On the night the sky turned white over Halcroft, a woman named Donna Cartwright was doing her rounds.
She worked nights at Ashveil Orphanage and Academy, had worked nights there for eleven years, and had developed over those years the particular relationship with the building that came from spending so many hours in it when it was quiet. She knew which floorboards announced themselves and which stayed silent. She knew the way the heating system spoke in the walls when the temperature dropped. She knew the sound of sixty children sleeping the specific distributed quality of it, the small unconscious noises that collectively added up to a kind of breathing.
She had watched the sky turn white from the building's front window at around eight in the evening, standing alongside two other staff members and saying nothing for a very long time. Then she had gone to check on the youngest children, and then on the rest, and then had continued her shift in the particular way of a person who has decided to focus on what is immediate and manageable because the alternative is not immediately productive.
By two in the morning, the building was settled.
She was on her third circuit of the ground floor when she heard it.
A sound from the front steps. Thin. Insistent. The sound of something that had been patient for a while and had decided it was finished being patient.
She opened the front door and looked down.
A baby.
Wrapped in a blanket that someone had taken care to tuck securely, lying in a shallow basket that had been placed deliberately on the top step rather than left on the path or the lower steps placed, she would notice later, exactly at the centre of the step, equidistant from both edges. Perhaps three months old. Red-faced with the expression of someone who had been crying long enough to have very strong opinions about the current situation and was making sure they were heard.
Donna stood in the doorway for a moment.
The sky behind her was still faintly luminous at the edges, the last traces of whatever the detonation had done to the upper atmosphere still visible if you looked for them. The particles were still drifting down, though nobody knew that yet. The street was quiet. The city was quiet. The whole world was still in the particular suspended state of a place that has just found out it is going to survive and hasn't yet processed what that means.
She looked at the baby.
The baby continued to have opinions.
Donna picked him up, brought him inside, and went to find the duty manager.
The investigation that followed was conducted carefully and without much optimism by the local authority. Nobody ever came to claim him. No note had been left. The basket had no identifying marks no manufacturer's label, no initials, nothing. Whoever had placed him there had done so with care and deliberateness and had then left no trace whatsoever. The investigation produced nothing, and after a reasonable period it was closed, as these things are, and the child was entered into the system as a foundling.
He had been outside, under the open sky, for an unknown amount of time. Hours, possibly. Long enough for the Starlight particles still drifting through the evening air to have settled into everything around him. Into the stone steps. Into the blanket. Into the small, new lungs filling and emptying with the night air.
Into him.
The staff named him Mars.
Nobody was entirely sure how it happened. These things rarely had a clean explanation. Donna said later that it had seemed right given the night, the circumstances, the way the sky had still been luminous when she carried him inside. The name of a planet. Something out there in the dark that had somehow ended up here, on a doorstep, waiting to be found.
The name circulated among the staff with no particular formality and then stopped circulating because everyone was already using it, and that was that.
He grew up at Ashveil, which was the only home he had ever had and would ever have for the first fourteen years of his life. He grew up in the way children grew up in institutions aware of the building's rhythms before he was aware of much else, learning the personalities of the staff before he learned to read, developing the particular self-sufficiency of a child who has always understood at some fundamental level that the adults around him are managing many things simultaneously and that adding to that management is a cost he prefers not to impose.
He was not unhappy in any simple way. Unhappiness in institutions was rarely simple.
He was just very clear, from an unusually early age, about the shape of his situation.
There was no fixed age for the assessment.
The programme had been running for three years by the time Mars was old enough to be considered, and in those three years the assessors had developed enough practical experience to know that the right time varied. Some children showed early signs. Some showed nothing at all until suddenly they showed everything. The standard practice was to watch, and to bring children in when the watching suggested that something was happening or in a smaller number of cases when the watching suggested that something very specifically wasn't happening that should have been.
Mars fell into the second category.
He was five years old in 2036 when they brought him in. The staff had been observing him since he was old enough to be observed in any meaningful way, noticing the absence of things they had come to expect the small involuntary expressions of developing ability that most children showed whether they were aware of them or not. A child with an energy affinity tended to leave warm spots. A child with a physical ability tended to do things that were slightly more than their size suggested. A child with a perceptual gift noticed things in a way that was slightly more than their attention suggested.
Mars did none of these things.
He was simply a five-year-old child, in a world where being simply a five-year-old child had become, gradually and without anyone explicitly deciding it was so, a thing that required documentation.
The assessment programme ran on a four-tier classification system.
Delta was the lowest detectable, barely worth logging. The faint warmth in the instruments assigned to people whose abilities manifested as little more than a persistent good mood in certain weather, or an uncanny ability to find misplaced things. Not nothing, technically. Close enough that the practical difference was difficult to articulate.
Above that: Beta. Then Alpha.
And at the top: Omega.
Omega was the ceiling. Omega was the number that made assessors set down their pens. Omega was the classification that meant something was present something real, something significant, something with a quality you could feel in a room before you had opened a single file or run a single test.
The assessor assigned to Mars that day was a man named Dr. Callum Fitch. He set down his pen.