"The Awakening hasn't happened," Sierra said, voice flat and surgical, the tone she used when she was about to dissect someone's entire worldview and leave the entrails neatly arranged for later inspection. "It's not supposed to happen until the Destined Day. Every Legacy family has this tattooed on the inside of their eyelids. Generations of us have been sitting on their hands, waiting for the cosmic alarm clock to go off. That single, boring, ironclad fact means Phei cannot be one of us."
The sentence didn't just land. It executed them all by firing squad and then politely asked the corpses to mop up their own blood.
Delilah stared at the dead fire pit like it owed her money. Cold ashes stared back, unimpressed.
But—
"What if," she said, dragging the words out like they were stuck in tar, "Phei was like us… but not, y'know, us us? Like, adjacent. Adjacent-adjacent. The knockoff brand nobody remembers ordering but it showed up anyway."
