A pause settled under his skull, heavier than silence should have been.
“You heard me before,” the voice said.
Flat.
No inflection at all.
The dark came back to him for a second — the glitching red light, that distant, half-swallowed call before everything folded in on itself.
Boss.
His hand went to his temple without him telling it to.
“That was you.
In the dark.”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?
Where are you actually — ” He stopped, not sure how to finish it.
“Within you.”
He pressed his fingers into his brow.
“That means nothing.”
“I know.”
The plainness of it — no defense, no explanation offered — left him with nothing to push against.
He looked around the courtyard again anyway, checking the shadows out of habit.
“Are you some kind of…
system?”
“Yes.”
He waited for more.
Nothing came.
“That’s it?
Just yes?”
“I exist to assist you.” A beat.
“That is all you need to know at present.”
He leaned his shoulder against the pillar, the stone cool through the linen.
“And you can hear my thoughts because — what, you’re wired into my head?”
“Something like that.”
He rubbed his forehead hard enough that it stung.
Too many things here didn’t fit together, and none of them were slowing down for him.
“Fine,” he muttered, and looked out past the terrace at the green running toward the treeline.
“Where am I?”
Nothing answered.
“Did you hear that?”
“Yes.”
“Then answer it.”
“I can’t.”
His jaw tightened.
“Why not.”
“It’s locked.
I don’t have it either.” This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“Locked by who?”
“Unavailable.”
“Why.”
“You’re not strong enough to hold it yet.”
He stared at the empty air in front of him.
“Strong enough.
To hold a location.”
“Your mind cannot hold the information in its current state.”
A short breath came out of him, almost a laugh, mostly disbelief.
“You’re saying I’m too stupid to know where I am.”
“Close enough.”
His hand curled loosely into the fabric of his tunic.
The tone gave him nothing to work with — no anger to match, no opening.
“You need to get stronger,” the System said, and something in its pitch shifted slightly, like it had moved on without waiting for him.
“Stronger how.”
Instead of an answer, a thin blue rectangle bled into the air in front of his eyes, hanging there in the warm terrace light.
He flinched back — it followed, holding its distance exactly, letters moving across it that he didn’t recognize but somehow understood anyway.
Body unstable.
Recovery required before further steps.
He looked past the words at the pale wall behind them.
“And this place?”
“You have access to it.
Food.
Water.
Washing facilities.
Medical support, if required.” A pause.
“There’s a lower level.
For building yourself back up.”
He glanced back through the arched doorway at the empty bedchamber.
“Building myself back up.”
“Training.
Recovery chambers.
Things that go into you to make the process faster.”
“Injections.”
“Yes.”
“That sounds like something that could kill me.”
“It could.”
He looked at the screen again, and something cold moved through his chest that had nothing to do with the wind.
“And I’m meant to just — do all this.”
“If you want your abilities back.”
He went still.
The word landed somewhere specific.
“Back.”
Nothing.
“You said back.
“Yes.”
“So I was — something.
Before this.”
Another pause, longer this time, and it hurt more than he expected it to.
“That information is unavailable.”
He shut his eyes.
Opened them.
His voice came out rougher than he meant it to.
“Then tell me something.
Anything.
Who am I.”
Silence again.
His throat had gone dry.
“I don’t know my own name,” he said, mostly to the wind, because there didn’t seem to be anyone else worth saying it to.
“I don’t know where I came from, or how I ended up on that bed in there, or why that thing a minute ago went straight through me like I wasn’t real.” He looked down at his hands — clean, no scars, nothing that matched what he half-remembered feeling.
“I don’t remember anything.”
Then something surfaced, uninvited.
A road, sun-bleached and cracked.
A brick wall running along a school.
A face, close, panicked.
“Ram.”
He said it out loud without meaning to.
It sat strangely in his mouth, half his and half a stranger’s.
More came after it, in no order he could control — a cramped flat, someone’s father shouting from a doorway, a table of friends arguing over nothing.
A girl with a white hairband, laughing at something he couldn’t hear anymore.
“Shweta.”
His chest pulled tight around the name.
He remembered the exact way she used to call him an idiot, half a second before the horn.
The van.
The color on the road that he didn’t want to look at directly even in memory.
Her body, and then just — the ground.
And under all of it, the specific, useless feeling of not being able to do anything about any of it.
He opened his eyes.
His palms had gone damp.
The memories felt real in the way a bruise feels real, but they didn’t explain a single thing around him — not the castle, not the light hanging in the air in front of him, not why something in the dark had once called him Boss, not why his body had come out the other side of whatever the lab had done to it.
He looked at the wall.
Then the floating screen.
Then his own hands again.
“Ram,” he said again, quieter, testing it.
It sounded like something that used to fit and didn’t quite anymore.
He stood there a while longer, the wind working steadily through the trees below, and one question kept circling back no matter which way he turned it.
Was the boy he remembered dying on that road the same person standing here now — or just someone this body used to be.