Chapter 1: Awakening
Arjun wakes up with a headache.
It's not the gentle throb of a hangover or the dull ache of a poor night's sleep. No this is something else entirely. The kind of headache that feels like someone's driving an iron spike through his skull, forcing their way in through sheer brutality. His eyes snap open, and the world tilts violently before settling into focus.
The ceiling above him is cracked concrete, stained with water damage and something darker that he doesn't want to identify. A single naked bulb swings lazily overhead, casting shifting shadows across the room. The air reeks of cigarette smoke, cheap alcohol, and something that might be rust or might be blood. Arjun's breath catches.
"What the hell?"
He sits up slowly, every muscle in his body screaming in protest. His hands tremble as he pushes himself up on his elbows. They're small hands. Too small. The skin is darker than he remembers, rougher, with calluses in places that don't make sense. He stares at them as if they belong to someone else and the terrifying part is, they might.
The room spins again.
Arjun forces himself to breathe. In. Out. In. Out. The cold concrete beneath him is hard and unforgiving, and when he finally manages to sit up fully, he realizes he's lying on a thin, grimy mattress that smells like it hasn't been washed in years. Around him, the room comes into focus—a small, cramped space that looks like it was never meant to house human beings comfortably. Empty bottles are stacked in corners. The walls are decorated with graffiti that ranges from crude symbols to actual gang markings.
Gang markings.
The thought arrives like an electric shock.
Arjun scrambles off the mattress, his movements frantic and uncoordinated. His legs feel weird shorter, lighter, like they belong to someone who hasn't quite finished growing. He stumbles toward what looks like a metal sheet serving as a mirror, propped against the wall. What he sees there stops him cold.
A face stares back at him that isn't his own.
The face is young too young, maybe sixteen or seventeen at most. Brown skin, dark eyes wide with panic, sharp cheekbones that speak of poor nutrition and harder times. Black hair, disheveled and long enough to fall across his forehead. The clothes hanging off this body are a mess a torn shirt, dirty cargo pants with holes in the knees, shoes that have seen better days. There's a long scar running down the left side of the neck, pale and obvious against the darker skin.
Arjun touches his own face. Or rather, he touches this face. This new face. His fingers trace the scar, and he feels the raised tissue beneath his fingertips, real and solid and *his* now, apparently.
"No. No, this isn't real."
He closes his eyes, counting backward from ten. A trick his mother taught him years ago for panic attacks. When he opens them again, the face is still there. Still not his. Still staring back at him with the same expression of disbelief.
The memory hits him like a truck.
Arjun staggers backward, his mind fracturing as images assault him from all sides. He was different. He was older. He was... he was *dead*. No, that's not quite right. He was dying. There was an accident. A car accident on the highway. The screech of tires. The terrible, impossible moment of impact. And then nothing but white light and the sensation of falling, falling, *falling*...
And then this. This body. This room. This life that isn't his.
His breathing comes faster now, almost hyperventilating. He sinks down onto the edge of the mattress, pressing his palms against his eyes. The headache hasn't gone away—if anything, it's gotten worse, now accompanied by a strange sensation at the back of his mind, like something trying to claw its way in or out. He can't tell which.
When he pulls his hands away, there's someone standing in the doorway.
The man is tall and broad-shouldered, with the kind of physique that comes from years of physical labor and fighting. Tattoos cover his exposed arms, intricate designs that Arjun recognizes from his memories (his *other* memories, he reminds himself) as gang insignia. The man's face is scarred and weathered, and his eyes—his eyes are cold in a way that suggests he's seen violence and dealt it out in equal measure.
"You're finally awake," the man says. His voice is gravelly, roughened by years of smoking and probably shouting at people. "Slept for two days. Had me worried you wouldn't make it."
Arjun stares at him, unable to form words. The man continues, apparently unbothered by his silence.
"Don't try to move around too much. The boss wants to see you when you're up to it. But that can wait till you're less of a wreck." The man steps into the room, and Arjun instinctively shrinks back. "Here. Drink something. Water and food. You need it."
He sets down a bottle of water and what looks like rice wrapped in newspaper. When the man leaves, pulling the door shut behind him, Arjun is left alone once more with his impossible reality.
He stares at the water bottle for a long time. Then he looks down at his hands again—these small, scarred, unfamiliar hands that now belong to him. To the body he now inhabits. To this life he somehow has to navigate.
Slowly, carefully, as if the water might bite him, Arjun reaches for the bottle and takes a drink.
It's warm and tastes faintly metallic, but it's real. Everything is real. The cold concrete. The smell of the room. The weight of this younger body. The phantom pain in his neck where the scar runs. All of it is real, and somehow he's going to have to figure out what comes next.
But first, he needs to understand where exactly he is and who this gang is. And more importantly, he needs to understand the blurry memories that aren't quite his own—fragments of a life lived in this body, fighting and struggling and surviving in ways his previous self never had to.
As darkness creeps in through the small, barred window high up on the wall, Arjun lies back on the mattress and stares at the cracked ceiling, the headache still pounding, and a new question forming in his mind:
*How is this possible?*
And more troublingly:
*What am I supposed to do now?*