Carter opened his eyes.
The first thing that registered was pressure. Not sound—pressure. A dull, uniform hum filling his skull, as if someone had replaced the world with static and forgotten to turn it off.
He lay slumped forward against his desk, cheek pressed to wood grain, and waited for the sensation to pass.
It did. Eventually.
Smell came next. Bitter. Burnt. Old coffee dried into rings beside his arm, staining the desk darker where liquid had pooled and evaporated days ago. His neck protested the angle—a stiff, pulling ache that registered distantly, like information arriving from another body.
He didn't move yet.
There was no urgency. No confusion. Just the understanding that movement would occur when required, and not before.
Light crept through the gap in his curtains—thin, colorless, early. Morning, then. The fact arrived in his mind like trivia: noted, filed, dismissed.
Something was ringing.
Ah.
The alarm.
His right hand moved before conscious thought completed. Fingers extended with unfamiliar precision, found the button, pressed. The noise cut off mid-shriek.
His hand remained there.
He stared at it as if observing a tool someone else had left behind. Five fingers. Steady. No tremor. The skin looked the same as it always had—slightly pale, unremarkable. But the quality of stillness was wrong. Too controlled. Too certain.
Alien competence wearing familiar flesh.
After a moment, he withdrew his hand and leaned back in the chair. The ceiling came into view—cracked plaster, a water stain spreading from the corner like an old bruise. Dust motes hung suspended in the weak light, neither rising nor falling.
No thoughts followed the observation.
Just awareness, hollow and expanding.
He lifted his arm again. Checked his wrist.
The scar was still there.
Thin. Pale as old paper. It crossed the joint at an angle that suggested carelessness, as though someone had drawn a line without bothering to measure.
He touched it with his other hand.
The sensation defied categorization—not painful, not numb. Something adjacent to both. Like phantom pain echoing through tissue that no longer remembered what had earned it. As if the limb had been severed once, then reattached, and only momentum kept the connection intact. Muscle memory tracing a path through flesh that shouldn't work but did anyway.
Beneath his sternum, something contracted.
Not fear.
Anticipation.
The memories arrived then.
Not as images. Not as dreams being replayed behind his eyes.
As data.
Weight distribution. Angles of force. The correct posture for absorbing impact. How to move a blade through resistance—where bone would catch, where cartilage would give. Each fragment slotted into place with mechanical efficiency, integrating into motor patterns he'd never trained, embedding themselves in reflexes he'd never developed.
Carter remained seated while it happened.
When the process finished, he stood.
His legs obeyed without the usual delay between intention and action. The motion was smooth. Efficient. Wrong in its fluidity.
---
The bathroom light buzzed when he flicked the switch. He barely registered the sound. His reflection met him in the mirror—same face, same general shape. Thinner, perhaps. Shadows pooled beneath his eyes, darker than they'd been before.
Then he saw what had changed.
His eyes.
They were black.
Not dramatically so. Not the kind of transformation anyone would notice at a glance. But where brown iris should have ringed the pupil, there was only darkness now. Pupils dilated so wide they'd consumed everything else, leaving the faintest trace of color at the very edges—a thin corona barely visible in certain light.
He stared.
This was the face he had worn his entire life.
These were not the eyes it had come with.
His hand curled into a fist.
The thought appeared fully formed: I could break the mirror. Angle, force, consequence—all calculated in the space between heartbeats. Then the impulse passed, fading like smoke.
Bile surged instead.
He bent forward, fingers locking around the sink's edge as his body convulsed. The retching came in harsh, rhythmic spasms—violent enough to strip away the clinical detachment, to remind him that this body still contained biology, still responded to stimulus it couldn't suppress.
Acid burned. Breath hitched. His knees struck tile.
When it stopped, he stayed there.
Cold seeped through his pants where they pressed against porcelain. The chill spread slowly, methodically, until his legs began to ache from stillness.
"My name is Carter."
The words emerged quietly. Almost accidentally. He hadn't intended to speak them—they'd simply appeared in the air, detached from volition.
He said them again.
"My name is Carter."
They felt… insubstantial. Like saying a word too many times until it decomposed into pure sound, meaning dissolving with each repetition.
He remained kneeling, testing the phrase under his breath. Not frantically. Not desperately grasping at identity.
Just observing what would happen.
Nothing did.
The name sat in his mouth like a stone. Familiar shape. No weight.
And that—more than the vomiting, more than the eyes, more than the scar on his wrist—unsettled him.
Because names were supposed to mean something.
Weren't they?
He stood. Turned on the shower. Stepped under the spray before the water had time to warm.
The cold hit like a fist—immediate, totalizing, stripping thought down to pure sensation. His body wanted to flinch, wanted to gasp, wanted to react.
He didn't.
Just stood there while freezing water pounded against his skull, ran down his spine, turned his skin mottled and numb. He stayed until the pipes caught up, until steam began to fill the space, until he could no longer distinguish between shivering from temperature and trembling from something trying to claw its way out from the inside.
---
"Carter? Come downstairs!"
His mother's voice cut through the fog.
He blinked at the clock.
Time had passed. He'd lost track of how much.
He dried off with mechanical efficiency. Changed clothes. Descended the stairs with footsteps that sounded rehearsed—each impact precisely measured, a performance of normalcy executed by muscle memory alone.
His mother sat on the couch, attention fixed on the television.
News. At seven in the morning.
She never watched news this early.
He slowed.
Began to angle toward the kitchen—
"—sixteen-year-old student from Northbridge Academy found dead this morning. Preliminary reports suggest he passed during the night. Cause of death remains under investigation—"
The glass slipped.
His hand caught it before conscious thought registered the fall. Fingers closed around ceramic mid-descent—clean, instantaneous, guided by reflexes that didn't belong to him.
He stared at his grip.
Set the cup down slowly, carefully, as if it might detonate.
People died suddenly all the time. Heart defects lurking undetected for years. Aneurysms rupturing without warning. Genetic time bombs no one saw until detonation.
Right?
Right.
His mother's voice drifted from the living room. "You're up early."
He swallowed. His throat clicked. "Slept early yesterday."
The lie emerged fully formed, rehearsed, convincing even to his own ears.
She turned to look at him then. Really look—eyes tracking across his face, his posture, the specific quality of stillness he now carried. Evaluating. Measuring. Comparing him against some internal baseline only she could see.
Then she looked away.
"Well. Perhaps today you can help with breakfast."
He blinked.
He hadn't helped cook in years. She'd stopped asking long ago, accepted his routine of stumbling downstairs barely functional, grabbing whatever required minimal preparation.
Why today?
Normally he would have deflected. Made an excuse. Found a reason to refuse that sounded plausible enough to avoid argument.
The words stuck in his throat.
"…Sure."
---
They moved through the kitchen in silence.
Metal scraped ceramic. A knife thunked against cutting board. The pan hissed when she added oil, temperature differential creating steam that rose and dissipated against the ceiling.
Then, without preamble, without looking at him:
"Honey." She paused. The spatula stilled in her hand. "If you ever hit your head. Or hurt yourself. Anywhere." Another pause. "You tell an adult immediately. You tell me immediately."
Not a question.
A command.
Delivered with the same flat affect she might use to remind him to take out the trash.
Carter's spine went rigid.
"…Okay."
She returned to cooking as if nothing had been said. As if she hadn't just issued instructions that implied knowledge—of what, he couldn't determine, but the specificity was too deliberate to be casual concern.
Something in the room felt displaced. Like the nightmare hadn't fully released its hold, had instead left residue clinging to reality's edges.
---
They ate.
He lifted fork to mouth. Chewed. Swallowed.
Tasted nothing.
Not salt. Not heat. Not the texture of eggs or the slight bitterness of burnt toast. Just the mechanical process of consumption—fuel entering system, body processing input, no sensory data returned.
Like eating in a dream.
"Hey." His mother's voice was light. Conversational. "Was it you who raided my coffee drawer yesterday?"
His heart kicked.
"I had a project. Needed to stay up."
"You said you slept early."
She tilted her head. Curious. Not accusing.
The discrepancy hung in the air between them.
His mind went blank—then his mouth opened, and words emerged in perfect formation:
"I didn't take a nap after school like usual. Started work immediately. Still felt tired, so I borrowed some coffee. Then finished early enough to sleep at a reasonable hour. For me."
She nodded. Satisfied.
Carter touched his jaw.
That response had felt scripted. Pre-written. As if someone else had composed the explanation and he'd simply read it aloud.
He remembered the first dream. How afterward food wouldn't stay down, how water had sent shocks through his nervous system, how his body had rejected everything for days.
But now?
Now he was calm.
Functional.
Too functional.
Why?
---
He finished getting ready for school.
Buttoned his shirt with fingers that moved too precisely. Checked his wrist one more time—the scar still there, still impossible, still refusing to make sense according to any timeline where he'd actually injured himself.
"What is happening to me…?"
The question emerged as reflex. Habit. The shape of confusion without its substance.
He left.
Walking to school felt like retracing steps someone else had taken, like his feet were following a path worn into the ground by previous iterations of himself. The sun pressed down—harsh, needle-bright, drilling into his retinas with each moment he forgot to squint.
Missing person posters fluttered on telephone poles. Dozens. Faces he half-recognized from hallways, from classes he'd never paid attention to, from crowds he'd moved through without seeing.
Normally the sight produced reaction—jaw tightening, guilt's faint chemical burn in his chest, the uncomfortable awareness that these were people who'd vanished and he'd never noticed.
Today?
Nothing.
He walked past without a flicker.
Noticed the absence of reaction.
Noticed he was noticing everything now.
---
Homeroom passed in silence.
Adam arrived late, sliding into his seat with whispered apologies the teacher ignored. Chris sat in another section entirely—separated by arbitrary scheduling, present but inaccessible.
Carter spoke to no one.
The solitude felt... comfortable. Natural. Like settling into a space specifically designed for him, dimensions matching perfectly, all excess stripped away.
He stared out the window.
Sunlight stabbed through glass, carving sharp-edged shadows across empty desks. If curtains had existed, he would have drawn them. Would have preferred darkness.
A hand landed on his shoulder.
Reflex exploded.
He flinched hard enough to shift the desk forward, wood scraping linoleum in a brief shriek that drew several heads. His hand had already begun to move—trajectory calculated, force prepared—before conscious override kicked in.
Not a threat. Not an attack.
"Heeey, dude."
Adam.
Carter turned, forced his shoulders to drop from their defensive hunch.
"You seem... unusually well-rested today."
"Slept early yesterday."
The response was automatic. Pre-loaded. He hadn't even processed the question before answering.
Adam's eyebrow lifted. "Huh. What, you forget to do a raid or whatever you usually grind at night?"
"Something like that."
The conversation felt like performing a script he'd memorized years ago, every line coming without thought, without effort, without him.
"Anyway," he heard himself say, "it's lunch. We have PE after. I'm going to the cafeteria."
"Sweet, I'll join." Adam grinned. "Gotta say, maybe you should sleep more often. You seem like a whole different person."
Carter's breath caught.
Snagged on something in his chest.
"No." The word came too fast. Too sharp. "I am Carter."
"...What?"
"Nothing. You coming?"
Adam followed, muttering something Carter didn't catch. Didn't need to. The specific words didn't matter—only the tone, the implicit concern, the recognition that something had shifted.
He noticed Adam noticing.
Catalogued the observation.
Filed it.
---
Lunch.
Carter ate with mechanical precision. Each movement measured. Each bite controlled. Performance art titled Normal Person Consuming Food.
Adam sat across from him. Emma draped against Adam's side, occasionally feeding him pieces of something Carter didn't bother identifying. Their voices produced sound. Words. Probably jokes. Possibly affection.
He wasn't listening.
He was studying.
Watching Adam's micro-expressions. The specific cadence of his speech patterns. The way Emma's eyes tracked certain words, how her posture shifted in response to tone rather than content.
He didn't usually analyze people like this. Didn't usually sit in silence dissecting social interaction like a specimen under glass.
The cafeteria lights felt sharp. Needle-bright. Stabbing at the edges of his vision every time someone moved too quickly through his peripheral field.
"Where's Chris?" The question emerged from his mouth. He wasn't sure why he'd asked.
Adam snorted. "Extra classes from the PE teacher. Last swimming session he almost drowned. Remedial lessons now."
Emma chimed in—something about book-types sticking to what they were good at. Adam laughed, said something vaguely philosophical about discovering hidden talents.
"Whoa," Emma said. "Are you sure you're Adam and not a skinwalker?"
Carter's attention sharpened.
Skinwalker.
The word resonated somewhere deep, triggering associations he couldn't quite trace. Something about replacement. About things wearing familiar shapes. About—
"Well," Adam said, grinning, "I did have this weird dream today—"
The world stopped.
Carter's body didn't.
He choked on nothing. Liquid attempted to enter his lungs. His diaphragm spasmed, coughing violent enough that heads turned throughout the cafeteria.
When control returned, he found Adam and Emma staring.
He stared back.
Hunting for something in Adam's expression. Some confirmation. Some proof.
"What did you just say?"
"I—I said I had this dream last night." Adam's voice carried uncertainty now, confusion creeping in at the edges. "Some bookworm guy. Like Chris but way smarter. Spent the whole day in a library or something—"
Carter stood.
The chair shrieked across linoleum.
"Excuse me."
He didn't wait for response. Didn't look back. Just walked—straight line, rigid posture, each step placed with mechanical precision while his mind raced ahead, cataloguing, connecting, trying to force pattern from chaos.
Behind him, Adam's voice: "Something's definitely weird today..."
---
Cold water shocked against his face.
He gripped the sink's edge, knuckles white, and stared at his reflection through the droplets sliding down the mirror.
First: the dead student.
Second: Adam's dream.
Third: his own behavior—shifting, warping, becoming something he didn't recognize in increments too small to pinpoint individually but undeniable in aggregate.
None of this was normal.
He'd tried convincing himself. Yesterday. The day before. Had clung to explanations—stress, exhaustion, overactive imagination, anything that fit within the boundaries of acceptable reality.
But not now.
Not after experiencing what he'd experienced. Not after living through perspectives that weren't his, feeling deaths that weren't his own, acquiring skills through osmosis that should have required years of training.
Something was happening.
To him.
To Adam.
Maybe to everyone.
He splashed more water. Then more. As if enough cold could shock his system back into something resembling baseline.
His reflection stared back.
Eyes darker than they'd been yesterday. Cheeks hollowing out. Jaw sharpening. The soft edges he'd carried his entire life—the slight pudginess, the rounded features of someone who spent too much time sitting, too little time moving—were being carved away.
Had he been sweating in his sleep? Burning calories through some metabolic process he couldn't explain?
No.
That wasn't it.
He didn't have a name for this. Just recognition. Just the cold certainty that transformation was occurring beneath his skin, rewriting him cell by cell.
A sound tried to escape his chest.
Not quite laughter. Not quite sob.
What emerged was neither—just a long, shaking hiss that didn't sound human.
"I need to get to the bottom of this."
The declaration hung in empty air. Meaningless. What was he going to do—research nightmares? Google 'why am I becoming someone else'?
The bell rang.
PE.
---
Track.
Carter hated track. Had always hated it. His stamina was legendary for all the wrong reasons—bottom of every ranking, first to give up, the one teachers stopped expecting anything from years ago.
Chris stood nearby, arms crossed, radiating misery.
"You must be tired," Carter offered.
"I hate that goddamn PE teacher," Chris muttered. "That fucking asshole can shove those remedial classes up his—"
"Shove what up where, Mr. Wilson?"
Chris went rigid. "Nothing, sir."
Carter blinked.
Chris was swearing. Chris, who apologized to furniture when he bumped into it. Chris, whose vocabulary had never included anything harsher than 'darn.'
"Hey." Carter kept his voice level. "You have any strange dreams today?"
Chris's eyes narrowed. "Dreams? Nah. Haven't dreamed in days. Just knock out and wake up eight hours later like I teleported. Why?"
"No reason."
Right.
Chris had always been odd. Probably just stress from the remedial lessons. Probably nothing.
Probably.
The whistle blew.
They ran.
Adam led the pack—as always, effortless, body moving like it had been designed specifically for this. Others followed in varying states of struggling competence.
Carter's feet hit pavement.
Rhythm emerged. Clean. Controlled.
His breathing stayed steady even as his chest began to burn. The usual signals—fatigue, pain, the body's insistence on stopping—registered distantly, like data from another system entirely.
The PE teacher was staring.
When the run finished, they were herded into the gymnasium to "cool down."
Chris got pulled aside for another lecture. Adam gravitated toward his club friends. Carter drifted to a shadowed wall and sank down, back against concrete.
He flexed his hands.
They responded with unfamiliar precision. No tremor. No hesitation.
Like the morning's shaking had been suppressed rather than resolved. Pushed down. Waiting.
---
The locker room smelled like sweat and industrial cleaner.
Carter moved through it mechanically, pulling his gym shirt over his head. Around him, voices bounced off tile—jokes, insults, the standard white noise of teenage masculinity performing for itself.
He didn't participate.
Didn't need to.
A shoulder slammed into his.
Hard. Deliberate.
Carter stopped. Turned.
The kid was bigger than him. Broader. One of those naturally athletic types who'd peaked early and knew it. Face flushed from the run, grinning like he'd just delivered the punchline to a joke Carter hadn't heard.
"Watch where you're going, Carter."
The name came out wrong. Mocking. Like it was funny that Carter had a name at all.
Something in Carter's chest went still.
He recognized the face—vaguely. One of Adam's football friends. The loud one. Always at lunch, always laughing, always taking up more space than necessary.
But the name wouldn't come.
He tried to pull it from memory and found nothing. Just a shape. A presence. Background character #3.
"Sorry," Carter heard himself say.
Flat. Empty.
The kid's grin widened. "Sorry? That's it?" He pushed Carter's shoulder. "What, you too good to talk to people now? Too busy being fucking weird?"
The locker room was paying attention now. Conversations dying. Bodies turning. The social animal's instinct for violence about to erupt, everyone positioning themselves to either participate or witness.
Carter stared at the hand on his shoulder.
Calculated its weight. Its angle. Where the joints were vulnerable.
Then—before thought completed—his body moved.
---
His hand closed around the kid's wrist.
Twisted.
The motion was precise. Clinical. The kind of joint lock that required knowledge of anatomy, of leverage points, of exactly how much pressure would transition from pain to damage.
The kid's face went white.
"What the—"
Carter pulled.
Not hard. Just correct.
The kid stumbled forward, balance destroyed, and Carter's other hand was already moving—palm strike to the solar plexus, calculated to expel air without breaking ribs.
The kid folded.
Dropped.
Gasping.
The locker room went silent.
Carter stood over him, breathing steady, heartbeat unchanged.
Waiting.
The kid tried to get up.
Carter kicked his supporting arm.
Not vicious. Just factual. The arm buckled. The kid went down again, harder this time, skull bouncing off tile with a sound that made people flinch.
Someone in the crowd: "Holy shit—"
Another voice: "Get a teacher—"
Carter didn't hear them.
He was crouching now, one knee pressing into the kid's chest, hand drawn back. The angle was perfect. One strike to the temple. Maybe two. Fast. Efficient.
Finish it.
The thought arrived from somewhere beneath language. Pure tactical assessment. Threat neutralized. Confirm kill.
"Carter!"
Adam's voice. Distant. Irrelevant.
Carter's fist began its descent—
Something warm splashed across his face.
He stopped.
Blinked.
Warm. Wet. Wrong.
He lifted his hand from where it hovered above the kid's face.
Stared at it.
Red.
Blood coating his knuckles, dripping from his fingers, running down his wrist in thin rivulets that caught the fluorescent light.
The certainty was immediate. Absolute.
He knew this much blood.
No.
He didn't.
…did he?
But—
The kid beneath him wasn't bleeding.
Not like this.
Split lip, maybe. Bloody nose, possibly. But not the volume soaking Carter's hand, not the spray pattern across his face, not the amount that didn't match any of the strikes he'd delivered.
Carter touched his face.
His fingers came away red.
The calm shattered.
All at once. Like ice breaking. Like waking from anesthesia.
His hands started shaking. The tremors he'd suppressed all morning returning with interest, violent enough that blood droplets scattered from his fingertips.
What the fuck did I just—
A scream.
Not from the kid he'd beaten.
From behind him.