Location: The Gullies, Maatari
Time: 06:21 AM
Khazim sat on the roof, breath even, chain warm against his chest.
He built his Oru'mi in silence and static air.
Se'lo gathered and settled.
The faint indigo in his dead right eye throbbed once, then stilled. Inside the tether, Tre'co rumbled like distant thunder. Their breathing matched.
The more he silenced the world, the louder memory became.
Nine years earlier...
Khaz was fifteen. Clear-skinned, wiry. Clothes stitched from whatever didn't say no. Home was a memory behind too many locked doors.
The first glyphstorm rolled into the Gullies in the afternoon, even the sky shivered.
Se'lo lightning combed the rails. Magnetic wind peeled signs off brick. Light fell in sheets that changed color when it hit puddles.
Khaz ducked into a collapsed service tunnel with a sack of storm scrap over one shoulder. The tunnel smelled like wet metal and salt. In the far corner, three stray dogs crouched behind broken conduit—ribs like the ribs of the city, eyes bright with reflected static. Two scavenger kids were throwing stones for fun.
"Beat it," Khaz said.
They didn't.
He put down the sack and moved.
The first kid swung a shortened pipe, only for Khaz to slip it and shove him into the wall.
The second raised another stone but the snap of Khaz's gaze stopped him in his tracks when he turned.
That was enough. They ran.
He unrolled a thin flatbread from his jacket and tore it in thirds. The dogs snarled at the first piece, tested the second with cautious teeth, devoured the third like an answer. A conduit snapped somewhere near the entrance, spraying a fan of sparks. The biggest dog yanked at his cuff, dragging him deeper just before the live line spat across where he'd been standing.
They rode out the storm like that—four bodies pressed to cold concrete while light rattled the tunnel. When it was over, he didn't have names for them. He didn't use names. The street already named anything you got too close to.
Weeks turned.
He even learned the pattern of storms by the way the air tasted metallic before the sky broke.
He traded residue from burnt glyph coils for Musa. The dogs slept in the alcove behind a busted terminal, followed him alley to alley, scared off anyone with too much curiosity.
Locals started calling him, "The boy with three shadows".
Sometimes his Se'lo flickered without warning or permission. A light under the ribs he didn't yet know how to carry.
He kept moving.
He wasn't running from home.
He was running toward something he couldn't yet explain.
The night felt heavy on the day it all came apart. The sky went violet and refused to pick a calmer color. This glyphstorm arrived like a something bigger than a small issue.
Too fast. Too loud. Like it held a grudge.
Khaz hurried to secure a cache he'd hidden beneath a rusted pallet in his make-shift camp — coils, connectors, a halosync backplate he could trade if the shop didn't ask questions.
He lifted the pallet just as a hand moved in his blind edge.
"Cute hiding place," the grifter said as he appeared over Khaz's shoulder.
Grease on the collar, a smile with two teeth too many.
"Storm rat tax. Pay up or phase out."
"Leave it," Khaz said.
"Or?" The man's laugh was smoke. "You'll stare at me to death?"
He closed the space with 2 quick steps.
The first punch skidded Khaz across wet concrete.
The grifter took off.
Khaz picked himself up and took off with his canine trio in tow.
After a short chase, he found the grifter two blocks south of the east spur with his hands deep in Khaz's stash. Half of his scrap already stuffed into a weatherproof bag.
"Put it down," Khaz said.
The man turned, thin smile under bad lighting. "Should've hidden it better, storm rat."
Khaz closed distance, silent. The man pulled a short hook-knife and swung wild. Cold air, hot pain. The blade carved down from brow to jaw, white flash and ringing silence. Khaz staggered, one palm finding the wall.
The dogs were faster. Three streaks of muscle and snarl slammed the grifter to the ground. The smallest bit his wrist; the others pinned his legs. He screamed and swung the knife again, catching fur, nothing vital.
The sky growled.
Static rolled across the roofs. A glyphstorm crested overhead, light bending into violet arcs. Power lines snapped in rhythm. A cracked relay exploded, throwing Khaz backward through a web of old fiber conduit. The impact stole his breath. For a second everything was weightless—then the current hit.
Light under skin. Heartbeat made of code.
His alignment, long dormant, woke and didn't know what to do. The chain at his neck burned. The dogs' bodies caught the flash, digital shadows stretching off them like ghosts trying to escape.
The storm folded in on itself. Sound became color. When it settled, smoke hissed from the walls and the smell of wet metal filled his lungs.
Only one shape stood.
Not three.
One.
A warped fusion of fur, static, and light—three heads moving on one trembling body, eyes full of something that knew him too well.
Khaz reached out. The creature mirrored him, head tilting the same direction, breaths matching.
In the quiet between thunder, a voice spoke—low, resonant, not his own:
"Tre'co."
The word wasn't a command. It was recognition.
Khaz blacked out with the taste of iron and rain.
Dawn dragged itself down into the tunnel after a while. The light had the color of a bruise. A man found him there—older, half-blind in one eye, coat stitched with years. Khaz knew him in the way the street taught names: Sher'oh, vendor of counterfeit halosyncs and inconvenient advice.
"You bled into the current, boy," Sher'oh said, bending slow to check the cut from brow to jaw. "Most never wake from that."
Khaz's mouth was dry gravel. The words stuck, then came. "They're gone."
Sher'oh's good eye tracked the chain at Khaz's chest, now embedded with the first dull glint of stone. "Not gone. Folded. Bound. The storm didn't take them. Your signal traded for them."
He helped Khaz sit against the wall. The room tilted and then remembered straight.
Sher'oh listened to the air like there was still a song in it. "Call it a corrupt signal tether," he muttered, more to the tunnel than to Khaz. "And somehow you all lived. You hear me? You ALL lived."
Khaz closed his eyes. Inside the tether, something paced—three heads, one hunger, all waiting for his breath to decide where to stand.
"What do I do?" Khaz asked, voice smaller than he liked.
"You breathe," Sher'oh said. "Slow. With purpose. That's called Oru'mi. You hold the line inside you so the thing inside you doesn't hold you." He put a hand to Khaz's sternum. "In through the nose. Out through the teeth. Count your pulse until it counts you back. It keeps you aligned."
Khaz did. The room changed shape around the numbers.
Sher'oh watched the tremor in Khaz's hands round down to stillness. "Pain isn't what made you strong, boy." He tapped the chain once. "Listening did. Remember this quiet. It's the only weapon louder than pain."
They rose with the day. The storm had left black kisses on the concrete and a new thing breathing under Khaz's ribs.
He didn't look for the grifter. Some parts of a story didn't need witnesses to be true.
The roof was the same roof when he opened his eyes. The city wasn't the same city, but it wore the same face.
Tre'co's outline flickered at the edge of sight—three heads low, weight evenly set, a guardian who had learned how not to crush what it guarded. The chain cooled back to its ordinary warmth. His dead right eye kept its private glow.
Vendors were already calling down on the street. A magnetrail murmured over the east spur. Somewhere closer, a kettle hit boil, and someone cursed like it had done it on purpose.
Khaz stood, rolled his shoulders, and let the breath go. Every scar had a voice. Some just spoke louder than others.
The city kept its secrets. So did he.