The sun did not arrive as a guest, but as an interrogator, casting its first feeble rays upon Zal's face. He awoke from a sleep in which he had been a root, not a dreamer. His limbs protested with a dull ache. A yawn rose from the depths of his wounded lungs and caught in his throat, erupting into a dry, rattling cough that bent him double. When it passed, his mouth tasted of iron and fatigue.

  He leaned on the cold stone wall, its rough texture a grounding truth against his palm, and pushed himself upright.

  "Awakening in a new world is, first and foremost, the discovery of poverty. The discovery that your body—your only certain asset—has no currency here."

  He began to walk. His gaze was no longer exploratory; it was predatory. Hunting for a chance to survive. He read the posters and signs: merchant, baker, carpenter, laborer. Café, circus, ship, tavern. A world of possibilities that were, for a man with no name and no memory, all impossibilities.

  "Your skills—flight, concealment, endurance of pain—are useless in a world that bears no wounds."

  So his choice was one of desperation: waiting tables. Invisibility. Becoming part of the décor. He stepped into the tavern "The Loose Rein," the smell of stale beer and wood polish hitting him like a wall.

  The owner, a burly man with a beard the color of ash and eyes that missed nothing, looked up from a ledger. "Help you?"

  Zal's throat tightened. He cleared it, a sound that was more of a scrape. "I'm looking for work."

  "Papers?" the man—Adam—asked, his tone neutral, administrative.

  Zal was stunned. Papers? Proof of an existence that had never occurred in this world? He felt a familiar, cold panic begin to climb his spine. He forced his hands to unclench at his sides.

  "The guilty always live in fear of documentation."

  "I'm not from here," Zal said, the words coming out rushed. "I have no papers." He took a shallow breath, fighting another cough. "But if you allow it, I'll work for you. Even for a tenth of the wage."

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  Adam Jupiter tilted his head, studying him. Not with suspicion, but with a detached curiosity, like a man examining an unusual insect. "Interesting. You speak well. Can you only speak, or can you work as well?"

  "To an extent." Zal’s fingers twitched, craving the absent weight of a tool, a weapon, anything to do.

  "I see you're truly not from here." Adam closed his ledger with a soft thud. "In Cadmus, papers mean nothing. Whoever lives under its banner belongs to it." He paused, his gaze drifting to a map on the wall, dotted with pins. "It simplifies things. No refugees, only future citizens." He looked back at Zal, and something shifted in his eyes, a flicker of something harder. "Of course, it also means when we see a neighboring people stumbling towards chaos, it becomes our duty to step in. To guide them. Men who think they are saving others often do the most decisive work."

  The words landed in Zal's gut with the weight of a remembered stone. Men who think they are saving others. The clerics in the church, their eyes fervent with purpose. His own hand, reaching for the Thread, believing he was breaking a chain. He tasted bile.

  "Worlds change." Zal’s whisper was almost lost under the clatter of a dropped tankard from a nearby table.

  Adam either didn't hear or chose to ignore it. "Well, I won't cut your pay. When can you start?"

  Zal blinked, pulling himself back from the edge of memory. "Whenever you say."

  "Your name?"

  "Zal. Zal Morgan." He offered his hand. It was steady, a small victory.

  Adam shook it, his grip firm and brief. "I am Adam Jupiter. Tomorrow morning. Be punctual. The drunks are more forgiving than my ledger."

  Zal nodded, a stiff, mechanical motion, and stepped out into the bustling street. The noise was a physical assault after the tavern's dim quiet. The assurance of tomorrow's job should have lifted a weight, but a colder, heavier one had taken its place.

  He walked without direction. His chest ached with a tightness that wasn't entirely from his sickness. He passed the ancient temple ruin, its colored glass glowing in the late afternoon sun. He didn't stop to stare this time. The image of the saint-king felt like an accusation.

  Finally, he came upon the square with the playing children. Their laughter was a bright, sharp sound. He sat on a low wall, watching them chase a ball. A genuine, unfettered joy he could observe but not touch, like a man outside a lit window in the snow. One of the children tripped and fell. For a second, there was silence, then a wail. A mother rushed over, scooped the child up, and the wail turned into hiccuping sobs, then, miraculously, a wet chuckle as she tickled him.

  "The laughter of children, to one who never had a childhood, is a form of torture."

  Zal looked away. His own breath whistled faintly in his ears, a private, broken rhythm against the symphony of life around him. He stood, his joints stiff, and retreated to a quieter alley, sinking onto a cold step.

  The silence here was different. It was his own. He pressed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes, seeing not darkness, but flames against stone.

  Are they unreal, or am I?

  "This is the question of every exile. When the reality around you does not match the reality within, the first thing you do is accuse yourself."

  Perhaps he was the flaw. The error in the code. Perhaps if he had hesitated a moment longer, questioned his own certainty… The memory of the Thread’s heat against his palm was more real than the cold stone beneath him now.

  "And the millstone of remorse begins to turn again. This time not with fire, but in the silence between a child's laugh and a man's ragged breath."

  Tomorrow, he would serve drinks in "The Loose Rein." He would be punctual. He would be invisible. But the true work had already begun: the work of holding himself together, word by silent word, in a world that asked no questions because it was already so sure of all the answers.