sponsorship — was the kind of problem that couldn't be solved from a branch estate in the middle of nowhere with twenty-three Ether Marks and a body that shook when it held a spoon.
He stared at the screen.
Eighteen days. No sponsor. No connections. No combat training. No resources. A Core that was one bad day from killing him.
The reasonable response was to close the Link and go to bed.
He started searching for information brokers in the nearest border town.
It took forty minutes of digging through forum posts, coded advertisements, and the kind of careful, indirect language that people use when they're operating in the gap between what's legal and what's possible. One name kept surfacing. Not directly — in references, in recommendations, in the spaces around conversations where someone had been mentioned and then not mentioned.
Zero.
Kael "Zero" Ashworth. Information broker. No registered guild. Operating out of Ashvale, a town seventeen kilometers from where Ren was currently sitting. Reputation: reliable, expensive, and moral in the way that a vending machine is moral — it gives you what you pay for and doesn't care what you do with it.
Also — and this was the part that made something at the back of his skull itch — operating in the exact geographic area where a discarded Ashford heir happened to live. Offering exactly the kind of service that a discarded Ashford heir would need to escape exactly this kind of cage.
Convenient.
In his experience, convenient things usually weren't.
But the alternative was the room. The bed. The journal. The slow, administrative decay of a life that had already been written off by everyone who had the authority to write things off.
He memorized the contact protocols and closed the Link.
Seventeen kilometers. He could walk it. The body wouldn't enjoy it, but the body hadn't enjoyed anything in a long time and wasn't likely to start now, so at least they were aligned on expectations.
He looked at the locked chest at the foot of the bed. He hadn't opened it yet. There was a key in the desk drawer — small, black, tucked under blank paper like someone had hidden it from themselves.
Tomorrow.
He lay down on the bed that wasn't his bed, in the room that wasn't his room, and stared at the ceiling that was starting, against his better judgment, to become familiar.
Sleep came faster than he expected. The body was exhausted in a way that went past tiredness into something structural. It pulled him under before he could resist.
His last thought, drifting, was about the journal. Day 347. No one reads anything I write or anything I am.
He'd read it.
He didn't know yet whether that mattered. But someone had, and the boy who wrote it was gone, and the man who read it was here, and the distance between those two facts was either a tragedy or a beginning and he was too tired to decide which.
The light fixtures turned themselves off.
The room went dark.
Seventeen kilometers south, in a border town called Ashvale, a man who went by Zero looked at a notification on his Link, read it twice, and smiled in a way that didn't reach his eyes.
He'd been waiting for this.