Chapter 1.1

It was not a face, or a room, or a smell. Just a voice, warm and shaking with joy, speaking over her head the way adults do when they think a child is too small to understand.

"A mutated divine heart and brain? Giving birth to an Imperial tier Astral? Our child will surely rise to the top!"

She remembered being held. She remembered the kind of warmth that makes a body go heavy and slow. She remembered particles drifting all around her like dust in a sunbeam, and the way she had thought of them, with a child's complete and uncomplicated certainty, as her little sisters. They came when she looked at them. They leaned toward her. When she held out a hand, they gathered on her fingers like birds that had never been taught to be afraid.

That was everything. It was not a lot to have, and for a long time it was all she was sure of.

The second thing she remembered was waking up lighter.

She was five. Her head was buzzing, a high, thin sound that came from nowhere and went nowhere, like a bell that someone had struck once and never silenced. She lay still for a while, trying to understand why her whole body felt wrong. Not hurt, exactly. There was a pain, but it was far away, the way a sound is far away when you are underwater. Something closer than pain was missing.

She put a hand on her chest.

It came away wet.

The bleeding was on the right side, which was strange, because she had always known where her heart was, and it was not there. It had never been there, in the way a person's own shadow is never anywhere else. But the place where it had always been felt hollow and foreign, as though someone had taken a piece of her out and left the shape of it behind.

She did not scream. Later in life she would find this the hardest part to explain. She had been a child who laughed and chattered and asked questions, and she woke up into a silence so huge that she simply lay in it, looking at the ceiling, waiting for someone to come and tell her what was wrong.

Nobody came for a long time.

When she finally looked at the particles again, they were still there. That was what broke her, in the end. Not the pain or the blood. The particles drifted through the air exactly as they always had, and she reached for them the way she always had, and they did not come. They did not turn away from her, either. They simply hung there, polite and distant, like strangers on a train. Her little sisters were still in the room. They just did not know her anymore.

She was found, eventually, and taken in. The people who found her did not know what had happened and did not seem eager to find out. She learned later that her case was passed along quietly, from one office to another, until it landed at an orphanage built for gifted children, a plain gray building with clean floors and a long dining hall.

There, a tired woman with ink on her fingers examined her. The woman found a human heart in her chest, ordinary and healthy and unremarkable, and wrote that down. She did not check its grade. Nobody did. What grade can an orphan get?

So Mary Gray grew up in a place with clean floors, small rooms and very little else. The first winter she learned that bread was the one food she could always count on. It came with every meal. It was warm, or at least not cold, and nobody ever took it away from her. She would hold the heel of a loaf against her chest at night, in the place where the hollow was, and she would breathe slowly until the buzzing in her head went quiet.

Bread was not a luxury. It was not a celebration. It was only the proof that tomorrow was going to arrive, and at five years old, she needed that proof more than she needed anything else.

She would understand, years later, that this was the day her life split in two. On one side was the child who had been born with a divine heart and an Imperial brain, and who someone, somewhere, had believed would reach the top. On the other was a girl in a gray building, learning to eat slowly and to sleep lightly and to never trust that anything would be there in the morning.

But that morning, she knew none of it. She only knew that she was lighter than she should have been. And that someone had loved her very much, once, and then they were not there.