Kai's lungs felt like they were splitting open. His legs wobbled, barely holding him. He slowed to a jog, then a stagger, clutching his side. The world tilted slightly with each step.
And then it tilted for real.
It started as a shimmer in the air ahead of him — like heat waves on asphalt. Only this wasn't warm. It was cold. The hair on his arms stood up.
The shimmer deepened into a thin crack, hanging in midair. It glowed faintly, threads of light weaving and unweaving along its edges.
Kai stopped dead. His breath came fast, but not from running now.
The crack widened. The glow intensified, spilling out in strands that swayed like silk underwater. He could hear them — a faint hum, a vibration he felt in his teeth more than his ears.
'What… is this?'
The threads reached toward him. He stepped back, but the ground under his feet seemed to pull him forward at the same time.
Behind him, Rian's voice called out again, closer than it should have been.
Kai turned, but before he could see his brother, the threads lunged.
They wrapped around him, not like rope, but like air that had weight. The cold sank into his skin, then rushed into his chest.
The street was gone. The cold deepened.
The cold hit first.
Not wind. Not water. Something older and deeper that clamped around Kai's bones and squeezed the air out of him in one brutal pulse. He didn't fall down so much as fall sideways, like the world had been yanked out from under him and then spun through a narrow slit. The asphalt, the streetlights, the echo of Rian's boots—everything peeled apart into thin bands of copper and gold and slid away.
He reached for anything—ground, railing, wall—but his hands scraped nothing. A flash burned through the dark without sound. The next heartbeat slammed him onto hard metal. His knees buckled. One palm skated across a surface that felt like sun‑warmed skin and hammered bronze at the same time. Salt stung the back of his throat. The ache where Rian's thumbs had dug in flared with the first breath.
He shoved himself upright, blinking away tears. The air cut clean and sharp. It tasted like sea and hot metal and a whisper of something that wasn't either—ozone, maybe, or the smell after lightning.
This wasn't his street.
He stood on a causeway of bronze that ran until the horizon bent it out of sight. Rectangular slabs fit tight, each one carved with deep grooves that crossed and looped. When he stared, the lines seemed to shift by a hair, like something underneath rearranged the pattern when he wasn't looking straight at it. The metal hummed under his feet, not loudly, but steady, the way a big ship hums when the engines turn somewhere below deck.
Beyond the edge of the causeway: water. Not night‑black. Not even blue. It shone from within, a slow roll of green and gold like sunlight poured into a basin and set to ripple forever. The surface held a skin too smooth to be normal, and under that skin something moved—heavy, patient, confident.
Above, the sky was locked in a copper dusk. Clouds curled and uncurled as if dragged by a slow hand. Between them hung a sunlike disk, low and motionless. Its light was syrup-thick, and the shadows it laid down looked drawn with a ruler.
He turned, and the view hit him like another shove.
Far off, deep in that fixed light, a figure rose against the horizon so huge it knocked scale out of his head. At first glance it was a mountain. Then the shape cleared and his mind named it before he allowed it.
A man in bronze. Feet planted on separate stone platforms like two separate shores, a harbor running between. Plates overlapped along his body, each one the size of a house, the seams between them pulsing with thin light. One arm reached up and held a bright thing—torch, spear, sun-shard—too strong to stare into without pain.
His pulse thudded in his throat. He knew this shape. Everyone did. Not like this, not with this weight and this hum, but still.
He'd seen it in a library book with glossy pages and a stapled spine. In a video a teacher let play for five minutes before she cut it off and told the class to copy terms. In a clip on a café TV while he waited with a plastic bag of cheap dinner and tried to steal a look before Rian came in behind him and said move.
Half a century ago, the world had cracked. Seven places it had taught kids to memorize and forget—Seven Wonders—had come back not as ruins but as zones with their own weather and gravity and rules. The Lighthouse had dragged storms with it like a coat. The Gardens had turned a swath of hard earth to riot-green in hours, swallowing buildings the way weeds swallow a fence. People drew lines on maps and argued and found names for the ones who went in and stumbled back changed: challengers.
For a year everyone he passed seemed to talk only about that. Posters went up on school boards—training, selection, watch teams broadcast their runs like sports. Recruiters came through the city with clean smiles. In the same hallways, kids drew lots to see who would dare the border fences just to touch the air and run back. Teachers warned. Parents warned. The news never shut up.
He didn't get the news at home. Not if it mattered. The TV was Rian's. Always. If a segment about the Wonders flickered on, Rian changed the channel without looking. Sometimes he said it out loud for the pleasure: "Don't need you getting ideas you can't afford, twig." If Kai lingered at someone else's TV, Rian would pull him away by the collar and smirk. If he brought a book home, Rian would take it and bend the cover in half, slow, watching his face.
You can only press your face to the glass so many times before you teach yourself not to look. By the time posters faded and new ones replaced them, he had trained the part of his mind that wanted to glance to keep its eyes forward. By the time his class signed up for a field trip to a "Challenger Prep Day" across town, he had volunteered for cleaning duty instead.
He hadn't thought about the Wonders in years. Not because he stopped caring. Because caring felt like holding your breath under water without a way up.
Now he stood on bronze that vibrated like a living thing and looked across a harbor at a giant whose seams glowed like veins, and the part of him that had learned to starve split down the middle. He didn't have to guess. He knew the name of this place and the rules people whispered about it.
The Colossus of Rhodes.
His knees wanted to give. He locked them. He made himself breathe. He made himself say it, not out loud, but in his head where it would stick: 'This is real.'
Something delicate quivered above the causeway a few steps ahead—so thin he thought it was a trick of light until the fixed sun caught it and turned it into a faint line. It swayed, a hair-width strand, as if a draft he couldn't feel combed the air. It ran from a carved pillar at the edge of the path to somewhere farther on, where the brightness swallowed it.
He moved his head. Another line swam into view. Then another. Then he couldn't stop seeing them. They hung everywhere—hair‑thin, rope‑thick, pale as vapor and bright as wire—crossing the air, dipping into the bronze under his feet, dropping into the green-gold water, climbing toward the copper sky. Some ran straight through him. He held his hands up and saw faint lines trailing from his fingers and wrists, like threads snagged on the world.
He sucked a breath that scraped his bruised throat. Sweat prickled his back.
'I'm hallucinating. I hit my head. This place is making me—'
A loud crack split the air.
He flinched up. A wedge of bronze the size of a small car was peeling from the top of an archway. It sheared loose and rolled, caught that syrup light, and dropped right toward him.
He didn't think. He didn't choose left or right. His whole body moved like it knew something he didn't. He reached into the air, fingers grasping for the nearest of those faint lines—
And a current lit his bones.
It wasn't heat the way fire burns skin. It was brightness and pressure, a chord struck inside his skull that rang through teeth and spine. It shot from his fingertips up his arm and knifed into the back of his head. For one stretched second he felt every joint like a gear, every beat like a hammer.
The falling slab jerked, as if a hand had grabbed a string tied to its rim. It slid off its path and smashed into the glowing water just to his right. The impact flung a fan of gold droplets up that hung for a breath too long before pattering back down like heavy rain.
He didn't watch them land. He was on both knees with his hands at his temples while something he had never agreed to tore a door open in him and stepped through.
Pictures hit him in rapid light.
A hand plucking a pale line running through a stone, and the stone shifting half an inch.
An arrow bending its flight because a thin strand from its tip had been tugged a fraction.
Footprints bright as wire fading in air where someone had walked seconds before.
A sword's inner loop loosening and the blade unspooling into shards mid-swing.
A shadow shaped like a person thrumming with thick cords where chest and throat should be.
Words burned in silently, not as language so much as shapes and certainties.
Thread Sense.
Everything bound by lines—life, weight, pull, heat, current.
See. Touch. Nudge. Guide.
Deflect. Unbalance. Reveal the unseen.
No voice taught him. No hand pointed. The knowledge planted itself the way a scar does—firm, undeniable, already part of you by the time you feel it.