People used to live on the ground
That was before the sky forgot which way to move.
It began on a morning that never truly ended. A comet no one could agree if it was chance, fate, or someone's curse skimmed past Earth with a tail like a rip through the heavens. Something intangible but immense brushed the planet, and the math of the world faltered. Clocks hiccuped. Shadows bent. In a single week, the rotation shifted, then reversed.
Sunrise became a stranger's face seen in a mirror.
That alone might have been survivable. What followed was not. Mountain bones groaned and ground; plates slid and seized like gears jammed by a stray nail. Glaciers calved and rushed like slow gods finally deciding to move. Rivers unstitched their banks. The air itself turned feral, storms dragging like teeth across continents. Whole coastlines stepped forward then sank back, as if unsure where they belonged.
The maps all lied. Gravity whispered different truths at different hours. Entire cities went quiet between one heartbeat and the next.
Humanity would have ended there—caught under falling sky and rising sea if not for the Seven.
They were not saints, though people would paint them that way later. They were seven scientists who refused to let the world decide their ending. In a time when even compasses threw tantrums, the Seven built the Senturies self-sustaining strongholds, a marriage of old-world physics and new-world stubbornness. Hammered into bedrock, latticed with magnetics, tuned to the reversed spin, each Sentury could hold a slice of civilization safe within its humming walls.
And so the cities became circles. The seasons became schedules. Life narrowed to the things you could repair by hand and the people you could stand to see every day.
The outside world was still there. It just wasn't invited in
"Again with the Reversal tale?" Jin groaned, peering up at the civic holoscreen that droned on in the plaza. Morning light spilled across the glass canopy overhead, sliding backward along its supporting ribs like a stubborn snail. "We get it. The Seven, the Senturies, blah blah blah"
"Young citizens are required to attend historical briefs," the holovoice chimed cheerfully. "Knowledge is a shield. Knowledge is"
"a pillow I could suffocate myself with," Jin muttered, then pivoted on his heel and ran.
He was fast fast enough to make it a game with the security cams, fast enough that the old men who played chess on the benches called him a stray shadow. He darted between planters overflowing with hydroponic tomatoes, slid under a banner advertising this cycle's "Young Engineers Fair," and nearly collided with a worker bot humming its way to an air filter.
"Jin!"
The voice carried a threat wrapped in laughter. He didn't need to look to know who it was. He took the corner harder.
"Don't you 'Jin!' me," a second voice sang out, bright and exasperated. "Stop right there! If I catch you, I'm making you eat the entire Sentury's broccoli quota!"
"In your dreams!" Jin shot back over his shoulder. "You can't catch me today!"
He couldn't help the grin that tugged at his face. They'd been playing this game since he could walk and she could chase, since the dome's light cycle glowed soft over a table too long for two.
"Jin, I swear"
He careened around another corner and crashed directly into a wall of someone.
"Ow hey!"
He stumbled back, arms pinwheeling, tablet hugged to his chest more protectively than his own ribs. Strong hands steadied him before he kissed the floor.
"You okay?" asked the someone he'd hit. She was taller than him, with hair tied back in a simple tail and eyes that could switch from laughing to serious and back again in the span of a breath. She had a small scar at the base of her jaw, right where her neck met her ear a souvenir from her last run, she'd said. Sarena.
"Sister Sarena!" Jin blurted, relief and embarrassment doing a messy tango. "I uh I mean, I didn't do anything!"
"Uh-huh." Sarena arched an eyebrow. "And I wasn't born inside the Gate. Relax." She dusted off the scuff he'd left on her jacket. "Betty's going to be here in three…two…"
"Got you!" A pair of arms hooked neatly under Jin's armpits and hoisted him off the ground like an unruly kitten. He yelped, his feet kicking uselessly in the air. The tablet wobbled; he tightened his grip instinctively.
"Put me down! Betty, I'm serious!" he protested, trying to keep the laughter out of his voice.
"You're twelve and a half, menace." Betty his sister, his occasional warden, his eternal rival in the realm of "Who can annoy the other more efficiently" glared up at him. Dark hair in a messy braid, sleeves shoved up to her elbows, boots scuffed. She was almost eighteen and had the steady hands the Gate teams loved and the smile the neighbors forgave.
"You can't keep making me chase you through half the plaza." She narrowed her eyes. "What's this? Skipping briefs again?"
"They're boring," Jin said, twisting a little to see Sarena. "Tell her. You're allowed to miss them if you already know the whole thing by heart."
Sarena's mouth quirked. "I would never encourage civic disobedience."
"Traitor," Jin muttered.
Betty set him down, but not before giving the top of his head a gentle chop with her palm. "Go. School. If you fail any modules this quarter, I'm making you clean the algae system with a toothbrush."
Jin pressed both hands flat over his hair as if to protect his dignity. "Okay, okay!" Then he looked up at her, and his voice softened. "But…be careful, okay?"
Betty blinked, then looked away. The plaza's light washed her profile in a warm glow that made her seem older, almost like the women in the Gate murals caught mid-stride, heading out into a world that still didn't want them.
"Hey." She flicked the worry off his brow with one fingertip. "You think your sister's weak?" She flexed comically, then winced and stopped. "Don't answer that. I'll be back before the dinner cycle. When I get home, we'll bake. And if we burn it again, you can pretend you meant to make charcoal muffins for your birthday."
"It's in two cycles," Jin said, but he was smiling. "Okay."
"Promise?" he asked, because sometimes he needed it in words, not jokes.
"Promise," Betty said. Then, softer, "We'll celebrate properly this time."
Sarena watched them with an expression that hovered somewhere between fond and amused. "Speaking of 'this time' Betty, I was actually coming to find you. It's our turn," she said. "Resource run. The supervisor is already yelling at a crate."
"Already?" Betty wrinkled her nose. "I thought the Metalheads had this cycle."
"They traded slots." Sarena nodded toward the Gate sector, where a distant cluster of voices echoed faintly. "We're on perimeter sweep too."
"Of course we are." Betty's smile tightened, but only Jian, who knew the threads of her moods by heart, would notice. "All right."
She glanced at Jin. "You heard the general. March."
"Yes, commander." Jin saluted, then lowered his hand. "Uh…what about"
"Jin," Sarena said, and her voice softened. "We'll be okay. It's just a routine run. We grab the nets from the wind farm, the ice from the capture trench, then back in before the Dragwinds pick up."
"They always say that," Jin said under his breath. Then, louder, "Fine. Go be heroes. I'll go do math."
"That's the spirit," Sarena said. Then, slyly: "And for the record? Sibling love is cute. But if I didn't know better, I'd say you two are married to the art of making everyone else in the plaza uncomfortable with how wholesome it is."
Betty's ears went a suspicious shade of pink. "Sarena," she warned.
"What?" Sarena's eyes were wide innocence. "I'm just saying"
Betty lunged. Sarena yelped and spun away; the two of them collided again, this time deliberately, in a flurry of half-playful grapples. Jin laughed until Betty snagged Sarena in a quick headlock and rubbed her knuckles across her scalp with affectionate cruelty.
"Take it back," Betty said, grinning.
"Never," Sarena gasped, muffled by elbow. "We die like heroes."
"You two are embarrassing," Jin announced to no one in particular, and ducked the swipe Betty made in his direction, still grinning.
He hugged the tablet tighter to his chest. Its screen was dark, but it hummed with potential. He'd taken it apart twice and put it back together more times than he'd admit, learning the logic of its stubborn heart by feel. It wasn't standard issue too old, too personal. Their mother's, from Before, before Before. The only reason he hadn't surrendered it to the Archive, as was technically law, was because when he pressed his palms to its back and whispered tell me, sometimes it seemed to answer.
Not with words. Just with a…pull. A vector in his bones that made him want to walk.
"Hey," Betty said suddenly, catching his wrist. "That thing you're not taking it to school, are you?"
"Archive project," Jin lied. It wasn't a full lie. The building he wanted to visit today wore the Archive's skin quiet halls, polished concrete, good echoes. But the room he wanted wasn't on any student map.
Betty narrowed her eyes, then sighed. "Just don't let Mr. Haq catch you. He still owes me from the time he said I was 'developing a habit of insubordination' and I told him my habit had a name."
"Sar-e-na," Sarena said, enunciating each syllable with a cheerful tilt of her head.
Jin snorted. Betty rolled her eyes, then leaned down and pressed her forehead to Jin's for a heartbeat, the way their mother had taught them two breaths, in and out.
"Go on," she murmured. "And lock the door when you get home if I'm not back by evening cycle. But I will be."
"I know," Jin said. He didn't, but he wanted to.
Betty let him go. Sarena straightened, shaking her hair back into order. "Come on, hero," she told Betty. "Let's go get yelled at by a crate."
They jogged toward the Gate, footsteps syncing, voices weaving into the hum of Sentury life. Jin watched them until they turned a corner and were lost behind the curve of the inner wall. The Gate district was a world unto itself heavy doors and heavier rules, armored vests and checklists and the murmur of the generator that was the Sentury's heart.
He turned the other way.
The school's bell had not yet sounded. He could make it, if he wanted. He didn't.
"Five minutes," he told the tablet, as if it could be bargained with. "We'll just look."
The tablet stayed dark, but that pull in his bones sharpened.
Jin allowed himself the small thrill of disobedience, the fizz of it under his tongue like stolen soda. He cut away from the main path, where kids in uniform wandered and gossiped, and threaded into the narrower arteries of the Sentury, where pipes ran exposed along the ceiling and the air smelled faintly of ozone and warm metal.
Sentury-12 was a circle, yes, but it was a circle full of corners. The Seven had designed it to be navigable by anyone with good shoes and a sense of direction, which meant maps were a polite suggestion, not a necessity. People found their own routes and handed them down like recipes. Jin had a dozen, all of which ended, more often than not, at the places he wasn't supposed to be.
He reached the building in four minutes flat.
From the outside, the Archive Annex looked like a stack of folded paper forgotten on the edge of a desk angles and quiet, all in pale stone and metal and glass. It had a way of being there without taking any space. If you asked a Sentury dweller to imagine wisdom, they'd imagine this building.
Jin palmed the entrance. The door sighed. No alarms screamed; no archivist ghosts descended on him with whispers of rules and rosters. He walked inside.
The hall was colder, not unpleasantly. A strip of light ran across the floor like a path someone had painted thinly and then scraped away. The walls were hung with pieces of Before: a bicycle wheel, an abacus, a printed poster for a concert that had never happened. Each had a placard with neat script that explained why this mattered and who had used it to save whom in a year that was now a number in a book.
Jin's shoes squeaked faintly. He grimaced and tried to walk quieter.
He had been here before, but never to this room. The tablet tugged, a gentle insistence: here, here, here. He followed it up one staircase, then another. He cut left, then right. He passed a room where two archivists murmured over a volume, their voices soft enough that the words didn't matter, only the rhythm.
Down a corridor. A door with no placard. Another with a placard that said STAFF ONLY, which he pretended meant STAFF ARE LONELY AND WOULD LIKE COMPANY.
At the third door, the tablet vibrated once against his palm. He stopped.
The door was unremarkable—plain metal, a reader set into the wall beside it. The reader's light was yellow, then, as Jin lifted the tablet, it breathed to green.
"You're kidding me," he whispered. The tablet was old, older than anything but the walls, and here it was, playing nice with a system that scolded modern devices for having yesterday's update.
He hesitated, half-turning to leave, half-wishing Betty were here to roll her eyes and tell him not to be an idiot.
Then the door handle turned. From the hallway side.
Jin froze. That was not part of any plan he had. The door swung in quickly, and a hand shot out, snatching the front of his shirt in a fist.
"What hey!" Jin gasped, slammed up against the outer wall hard enough for the back of his head to ring. The tablet, trapped between his chest and the rough fabric of the stranger's sleeve, dug into his ribs. He shoved, but the grip didn't give.
His first flaring panic burned itself down to anger. He ground his heel down onto an instep, but whoever had him lifted his foot easily off the floor like he weighed nothing.
"Nice toy," said the boy holding him. Boy because he was no one Jin had ever seen stand in a teacher's doorway, but not young enough to be harmless. Seventeen? Eighteen? His hair was a dark mess, his eyes a calm, cold brown like puddles left to freeze overnight. He wore no uniform Jin recognized, just a jacket that had seen outside weather and a band around his wrist, matte black with a symbol etched into it: a stylized seven, broken like a lightning stroke.
Jin's pulse kicked up. "Let me go," he snapped. "Right now."
The boy's mouth tilted at one corner, humorless. "You shouldn't have brought that here, kid."
"It's mine," Jin said stiffly.
"It belongs to the person who can use it." The boy's gaze flicked from Jin's face to the tablet and back again. He leaned in slightly, voice low enough that it didn't belong to the Archive's clean halls. "And it belongs to us."
Us. The wristband. The broken seven.
Jin swallowed hard, the back of his throat suddenly dry.
"Who the hell are you?" he demanded.
The boy's smile did not reach his eyes. "Someone who doesn't like being interrupted," he said softly. "Move, and you'll regret it."
Pressure. A wall at his back. A cold door at his side. The tablet between them like a heart that had never learned to beat quietly.
Jin grit his teeth. "Let me go, you"
The bell for school chimed far away, a bright, indifferent sound. It sounded like childhood. It sounded like a door closing.
"—jerk," he finished through gritted teeth.
The boy's fingers tightened. The tablet vibrated again, harder this time, as if it had its own opinion about all this.
Somewhere deeper in the Annex, something hummed to life
Far across the circle of the Sentury, Betty stood at the Gate line with Sarena, the air crisp and electric against her skin. The big door loomed ahead, a slab of safety on hinges thick enough to hold a mountain. The Gate captain barked names. Gear checked. Guns racked. Nets coiled.
"Ready?" Sarena asked quietly.
Betty thought of Jin's laugh ricocheting off the plaza's glass, of the way his eyes did that soft thing when he thought she wasn't looking.
"Always," she lied, and stepped toward the outside.
Back in the Annex, the stranger's lips parted, as if to say something he hadn't planned on saying.
He did not get the chance.
The door beside Jin bucked once in its frame.
Then it began to open from the inside.
To be continued…