Chapter 1 — I Am An Extra Huh?

Adrian woke up without air.

There was no dream. There was no transition. One instant, nothing existed; the next, his lungs refused to work, like a door locked from the inside.

His body reacted before he did.

An arm moved. A hand struck the cold floor and kept going, dragging blindly across the boards without waiting for anyone's order, the way one searches for the light switch in a house where one has lived for years.

Adrian tried to breathe. His chest rose halfway and jammed.

'No. No, no, no...'

His fingers found something small, cold, and metallic, and closed around it with a certainty Adrian did not have. He didn't even understand what he was holding. His thumb was already turning the safety. His other hand was already pressing the tip against his neck, in a clean, worn, rehearsed motion, the motion of someone who had imagined that moment on many nights before it arrived.

A dry click.

A bite of fire in the neck. The pressure came before the relief.

Then, air.

He drew a breath so deep it hurt. Another. Another. He was on his knees, bent over his own chest, breathing like someone just dragged up from the bottom of a lake, and with each gulp the world came back a little sharper: the smell of dust and metal, the hard floor beneath his palms, a heart beating much too fast in his ears.

— What the fuck...

The voice died in his throat.

It wasn't his voice. It was thinner, younger, with a rasp in the back that Adrian had never had.

He looked at the hand that was still holding the auto-injector.

That wasn't his either.

He stared at it for a few seconds. Too long. Too pale. The knuckles jutted out like steps. A small scar crossed the base of the thumb, the nails were bitten down to the limit, and the palms had calluses, the kind that come from carrying weight and not from typing.

Adrian's hands were keyboard hands. These had never seen one.

He raised the other. The same thing.

The room was small. Not in a modest way, but in a necessary one: an iron cot with the blanket dragged to the floor, a desk crammed with books, notebooks, and papers, a bookshelf bowed under the weight of used volumes, a chair with a pressed uniform hanging on the backrest, the only thing there that looked cared for. A backpack leaned by the door, waiting.

And coins.

There were coins all over the floor, scattered as if someone had knocked over a small fortune and hadn't had time to care. Adrian, who spent his days counting boxes, calculated without meaning to, by reflex: it was little. Too little for a rented room, books, and food.

The only light came from the window. Across the alley, a tiny lantern burned in a windowpane, a small, firm flame that painted everything amber.

Adrian looked at the trail on the floor.

The desk pushed aside. A phone fallen down. The blanket pulled off the bed. A line of overturned things that ran from the cot to here and ended exactly where he was, on his knees, with his arm still outstretched.

Someone had dragged themselves to this spot, trying to reach what was now in his hand.

He didn't know who. Even so, something in his chest tightened, and it had nothing to do with asthma.

He got up slowly. His legs felt wrong, lighter, less steady, the center of gravity in a place where he wasn't used to looking for it. Like wearing a coat of the wrong size from the inside.

There was a cracked mirror fixed to the wall, beside the door.

Adrian stopped in front of it.

A young man stared back at him.

Dark blond hair, disheveled. A thin face. Deep dark circles under the eyes, the kind that don't come from one bad night but from many. And an expression that, at that moment, looked as frightened as his own.

Adrian raised a hand.

The young man did the same.

He touched his own face. The image repeated the gesture.

— No — he whispered, taking a step back. — No, no. This isn't...

He closed his eyes. Breathed.

And then, because he didn't know how to do anything else, Adrian did what he always did when the world broke.

'What happened?'

Silence. He had no idea.

'Can it be undone?'

None. He had no idea about that either.

'If not, how do I get through this?'

That one, at least, he knew where to start: with information.

He opened his eyes, looked around, and saw the phone lying on the floor, screen facing up.

He picked up the device carefully, as if it might bite. The screen lit up by itself. The face Adrian didn't know unlocked it on the first try, and that, somehow, was worse than everything that had happened so far.

The date glowed at the top.

January 12, 2457. 01:07.am

— Two thousand... four hundred and...?

He looked again. The phone's clock showed an hour that went up to 25:59, the kind of detail that, reading the book, he had found charming. Now he found it personal.

— Someone messed with this phone's settings — he muttered. — It has to be that. Wrong time zone by some four hundred years.

Then a notification covered the screen.

— A pop-up. — His voice came out dry. — Of course. Malware.

He tapped to close it. It didn't close. He tapped again. The message opened in full.

" HALCYON GATE UNIVERSITY Registrar's Office | Official Notice

Dear student Vincent Vane,

We inform you that the period of disciplinary suspension registered in your name ended at 00:00 today, in accordance with the Student Regulations. Your academic enrollment returns to ACTIVE status as of the opening of business hours.

You are required to appear at the Registrar's Office by 10:00 am today for record updating and to collect your Term 2 schedule. Failure to appear within the deadline may result in a new evaluation of your enrollment.

We wish you a good reintegration. We remind you that discipline is an essential part of the training of every future Gatewalker. "

Adrian had written notices like this one. He knew exactly how many people had reviewed that text so that no one would look guilty, and he could translate that "may result in a new evaluation" without effort.

Show up, or we'll take care of you.

But it wasn't the polite threat that made him sit down on the edge of the cot.

It was the name.

Vincent Vane.

He read it once. Twice. The third time, out loud, without realizing.

— Vincent Vane.

And then he recognized it.

Not because he knew that young man. Because he knew that page.

It wasn't a memory of a life. It was a memory of reading, less sharp, colder: a university hallway, a young man in uniform leaning against the wall with a crooked smile, extremely fine lines of light hanging from his fingers like fishing lines. An Arcanist. A Threads user. An arrogant remark to the protagonist's group, a confrontation he lost, an exit from the scene.

Three chapters? Four?

And then...

Adrian searched his memory. Four hundred-some chapters. Three years of unhurried reading.

Nothing.

Not an expulsion. Not a death. Not a redemption. Vincent Vane simply stopped existing in the book, like a piece of furniture removed from a scene, and no one missed him.

The phone almost slipped from his hand.

He looked at the mirror. At the hanging uniform. At the coins on the floor, at the lantern in the window, at the backpack by the door.

He looked at the auto-injector, still in his other hand.

'I'm...'

The conclusion came slowly, like rising water. Too absurd to be accepted all at once, so it arrived in pieces.

'Did I die...?'

There was the pressure in his chest, and this time it wasn't from the body.

He remembered the sofa. The lit phone on his chest. The scroll bar the size of a grain of rice. Having thought, with that gray calm, tomorrow I'll catch up on this.

He wasn't going to.

There was a bookmark waiting for him, faithfully, at the chapter where he had stopped, and a list of two thousand chapters that would never scroll down again. A plasma TV turned off. Consoles no one would turn on. A photograph in the entryway of an apartment where someone, at some point, was going to notice that the light had been on for days.

Adrian pressed his lips together until they hurt.

And then he did the second thing he always did when the world broke: he stopped looking back, because back was a place where there was nothing to fix.

If it can't be undone... then how do I get through this?

He looked at the room again. At the uniform. At the backpack. At the clock, which read 01:12.am

Nine hours.

In nine hours, he had to walk into an entire university, in the skin of a student everyone knew and whom he knew from a page, without knowing the name of a some professors, without knowing where to sit, without knowing what the owner of this body had done to get suspended.

All he knew was that the young man was a weak character, that he had caused trouble, and that, according to the story, he disappeared.

And now the story had a new problem: Adrian was inside it.

A small memory passed through him, so discreet he almost didn't notice it. Across the alley, the lantern was still lit. In the whole building opposite, in every window he could see, there was an identical flame. Only in his, no.

Adrian kept looking at that empty window for longer than he intended.

— Stable? — he asked the room.

It was the greeting of that world, the politest and most intimate question in the book: how is your Core? He had said it out loud without planning to, and only afterward understood that he had asked it of someone. Of the body. Of its owner. Of whoever might still be in there, or nowhere at all.

No one answered.

The pipes creaked inside the walls. Somewhere, a radio was arguing with a wall.

Adrian let out his breath and looked once more at the name on the screen.

A student of Halcyon Gate University. An Arcanist. A character who appeared briefly, caused trouble for the protagonist's group, and then vanished without anyone noticing.

— Wait.

The word hung in the air.

— I'm an... extra?

Silence.

He laughed, a short, dry sound, with no humor in it at all. Not out of joy. The kind that escapes when the body has nothing left to do with what it feels.

He looked at the mirror, at the thin young man with sunken eyes staring back at him as if waiting for the answer too.

— ...I'm fucked.

Deep in the borrowed body, an empty stomach disagreed with everything except that.