The morning began like every other.
The air was gray and the streets stank of metal and wet concrete. Children ran barefoot through puddles that shimmered with oil. A train groaned somewhere far above, carrying the rich to their towers in the sky.
Rion watched them pass from the narrow alley that had always been his world. His hands were small but hard from scraping through trash bins for food. His mother slept inside the small tin house, if you could call it that. Most days she didn't speak to him. Some days she did, and those were worse.
He used to wonder if she hated him because of his father, though he didn't know who that was. The other kids said he was a mistake, a curse. Sometimes he thought they were right.
The morning rain began to fall again. Thin drops, cold against his skin. He wiped his face and stepped out from under the sheet of metal that hung over the door. Across the muddy road stood Lira, balancing a cracked bucket of water against her shoulder. She was thin like him, but her eyes had something he didn't. Hope, maybe.
"You gonna help or just stare?" she called.
He didn't answer, but he walked over anyway. They filled what little water they could from the public pipe before Grey Rock shut it off again.
"You heard the news?" she said as they carried the bucket together. "They say some rich family's kid was born without power. People are saying it's a sign."
Rion frowned. "A sign of what?"
"That the world's changing. Maybe the gods are waking up again."
He didn't believe in gods. He only believed in hunger and rain. But when she spoke, he wanted to.
The ground trembled as another cargo train passed overhead. Grey Rock's symbol glowed on the side of it, bright white against the fog. The people below stopped to watch, just for a moment, as if staring at heaven.
Rion looked away first. "They live up there because they're scared of us."
Lira laughed softly. "No. They live up there because they can."
When he returned home, his mother was awake. She sat at the table, eyes red, bottle half empty.
"Where were you?" she asked.
"Getting water."
"Liar."
She threw the bottle at him. It missed, hit the wall, and shattered. He didn't flinch.
"Why won't you just disappear," she whispered. "You shouldn't have been born."
He wanted to answer but couldn't. Words caught in his throat like broken glass.
That night he dreamed again. The same dream he'd been having since he was small.
A voice calling from deep underwater. A shape moving in the dark, too big to see all at once. The water turned red, and the voice whispered his name.
When he woke, he was shaking. The lights flickered above him. His hands glowed faintly for a moment, a soft shadow light pulsing under his skin, then faded.
He didn't know what it meant. He didn't know that far above, in the towers of Grey Rock, someone had already noticed.
The reports said a child was born on the wrong day. The signal of the 366th had shifted. The man reading it whispered to his superior, "We found an anomaly."