Warmth held him without edges. He did not know where he was; he knew only that he was. The place felt like a hot spring folded into darkness—no hunger, no sharpness of time, only the gentle satisfaction of existing and the slow mathematics of growth.
He could feel himself assembling: stubby arm-buds lengthening, the hint of toes, the curl of a spine. He didn't know how people were made—only that everything begins small and then becomes. Whatever he was becoming—human, mole, some useful creature with a useful task—he hoped it could help and guard others. The thought of the dark place he had fallen through returned: the gray souls, the Gate, the Wardens. Had the rest made it where he had not? He had been given a task—to help humanity—but how could he, who had not saved himself from a fire?
In the hush of becoming, a small drum started in his chest.
tadum… tadum… tadum…
A shy heart, made of flesh, learning its rhythm.
When he focused—when he looked with the part of him that had no eyes—he felt the second beat: the light-heart, tucked within the red one like a candle inside a lantern. A sphere of white glass with a brighter white seed at its center; with every pulse the seed flared and dimmed, sending threads of radiance outward. Those fine rivers ran beside the veins his body was knitting, not pushing him to grow but persuading each cell toward wholeness—mending, refining, setting the line true. A quiet sun lodged in his chest.
The two hearts listened to each other.
tadum, hum… tadum, hum… tadum, hum…
When he gave the light his attention, it leaned close—as if to whisper. He leaned, too.
A flash.
Night again—London lit with wrong orange, blue strobes writing on wet tarmac. The tower burned; hoses hissed; medics moved at the edges, wrapping blankets around shivering shapes. People clung to one another, weeping into sleeves and phones. Firefighters called questions down the cordon—"Anyone still inside?"—and heads shook, unsure, afraid to swear to anything.
A voice near the stairwell: "Headcount says we've got everyone."
A breath left the crew-chief, half a sigh, half a prayer of relief—and then his gaze cut toward the body on the ground. The man in the wheelchair—the one the big American had hauled out—was stable, wrapped and breathing. The big American was not. Hands worked his chest. A mask sealed and lifted and sealed. Numbers came steady from someone who would not let panic through.
Bruce hovered above the scene like a lamp over a table and understood the shape on the asphalt was his. At the margin of sight the two "ninjas"—little girls in dark dresses and headscarves—were being treated by medics; frightened, coughing, alive. The man from the stairwell blinked and rasped and lived. Bruce's body did not.
The line of hi-vis vests opened as if parted by weather. Frank came through at a run, shouldering bodies that had not meant to be in his way, dropping to his knees beside Bruce and trying, absurdly, beautifully, to argue with death by using Bruce's name. He shook him once; he begged the crew to keep going; he pressed his forehead to Bruce's temple and stayed. Frank, who did not cry, cried—shoulders stuttering, breath snagging on a reef no one could see. Tears tracked silver through soot and vanished into the collar of Bruce's shirt.
"I'm sorry," Bruce thought, helpless above himself. "For the tour we won't take. For the promise I broke. For the stupid brave."
The light-heart answered with a single, steady hum—not absolution, exactly, but company.
Procedure carried him onward. An ambulance. Siren, not too loud. Hands, practiced and kind. Everything possible, done because doing is what the living can still do. At the hospital, the sterile mercy of white light. When the room was finally quiet, Frank sat at the bedside and watched a face that used to laugh at bad movie quotes and now did not move at all. It was there, for the first time in all the years Bruce could remember, that he saw his friend's tears fall without shame.
Sarah came—one hand over her mouth, the other finding Frank's shoulder. Emma and Ben slipped to the rail, went still in the way children go still when learning what silence means. The family wept softly, a small weather system all their own. Frank's eyes never left Bruce.
From within the warmth, Bruce reached the only way he could: a thought placed carefully on the air between them.
I'm sorry. Thank you. You got everyone out.
The room did not answer.
The light-heart pulsed, gentle and sure.
tadum, hum… tadum, hum…
Then the vision tilted, and time began to move like fast-forward rain.
They marked the pavement where he had fallen. A small memorial first—his name alone on the metal, because in this telling only one life had been lost. Flowers gathered, withered, gathered again. Winter put white in the air and on the stems, then left. Summer arrived with scaffolds and decisions. By midsummer, machines shouldered the tower down. The empty sky above it felt like a held breath.
Next year, Frank came with the kids. Hands small and hands large set flowers at the plaque; tears made their slow, private paths. Time pressed its thumb upon the city and the city pushed back. Steel grew. Glass returned. A taller, safer face rose where the old one had burned. The memorial stayed. Years spun—winters that taught roofs humility, summers that turned bus stops into bright aquariums. Emma and Ben and Sarah came less often. Frank never missed.
His hair turned winter at the edges. His stride shortened but did not lose its line. One year he stood a long time and touched the name with two fingers. The next, he did not come.
Time leaned hard upon the wheel and the wheel spun free.
A day collapsed into a line; a year drew itself down to a grain.
The sea rose.
From far off, the horizon thickened; a blue wall became a moving continent. It lifted and advanced—ship-lights caught like drowned stars inside its green glass. When it shouldered the coast and poured itself into streets, the vision blew out like a candle pinched between wet fingers.
Darkness again. Not the womb-warmth; a higher dark, thin and cold.
The world rolled beneath him, and it was not the world he remembered. Continents wore pale scars—impact bowls bright as old bones. Inland seas gleamed where farmland had been; deserts ran together in knotted belts. Storm bands spun like angry gears. Satellites drifted wounded, their ribs showing; silent stations hung in a ragged ring like a necklace of broken teeth.
Out of the wounded atmosphere, a single spear of fire rose—then shook itself apart. From the shedding came a flock of man-guided machines. They did not leave; they worked. Little jointed shapes nosed through debris, ferried panels, stitched the trash of the old age into scaffolds for a new one.
Time surged. A structure flowered in orbit—no mere habitat but a city that understood vacuum. Around it, ships idled the size of boroughs. On the Moon, a crater glazed itself with metal and glass until a lid of lights hid the rock: a base that breathed.
Engines brightened. Vectors drew themselves across the dark.
Not only through Sol's neat garden—beyond.
The light-heart pulled him farther out, as if to teach scale. The solar wind thinned to a whisper. The stars did not move; he moved among them. The Milky Way unrolled beneath him like a frost river, then fell behind. Between galaxies lay a black so honest it felt like truth.
They came through that truth: seventeen ships in procession, each an arching cathedral of hull and spire. He felt as small as a firefly beside a row of nighted mountains. Their skins were scrolls of unreadable script; on one flared a device he somehow recognized without knowing—an eagle with three heads, sword and shield clenched in heraldry. Their running lights were sparse, as if whole wings of them had gone to sleep or been put out.
Damage told its quiet story.
Acid-bite scalloped plating.
Spines of bone—not theirs—jutted from cratered seams.
Along one flank, a claw as big as an island lay snapped to the armor like a trophy no one had chosen to keep.
They thundered past (without sound, but the bones of his idea of sound remembered thunder) and the vision swung forward again: a green world, seas and continents mapped in a way that made his chest ache with familiarity. Not Earth—but Earth's cousin seen in a mirror built by distance. The seventeen turned their bows and fell toward it, not drifting but arriving, cathedral-shadow crossing ocean light.
The picture stopped there, as if a hand had pressed pause.
Warmth returned—the sea without shores. The small drum of his red heart found its measure; the white sun inside it answered with a steady, quiet hum.
He didn't know everything the light meant to teach him. He knew gratitude—Frank, Sarah, Ben, Emma; the years of joy they'd given him; the lives the two of them had saved together; the warning the Godling had pressed into him; the little sun now mending him from within. He settled himself in the dark the way a traveler packs by feel: readying for a road he could not yet see.
If he wasn't going back to the same Earth, then wherever he arrived he'd still do his utmost to help those in need. The thought pricked—a sting of guilt. If he was meant to help, shouldn't he be doing more than floating and waiting?
Thinking spun into growing.
Fingers budded; toes counted themselves. A spine curled like a fern. His skull learned its seams. Blood found its routes—and beside every river of blood ran a narrow rivulet of light. He noticed he was small—not the heavy, heroic lump he'd been the first time he was born. No boulder of a head, no bulk that would cost a mother too much. He felt slim, quick-made, fine-boned. Petite. Girlish. And it felt right, like a tool chosen on purpose.
Maybe this time he wouldn't be all muscle and little sense. Maybe he could be more mind than meat. Help in other ways—like Sarah did. She calmed rooms. Children listened to her. She made people, somehow, out of her own body. The idea sparked a ridiculous, happy chain reaction: what if he was a girl like Sarah? Could he be a little cloning factory? Pop out an army of helpers—miniature Bruces, volunteers included? Ben and Emma were already like tiny clones of Frank and Sarah. Why not him? Why not a small army of kindness, discipline, and stubbornness?
Thinking of Sarah pulled a memory into focus: a clip of her on TV, gymnast-light, weightless and nimble. People loved her just for existing. Her smile had bent Frank's life into a new shape. Bruce had never had that gift. His training had made him into a warning sign. Sunglasses didn't help. The long black coat didn't help. Quoting action movies didn't help. Muscle on him made strangers shiver, especially if he smiled. Maybe this time people wouldn't flinch. Maybe a wave would be answered. Maybe there would be friends and long stupid nights and games until morning; laughter that didn't sound forced.
He slept and dreamed of that and woke with urgency humming inside him like a remembered tune. Stop being lazy, it said.
So he trained.
He tried a flex. He tried push-ups. He attempted a squat. He even imagined a backflip. All failed gloriously. The best he managed was a dignified wiggle of a few fingers and a fist-clench which—if you squinted—looked exactly like Neo catching bullets. Good enough for a start.
That's how his new life's training began. Between heroic finger-wiggles and fist-clenches, he added toe wiggles, curling tight, opening, and flexing. A simple rhythm: relax, curl, uncurl, wiggle, hold, rest—repeat. It was a good start. Maybe, soon enough, he'd even have abs again—and, with luck, eyes that worked.
Then the world outside slowly slipped in, as his body apparently decided to gift him ears at last. He stopped and listened.
First came the breaths: a man and a woman, heavy with heat and effort. The man kissed; the woman tried to hiss in defiance, but only gasps escaped. A wooden bed groaned, as if two bodies pushed it back and forth and the frame complained at every shove. Beneath those sounds came the crackle of a small hearth fire, a salt breeze teasing a high window, gulls calling, and—farther still—the softened murmur of a town. It sounded coastal: a settlement below, stone above.
The chamber rocked gently as the man pressed against the woman and groaned in satisfaction; she answered with a sound that might have been pleasure—or anger wearing the same voice. His breathing came close; a kiss landed on a cheek, not on offered lips, and he laughed. She turned away, shifting Bruce's world. When he tried to pull her back, she spat at him.
He laughed again, richer, and at last Bruce caught his words—not the modern English Bruce expected, but something older:
"Þou art stedefast, and wilful of herte; þat is goode, and God him-selve woot it. Therfore am I certeyn in my soule þat þou schalt yive me a sone ful myghty, þat schal arisen and reule this reame. Þou schalt see—his name shal be song in halles."
The woman sneered. A wet kiss—placed by him on her brow—made her heart race. She hated that she liked even a part of his gentleness. Tears stung; she snapped, voice iron-hard:
"Þú illr bastarðr, hætt at sýnast svá ástsamr, ok far út! Þú grimmr maðr—þú hefir fengit þat er þú vildir, hefir þú eigi?"
Bruce didn't know the words, but the sound of them was ancient and northern: Old Norse, the tongue of raiders and traders and stubborn kings. The man answered from a little distance now:
"Fyne, I shal gon."
Leather, cloth—then mail. The clack of metal on metal. A sword kissed its scabbard. The bed sighed when he rose; the floor answered with a firm stone clap at each step.
"Lili," he said—Lily, Bruce thought, his mother's name—"thy deffiaunce is fair to biholde. Yet soone or late thou, as wommen of febler kynde, shalt falle to myn charmes. As now, reste thee; my servauntes shul brynge thee souper. Take this while to thenke ageyn thyne affeccioun toward me, for I myself thee love alredi."
Whatever that declaration meant to her, it tangled her feelings only more. "Far út nú!" she shouted, flinging a soft pillow. He merely stooped, set it back with a devious little chuckle, and walked away. A key slid home; an iron-banded door opened. Boots rang into a stairwell—spiral, by the echo—and the door thudded shut behind him. The lock turned. The footsteps drained downward through the tower's throat.
A princess-in-a-tower story, Bruce thought—except the dragon wore armor and smiled.
The woman cradled the pillow and broke into sobs—rage and grief braided together. One hand pressed her belly—pressed him—and she swore aloud:
"Þat er allt í lagi, lítil mær mín. Þú munt verða heil. Ek sver—ek læt hann eigi fá þik."
Whatever the exact meaning, Bruce chose a side—her side. Protecting her would take work. So he worked.
One hundred hand-clenches for his arms. One hundred crunches for his core. One hundred kicks for his legs. And, floating, he "ran" for ten long minutes, driving ghost-steps through warm dark. He would do this every day—until his hair grew, until his lungs learned air, until he got out of this sheltering sea.
He promised her in silence and trained to make the promise true.