Zanya learned the shape of the limit by pressing against it.
It started small.
Her breath caught whenever she stood too close to the edge of the pier, lungs stalling mid-inhale like they'd forgotten the rest of the motion. Showers left her dizzy, fingers tingling as if the water was waiting for permission she refused to give. Even washing her hands became a careful, measured act—quick, controlled, eyes averted from the way droplets clung to her skin just a heartbeat too long.
She told herself it was stress.
She lied.
By the third night, the moon headaches set in.
Not pain exactly—pressure. A slow, inexorable tightening behind her eyes that worsened whenever moonlight touched bare skin. She started sleeping with the curtains drawn, lights off, phone face-down on the nightstand. Darkness helped. A little.
The System remained quiet.
That scared her more than the warnings had.
At school, she compensated.
She laughed louder. Talked more. Kept herself moving so no one noticed the way she leaned away from the drinking fountains or flinched when a breeze carried sea spray across the courtyard.
The girls noticed anyway.
"You don't swim anymore," Emma said one afternoon, not accusing—just confused.
Zanya froze for half a second too long. "Taking a break."
Rikki snorted. "For you, that's like telling the sun to stop rising."
Cleo studied her, eyes soft and searching. "You don't look good."
Zanya smiled, careful and controlled. "Neither do you, some days."
That shut them up.
Guilt flickered across their faces—confirmation she hadn't wanted. They were struggling too. Hiding. Learning how to exist in bodies that no longer obeyed the rules they'd grown up with.
And she couldn't help them.
Not without breaking something in herself.
The worst moment came at the beach.
She hadn't meant to go. Just a walk, she told herself. Fresh air. Sand between her toes. She stayed well above the tide line, shoes on, hands shoved deep into her pockets.
The ocean noticed anyway.
It didn't surge or pull. It reached—a low, resonant awareness brushing against her awareness like a question mark.
Her knees buckled.
Zanya dropped to the sand, palms scraping grit as her lungs spasmed, breath hitching painfully. Every instinct screamed at her to run into the water, to let it carry the rhythm her body was failing to find on its own.
"No," she gasped. "No, no—"
Her heart stuttered, then slammed back into motion out of sync, pounding too fast, then too slow. The world tunneled, sound warping, vision dimming at the edges.
The System snapped awake at last.
[SYSTEM ALERT]
[Host physiology destabilizing.
Soul-body coherence dropping.
Immediate risk detected.]
She laughed weakly, half-hysterical. "You don't say."
She crawled backward, away from the water, until the pressure eased just enough for her to breathe again. It took long minutes before the shaking stopped.
When she finally made it home, she collapsed onto her bed, exhausted down to the marrow.
That night, the dream returned.
Not the deep.
Not the chains.
Just moonlight—thin, distant, refracted through layers of water she couldn't reach. She floated in the dark, untethered, lungs burning with the effort of holding a breath she no longer needed but still instinctively tried to keep.
A presence hovered at the edge of awareness.
Not calling.
Watching.
She understood then, with a clarity that hurt.
This wasn't about power.
It was about compatibility.
Her body was failing because it was trying to house something it no longer knew how to support. The resonance hadn't made her stronger—it had made the lie of being human harder to maintain.
She woke with tears on her cheeks and salt on her lips.
The System greeted her quietly, without ceremony.
[SYSTEM ANALYSIS COMPLETE]
[Conclusion:
Current host form insufficient for sustained resonance exposure.
Recommendation pending.]
She stared at the ceiling, chest tight, pulse uneven.
"Don't," she whispered. "Don't say it yet."
The System complied.
For now.
But outside, the tide turned—slow, inevitable—and Zanya knew, with a certainty that settled deep in her bones, that she was running out of ways to stay exactly as she was.
Human.
And breathing.