Extraction: Infinite Hunger Chapter 1: What Are You Hoping For?

Ash had been in the back training yard for six minutes before Leon arrived.

He knew because he’d counted. Not anxiously, but just because the part of his brain that refused to idle needed sothing to do. So Ash let it do what it wanted. In this case it wanted to count. Cracks in the concrete. Students crossing the far courtyard. Clouds moving northeast at whatever pace clouds moved.

The counting wasn’t aningful. It just filled the space.

Leon’s entourage arranged themselves in their usual semicircle. Ash watched them settle into position like they were ducklings following their mother.

"Still here," Leon said.

He said it every ti. The delivery changed. The aning never did. Ash had long since figured out that responding, or not responding, produced approximately the sa result, so he generally chose silence on the grounds that silence required less upkeep.

The shove ca. Ash took a step back, steadied, returned to his original position. His bag strap caught his shoulder and he adjusted it. Soone behind Leon laughed.

Three years of this.

He’d been doing it since fifteen, since the Threshold rewrote the world and forgot to include him. Everyone in his class had Awakened. Everyone in the academy. Statistically, everyone everywhere—99.7% of the global population over twelve, flooded with power born from whatever truth they’d been hiding from. The boy who secretly resented his family. The woman with thirty years of buried anger. The man who’d spent a decade pretending he didn’t want to watch everything burn.

All of them got sothing.

Ash’s translucent blue screen had read:

[ DOMINION: NULL ]

[ RANK: — ]

[ DESCRIPTION: — ]

Three dashes where his na should have been. No power. No Shade integration. No explanation. Just the quiet understanding that in a world where even the most diocre person had sothing, he was the kind of exception that didn’t even get to be interesting.

"You’re not listening." Leon’s voice carried a note of genuine offense.

Ash looked at him.

He was, technically, listening. He had heard the last forty seconds of Leon’s monologue and could have played it back accurately. He just hadn’t been in the mood to.

"I was," Ash said.

"Then what did I say?"

Ash weighed whether he should answer correctly versus going quiet.

He chose the latter.

Leon shoved him harder. Ash’s back hit the wall. The impact traveled up his spine in a way that would ache tomorrow. He saw a sar his elbow had just picked up from the concrete. Gray, centered on the left sleeve, probably fixable in the block C washing machines.

He thought those had been repaired. Soone had ntioned it last week. He was fairly sure of it.

At least, he hoped they’d been repaired.

Leon’s face appeared in his field of vision, now uncomfortably close.

That was new.

He’d never done the proximity thing before. Ash adjusted his expectation of how the next few minutes would go. New behavior usually ant escalation. He’d have to decide if this beca the kind of situation where actually trying to leave was worth the extended effort of being followed.

Leon crouched, bringing himself down to where Ash was half-leaning against the wall, and took hold of his chin between two fingers.

He forced his face to look up at him.

His expression was almost gentle. That was significantly worse than everything else.

"You know what’s sad?" he asked.

Ash waited.

"You’re still here. Three years. An awakened with zero power. Everyone hates you. Everyone wants you gone. And you still show up every day."

He tilted his head slightly, like the question was a genuine one.

"What are you hoping for?"

The back of Ash’s throat went dry.

He opened his mouth. He wanted to say sothing neutral, sothing that closed the loop, sothing that let him stand up and walk back across the courtyard and eat whatever the ss hall had left and go to sleep.

He had the shape of the next four hours clearly in his head. He just needed to get from here to there.

Except the thing he’d spent three years keeping at a manageable volu didn’t wait.

It said, from sowhere below his ribs:

I want to be soone.

He didn’t an to think it. It surfaced how old injuries do. Not from anything dramatic, just from an angle of pressure in the wrong place.

He hadn’t ant to an it. But it was there, fully ford, with a weight behind it that had been accumulating since before the Threshold, since before the academy, since before he had words for the hollow space where a self was supposed to be.

I want to be soone I want to be soone I WANT TO BE—

The world inverted.

No sound. No light. No sensation of movent. One second he was in his body, feeling the ache between his shoulder blades. Then sothing inside him that had been facing the wrong direction for eighteen years turned around all at once.

He felt it like sothing starving recognizing a sll.

The training yard was gone.

The space that replaced it had the sa walls. Sa dinsions. Sa chain-link fence along the south edge, sa eastern light coming from the sa angle. Every physical detail of the training yard, present and accounted for.

All of it was wrong.

The colors bled at the edges. The gray concrete softened at the corners into sothing almost blue, then washed out entirely before the wall t the sky. The chain-link left faint copper traces in the air where it caught the light, color seeping past its boundaries like sothing wet. Hard lines dissolved when Ash didn’t look at them directly. The shadows pooled slow and deliberate, flowing how ink spreads in still water, and they followed logic that almost held but didn’t quite.

He looked down at his hands. His skin looked like his skin. But the creases in his palms were too dark, like soone had drawn them in after the fact.

He was inside sothing.

Leon stood ten feet away, frozen mid-expression. Chest rising, falling, at a rhythm just slightly too slow to be natural. His eyes still open.

Sothing behind the pause in the world was watching. Ash could feel that much. Present and aware and completely unable to move.

At the far end of the yard, sothing else was watching back.

It had Leon’s height, Leon’s build, Leon’s uniform pressed to regulation precision, every button in place. But the face at this distance wasn’t quite right. The eyes were wider than they should be and wet with sothing Ash couldn’t na, and underneath the surface expression there was nothing that resembled cruelty.

It looked like sothing that had been frightened for a very long ti and had learned to keep its posture while it happened.

Ash had no powers. No weapon. No understanding of where he was, or how he’d gotten here. He wasn’t quite sure whether leaving was sothing he was allowed to choose. The air slled like chalk dust and old concrete, which was sohow the most unsettling part of all of it. Even the wrong version of a place should sll different.

The thing wearing Leon’s face opened its mouth.

He only loves when I make soone bleed.

The voice was smaller than Leon’s. Less constructed.

The watercolor light flickered. A slow, sourceless shift, like a page turning in another room. The shadows at the yard’s edge spread another inch outward. At the boundary where the concrete blurred into nothing, the air changed pressure in a way Ash felt behind his eyes.

Then the hunger opened in his chest.

Not a taphor. A physical event. An absence in the center of his ribs, a hollow that had been there his whole life and had just, for the first ti, decided it was done waiting. It wanted to be filled. It had always wanted to be filled. It had simply been too quiet for him to hear until now, when sothing had turned the volu up all the way at once.

More, said the voice that lived in the hollow.

Ash’s back straightened on its own.

He noted, with distant interest, that he was not afraid.

He took a step forward.