Ethan Kai's right hand ached.
It had been bothering him all morning. The center of his palm was raw, the skin scorched into a rough circle; dark at the core, red along the edges. It did not look like a normal burn. It looked deliberate, as if something hot and precise had been pressed into him. Yet he had touched nothing hot. No flame, no chemical.
It had come from a close encounter of the strange kind.
There had been a man outside the employee parking lot of the First City Transportation Training Building. Not the usual sort of beggar. No cardboard sign. No backpack. Just layers of ragged clothing; filthy, stiff with grime; wrapped around his thin frame like a monk's robe turned sour. He stood at the edge of the sidewalk, almost motionless, holding out a battered tin cup.
Ethan had parked, glanced at him once, and nearly kept walking. But something in the man's stillness, the strange pull of the space around him, caught his attention. Against his better judgment, he approached.
The smell hit first: unwashed flesh, ammonia, and something deeper. Something old. The man's eyes were wide and milky, glazed with the blur of age or blindness. But as Ethan neared, the beggar lurched forward with startling strength and shoved the tin cup toward his face.
"You will give," the man said. Not a plea. A command.
Ethan jerked back on instinct, his hand moving toward his wallet out of habit rather than kindness. Then he hesitated.
"Excuse me?"
The man said nothing. Just stood there, mouth slack, eyes unfocused, breathing shallowly through his nose. Staring through Ethan like he was made of glass. Ethan almost turned away.
Then the old man spoke again, softer this time. Clearer. "You have been warned."
The words stopped him cold. There was no threat in the voice, only a flat inevitability. As if the man had already seen what would happen and no longer cared.
Ethan frowned, pulled a crumpled twenty from his pocket, and flicked it into the cup. "There. Go buy yourself a bath."
But the man did not release him.
Before Ethan could turn, the beggar seized his right hand in both of his own. His grip was cold. Unnaturally strong. Ethan gasped and tried to pull away, but the man's fingers clamped like a trap around his wrist. Then the thumb pressed into the center of Ethan's palm.
Pain surged. Sudden and absolute. Not heat...but fire. A white-hot spike of agony shot up his arm, pure and electric. He staggered back, clutching his hand.
"What the hell..."
The man had already stepped away and was moving quickly down the sidewalk. His face had gone blank again, the cup swinging gently from one hand.
"For my gratitude I have given you a gift, young man. Careful what you do with it."
Ethan stared down at his palm. His breath caught. The skin was marked. Not bleeding. Not blistered. Just burned. A perfect circle. Still cooling.
He had wrapped it before his shift, trying not to think about it. Told himself it was a rash. A reaction. Nothing more. But it pulsed now. It throbbed with a strange, persistent cold beneath the surface. Not heat. Cold like stone. Not the chill of weather or ice, but the kind that came from something buried. Waiting to be used.
And in his mind, over and over again, came the old man's voice. Thin. Rasping.
Later that morning, once the rhythm of the Dispatch Center had settled into its usual pattern of incident logs, status checks, and radio blur, Ethan took a moment to tap into the surveillance system. Transportation Surveillance covered every part of the agency's property; lots, stairwells, sidewalks, even the outer zones of the parking garage. Not high-end tech, but good enough. Enough to settle disputes. Enough to catch what did not belong.
He keyed in the time stamp: thirty minutes before his shift. The time of the encounter. The moment everything had begun to feel strange. He pulled up the feed for the east employee entrance. The sidewalk just outside the lot. That was where the old man had stood. That was where Ethan had felt the burn, where the voice had spoken, where something had changed. The footage buffered. Loaded. Began to play.
Ethan leaned in. There he was, walking into frame. He watched himself parking, stepping out, and crossing the lot. He had stopped then at the sidewalk where the old man had stood and it was just as he remembered. But he was alone. The camera showed only him, standing still on the sidewalk, frowning at nothing. No tattered man. No outstretched cup. Just empty space. Then came the moment he also remembered; the jolt, the searing pain. Onscreen, he watched himself flinch backward, clutching his hand. But there was no one with him. No one had touched him.
He rewound. Played it again. Same outcome. Same eerie silence. He had been alone. He sat back in his chair, throat dry, staring at the monitor like it might blink and show him something new. It was impossible. He had felt that grip. He had seen the imprint rise on his skin, had heard that voice. It had been so clear it had etched itself into his mind. But the cameras displayed otherwise. The cameras told a different story. They told a lie.
Trying to shake the unease crawling down his spine, Ethan looked across the room. Front row of dispatch desks. Steve Pettinger, as usual, slumped at his console like he had been poured into the chair and left there to settle. Chin in palm. Blank stare. Pretending to work.
Ethan stood. Crossed the room.
"Hey," he said. "You come in through the east lot this morning?"
Steve did not look up. "Why?"
"There was a guy out front earlier. Homeless maybe. Covered in rags. Looked like something out of a history book. Did you see anyone like that?"
Steve snorted, clicking randomly at his keyboard. "Do I look like I pay attention to street freaks?"
"Just wondering."
"I come in. I sit down. I work." He finally glanced up, the look in his eyes dull and empty. "You want a daily report on who I don't see now?"
Ethan stared at him a second longer than necessary. "Forget it."
Steve already had. His eyes dropped back to the screen. His fingers resumed their meaningless taps.
Ethan returned to his own station. Sat down. Turned his hand beneath the monitor's glow. The bandage did not hide the truth. The burn still pulsed with a fierce cold. Not visibly, but deep inside. A presence more than a wound. The surveillance system had seen nothing. Steve had seen nothing. But it had happened. And whatever it was, he suspected, it was not finished with him yet.
An hour later, Ethan set down the E-Ink Onyx Boox tablet onto the desk in front of him. The soft click of its leather cover folding shut punctuated the stillness of the room. The device was large, wrapped in imitation leather that had aged into something that almost passed for genuine—an illusion of antiquity that matched its contents. Across the screen, the title page lingered in grayscale: The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan.
He had decided to read it again—for the seventh time. There was comfort in those pages, a kind of structural sanity. A world where choices mattered. Where sacrifice had weight. Where heroes earned their scars and evil had rules.
Ever since that awful failed television adaptation had aired-with its clumsy rewrites, plastic dialogue, and hollow substitutes-he had felt as though something decent had been defiled. A story he had grown up with had been dissected and reconstructed into something that wore its skin but none of its soul. Made for modern audiences. Watching it had been like hearing a stranger misquote your dead father's last words.
There was only one remedy: return to the original. Let it overwrite the damage.
He leaned back in his chair and exhaled through his nose, slow and deliberate, as if trying to cleanse something unseen from the air around him. On reflex, he picked up his phone and tapped the Gmail app.
The message was there. Small. Silent. Waiting. The subject line was polite. The body of the email was colder: the recruiting department informing him that he had not scored competitively enough to warrant an interview for the Assistant Manager position.
Disappointment spread through his chest like a slow bruise. Dull. Predictable. It was the second time he had applied. The second time he had taken the grammar and typing test designed to filter out hopefuls with surgical efficiency. And for the second time, he had come up short.
He knew he was smart. English comprehension was not an area he struggled with. He could type quickly; his fingers moved like flicked switches when he was focused. But something in that test eluded him. Something weighted or slanted or simply cruel. It was still beating him. And he still did not understand why.
With a sigh, he set the phone down and glanced around the room. The Dispatch Center was quiet. Three rows of desks stretched forward, each holding three workstations. Twin monitors flickered above each console, displaying a live mosaic of data feeds; incident logs, GPS maps, dispatch queues. Glowing grids of real-time urgency, humming in digital silence.
Being a Dispatch Controller for a transportation agency was not a bad job. The pay was decent. The benefits steady. The shifts were long, the calls sometimes awful, but there was rhythm in the routine. Enough pattern to make the world feel knowable.
But Ethan always felt it. That itch beneath the surface. The sense that he could be doing more. Should be doing more. And yet somehow, people with less talent, less insight, less grit floated upward around him like helium balloons with no strings. They laughed at supervisor jokes. They networked and name-dropped and surfed mediocrity straight into management roles.
He remained tethered to the desk. To the screen. To the quiet hum of a job that fit like a jacket one size too small.
What did any of it matter? So he would not be promoted this time. Or the next. Or the one after that. Perhaps it was time to accept that. Let it settle in his bones like old weather. There was a strange kind of peace in surrender.
And with that came the thought that maybe a snack would soften the edge. Something sugary or salty to ground him, even briefly. He stood. Stretched his legs. Cast a glance toward the front row of consoles. Steve Pettinger sat there, slouched into mediocrity, content in his complacency. He was staring at his screen like it owed him something.
Ethan frowned. That man stirred a different kind of feeling in him. Contempt, mostly. Steve was a void. A black hole where ambition and decency went to die. He moved like inertia itself and contributed even less. Not once in Ethan's entire career had he encountered someone so thoroughly committed to the art of doing nothing.
Ethan hated him. Truly hated him. Not a passing annoyance. Not a professional rivalry. Something deeper. Something more primal. A resentment that crawled just beneath the surface of his calm exterior. Sometimes it whispered things to him when the room got too quiet.
He turned toward the Dispatch Center door, ignoring the urge-very real and very tempting-to hurl his stapler at the back of Steve Pettinger's thick skull.
His right hand reached for the handle. The metal felt colder than it should have. Sharply cold, like it had been pulled from a snowbank. His palm, still wrapped in the bandage, pulsed once beneath the cloth. Not pain. Not heat. Something else. Like pressure. Like something waiting to push back.
He gritted his teeth, gripped the handle, and pulled the door open. Then stepped forward. And the world changed.