I'd spent eleven years pretending to be fine.

  At the factory, it was easy. Show up. Do the work. Nod at the right times. Say yeah, doing okay when someone asked and no, can't make it when someone invited me somewhere. Smile at the Christmas party. Sign the birthday card. Keep the surface intact while everything underneath went quiet and still.

  Nobody pushed. Nobody dug. People respected the boundary of a man who showed up and did his job, even if they suspected there was nothing behind it. The American social contract in its purest form: don't make it weird, and nobody has to feel anything.

  I was good at pretending. It was maybe the only thing I'd ever been truly skilled at.

  Turns out, pretending transcends universes.

  Day seven. Or eight. I'd stopped counting. The days blurred together in a rhythm that felt eerily familiar. Wake. Work. Eat. Repeat. Even the discomfort became routine, which was its own kind of horror. The human body can adapt to almost anything. The human mind follows along, too tired to argue.

  Sarah would have started soccer season by now. Back in Colorado, where February meant indoor practice in some gym that smelled like floor wax and shoe rubber. She'd be tall. Fourteen was when Rachel started growing, and Sarah had her mother's frame. I wondered if she still played midfielder. If she still did that thing where she bit her lower lip when she was concentrating.

  I wondered if she knew I was dead.

  I wondered if she cried, or if I'd been absent long enough that my dying was more paperwork than grief. Insurance forms and a phone call and a casserole from the neighbors, and then life continuing in the shape it had already taken without me.

  The thought should have hurt more. Maybe it did, somewhere below the level where I could feel it.

  The morning run went better. I finished the loop only a hundred yards behind the second-slowest runner. Kolt didn't comment. She didn't need to. The absence of the rod across my shoulders was commentary enough.

  Weapons training was where I came alive. If "alive" meant hurting in productive ways instead of hurting uselessly.

  Havel had started pairing me with better fighters. Not the best, but recruits who had been training since childhood, who'd held wooden swords before they could write their names. They forced me to think two moves ahead instead of reacting to whatever arrived.

  And I could think two moves ahead now. That was the terrifying part.

  During sparring, I read my opponent whole. Weight distribution. Breathing pattern. The micro-adjustments in grip that telegraphed intent. My eyes found patterns within patterns. The difference between a body moving smoothly and one about to commit.

  A human body swinging a sword was another machine. More complex, more unpredictable. But governed by the same physics. Leverage. Momentum. The line between a body's center of gravity and its base of support. When that line shifted, something was coming. The direction of the shift told me what.

  My partner came in with an overhead strike. I saw it in his shoulders three heartbeats before the blade moved, the tension gathering, the slight lean forward, the eyes tracking the spot where he wanted the sword to land. I stepped left. His strike cut air. I countered. Light contact against his forearm.

  He blinked. Looked at me like I'd done a card trick.

  "You read that," he said.

  "Lucky guess."

  It wasn't. But I wasn't about to explain why a man branded Low Quartz who couldn't produce a flicker of channeled light could read human movement at that speed.

  That last part was the problem.

  The second channeling class was worse than the first.

  Not because I expected to succeed, I'd already made peace with the void. But because the other recruits were improving.

  The kid who'd barely managed a flicker last time now held a steady glow for five seconds. Ten. His face screwed up with effort, sweat on his brow, but the light was there. Real. Present.

  Others had progressed too. Faint pulses of enhancement flowing into their arms, their legs. One recruit channeled enough power into his fist to crack a practice dummy's wooden frame. The impact was sharp, decisive. Enhanced. The instructor nodded. "Good. Crude, but good. You'll refine it."

  My turn came.

  I placed my hand on my chest. Closed my eyes. Reached.

  Nothing.

  The void was patient. It didn't taunt me. Didn't resist. It was just there. The absence where everyone else had something.

  "Show me," the instructor said.

  I held up my hand. Empty.

  He frowned. Took my wrist. Pressed my palm flat against the practice post. "Channel into the wood. Even the lowest of Low Quartz can manage that. Push the energy outward."

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  I pushed. I strained. I gritted my teeth and tried to force something, anything, through a channel that didn't exist, from a source that wasn't there.

  The post stood unmoved. My knuckles ached from pressing too hard. No glow. No warmth. Nothing.

  The instructor's frown deepened. He placed his own hand on my chest. Over the brand. I felt his power probe inward, a faint pressure, warm, searching.

  His expression changed.

  Confusion.

  His hand pressed harder. Searching. The warmth of his channeling pushed against my chest, into the space where a Core should be, and found…

  His hand dropped away. He looked at me with an expression I couldn't read. Then he pulled a small ledger from his belt, made a mark, and moved to the next recruit.

  He didn't tell me to try again.

  That was worse than being told I'd failed.

  I stood at the back of the group for the rest of the class, watching palms glow and listening to the instructor praise progress I could never make, and the mark on my chest throbbed with each heartbeat like a second, lying heart.

  I couldn't sleep that night.

  The tent breathed around me, the rhythmic sighs of exhausted men, the creak of cot frames, someone grinding their teeth in the dark. Normal sounds. Comforting, even, in their constancy.

  I lay on my back and pressed my hand against the brand and tried one more time.

  I always tried one more time. The same way I'd always checked my phone one more time before bed back in Ohio, hoping for a message from Sarah or Michael that I knew wouldn't be there. The hope was irrational. But killing it required an effort I'd never been able to make.

  The void was unchanged. Still. Patient. A hole in the center of me that had been there since I'd woken on that battlefield. Or maybe since long before that. Maybe I'd always been hollow. Maybe the factory had been the Earth version of the same emptiness. No Core, no crystal, no spark. Just a man with a gap where the important parts should be.

  Rachel had said something, near the end. Not during the divorce. That had been lawyers and paperwork, procedural and calm. Before. When she'd still been trying.

  It's like you're not really here, she'd said. You're standing right in front of me and I can't reach you.

  I hadn't understood. Thought she was being dramatic. Thought presence meant showing up, and I showed up.

  I understood now.

  Presence wasn't just being there. It was having something inside that could connect. Could reach back. Could meet someone halfway.

  What if I'd never had that? What if the void wasn't new, just newly visible?

  The thought was too big for 2 AM. I shelved it. Focused on the tent canvas. The breathing. The cold.

  Footsteps outside. I tensed. But they passed, a guard on patrol, boots squelching in mud.

  I turned on my side. Closed my eyes. Tried to sleep.

  Didn't.

  I found Senna outside at first light, sitting on an overturned crate behind the barracks, sharpening a blade with a stone she'd found somewhere. The scraping rhythm was steady and precise. Farm work, I thought. You learned to maintain your tools or you didn't eat.

  "You're up early," she said without looking up.

  "Couldn't sleep."

  "Channeling?"

  I didn't answer. Which was an answer.

  She set the blade down. Looked at me with those direct eyes. "Come here. Sit."

  I sat on the crate beside her. The morning was cold. My breath came out in pale clouds. The camp was stirring. Fires being relit, the distant clatter of the mess tent.

  "Give me your hand." She took it before I could respond. Turned my palm upward. Placed her other hand on her own chest.

  Her palm began to glow.

  It was faint, Low Jade, not much power, but present. A soft green-tinged light that spread from her chest down her arm and into her hand. Warm. I could feel it against my skin. A gentle pressure, like standing near a fire.

  "That's what it feels like," she said. "Warmth first. Then a pull, like water flowing downhill. You reach for the warmth and it comes to you." She moved her glowing hand over mine. "Now you try."

  I closed my eyes. Reached.

  I wanted it to work. Wanted it so badly my throat tightened. For the normalcy. To be a man with a Core, a rating, a ceiling. To be Low Quartz for real instead of a lie. To have a spark, even a small one, even a pathetic flickering ember.

  Nothing.

  Senna's warmth pressed against my palm. Inside my chest: the void. Patient. Unmoved. Infinite in its refusal to be anything other than what it was.

  I opened my eyes.

  Senna was watching me. Her expression careful. "You really can't feel it?"

  "There's nothing to feel."

  She processed that. I could see her working through it. The farm-girl pragmatism sorting the information into categories. Soil that won't grow. Animals that won't breed. Things that are broken in ways you can't fix.

  "Some people take longer," she said finally. "My brother couldn't channel until he was fifteen. Almost gave up. Then one day it just clicked."

  Her kindness made my chest hurt worse than the brand.

  "Thanks, Senna."

  "Don't thank me. Just keep trying." She picked up the blade and the stone. Resumed sharpening. The rhythmic scraping filled the silence.

  I sat beside her and watched the camp wake up and thought about the channeling instructor's ledger. The mark he'd made. The way his hand had dropped from my chest with a small, puzzled frown.

  Those reports went somewhere. Someone read them. Someone tracked which recruits could channel and which couldn't and how fast they were progressing.

  And somewhere in those reports, my name sat next to a gap. A zero. An absence in a column where everyone else had a number.

  I wondered how long it would take for the wrong person to notice.

  The afternoon brought weapons training and the answer to a question I hadn't asked.

  The tall officer was back.

  He stood at the edge of the yard, arms crossed, watching the sparring with the same patient intensity as before. Gray eyes moving between bouts. Assessing. I caught Havel glancing toward him with the slightly stiff posture of an instructor being observed by a superior.

  I tried to focus on the sparring. My partner was a Low Jade this time. Faster, stronger, with the benefit of actual Core enhancement behind his strikes. The practice sword hit harder. Moved quicker.

  But I could read him. Could see the combinations forming before they arrived. Could predict the angles.

  I blocked four consecutive strikes. Countered twice. Both times, my practice sword found its mark, light contact, technically clean.

  Havel stopped. Watched. Nodded once.

  "That's good, Marcus. Your reads are ahead of your muscle memory. But the muscles are catching up. Keep that pace."

  I felt the gray-eyed officer's gaze settle on me and hold there. Too long.

  I finished the session. Returned my practice sword to the rack. Walked toward the barracks.

  The officer was still watching. Our eyes didn't meet. I made sure of that. But I felt the weight of his attention.

  Two facts.

  Channeling class: zero. Empty hands. A void where a Core should be.

  Weapons training: accelerating. Reading patterns at a speed that didn't match my rating, my experience, or anything about me that was supposed to make sense.

  Those facts told a story. And the officer at the edge of the yard looked.

  I walked faster. My feet ached. My chest ached worse.

  The lie was holding. For now.

  But lies had expiration dates. I'd learned that the hard way, safety reports stayed clean right up until someone lost an arm, and then everyone pretended they'd never seen the piece of wood propping open the safety guard.

  The only question was whether the lie would expire on my terms or someone else's.