If you want a neat beginning, blame the letter.
People love stories that start clean: the car crash, the first kiss, the explosion. I don't get one of those. What I have is a sheet of government paper pinned to my wall.
MANDATORY CONSCRIPTION ORDER – SURVEYOR CADET INTAKE 72
REN, JACE – STABLE ZONE 17–LOWER
REPORT TO VERRIN CENTRAL MUSTER HALL BY 09:00
It looks like a bill. It behaves like a guillotine.
My alarm tried to warn me in its own broken way. The speaker coughed out half the wake-up tone, hiccuped, then skipped to the end like it couldn't be bothered.
I stared at the cracks in the ceiling. The sprinkler in the middle had a new rust stain branching out around it. It almost looked like a tree if you squinted, then kept looking until you felt stupid for trying to find shapes in damage.
"REN!" my uncle yelled through the wall. "You awake?"
"I think so," I said.
"Think faster! If you're late, I am not paying your treason fine!"
There's nothing like family support.
I forced myself upright. The mattress on the floor protested with a tired creak. Cold cement slapped my feet. I immediately stepped on a pen, heard it snap, and felt ink soak through my sock.
I looked down. Blue spread across the fabric.
"You died in service," I told it. "Respect."
My room was the standard Zone-17 coffin: bed, locker, desk welded to the wall under a cheap screen. The plant in the corner had lost half its leaves a month ago and was now surviving out of sheer spite.
The news was already playing.
On-screen, a shining Rift flare hovered over the upper tiers, painted behind a smiling anchor. Threads of too-bright light stitched across the sky behind her.
"…Concord representatives assure all citizens the anomaly has been fully stabilized," she said. "Unauthorized approach to any Rift perimeter is—"
Mute.
I pulled on the least-wrinkled shirt I owned, then a dark jacket sturdy enough to pretend it was useful. Water and hand-combing managed to bully my hair into something slightly less haunted.
The mirror on the locker door threw a bleached version of me back: dark eyes, permanent tired circles, jaw that always looked like it clenched in its sleep.
"You," I told the glass, "are going to walk into a building full of people who can do real pull-ups. Try not to weep on the floor."
The reflection offered no promises.
I checked my pockets three times: wristband, ID, conscription letter, keycard. Every time I found all four. Every time I still felt like I'd misplaced my life somewhere.
The stairwell stank of boiled cabbage, detergent, and old concrete. My uncle leaned over the railing from the floor above, mug in hand, hair in full static.
He squinted at me. "You look like you lost a fight with your own thoughts."
"Round three's scheduled for later," I said.
He snorted. For him, that qualified as tenderness. "Don't die stupid," he said. "If you die, make it impressive enough that they name a pothole after you."
"I'll aim for 'annoying urban legend'."
"That's my boy."
Outside, Verrin's morning pressed in.
Zone 17 never saw the real sun. Light filters from the upper levels washed everything in a tired gray. Towers leaned over the narrow street. Laundry lines, cables, and old banners tangled overhead in a permanent spiderweb.
Under my boots, the city vibrated: transit lines rumbling below, vents breathing out warm exhaust, some distant factory grinding away at yesterday's problems.
I joined the flow heading toward the transit hub. Workers in gray. Kids in school jackets. People in Concord white moving toward a chapel that used to be a warehouse.
Posters peeled from the walls in layered slogans:
KEEP CALM – CONCORD HAS A PLAN
REPORT ANOMALIES – SILENCE BREAKS LAW
SURVEYOR CORPS – WE WALK WHERE YOU SLEEP
My gaze slid to the gap between two high-rises where the tiers opened up.
From here, the First Scar was just a thin vertical line in the sky—a seam where the colors didn't quite agree with each other. Clouds bent around it. Light kinked at the edge.
I stopped walking.
Every time I saw it, my brain tried to drag that line down to street level and imagine what it would do to us on the way through.
Someone bumped my shoulder.
"Keep moving," they muttered.
Right. One disaster at a time.
The transit platform was already packed. When the carriage arrived, it swallowed us in one compressed, sweaty gulp. I claimed a spot by the door and wrapped my fingers around the overhead rail.
The train shuddered into motion. Tunnel walls slid past: pipes, emergency ladders, graffiti half-buried under fresh warnings.
I checked my wristband. 08:17.
The people around me dissolved into crowd noise. A kid played a game on his band, explosions reflected in his eyes. An old man rolled prayer beads between his fingers, lips moving. A woman in a work vest leaned against the door with her eyes closed.
The carriage swayed, lights buzzing.
I blinked.
The woman was now standing two steps closer to me. The kid's game showed a different screen. The old man sat instead of stood.
I hadn't felt the train slow. I hadn't felt myself move.
The hairs on my arms tried to stand upright.
My band read 08:19.
Logical explanation: you zoned out. It happens. You're about to get shipped off to crawl into reality holes; you're allowed to be distracted.
Except my stomach had that off-kilter feeling it got when the world did something wrong and then politely pretended it hadn't.
"Anxiety isn't paranormal," I murmured. "Calm down."
The train rattled around a long curve. The tunnel lights flickered.
For a heartbeat, the wall outside wasn't solid.
A vertical wound of white-blue light hung in the air just beyond the glass. Its edges frayed into long strands that drifted like slow sparks. Behind it, there was depth where there shouldn't be any—like someone had cut a chunk of tunnel out of the world and forgotten to paste anything back in.
My skull rang, sharp and quick, like someone flicked the inside of it.
I flinched.
The next blink, there was only tunnel again. Concrete, pipes, graffiti. Nobody screamed. No emergency stops. A woman yawned.
I stared at the wall a few seconds longer.
If that had been a real Rift, alarms would be chewing through our eardrums and a Concord team would already be turning us into a safety lecture.
My fingers dug into the rail.
Imagined or not, I was still going to the same place.
Verrin Central station emptied the carriage onto the platform in one huge exhale. I let the crowd carry me up the stairs and into the plaza.
The Central Muster Hall sat at the far end like a concrete verdict. Clean lines, tall windows, too many cameras. Concord sigils and Surveyor emblems lined the facade in competing attempts at reassurance.
Cadets-to-be milled at the entrance: some trying to look confident, some failing, some clearly here because running hadn't been an option.
Inside, the hall was bright and polished. Hall C was even bigger. Lines on the floor marked where we were supposed to stand. Screens on the walls played looped footage of armor-clad squads stepping through stabilized Rift perimeters, all dramatic framing and controlled chaos.
A seal covered the far wall:
SURVEYOR CORPS
WE WALK WHERE LAW BREAKS
I took my place in one of the middle rows. A kid with a buzz cut a few spots down was breathing too fast. Another kept tapping their thumb against their leg in a steady, nervous rhythm.
When the woman in dress uniform walked out onto the stage, the noise dropped without anyone having to ask.
She had the kind of presence that didn't need volume. Short hair, sharp eyes, uniform that fit like it had grown there. She stepped up to the podium and looked us over slowly, like she was estimating how many of us would still be standing in a year.
"Cadets," she said. "Most of you have already seen our recruitment feeds, so I'll spare you the slow-motion heroics."
A few short laughs escaped and died.
"You know the headlines," she went on. "The Scar. The Rifts. Districts that folded overnight. Streets that loop, stairwells that don't lead where they used to. You've watched shaky clips of things walking through walls."
Her mouth tightened just enough to show she'd seen them in person.
"What the feeds don't show is the smell. The sound." Her gaze flicked briefly to the ceiling. "I once walked into a school where the classroom clock had grown to three meters tall and started beating like a heart. Kids were hiding under desks while the walls tried to decide if they were bones."
The hall went very quiet.
"That's what you're being trained for," she said. "Not the posters. The parts the posters can't make pretty."
She let that sit, then continued.
"Some of you volunteered. Most of you are here because your number came up and the city needs bodies that can learn. Whatever the reason, as of today, you belong to the Corps. Our job is to make sure that when Law breaks, someone's still there to walk in and take notes instead of just praying from a distance."
My throat tightened.
Uncle would hate that line, I thought. He trusted prayer about as much as he trusted electrical wiring.
"Before we assign you to training units, you'll undergo a basic assessment," she said. "Mental. Physical. We need to know who faints at needles before we let you near a Rift."
A more honest ripple of laughter moved through the ranks this time.
She almost smiled.
"Until then—"
The lights flickered.
Every panel in the ceiling dipped at the same time, then overcompensated, flooding the hall with harsh, too-white brightness. Shadows snapped into sharp relief.
A strange vibration crawled up my ankles.
The instructor's eyes narrowed. "Everyone stay where you are. This facility is rated Class Zero for—"
The floor twitched.
Not the muted thump of transit lines. The concrete under my boots shivered in a short, hard spasm, then again, stronger.
The screens on the side walls glitched. Surveyor footage warped into horizontal bands, colors sliding, then returning with too-saturated edges.
A low hum climbed the back of my teeth, like the building was grinding against the wrong shape of itself.
Someone in the front row said, "Uh—"
The sound of cracking stone cut across him.
A thin line opened in the floor near the stage, dark against the polished surface. It crawled outward in a jagged path, splitting and branching between boots.
Another line appeared on the far wall, right under the big Corps seal. Plaster dust sprinkled down in a fine mist.
"This can't be—" someone whispered.
This building was on posters. On school vids. When they'd said "safe," this hall was the picture in my head.
For the first time, something cold slid under the jokes and stayed there.
The instructor's voice snapped. "Do not panic. Do not—"
The crack on the wall reached the motto.
For a heartbeat, it paused there.
Then it climbed through the word LAW.
The concrete behind the letters bulged inward. Light leaked through the fracture—thin and color-wrong. Too sharp around the edges.
Alarms tried to scream. They managed a strangled, electronic cough and died. The status strips along the walls spasmed red, then froze.
The air thinned in my lungs.
The crack tore wider, from ceiling to floor.
The safest room in Verrin opened like rotten cloth and fell forward into white.