The boy's name was Marco.
Cael learned this forty minutes after the sky broke, when the kid finally stopped shaking long enough to talk. They were crouched behind the dumpster in the pharmacy alley, the same gap Cael had squeezed them into, and the world outside was still tearing itself apart in ways that sounded like the end of a movie played at triple speed — screams, crashes, something rhythmic and heavy that might have been footsteps but couldn't have been because nothing that size should exist.
"Marco Reyes," the kid whispered. "I live on Coster. Mom's at work."
Coster Street was six blocks east. Cael had walked it a thousand times. He could see the route in his head — the shortcut through the laundromat lot, the gap in the chain-link behind the school, the underpass where the drain smelled like copper.
The lines appeared on the alley walls when he thought about the route. Stress patterns. Structural flaws. Every weakness in the brickwork and mortar lit up like a schematic drawn by something that cared only about how things break.
He closed his eyes. The lines vanished.
"Stay here," he said.
"Don't—"
"I'm going to look. Stay behind the dumpster. Don't move."
Cael edged to the alley mouth and looked.
The Greymire District didn't look like the Greymire District anymore. The intersection where he'd grabbed Marco had a crater in it — the concussive blast from the tattooed man. A fire hydrant was vomiting water into the street and the pressure was wrong, spraying in a twisting spiral instead of a geyser, as if gravity had opinions it hadn't shared before. Two cars were still crumpled in their parking spots, metal folded inward like origami.
No tattooed man. He'd moved on. Other sounds said he wasn't the only one.
Three blocks south, something was glowing. A pillar of orange-amber light pulsing from the second floor of a residential building. Through the broken windows, Cael could see a woman standing in the glow, her arms outstretched, and the walls around her were *growing* — not repairing, not reforming, but growing like living tissue, plaster stretching and reshaping into structures that shouldn't exist.
He focused on her. The lines appeared — different again. On the tattooed man, they'd been physical tells. Behavioural weaknesses. On this woman, they were... quieter. More structural. The lines traced the flow of whatever energy she was using, mapping where it entered her body (the back of her skull, the base of her spine) and where it exited (her palms, her fingertips). He could see the *pattern* of her power.
But that was it. He could see it. He couldn't do anything about it.
A familiar nausea crawled through his stomach. The same feeling he got at university when he could identify every flaw in a system but couldn't fix a single one. The logistics company had paid him to find inefficiencies, not to solve them. Someone else always solved them.
He looked at his hands. Focused as hard as he could.
Nothing. No lines. No weaknesses. His own body remained a blank wall — the one surface in the world his new ability refused to read.
He went back to Marco.
"Can you run?"
The boy nodded. His eyes were swollen. Grape juice had dried to a purple crust on the front of his shirt.
They ran.
---
Getting Marco to Coster Street took twenty-two minutes. It should have taken eight. But the city was a maze of new dangers now — streets blocked by rubble where someone had punched through a building's load-bearing wall, zones where the air felt thick and wrong, a two-block stretch where every piece of metal had fused to the pavement as though welded by invisible hands.
Cael used the lines to navigate. They showed him which fire escapes would hold weight and which would collapse. Which doors were structurally sound and which would fall if pushed. Which walls had gaps behind them, and which were solid enough to hide behind.
He couldn't fight. He couldn't fly. He couldn't crush steel or grow walls or make things explode. But he could see every crack in the world, and cracks were everywhere.
Marco's building was intact. His mother — a compact woman in a nurse's uniform — opened the door before Cael could knock. She pulled the boy inside so hard his feet left the ground. She looked at Cael, at the blood still running from the cut on his arm, at the glass fragments in his hair.
"Who are you?"
"Nobody. He was at the intersection on Vine."
Her face did something complicated. Fear, gratitude, suspicion, and the dawning horror of a woman who understood that her commute home was now a life-threatening journey.
"Your arm—"
"I'm fine."
He wasn't fine. The cut was still bleeding. But she had her son, and Cael had nothing left to give that moment. He turned and walked back into the broken world.
---
His apartment was how he'd left it. Door unlocked. Coffee stain on the floor. Phone face-down near the desk, screen cracked from the fall.
He picked it up. The insurance call had disconnected. No record of the strange message. No notification. No app. He checked every folder, every hidden menu, every cached file. Nothing.
[PERMISSION GRANTED] — he'd seen those words through the window from three flights down, reflected in the phone's glow as he'd fled the apartment. He was certain. Two words that turned the world into a diagnostic readout.
He sat down at his desk and started testing.
The mug. The one that had held the lukewarm coffee before the world changed. He focused on the handle. Lines appeared — clean, precise. The ceramic had a hairline stress fracture running from the handle's base to the rim. If he applied pressure at the junction point — roughly fourteen newtons — the handle would snap.
He gripped it. Applied force. Fourteen newtons was barely a squeeze.
Crack. The handle broke off in his palm. Exactly where the lines had shown.
The information had been right. Precisely, mechanically right.
He looked at the wall. Lines mapped the plaster — weak points, moisture damage, load-bearing studs behind the surface. He picked up a pen and marked the weakest point. Then he pushed. Two fingers. Moderate pressure.
The plaster caved inward, exposing the wooden lath beneath. Exactly where he'd marked.
He tried the desk. The locked drawer he'd lost the key to months ago. Lines appeared on the lock mechanism — he could see *through* the housing, somehow, to the internal pins. Three pins. The second was misaligned by 0.4 millimetres due to a manufacturing defect. If he jammed something thin into the keyhole at a twenty-degree angle and pushed down—
A paperclip. Bent. Inserted. Twenty degrees. Push.
The drawer opened.
Inside: his mother's hospital bracelet. Her handwriting on a birthday card. A photo of them at the lake when he was eleven. He hadn't been able to open this drawer since the funeral.
He closed it.
His hands were shaking again.
---
For the next hour, Cael dismantled his understanding of what he could do.
He could see structural weaknesses in objects. Walls, doors, furniture, glass, metal — anything with physical structure showed him its faults. But only faults. He couldn't see strengths. He couldn't see optimal configurations or repair solutions. Only where things would break.
He could read behavioural patterns in people — but only when he could see them. Through the window, he watched a man pace in the apartment across the street. Lines appeared on his posture, his gait, his movements. The man favoured his left knee. He checked the door every ninety seconds. His hands trembled when he passed the kitchen window. Reading: *injured, paranoid, dehydrated.*
He couldn't project anything. Couldn't shoot anything. Couldn't generate force, create shields, manipulate elements, or alter his own body in any way. [Analyze] was purely informational. It told him where things were weak. That was all.
He tried it on the sky. On the crack.
Nothing. The fracture line — that impossible seam of white light — returned no data. [Analyze] couldn't read it. Either it had no weaknesses, or it was something his ability didn't have permission to examine.
He tried it on himself. Again. Hands, arms, legs, reflection in the bathroom mirror.
Nothing. Every time. He was invisible to his own power.
He tried it on a cockroach that had crawled out from beneath the refrigerator.
Nothing. The insect returned no data, same as the dog in the alley.
Animals are immune.
He wrote this on the back of the logistics report, beneath 11:47.
Then he sat on the floor of his apartment, back against the wall, bleeding arm wrapped in a kitchen towel, and faced the mathematics of his situation.
The world had changed. People had received powers — real, physical powers. He'd seen a man crush cars. He'd seen a woman reshape concrete. Outside, the sounds of destruction continued, which meant more people were discovering abilities that let them break, burn, build, and kill.
Cael had received the ability to see where things are weak.
He couldn't fight. He couldn't build. He couldn't heal. In a world that had just been divided into the powerful and the powerless, he'd been given a diagnostic tool. A readout. A spreadsheet that showed him exactly how everything would break, without giving him the strength to stop any of it.
Fourteen newtons to break a coffee mug handle. Congratulations, Cael. You've been granted the Authority to notice things slightly faster than everyone else.
He pressed the back of his head against the plaster and stared at the ceiling. The lines were there — always there now, lurking at the edge of focus, ready to show him every flaw in every surface. The ceiling had seventeen points of potential failure. The light fixture was mounted two centimetres off-centre, creating uneven torque on the anchor bolts. The drywall tape was separating along a seam near the window.
He could see every crack in the world.
He couldn't close a single one.
Outside, someone screamed. Something heavy hit the pavement. A car alarm started and then stopped mid-note, as if the car had simply ceased to exist.
Cael sat in his apartment and bled.
On the phone, face-down on the desk, a dead screen held no record of two words that had changed everything. And somewhere in the city, a boy named Marco was eating dinner with his mother because a man with a useless power had jumped through a window.
Fourteen seconds. One second faster than death.
Maybe there was something to that. Maybe seeing the cracks was the first step to understanding why they existed.
Or maybe he was just the guy who noticed the building was falling while everyone else had the power to hold it up.
He wrapped the towel tighter around his arm. The bleeding was slowing. The lines on the ceiling pulsed faintly in his peripheral vision, patient and precise and utterly, devastatingly unhelpful.
Somewhere above the city, the crack breathed.
Cael reached for a pen. Drew a line on the wall beside him — the first mark. Beneath it, he wrote:
Day 1. The sky broke. I can see weaknesses. I have no strength.
The number is 11:47. I don't know why it matters.
I saved a boy. I don't know how to save anyone else.
He underlined the second line twice.
Then he leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and let the lines fade to darkness.