Chapter 4: Everyone else already knew.

They showed up at seven forty-three.
Ren heard them before he saw them—the specific noise of his friends arriving, which was less like a knock and more like a small weather event. The doorbell, then immediately after, fists. Then a voice.
"Ren. Ren, we know you're awake. Your light was on at six."
He opened the door.
Kaito was standing on the front step with his bag slung over one shoulder and his school uniform already half-untucked, looking exactly the same as he always had—messy hair, easy grin, the kind of face that made teachers feel vaguely suspicious even when he hadn't done anything. Behind him stood Yua, arms crossed, expression somewhere between relieved and annoyed in the specific ratio she reserved for Ren specifically.
And beside her, Sota, who said nothing, just raised two fingers in a quiet greeting.
For a moment, Ren stood in the doorway and felt something loosen in his chest. Something that had been very tightly wound since the hospital.
"You look terrible," Kaito said warmly.
"You look the same," Ren said.
"That's a compliment and we both know it." Kaito's eyes moved briefly, quickly, to the outline of Ren's shoulders under his uniform jacket. Something flickered across his face—surprise, maybe, or recalibration—but he didn't say anything about it. "Your mom called mine. Said you were cleared. Are you actually good or are you doing the thing where you say you're good?"
"I'm doing the thing," Ren said.
"Okay," Kaito said. "Noted. Let's go."
---
His mother handed him his bento at the door with both hands and a look that said several things she didn't say out loud. He tucked it into his bag. He wrapped the green scarf twice around his neck the way he always did. He stepped outside.
The morning was cool and ordinary. The persimmon tree dropped a single fruit onto the garden path as he passed it.
They walked the first two blocks the way they always had—Kaito talking, Yua occasionally correcting him, Sota walking slightly apart from the group with his hands in his pockets. Ren walked and listened and felt the familiar shape of it settle around him like something borrowed that used to be his.
*This is fine,* he told himself. *This is the same.*
Kaito was mid-sentence about something their homeroom teacher had announced last week when he stepped off the curb at the corner of Nishi and the shopping street—
—and didn't come back down.
Ren stopped walking.
Kaito's feet left the pavement with the casual ease of someone stepping onto an escalator. He rose half a metre, then a full metre, the hem of his untucked shirt settling around him as he levelled out, hovering in the morning air with his bag still over one shoulder and his sentence still unfinished.
"—anyway she said we'd have a practical evaluation on Friday, which is—" He glanced down at Ren. "You're staring."
Ren was staring.
"The hospital," Yua said to Kaito, with the tone of someone who had prepared for this.
"Right." Kaito had the decency to look slightly sheepish. "Right, you were—you missed the awakening week, didn't you." It wasn't a question. He said it the way you'd say *you missed the announcement about the schedule change*, mild and practical, as if the sentence made complete sense.
*Awakening week.*
Ren's brain attempted to process this. It made a sound like a machine running the wrong program.
"I was in the hospital," Ren said. His voice came out even. He was mildly impressed by that.
"We know," Yua said. "We visited. Twice. You were asleep both times." She looked at him carefully in the way she had always looked at him when she was deciding how much to say. "Are you going to be okay with—" she gestured at the general situation, which included Kaito still floating at approximately chest height "—all of this?"
Ren looked at Kaito. He looked at the gap of open air beneath Kaito's shoes. He looked at the shopping street continuing normally around them, a woman walking past with groceries who glanced at Kaito and did not slow down.
"Yes," Ren said.
This was not true. But his legs were already moving, and he had learned in the past forty-eight hours that sometimes that was enough.
---
Kaito drifted ahead of them at a pace that kept him just above walking speed—not flying exactly, more like being carried by something invisible that moved when he moved, responsive and easy, as natural as walking had presumably once been. He kept talking. That part, at least, was unchanged.
Yua moved differently than Ren remembered.
He noticed it after half a block—the way her steps landed with a precision that seemed calculated rather than automatic, heel to toe, weight distributed, each footfall placed like punctuation. When they reached the narrow part of the street where foot traffic was thicker, she moved through it without adjusting, the crowd seeming to part around her in a way that was too consistent to be coincidence. Not pushed. Just... redirected. Like water finding the path of least resistance before it arrives.
"Is that—" Ren started.
"Force vectors," she said, without looking at him. "I can feel the direction and weight of things before they move. It doesn't make me faster." A pause. "I just stop wasting motion."
He watched her for another block. She was right—she wasn't moving faster than normal. She was just moving with zero inefficiency, every step already accounted for, her path through the city like a line drawn in advance.
*That's terrifying,* he thought. *That's actually terrifying.*
"It came in during the third day," she said, as if he'd asked. "You had already been in the hospital for two days by then. Everyone's started coming in at different times—there's no pattern they've found yet."
"Everyone?" Ren said.
"Most of the class," Sota said. It was the first thing he'd said since arriving. His voice was low and measured and he was still walking with his hands in his pockets, his pace unchanged. "Not all. They think it's still spreading."
Ren looked at him. Sota met the look steadily.
"What about you?" Ren asked.
Sota was quiet for a moment. Then he pulled his left hand from his pocket.
There was a faint luminescence running along his knuckles—not bright, barely visible in the morning light, a soft blue-white that pulsed once slowly and then stilled. He put his hand back in his pocket.
"Temperature," he said. "I can drop it. Or raise it. Things, surfaces, air." He paused. "It's not useful for traveling fast."
"He made the entire convenience store a walk-in freezer on accident," Kaito said from above them, helpfully.
"I contained it," Sota said.
"After three aisles."
"After three aisles," Sota confirmed, without particular emotion.
Ren walked between them and listened to this exchange and felt the wrongness of it pressing against him from every direction—not the wrongness of something bad, but the wrongness of a world that had changed its fundamental rules while he was unconscious and expected him to catch up at walking pace.
*Kaito is floating,* he thought. *Kaito, who once fell off a chair trying to reach the top shelf in the classroom, is floating.*
*And nobody on this street is looking.*
He almost said that out loud. He turned it over instead and carried it, the way he had been carrying things since the hospital.
His hands were clean. The street was ordinary. The morning continued.
He kept walking.
---
The school looked the same from outside.
It looked the same from inside the gate, too. Same concrete path, same rows of shoe lockers, same smell of chalk dust and cleaning solution and the specific institutional air of a building that processed several hundred teenagers daily and had simply accepted this as its purpose.
Then Ren looked at the students.
Not all of them. Not even most of them. But enough.
A second-year he half-recognised had an extra joint in her fingers—not broken, not swollen, just *more*, a third knuckle on each finger that bent inward when she held her phone. She was scrolling, unbothered. Two boys near the shoe lockers were having a conversation, and one of them had irises the colour of static, grey-white and faintly shifting, like a television between channels. In the corridor, a girl passed Ren carrying a stack of notebooks and trailing what appeared to be a low-grade heat haze, the air around her shoulders shimmering very slightly, the way summer roads looked from a distance.
She nodded at him. He nodded back.
*This is normal now,* he realised. *This is just what school is.*
The notice board outside the main corridor had new pages pinned to it. He stopped and read the closest one without fully meaning to:
**REVISED PROTOCOL — ABILITY EXPRESSION DURING CLASS HOURS.** Passive expressions that do not disrupt instruction are permitted at teacher discretion. Active use requires prior declaration. Students experiencing first emergence are requested to visit the school counsellor's office before attending class.
He stood in front of it for a moment.
*First emergence.*
He looked down at his own hands. Clean. Ordinary. No light beneath the knuckles, no heat haze, no extra joints. Just his hands, the same hands he had always had, except for the faint memory of the car crash that wasn't his, the blood that had come and gone in the street outside the hospital.
Just his hands.
He tucked them into his pockets and followed Kaito through the corridor toward classroom 2-C, past students who had changed in ways that were still coming in, still arriving, still making themselves known.
He said nothing.
He had become very good at that.
---
The classroom was loud in the way classrooms were always loud before homeroom—chairs scraping, someone's phone at the wrong volume, overlapping conversations about things that mattered and things that didn't. His classmates turned when he entered, and for a moment the noise dipped, and then it rose again, warmer now and directed at him.
"Ren—"
"Finally—"
"We heard about the earthquake—"
"Are you okay? You were in the hospital for—"
He answered them. He smiled when it was appropriate. He said the words that the situation required—*I'm fine, yes, it was strange, I don't remember much, thank you*—and meant some of them and carried the rest and sat down at his desk and felt the room settle back into its ordinary rhythm around him.
At the desk two rows across, a boy named Hiroshi had a third eye. Not metaphorically. A small, perfectly formed eye in the centre of his forehead, currently closed, the lid smooth and pale. He was copying notes from last week into a clean notebook and paying no particular attention to anything.
Ren stared at it for three seconds.
Then he took out his own notebook, placed it on the desk, uncapped his pen.
He wrote the date at the top of the first page.
He underlined it.
Outside, through the window, Ren could see the ordinary sky. Blue and wide and completely, utterly normal. The kind of sky that had nothing to say about any of this.
The bell rang.
Class began.
---
*To be continued...*