Episode 1-Continuity

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  THE NIGHT OF THE FIRE

  At 9:09 PM, something crossed the block. A blue flame shaped like a tail, fast, gone before anyone could name it. The screens went dark. The refrigerator. The corridor lights. Five minutes later, the companions fell. All of them. At the same time.

  Hylan was in hallway 32-C with two kilos of rice under his arm when it happened. Not like the emergency simulations Vexoris Corp. broadcast every quarter: they dropped all at once, as if something had flipped the switch keeping them airborne. The sound came simultaneously with the darkness — that specific noise of many small objects hitting the floor at the same time, multiplied across every floor of the block, every corridor, every wrist that was suddenly empty.

  The mantis fell from his right wrist without a sound.

  Then came the alarms, overlapping, useless, designed for a scenario where only one thing failed at a time.

  The floor of level 32 opened like a mouth.

  He dropped the rice. It wasn't a decision — it was arithmetic. Two kilos in the left hand, exposed beam four meters away, fall angle approximately thirty degrees. Free hands were worth more.

  He ran toward the smoke instead of away from it, because the smoke was rising through the western ventilation columns, which meant the fire was to the east, and if the fire was to the east, the southern stairwell still held.

  Floor thirty-three. Two neighbors on the landing, disoriented, coughing. He pulled them by the arm. Took them down to 29, where the air was still breathable, left them with a woman who had a flashlight and the look of someone who knows what to do. Went back up.

  On the landing of floor 31 there were three doors. Two closed. One open, smoke curling out in slow spirals. He went in.

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  Nayara was standing by the window.

  Not paralyzed. Calculating. Her hand resting on the frame, chin raised, eyes measuring the distance to the ground with the same attention he used to measure trajectory angles. She had soot on her forehead and her hands were still damp with lemon, as if she'd stepped away from something she hadn't finished yet.

  When she saw him come in, something in her face changed.

  Not fear. Relief. The specific kind of relief someone has when they've been calculating impossible options and just received one more.

  — There are still people on 33, — she said before he could speak.

  — Already got them.

  — And 34?

  — Empty. I checked on the way up.

  Nayara nodded. She looked toward the door, toward the smoke still thickening in the corridor, toward him. Running the same calculation he would have run: available routes, time remaining, weight to carry.

  — Then we go down, — she said.

  — Then we go down.

  She moved toward the door. Hylan led, reading the hallway, calculating which parts of the floor could still bear weight. The heat was dense — the kind that doesn't burn yet but warns that it will. Four steps. Six.

  The crack came without warning.

  Not from the floor. From the side wall, where a beam that had spent thirty years holding the building up decided it couldn't anymore. The sound was dry, final, the kind that leaves no room for interpretation.

  Hylan processed it in fractions of a second. The direction of the collapse. The angle of the fall. The available space. The weight of the debris against the time left to move.

  All of that in under a second.

  And in that same second, Nayara was already moving.

  Not toward the exit. Toward him.

  Her hands reached his chest before he could calculate what they were doing. Palms open. The warmth of lemon still in them — that specific smell his system registered with a precision he hadn't asked for and wouldn't be able to erase.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  She pushed him.

  Not with calculated force. With everything she had. Toward the side where the floor was still floor, toward the door frame that still held, toward the only space in that corridor that in that precise second was safe.

  Hylan went backward.

  Time did what time does in the moments that matter: it stretched. Not to give him more options. Only so he could see clearly what was happening and do nothing with that clarity.

  He saw Nayara's hands pull back from his chest.

  He saw the weight of the corridor shift around her.

  He saw her face.

  She didn't scream. She didn't close her eyes. She didn't say his name. She just looked at him the way people look when they've made a decision and want the last thing they register to be the face of someone specific. As if looking were a way of carrying him with her to wherever she was going.

  That second lasted as long as the seconds that are never forgotten.

  Then the corridor closed between them.

  And she was gone.

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  THE LANDING

  Smoke kept pouring from the open door.

  Hylan was on the floor, one palm pressed against the tiles, his body's weight held by an arm he didn't remember extending. Where Nayara had been, there was only the window frame and the cold night air coming in without permission.

  He didn't scream. He didn't calculate. He didn't file anything away.

  He stayed there just long enough for the silence to become a piece of data without a category.

  Then came the fall.

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  THE VOID

  More than twenty floors. Fire, debris, twisted metal. The sudden cold of open air where there should be no open air.

  Memories stacked like layers of city as he fell:

  His father's name was Dael. He worked in infrastructure maintenance on Level 18 of Ruma. The kind of work no one notices until something explodes. One night during an electrical storm he saved three families from Interstice 4 before the generator cut their oxygen. A woman from the fourth floor gave him her black scarf as the only payment she could offer. Two weeks later, Dael didn't come back from his shift. There was no accident report. No statement from Vexoris Corp. Only the specific silence of an absence when the system decides a person never quite existed.

  Nayara kept the scarf. Hylan was less than a year old. Nayara was eighteen.

  When he was old enough to understand, she tied it to his wrist and explained only this: that his father was the kind of person who did things right even when no one was watching. That it had a cost. And that the scarf was the only object in their lives that Vexoris Corp. had never registered — because it had traveled hand to hand, no chip, no code, no trace.

  The scarf, pressed between his arm and chest as he fell. Charred at the edges. Intact.

  The assignment room smelled like new plastic and manufactured expectation. Nine years old. Teacher Cleo with her butterfly. Twelve options on a thin screen. Words like companion, cheerful, calm. The mantis: Precise movement. Passive observation. The only one that didn't need to move to be present.

  Lyra extending her hand in a new classroom. The palm he never got to shake. The pen spinning. Four paragraphs. Personal record.

  The smell of ceviche. Nayara's hands on the cutting board. What happened to your father was that he was the kind of person who couldn't see an injustice and keep walking.

  Black.

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  No body. No air. No throat.

  But something is here.

  It isn't looking for anything. It doesn't know it's here. It only finds a resistance — blind, irrational, saying no without understanding what it's saying no to. Not to forgetting, not to disappearing, not to becoming the next piece of data that Lima's system will erase from the record, because anomalies aren't archived. They're eliminated.

  That is enough.

  The crack between life and death widens where it should be closing.

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  CONTINUITY

  A chest rebuilds itself around a sudden heat.

  Weight. Substance.

  He breathes.

  The first breath hurts like swallowing glass.

  He brings his hand to his chest. Waits for a beat. Nothing. Moves his hand to his neck. To his wrist. Back to his chest, as if the heart were something that might have shifted.

  No heartbeat. No rhythm. No error.

  The silence is perfect.

  And still he breathes. Not because he needs oxygen. He breathes because he remembers that humans breathe, and something in what he now is hasn't yet decided what to give up.

  The black scarf is still on his left wrist. Charred at the edges, but whole.

  His right wrist was empty.

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  THE LOST ISLAND · 2163

  He woke on wet sand.

  The first thing was the weight. Or the absence of it — strangely light, as if someone had calibrated the gravity wrong. Then came the air.

  It wasn't the air of the Levels. It didn't have that constant taste of ozone, or the soft hum of the recirculation filters that in Cantos are so constant they stop being heard. This air was cold. Clean in a way his lungs didn't recognize. The first breath was almost painful, like drinking ice water too fast.

  He coughed. Sat up slowly.

  The sky was a blue that didn't exist in any Level — no photovoltaic panels filtering it, no companions cutting across it. Just sky.

  He looked at his left hand. The scarf was still on his wrist. Charred at the edges, but whole.

  That was the first thing he checked.

  The second took longer: he raised the back of his right hand. Ran his fingers over it twice, three times, looking for the ridge that had always been there. The skin was smooth where it shouldn't be.

  The sea stretched infinite in every direction.

  Wooden houses with smoking chimneys. The smell of firewood. Human voices without amplification. The sound of water.

  In the distance, at the peaks where the light bent slightly wrong, there was a temple shaped like a skull. Something pulsed above its threshold — blue-white, rhythmic.

  Hylan looked at it long enough to register it.

  He didn't know what to calculate first.

  He started walking.

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  — End of Episode 1 —

  BEYOVOID