Chapter 5: Nothing Little
The drone of Lecturer Thorne’s voice was a flat, metallic buzz, competing with the low hum of the academy’s climate system. Ren stared at the chronometer on the classroom wall, watching the digital numbers blink from 10:47 to 10:48. Each minute felt like a sediment layer, hardening over the unresolved anger from the night before.
His father’s unopened gift was a phantom weight in his pocket. Kaito’s words—his failure, not yours—echoed, but they couldn’t quite dissolve the bitter kernel of humiliation. The kids from the Kansen District had sniffed that humiliation on him for years. Pretty-boy cleaner. Daddy’s little ghost. He felt the familiar heat start to climb his neck.
“—and the tertiary stabilization field is thus the pilot’s primary buffer against ontological feedback,” Thorne droned, pointing at a rotating hologram of an exosuit’s core.
Ren’s hand clenched around his stylus. He imagined it was his father’s commendation medal, the one Kaito kept in that lockbox. He imagined crushing it into a useless lump of metal.
A sharp nudge jabbed his ribs. “Hey. You’re gonna fuse with that thing.” Haru’s face was tilted toward him, a mess of choppy black hair falling over one amused eye. He kept his own stylus moving, doodling what looked like a very elaborate, very insulting caricature of Thorne on his data-slate. “Breathe, man. You look like you’re trying to stare a hole into next week.”
Ren forced his fingers to relax. The stylus had left deep indents in his palm. “Just bored.”
“Bored, my ass. You’ve got the ‘someone pissed in my nutrient pack’ face. Birthday hangover?” Haru whispered, his tone lightly teasing but with an edge of genuine concern. He was the only one who ever asked, and the only one Ren might even consider telling.
Before Ren could mutter a reply, the world stuttered.
It wasn’t a sound first. It was a feeling. A sudden, profound silence as the climate hum died. The hologram at the front of the class flickered, pixelated, and collapsed into nothing. The lights dimmed, then surged to a painful, blinding white.
Then the shaking began.
It wasn’t an earthquake. It was deeper, wronger. The polished permacrete floor didn’t just vibrate; it rippled, like the skin of a drum. Desks screeched. A student yelped. Thorne’s voice cut off into a gasp.
Ren’s training—Kaito’s endless drills—kicked in a half-second before his panic. He was out of his seat, dropping into a crouch, one hand on the floor to feel the frequency. Too fast. Not tectonic. His eyes shot to the arched windows. The sky outside the gothic stone frames was darkening, not with clouds, but with a creeping, bruise-like purple that swallowed the daylight.
“Anomaly surge!” someone screamed from the hallway, their voice raw with protocol-recited terror.
Chaos erupted. Chairs toppled. Students scrambled for the door, a jostling, yelling tide of grey uniforms. Thorne was shouting about calm and procedure, his voice lost in the din.
Haru grabbed Ren’s arm, his usual flippancy gone. “Move, clean-head! This isn’t a drill!”
They were shoved toward the grand staircase with the crowd. The carved symbols on the steps seemed to writhe under their feet. The air grew thick, tasting of copper and burnt citrus. A pressure built in Ren’s ears, a descending whine that swallowed all other sound.
Then, the light.
It wasn’t an explosion. It was an erasure. A silent, white-out flash that originated not from a point, but from everywhere at once. It consumed the staircase, the screaming faces, Haru’s grip on his arm. For a moment, there was no up, no down, no sound, no self.
Ren felt a lurch, a sensation of being infinitely stretched and then snapped back into a shape that didn’t quite fit.
The light faded.
He was standing. He didn’t remember falling.
Silence. A deep, cottony, absolute silence.
He blinked, his eyes struggling to resolve the scene. He was still in the academy. But it was wrong.
He stood on what should have been the ceiling of the lecture hall. Or was it the wall? Gravity had reasserted itself, but its logic was broken. His boots were planted on a surface of light fixtures and structural beams. Above him—or below him—the abandoned desks and chairs hung in mid-air, tethered to nothing, drifting lazily like seaweed in a still ocean. A fragmented data-slate rotated slowly past his face, displaying a frozen fragment of Haru’s doodle.
The world was inverted. Colors were leached out, everything cast in a monochrome of muted greys and sickly greens. The grand staircase he’d just been on was now a shattered spine of floating stone fragments, twisting in a slow, impossible spiral into a gloom that had no end.
He was utterly alone.
“Haru?” His own voice was a shock, tiny and immediately swallowed by the dense, dead air. No echo. Nothing.
A low, grinding hum began to permeate the silence, coming from the very stones. It felt like the building itself was in pain. Ren’s breath fogged in air that had turned suddenly, bitingly cold. He took a careful step. His boot crunched on a layer of frost that coated the ceiling-turned-floor.
Containment protocol. Assess. Orient. Kaito’s voice in his head was a lifeline. He was a cleaner. Or was training to be one. This was the thing. The family business.
But this wasn’t a training sim. This was the deep, swallowing quiet of a turned-off world. The anger he’d nursed all morning was gone, burned away by a pure, primal ice that was now spreading from his stomach to his limbs. He was not just scared. He was erased. A speck in a broken snow globe.
He looked at the floating debris that had been his classroom, at the yawning, spiraling void where the staircase should lead back to the world. The crushing solitude was more terrifying than any glitched creature from the briefing videos.
He was in it. The anomaly had him.
And he was completely, devastatingly alone.