The Expanse hummed under my skin like an engine idling, pleased and patient. It felt wrong to call it comforting, and yet there was a warmth to that vibration, a careful pressure that settled around my ribs and made the emptiness feel occupied. The horizon bled a new tint — not the gray I'd known, but a thin wash of something like old wounds. The void smiled without mouth.
I sat on the edge of nothing and let my thoughts unspool. They always did, here. The Expanse loved company. It loved the way memory curled into itself and sharpened into blame. It nudged the images toward the bright bits, the cuts that had never healed.
Jae-min's grin came first. It was a thin thing I could still hear: loud in the cafeteria, loud when he shoved me, loud when he told the class I was nothing. Min-ho's laugh followed, like nails on the inside of my skull — eager, cruel, the sound of a pack keeping time. Faces, names, moments: the locker shoved closed on my shoulder; the bread lobbed at my head; the way teachers looked away when they could have helped. The list was long enough to fill a life.
"I should have done something," I said aloud, because even words that vanished into the Expanse had weight now.
It answered, not with language but with impressions that settled like stones: you were small, you were left, you were empty. It fed on all of them and set them like tinder beneath a slow fire.
They made you nothing, it seemed to say. They left you to rot. Good. Use it.
The voice — the Expanse's presence — was manipulative. It folded my guilt into the shape of a weapon and handed it back. It urged and pleased and then, when I reached for solace, held its silence like a mirror. When I needed it most, it would be mute; when I was weak, it hummed encouragement. It wanted me enraged enough to burn and tempered enough to aim.
I thought of my mother. She was a small, stubborn light: scoliosis that bent her back and never bent her will. Lemon cleaner on the shelf, the hum of the old fridge, the way she smiled at small things as if she were making time for them. The doctors, the letters that stopped coming, the cheap months where I pulled three jobs into the shape of an existence — all of it stacked like dry wood.
"Why didn't I save you?" I asked the void. The question had no target, only a place to land, and the Expanse let it fall.
It painted the scene again, in a dozen small, precise details that hurt. The hospital room, the machine's clicking, the way her hand reached for me and found only air. "You were small," the tone suggested. "You waited." There was no mockery in it, only observation — clinical, delighted.
I gripped my knees until the skin went numb. Hatred frothed under the numbness like a second heartbeat waking from sleep. It gathered itself around the names I hated and made them heavy and useful. Jae-min. Min-ho. Teachers who signed forms and left. The classmates who turned their heads.
The Expanse hummed approvingly. It coaxed my anger by showing me the worst parts again and again, each replay a lens that made the cruelty clearer, the betrayal thicker. It fed me images of them thriving while I bent, of their smug faces when I worked and cleaned and lied about sleep. It arranged those faces into targets.
"You want to destroy them, don't you?" the feeling suggested, careful as a surgeon. It did not ask; it offered logic.
I imagined it: ripping the scaffolding from under their city, unmaking the system that crowned strength and spat out the weak. I pictured the old schoolyard, the lockers, the field where they practiced and showed off. I saw the faces of parents and teachers and classmates, shrunk small beneath whatever law I might one day wield. I saw Jae-min's grin stop mid-sneer. I saw Min-ho's hands fall uselessly to his sides. Nothing about it felt like balm. It felt like raw function.
The Expanse was pleased. Its hum swelled, approving the architecture of my rancor. The thought that I could be the instrument — that my anger could be forged into a law that unmade people who hurt the helpless — made my chest tighten with icy purpose. It made me taste the mechanism of revenge.
At times the Expanse fell silent, which was worse. Those hushed absences were when it allowed me to drown in my own thoughts without guidance, when the temptation to collapse under grief flared hot and consuming. In those dark pockets, the old doubts crept in: what if I only feed a new cruelty? What if I become the same thing I hate? The void offered no moral counsel. It offered utility. It wanted me capable.
"You will need more," the silence implied one slow time, as if speaking through the stillness by making the air condense around a single thought. Not loud. Not direct. Just enough.
I understood what it meant. Hatred grows by practice. The decay inside me favored malice; it answered to the push of bile and grievance. Each memory I fed into it edged the power into being. The Expanse made that clear without a word — a smile in the arrangement of stars, a brightening of the red at the edge of the horizon. It taught me that feeling less would weaken me, that restraint would leave me as I once had been: small, useful only as a lesson for others.
I replayed scenes with surgical clarity. Jae-min leaning on the locker, hair falling over mocking eyes; Min-ho fist raised mid-shove as laughter glinted behind him. The teachers' faces when I blinked back tears in class. My mother coughing into the socket of the pillow, asking me to eat, her hand reaching for my sleeve and finding it empty.
The Expanse hummed, and in that hum I found a terrible solace: I would not be small again. I would not be left watching while they lived.
"I will make them remember," I whispered. The words tasted like iron, and the hunger behind them felt righteous.
The void accepted. It did not promise mercy. It promised effect.
I stood and let the thought spread through me like ink. The decay twitched inside my bones at the notion of using hatred as fuel. The Expanse leaned in, pleased, patient, already mapping constellations of ruin with the curve of its quiet. In the dark, it smiled and did not speak when I needed the gentleness that would have stopped me.
That was its teaching: you will be given what you need, and you will be left alone to become.
I did not know yet whether I was being made or making myself. I only knew that the machine inside me loved the load. It craved the weight of revenge. It told me, in a thousand small ways, that my purpose would be to unmake the web that had trapped my mother and me.
For the first time since she was gone, the thought of her didn't make me ache. It made me plan.
I stepped off the edge of the Expanse and felt the void close like a satisfied mouth. Hatred sat in my bones like a new name. I said it once under my breath — not to anyone, only to myself — and the sound felt like a promise and a threat both.
"Remember," I told the empty sky. "I will finish what you started."
The Expanse pulsed, and somewhere in that pleased, patient beat, I heard encouragement. It did not speak. It did not have to. The silence, when it chose to be quiet, was the loudest thing of all.