**GENE**
The anger arrived first as a taste—copper and ozone, like biting down on a live wire. It pooled behind Gene's molars while Zhao Mingwei poured tea from a pot that moved of its own accord, a minor dimensional trick that should have rolled off Gene's training like water. Instead, his knuckles whitened on the rosewood chair arms, leaving damp prints that steamed slightly in the cool office air.
*Not here. Not now.*
Zhao Mingwei's voice cut through the haze. "You survived Chen Lao's training. Dock work. Boundary navigation. Vomited twice, I heard."
"Three times." The correction came out sharper than intended. The copper taste intensified.
Zhao Mingwei's eyes narrowed. "Your file mentions a break. Before you arrived."
Gene's posture remained forward, feet flat, spine straight—the defensive stance of someone whose shell had been cracked open once and would not yield again. In his peripheral vision, the office walls shimmered, revealing brief flickers of another room: smaller, fluorescent-lit, where a man named Morrison once asked if he was seeing things that weren't there.
Gene had answered truthfully: *I'm seeing things that are there. You're just not looking.*
"Your father told me everything," Zhao Mingwei continued. "The fever. The alternate world you built. Friends who didn't exist. Business partners. A whole life in a city called Taipei."
The anger projection leaked. On the desk, a jade seal cracked along an invisible fault line, whisper-fine. Zhao Mingwei didn't flinch.
"I killed that version," Gene said. His voice held no inflection, a calculated Aquarian remove. "The one who needed his parents' approval. The one who felt guilty about their sacrifices. I met them in the void between worlds and I unmade them."
Zhao Mingwei studied him. "You believe that literally."
"I believe what I experienced."
"And the anger?" He gestured at the cracked seal. "Is that a souvenir from the crossing?"
Gene unclenched his fists. The crack stopped spreading. "It's a tool. When my mind broke, it didn't just fracture. It opened. I can feel the spaces between realities now. Rage is one way to push back against them."
"Useful." Zhao Mingwei sipped his tea. "Dangerous. But useful." He set the cup down with deliberate precision. "My daughter gave you her card."
"She's testing whether I'll become a liability."
"She's collecting assets. There's a difference." The older man pulled up a display only he could see—data streams flickering across his retinas. "Your chart was in your file. Twelfth house emphasis. Sun in Aquarius. Cancer rising."
Gene's jaw tightened. He'd asked his parents to destroy that chart.
"Charts don't lie," Zhao Mingwei said, reading his expression. "People do. Yours says you're built to live in multiple worlds while carrying the weight of where you came from. That you had to destroy your old self to be reborn. That the wound itself is the gift." He dismissed the display. "It also says you'll always be an outsider, even when you're inside."
"What's the point of this analysis?"
"The point, Mr. Eu, is that you're not sick. You're perceiving layers that most humans filter out. The psychosis was your brain's attempt to process dimensional awareness without training." He leaned forward. "Chen Lao's teaching you to control it. I'm offering you a place to use it."
"Doing what?"
"Someone is collapsing timelines intentionally. Whole realities blinking out, taking our shipments with them. We need someone who can sense the collapse before it happens. Someone who's already had their mind broken and rebuilt."
Gene's anger pulsed in response—not as aggression, but as recognition. "Who's doing it?"
"A competitor. Someone with similar sensitivity but fewer ethics." Zhao Mingwei's eyes hardened. "They call him the Potter. He operates out of a timeline that resembles your delusion. Taipei, grief therapy, pottery as a weapon. He uses emotional anchors to unravel realities."
The room tilted. Gene saw it: the pottery studio, Mei's hands guiding his, the way the clay had pulsed with something not quite natural. The timeline he'd thought was hallucination was real—just not his. It was the Potter's. A trap. A place to lure people like Gene and unmake them.
"I lived there," Gene whispered.
"No. You *almost* lived there. The difference is you fought your way out. Unmade your parents' expectations. Became someone new." Zhao Mingwei slid a tablet across the desk. "Your first target. Find him. Stop him. Prove the anger you project can protect, not just destroy."
Gene looked at the screen. The face staring back was his own, but wrong. Softer. Safer. The version who'd stayed in Irvine, taken the medication, let the dreams go.
The version who'd become the Potter.
"Why me?"
"Because you know his pattern. You lived it. And because if you don't stop him, he'll collapse this timeline next." Zhao Mingwei stood. "Dinner with my daughter tomorrow. Seven PM. She'll text you the address. Don't be late."
Gene left the office, Zhao Xian's card now burning cold in his pocket. It wasn't a key to a restaurant. It was a key to a weapon.
Three floors down, Zhao Xian was waiting in the hallway.
"You met the Potter," she said. Not a question.
"I almost became him."
"That's why I gave you the card. You're the only one who can." She stepped closer. "When you killed your parents in the void—"
"I killed the part of me that needed them."
"—you created a shadow. The Potter is that shadow, given form in another timeline." Her eyes searched his. "He's not real. Not anymore. But he's trying to become real again. By collapsing everything else into his safe, boring, pottery-filled world."
Gene's anger projection surged, not as an attack but as understanding. The rage he'd felt toward his parents' expectations—their need for him to be grateful, successful, safe—had manifested somewhere else. Created a villain who wanted to freeze reality in that singular, suffocating moment.
"Tomorrow," Zhao Xian said, "we'll go hunting. But tonight, you need to rest your 12th house. The ghosts are settling."
She walked away, leaving Gene alone with the weight of infinite worlds on his shoulders.
In his pocket, the card pulsed with coordinates. Not for dinner.
For war.