Kael was twenty years old for eleven minutes when the first crack opened in the sky.
He wasn't doing anything worth remembering. He was in the bodega aisle with a plastic basket on his forearm, staring at a wall of gum like it could give him a reason to feel different today.
The place smelled like bleach and hot oil. A fan behind the counter clicked on and off, making the hanging chip bags tremble. Someone's music leaked tinny from a phone speaker near the freezer.
Kael checked his phone. 12:11 a.m. A missed call from his mother at 12:02. A group chat called "KAEL 20" exploding with emojis. He didn't open it. He stared at the missed call until his thumb hovered over "call back," then lowered. Not here. Not in fluorescent light with strangers breathing close.
He paid for water, a protein bar, and the cheap gum anyway, then stepped outside into damp January cold that slid under his hoodie like it belonged there.
He started home with his hands in his pockets, chewing as he walked, thinking about calling his mother back once he was indoors, once he didn't have to say anything personal to the street.
He turned onto his block.
The sky made a tearing sound.
Not thunder. Not a plane. A dry rip that pressed behind his ears, like thick paper being pulled apart slowly, huge enough to make his teeth ache.
Kael stopped mid-step. Across the street, a woman in a puffer jacket froze, grocery bag swinging once before it thumped her thigh.
Above them, the clouds didn't part. They peeled.
A thin bright line cut from east to west, straight as a knife score. It wasn't lightning. It didn't branch. It just… opened. Light spilled out—silver-gold, the color of a screen seen through tears. It didn't brighten the street the way light should; it made edges too sharp, as if the world had been turned up past natural.
Kael's first thought was stupid and immediate.
Am I having a stroke?
He flexed his fingers. Cold air bit his knuckles. Gum stuck to his molars. His heartbeat sounded normal in his own head, loud but steady.
Windows slid up. Doors opened. People spilled out like the street had called them by name.
"Yo!" someone yelled from a fire escape. "You seeing this?"
A wave of phone buzzes rolled down the block. Kael's pocket vibrated hard enough to feel like a second pulse.
His screen lit before he touched it.
Black background. Clean text.
[THRESHOLD MET]
Kael blinked. The line stayed.
[WORLD: EARTH — QUALIFIED]
Across the street, a guy in a beanie held his phone up like it was evidence. "Nah. Nah. My phone hacked."
Kael's screen added another line:
[AWAKENING WINDOW OPEN]
Then, smaller:
[AGE REQUIREMENT: 20+]
His stomach tightened. He stared at the number like it could change if he stared long enough.
Twenty plus.
The words landed weirdly because they weren't instructions; they were a filter. He looked down the block at faces he knew by repetition—teenagers leaning on railings, kids dragging scooters by their handlebars, older people in pajama pants, delivery guys with shoulders permanently tense.
Someone laughed, too loud. "So, what, all the old heads get superpowers?"
A girl—maybe nineteen, maybe younger—held her phone up to her face like it might bite her. "I'm not twenty," she said, voice cracking. "I'm not twenty yet."
Her friend grabbed her elbow. "Shut up, you're fine."
Fine didn't sound like a word that belonged in this light.
Down the block, Mr. Hernandez—first floor, always in a Mets cap even in winter—stepped onto his stoop in slippers and a bathrobe. He squinted at the sky like he was offended.
Mrs. Kim from the laundromat stood beside him, one hand pressed to her chest.
Mr. Hernandez bent forward suddenly, like someone had punched him in the gut.
Kael took a step without thinking. "Sir—"
Mr. Hernandez dropped to one knee. His breath came fast and foggy. Mrs. Kim grabbed his shoulder.
"Are you okay?" she asked, and her voice was already breaking.
"I'm not—" Mr. Hernandez rasped. "I'm not doing—"
Golden light leaked between his fingers.
It wasn't movie-pretty. It flickered like a bad bulb, harsh and uneven. The air around his hands warped, bending the streetlight's glow.
Mrs. Kim recoiled. "Stop—stop doing that!"
"I can't," he gasped.
Kael's phone buzzed again. Something in his chest answered—pressure behind his sternum, like a second heartbeat trying to sync with the first.
His vision flickered.
A translucent panel slid into the edge of his sight, angled like it belonged there. Kael flinched and looked away. It stayed.
NAME: KAEL VASQUEZ
AGE: 20
STATUS: ASCENDANT (UNBOUND)
AUTHORITY SEED: PENDING
His mouth went dry. He looked for a "close" button like this was a pop-up ad. There wasn't one.
"Kael!" someone yelled.
Jae came sprinting down the block from the corner, hood up, phone in his hand. He slowed when he saw Kael's face.
"You seeing this?" Jae demanded, breathless, shoving his phone forward. Same black screen. Same lines.
Kael nodded once.
Jae looked up at the crack in the sky and then back at Kael, trying and failing to find a joke. "That's… not real."
Mr. Hernandez made a sound—half sob, half cough—and the light in his hands surged.
Kael's panel updated:
[AUTHORITY SEED LOCKING…]
On his phone, a new line appeared:
[DO NOT RESIST]
Kael's blood went cold. Resistance was his default setting. Now the universe was telling him not to.
The light snapped outward—
—and then folded in on itself.
The air made a sound like a heavy door closing.
Mr. Hernandez vanished.
No smoke. No blood. No ash. Just absence so clean it looked edited out of reality.
Mrs. Kim screamed and fell backward onto the concrete. Her hands scrabbled at empty air where he'd been, as if she could pull him back by force.
In the space he left behind, something hovered: a dense point of light, pulsing faintly like a heart left outside the body.
Kael's panel flashed:
[DIVINE FRAGMENT FORMED]
The crowd's noise turned jagged.
"What the hell is that?" Mrs. Kim choked, staring.
A man two houses down—late twenties, sweat on his face like he'd sprinted from somewhere—staggered toward the fragment. Not walking with purpose. Being pulled.
"Don't touch it!" someone shouted.
He reached anyway.
Kael's panel flared warning red:
[WARNING: FOREIGN FRAGMENT]
Kael moved before he had a plan. He grabbed the man's wrist.
The man whipped his head toward him, eyes glassy. "Let go."
"You don't know what it is," Kael said, and hated that he sounded like he was lecturing.
"I know what it is," the man hissed, and there was hunger in it. "It's mine."
He yanked free and lurched forward again.
Jae shoved in beside Kael, shoulder to shoulder. "Back up, bro."
The man swung. His fist clipped Jae's cheek with a dull thud. Jae cursed, staggering, hand flying up.
Kael's stomach twisted. The fragment pulsed once, like it enjoyed the attention.
Kael felt something shift inside him—new, small, responsive. Not strength. Not heat. Awareness, tuned sharp.
He focused on the air around the fragment. On the faint hum that seemed to live in his ribs now. He tried to push—not with his hands, with that pressure behind his sternum.
The air shivered. The fragment drifted half a foot away from the man's fingers, as if nudged by wind that didn't touch anything else.
The man froze, blinking, confusion cracking the hunger for one clean second.
Kael's panel updated mid-breath:
[AUTHORITY GRANTED: ECHO]
RANK: F–
NOTES: PERCEPTION-BASED INTERFERENCE (LOW OUTPUT)
That was it.
Echo.
The word landed like a joke someone else told. Not fire. Not gravity. Not anything that made people kneel.
Kael's hands started to tremble anyway, not from cold—from the sudden realization that whatever had just moved the fragment had come from him.
The man's confusion cleared. He lunged again.
Kael pushed again. Too small. The fragment drifted, then hovered stubbornly, pulsing like it was deciding who deserved it.
Around them, the block tightened. People pressed in, voices rising.
"If it's power, it's power," someone said, breathless.
"My dad's twenty-seven, he's upstairs—"
"My sister's nineteen, she's not glowing, why—"
"Back up, back up—"
A teenage boy shoved forward and stopped short when his friend yanked him back by the hoodie. The teen's face twisted, half panic, half resentment. "What, you scared?"
"I'm scared of you being stupid," his friend snapped.
Phones buzzed again, synchronized, and the sound alone made several people flinch like it was an electric shock.
Kael looked down at his screen and hated the new lines:
[ASCENSION EVENT: ACTIVE]
[FAILURE RATE: HIGH]
A siren started somewhere and cut off abruptly, like the driver had stopped breathing mid-sound. The streetlight above them flickered, then steadied. In the crowd, a woman's hands began to glow faintly and she slapped them against her jeans like she could wipe it off.
Kael felt Echo catch it—little tremors in the air, people on the edge. He couldn't see their panels, but he could feel their bodies trying to carry something too large.
Jae grabbed Kael's sleeve, knuckles white. "Kael. We gotta go. Right now."
Kael looked at his friend's cheek swelling, at the street turning into a mess of bodies and belief. Echo showed him the crowd like a map: pressure points, panic spikes, the fragment as a bright, hungry center.
If someone failed here, the crowd would rush the new fragment too.
If the fragment destabilized, the shock would hit everyone close.
The street would feed itself.
Kael made himself step back.
He hated how easy it was to stop being brave when being brave looked like dying on concrete.
They moved fast, slipping between parked cars, keeping close to building walls. Kael didn't look up anymore. He didn't look back. Echo made it impossible to pretend he wasn't still hearing the crowd, though—the sobbing, the shouting, the scrape of shoes on concrete as people surged around that hovering light.
Jae ran beside him with one hand pressed to his cheek. "Did you—did you just move it?"
Kael's throat tightened. "Yeah."
Jae stared at him like he was trying to reconcile it with the Kael he knew—the one who avoided attention, who took stairs instead of elevators when he didn't want to make small talk. "Bro…"
"Don't," Kael said. It came out harsher than he meant. "Don't say anything."
"Why not?" Jae snapped, anger flaring out of fear. "You saved—"
"I didn't save anybody," Kael cut in. "I delayed a disaster and left."
Jae's mouth opened, then shut. They ran.
Kael tried to call his mother as they moved, because his hands needed something to do besides shake.
No bars.
He hit "call" anyway. The phone spun and failed. He tried again, like stubbornness could become signal.
Nothing.
The group chat exploded with messages he couldn't read while moving: people sending videos, people screaming in text, someone typing "WHO IS GLOWING" in all caps.
Jae's phone buzzed again, and he glanced down mid-run. "I got a panel," he panted.
"You already said," Kael said.
Jae swallowed. "It says Authority: Burst."
Kael's stomach dropped. Burst sounded like the kind of thing that solved problems by making new ones.
"Don't use it," Kael said, too fast.
Jae stared at him, eyes bright with anger and fear. "Bro, I might have to."
Kael didn't have an answer that didn't sound like denial. He just kept running, because the street behind them sounded like it was turning into something with its own appetite.
His building's front door was hanging open. The lobby lights flickered like electricity was reconsidering the job. Someone had dropped a stroller near the mailboxes. A set of keys lay on the floor, abandoned mid-motion.
From upstairs, a voice screamed, "Mom!"—thin, desperate.
Kael took the stairs two at a time, Jae behind him. The building smelled like old carpet and cooking oil. Someone's incense still burned from earlier, sweet and wrong in this context.
On the first landing, a kid—maybe ten—stood in pajamas, clutching a tablet to their chest. The kid's eyes were huge.
"My dad's glowing," the kid whispered, voice barely there. "Is he gonna die?"
Kael stopped for half a heartbeat. The kid's face didn't shimmer. No glow. No panel. Too young.
Kael opened his mouth and realized he had nothing safe to say.
Jae said it instead, rough but honest. "Stay with somebody. Don't go outside."
The kid nodded like they'd been given a job.
They kept climbing.
On the second-floor landing, Mrs. Marlowe from 2B stood in her doorway, hands pressed to her face. She was usually loud, nosy, the kind of neighbor who remembered your business better than you did.
Now she was shaking.
Her fingers glowed faintly.
"Kael," she choked out when she saw him. "My hands—my hands—"
Kael stopped short. Echo caught the same string-tight vibration in the air, the beginning of a fold. Like pressure building in a sealed room.
"Don't move," Kael said, and heard how useless it sounded.
"I can't—" Mrs. Marlowe sobbed. She tried to clamp her hands together like she could hold the light inside her own skin.
Her eyes flicked past Kael to Jae, then back to Kael, like she wanted one of them to tell her it would be okay. Like she'd spent her life believing adults could say a sentence and make it true.
For one second she looked like a person trying not to drown.
Then the air folded.
That heavy-door sound again.
Mrs. Marlowe vanished.
The hallway went cold, empty in a way that didn't make sense with the fluorescent light still buzzing overhead. The smell of her perfume lingered for half a second, then didn't.
A fragment hovered where she'd been, pulsing softly.
Jae stared at it, jaw slack. "Bro…"
Kael's panel flashed:
[FRAGMENT: UNCLAIMED]
[HIDDEN ORIGIN: SEALED]
Requirement: absorb one fragment.
Kael stared at the fragment. It hummed at him like a held note, patient. He felt the tug—subtle, instinctive—like hunger you didn't choose.
He stepped back.
"No," he said aloud, voice thin. "Not yet."
Jae's voice shook. "We can't stay here."
Kael nodded, still staring like it might lunge. "Down."
They ran back down the stairs, past the kid in pajamas who had moved into the corner like he'd been told to. Past the lobby with its flickering light. Past the open door where street-noise leaked in.
At the base level, a door led to the basement stairwell—damp concrete, dead lights, the smell of pipes and old water.
Jae hesitated at the top step, swallowing hard. "You sure?"
Kael listened.
Above: screaming, sirens, glass, the crack in the sky still tearing wider.
Below: heavy silence that smelled like rust.
He stepped into the dark.
"I'm not sure of anything," Kael said. "But I'm sure staying up here kills you."
The basement stairs were narrow and steep, the kind of stairs landlords pretended didn't exist until the super needed you to carry something heavy down them. Kael's phone light cut a weak cone through the dark. Dust floated in it, slow, lazy, like the air down here had never learned urgency.
The door swung closed behind them with a soft latch that sounded too final.
Above, the building groaned faintly, and Echo caught the vibrations like fingertips on a railing: people moving fast on the floors above, a door slamming, a burst of shouting that muffled itself as if the concrete got tired of carrying it.
Below, pipes ticked. Water moved somewhere behind a wall. The quiet wasn't peace. It was absence.
Jae's breath hitched. "If something happens down here…"
Kael didn't answer because the thought had already formed in him: down here, if someone failed, there'd be no crowd to eat the fragment. Down here, they might have space to survive the shock.
Or they might have nowhere to run.
He tightened his grip on the phone and kept descending. At the first landing, he stopped and listened harder—less to sound, more to the way the air felt.
Echo gave him a thin, steady hum farther down, like the building's bones were denser there. A sublevel. A garage. A place meant for storage, not people.
Kael swallowed. His gum had gone flat and bitter.
"Keep close," he told Jae, and hated that he sounded like he knew what he was doing.
They went down into the dark anyway.