Chapter 1: Three Days

The ceiling was wrong.

Not water-stained, not concrete, not the low curve of the bunker. Just plaster, eggshell, clean. His chest didn't hurt. That was the part that got him sitting up before his eyes had finished working, because his chest had hurt for about two years running, and the absence of it felt less like relief and more like a limb missing in a place he couldn't see.

He pushed the sheet down. His forearm came into view unscarred. No puckered line from the rift-claw, no burn shadow along the wrist where the bracer had gone white-hot and welded a strip of skin to the leather. The skin was even. Young. The sheets smelled like the detergent his grandmother had used, the cheap green kind from the market two blocks down, and he had watched those sheets burn in a fire he lit himself.

He kept his breathing shallow for a second, because a deep one felt like it might break something.

Slowly, he sat up. He tested his knees by flexing them under the blanket, then put his feet on the floor and tested that too. The floor was the floor. The planks were the ones with the warped seam near the radiator he'd kept meaning to fix. He stood, found that his legs held him, and took three careful steps to the middle of the room.

The maglev hummed three blocks over on its morning run, a soft mechanical exhale through the walls, and he hadn't heard that sound in years. He registered the old coffee-ring on the desk, a horseshoe the color of weak tea, and moved past it. His eyes went to the capsule in the corner, still sealed in shipping film, and skipped off that too because looking at it too long would do something to him he didn't have time for.

Hallucination, he thought, in the clinical way he'd learned to think. Dying brain, the last lit second stretched out by oxygen deprivation. Or a loop, or a dream with teeth. He'd heard stories in the bunker about men who'd gone under and refused to surface.

He went to the desk and picked up the tablet.

The screen woke on a lockscreen he recognized like an old handwriting. The date sat in the upper corner in a font he hadn't chosen and had never quite liked. He read it twice. His pulse moved up a step without asking him. He unlocked the tablet and checked the date in the weather widget, then the date in the news feed, and the numbers agreed with themselves in the stubborn way numbers do.

Three days before launch.

He crossed to the wall display and woke it with a gesture. The ticker scrolled across the bottom of the muted news feed, light grey on dark. Zenith Systems chief executive declines seventh interview request this quarter. Industry moves toward identity verification at point of capsule fulfillment as pre-launch screening protocols expand. Maglev extension to East Harbor on schedule for Q3. The date and time in the display's upper corner matched the tablet. The weather matched the tablet. He turned over his phone on the desk and the lockscreen matched the other two.

He stood in the middle of his grandparents' apartment and let the numbers sit on him.

It was not the date that convinced him. The date was a thing screens could lie about if a brain was determined enough, and his brain had spent two and a half years being determined about things that weren't true. He needed something his body could check.

So he did the thing he hadn't done in a very long time, the thing he'd done the first time without understanding what it was and later understood too well. He closed his eyes and stilled his breathing. He drew in a slow one and held it past the point where his body wanted it back, held it through the first kick of want in his diaphragm, and on the second kick he did the old step, a small inward turn of attention he'd never found a better word for.

Mana pooled in his palm.

Not cold, not warm. Weight. A coin-sized gather of pressure just under the skin at the center of his right hand, thin as a held breath and denser than the air around it, as though his hand had found a seam in the room and was cupping what came through. It held when he held, and when he eased the breath out a fraction it thinned against his fingers without leaving. He pressed his thumb lightly into the center of his palm and felt it give, then resettle, a small resistance with a shape of its own. It answered his attention — tighter when he looked straight at it, looser when he let his focus drift. For one strange second he had the sense that the gathering wasn't only his, that some part of what he was doing was being looked at from the other side, the shape of his attention measured rather than the attention itself. He filed it under nerves and let the rest of the breath out.

He opened his eyes.

It was real. All of it was real, because that was real, and that had been the one thing in the first life that had only ever belonged to him.

Elation came in cold. It wasn't joy. Joy had wanted the company of people he didn't have anymore. This was closer to the feeling you got when a weapon settled right in the hand for the first time, a recognition that you had, at last, the tool you had been missing. His mouth moved into something that was not a smile.

He did not think about how he died. He specifically did not think about it. For a half second a note surfaced anyway, a single bell struck at a pitch that was not any pitch, and his shoulders flinched without permission. He turned his head as if that would help and pushed the note back down where it had come from.

He looked at his forearm one more time, ran a thumb along the place where the scar should have been and wasn't, and closed his hand.

Work.

He went into the kitchen, which was four steps from the foot of the bed, and set the kettle on the induction stovetop. The indicator glowed a pale blue and a faint hum came up under the kettle. He measured coffee into the press by habit, the same wrong amount his grandfather had always used, and did not correct it. Steam began to pull at the kettle's lid. The apartment, all of it, was exactly as empty as it had been the first time, which was the part he still hadn't been ready for, and the part he didn't plan to look at directly until it stopped costing him this much to walk through the room.

He let the coffee steep while he thought in priorities.

Three days. The System would evaluate him on the first login, and it would see whatever he had done with the seventy-two hours between now and then, and after that the window closed. He had one advantage the rest of the planet didn't have, and he had three days to compound it.

He carried the press back to the desk, poured into the same chipped mug he kept meaning to replace, and woke the tablet again. He opened a blank document and started numbering.

His thumb moved down the list without pausing. His mouth went flat with concentration, the way it used to during triage. Halfway down he stopped long enough to add a parenthetical next to the fourth item, pre-order confirmation, expedite if possible, and kept going. The sixth line started with the word capacity and he underlined it once and let it be. He wrote out the last two items without looking up, closed the document, and set the tablet face-down on the desk.

The list could stay off the page. It was for him.

He drank half the coffee standing. It was too strong and slightly bitter in the way his grandfather had liked, and he didn't correct that either. Outside, the maglev went through on its return leg, a different harmonic, and the apartment vibrated so faintly under his feet that he would have missed it if he hadn't been listening. He was listening to everything. He was going to have to stop doing that by the end of the day or he'd burn out before the capsule even opened.

He set the mug down.

The phone was next to the tablet. He picked it up, thumbed through to the contact he'd used twice in the old life and never since, and stood there for a second with it pressed to his ear while the line connected. A cheerful prerecorded voice thanked him for choosing the brokerage and offered him options. He ignored them and waited for a person, because a person was what this particular conversation needed.

The person came on after a held half-minute, bright and professional. "Good morning, this is Harker. How can I help you today?"

Felix watched the steam rise off the mug and felt the weight still pooled faintly at the base of his palm, the reassurance of it, the proof.

"Yes," he said. "I'd like to open a margin account today."