They ran until the city thinned out.
Alleys turned into cracked roads, cracked roads turned into old freight yards, and then even those gave up. Their footsteps echoed off abandoned warehouses and half-collapsed billboards warning people to stay away from the Hole Sector.
Raku's lungs burned. His fist still tingled. Every time he blinked he saw the cop's jaw folding sideways, teeth and blood and the sound that didn't sound like anything a human body should make.
"Dude," Osio panted beside him, hands on his knees. "You just… you broke a cop's face."
Raku swallowed, trying not to puke. "He planted drugs on you."
"Still!" Osio wheezed. "There's, like… yelling options first. Strong-worded complaints. You skipped straight to 'jaw demolition'."
"If I hadn't—"
He couldn't finish that sentence. Prison. Records. His mom's face when they came for him. All of it hovered there, waiting.
Raku forced his legs to move again. "We can't stay in the city."
"Yeah," Osio agreed, straightening up. "Let's go somewhere no one in their right mind would go."
Raku gave him a look. "You mean—"
"Field trip," Osio said, pointing ahead. "Edge of the Hole. We always wanted a closer look, right? Congratulations, we now have negative better plans."
Raku wanted to argue. His brain said: go home, hide, pretend none of this happened.
His body kept walking toward the one place every teacher, parent, and warning vid had told them to avoid.
The last buildings gave way to a scar.
No water. No waves. No anything.
Just endless dry land: broken piers leading to nowhere, chunks of old ships sticking out of the dirt like bones, rusted metal containers, cracked ground that looked like it had been cooked from the inside.
Wind rolled dust across the empty basin.
"So this is it, huh," Osio said, quieter now. "The big… whatever. The thing from class."
"The 'Ocean'," Raku said. His own voice sounded thin.
"You ever seen water that big?"
"No."
"Me neither."
"I don't think anyone alive has," Raku added.
From up here on the rim, the world looked wrong. The basin went on and on, swallowing the horizon. No waves, no shine, just a dead bowl where something huge used to be.
They walked down the slope slowly, like they weren't sure the ground would hold.
Old warning signs lay half-buried in dirt. Some barriers had fallen over. It didn't feel like a legendary mystery anymore. It felt like the world had been broken, and then everyone got used to walking around the crack.
Osio kicked a rock. It bounced twice, then disappeared over a sudden drop.
"Careful," Raku said.
Osio edged closer and peered over. "Yo. That's a drop."
They were standing near what used to be a pier, now hanging out over nothing. The stone ended abruptly. Below, darkness pooled like spilled ink. Not bottomless, maybe—but deep enough that neither of them wanted to test it.
"Okay," Osio said. "New rule. We don't fall and die. Agreed?"
"Strong rule," Raku answered. "I support it."
He took one cautious step closer to the edge to look. From here he could see broken support pillars, twisted metal, and then… nothing. The air above the darkness shimmered very slightly, like heat over asphalt.
Osio grabbed his hood. "Bruh."
"I'm not gonna jump."
"Everyone who falls says that before they fall."
Raku rolled his eyes and shifted his foot.
The ground under him crumbled.
Stone slid away with a grinding sound. His shoe lost grip. His weight pitched forward.
"Raku!" Osio yelled, yanking hard on his hoodie.
Raku's right arm shot out on instinct, reaching for balance.
His hand went forward—
—and vanished past an invisible line.
He didn't hit stone.
He didn't hit air.
He hit nothing.
From the shoulder down, there was just absence. No pressure, no temperature, no sensation at all. Like his arm had been erased.
Osio screamed. "Raku! Your arm! Your ARM—"
"I know," Raku said through clenched teeth. His voice came out too calm, like it belonged to someone else.
He tried to pull back.
Part of him braced for something horrible to happen—for a crushing force to clamp down, for searing pain, for something down there to grab him and drag him in.
There was nothing.
His arm slid out as easily as it had gone in.
He stumbled backwards and landed hard on his backside. His right arm flopped across his lap.
It was there.
Hand. Fingers. Skin. Tiny scar on his knuckle from when he'd punched a wall last year. Everything exactly where it should be.
His heart pounded so hard his vision blurred around the edges.
Osio dropped down beside him, grabbing his wrist and turning it over, then over again. "Nope. No. No way. This is not… this is not how the world works, man."
"I noticed," Raku muttered, but his voice shook.
Osio stared at the invisible line where Raku's arm had vanished. "Everything they throw in disappears," he said, almost reciting the warnings. "Signals get cut off. Stuff gets crushed. People lose limbs. Your arm went in and just—came back. Like it took a little vacation and returned with no souvenirs."
Raku flexed his fingers. They obeyed.
He didn't feel special.
He felt like he'd just cheated at something the universe took very seriously.
"Say nothing," Osio said suddenly.
"To who?"
"To anyone. Not teachers, not parents, not your future therapist, no one."
"Yeah," Raku said. "Hard to explain on a form. 'Any health conditions?' 'Yeah, my arm doesn't follow physics.'"
Osio let out a hysterical little laugh, then clapped a hand over his mouth.
They sat there for a while, breathing, listening to the wind scrape across the dead basin. The adrenaline started to drain, leaving a heavy, shaky exhaustion in its place.
Finally Raku pushed himself to his feet. His legs were jelly, but they worked.
"We should go," he said.
"Yeah," Osio agreed. "Before the universe decides to patch the bug."
They climbed back up the slope, leaving the edge behind.
Neither of them noticed the way the broken drone, half-buried in the dirt a few meters away, flickered faintly to life for the first time in years.
A week passed.
They didn't knock.
The cars were black and quiet, engines barely humming as they rolled onto the narrow street in front of Raku's building. Dark windows. Clean doors. Too shiny for this neighborhood.
Raku was at the kitchen table, doing homework he didn't care about, when his mother frowned and looked out the window.
Her face went pale.
"Stay here," she said.
She didn't sound like herself.
By the time Raku stood up, the knock had already come—sharp, official knuckles on thin wood. His mother opened the door only halfway.
"Can I help you?"
Voices. Calm, practiced. "Ma'am, we're here about your son. Raku De costa."
Raku's stomach twisted.
He stepped into the hallway. "Mom?"
The people in the doorway turned to look at him.
They wore suits, not police uniforms. Neatly pressed. ID cards clipped to their jackets. Their faces all had the same expression: polite, empty, like they'd been printed from one template and just colored slightly different.
"Raku De Costa?" one of them asked.
Every instinct in his body screamed run.
"Yeah," he said, because his mouth hated him.
"We'd like to ask you a few questions," the man said. "About an incident last week near the Hole Sector."
His mother tensed. "He's done nothing wrong."
"Of course," the man said smoothly. "This isn't about guilt. It's about safety. We just need to make sure everything is… normal."
Normal.
Raku thought of his arm disappearing into nothing and coming back fine.
Hands reached for him. Not rough at first, just firm. Guiding.
Then his mother tried to pull him back. "Wait, you can't just—"
Another voice cut her off. "Ma'am, please. If there is an anomaly, it's better we handle it. For everyone's protection."
Too many hands now. On his shoulders, his arms. Pushing him toward the hallway. The world narrowed into the frame of the open door and his mother's face behind it, eyes wide, shouting his name.
"Raku!"
He fought then, but it was clumsy—kicking at the floor, trying to twist free. Someone grabbed his wrist, another his neck, fingers digging in just enough to hurt.
A sting in his arm.
Cold rushing through his veins.
The ceiling tilted. Voices blurred.
"We have to test him," someone said over the ringing in his ears. "Before the trail goes cold."
His mother's voice became a smear of sound as the world slipped sideways and away.
He woke to buzzing lights.
Fluorescent strips hummed overhead. The air smelled like metal and disinfectant. The walls were white and too clean, no windows, corners a little too sharp, like the whole room had been built to make people feel small.
Raku lay on a hard surface—a slab that barely deserved to be called a bed. His tongue felt thick. His arm throbbed where they'd stuck the needle.
A door hissed open.
He turned his head, stomach tight.
They didn't send a doctor.
They threw in a gorilla.