Emma paced back and forth in a room bathed in artificial light. The space was clinically simple, a messy single bed showing that someone had spent the night there, a bare white desk, and a completely empty shelf, as if to emphasize that she was its very first resident. The walls were smooth and brand new, a detail that had deeply shocked her at first, considering the rotting ruins she had left behind at the University. An open window looked out over a massive courtyard, dizzyingly far below. Judging by the drop, she had to be in the upper levels of a towering skyscraper.
To say Emma was confused would be an understatement. As she continued to wear a path into the floor of the small room, a single thought looped in her mind. An Anomaly? Me? That's impossible.
Although she had been denied the details, the snippets of information she had managed to gather were unsettling. Anomalies were extremely rare cases among the Awakened, individuals whose nature mysteriously mirrored that of the Original Fathers, the Tohotsi. She had not been allowed to know more.
Absorbed by her turmoil, her mind inevitably drifted back to the moment she had woken up in this very room, a few days earlier.
Emma opened her eyes slowly, as if emerging from a long dream. She couldn't remember the last time she had slept so well. Slept?
She jolted awake and sat bolt upright, her gaze darting to the four corners of the sober, unadorned, almost sad room. "Where am I?!"
All she remembered was wanting to help Atlas, and then... A shiver ran down her spine. Someone had kidnapped her. She felt like she could still smell his sickening, alcohol-laced scent. A wave of disgust churned her stomach.
"Calm down, young lady. I am here to explain everything. Breathe."
A mature woman spoke to her in a soothing voice, extending an arm toward her without actually daring to rest it on her shoulder.
Emma turned her head toward the stranger, instinctively backing away against the headboard. She wasn't sure of anything anymore. She studied the old lady: mid-length gray hair, brown eyes filled with maternal warmth, faint wrinkles stretching from the corners of her eyes to her cheeks, and a small round nose. She looked remarkably like Emma's own grandmother, which brought on a violent wave of nostalgia. Emma felt her hostility melt away almost instantly.
She wasn't fooled, though; the people who had brought her here were cunning. They had deliberately chosen this comforting figure to soften her awakening.
"Who are you?" Emma blurted out in a tone that was meant to be cold, but completely missed the mark. She could never have spoken like that to her own grandmother.
"I am Agatha, and you must be Emma, right?"
Emma's eyes widened. How did they know her name? Had they been following her for weeks? A feeling of immediate danger washed over her.
"How do you know my name?" she snapped, this time with a much sharper tone.
Instead of answering, Agatha turned her face toward the nightstand. With a slight nod and an unwavering smile that Emma's harshness couldn't seem to penetrate, she motioned for her to look in that direction.
Emma followed her gaze and spotted her personal belongings, her phone, her wallet, some wired earphones, and right next to them, her student ID card, with her identity clearly displayed.
The sight of them hit her harder than she expected. Such ordinary, forgettable objects, a phone she'd complained about for having too little storage, earphones she was forever untangling, and yet here, in this sterile room that smelled of nothing at all, they felt like relics pulled from some other life entirely. She had the sudden, absurd urge to hold the phone, just to confirm it was real, that she herself was still real.
Suddenly ashamed of her paranoia, Emma lowered her head slightly.
As if nothing had happened, Agatha let out a cheerful little laugh, immediately covering her mouth with her hand so as not to offend the young girl. "Don't worry, it's completely normal for you to feel lost. Let me explain, Emma. You are an anomaly."
This time, absolute surprise was painted on Emma's face. "An anomaly? What are you talking about?"
She had never heard such a term used to describe a human being.
"I will try to explain it using concepts you can grasp. You must surely remember hearing the Call of the Tohotsi..."
Before she could even finish her sentence, Emma cut her off sharply. "What call? From who?"
Emma viscerally hated this situation. She understood absolutely nothing and had no certainties left to cling to. The ground kept shifting beneath her feet.
"What do you mean, you didn't hear the Call? But you are a Relic..." Agatha murmured, her eyebrows furrowing ever so slightly, before her unwavering maternal smile took over again. "You must still be in shock. It's alright, rest assured, you are safe here."
Agatha immediately chalked up this memory lapse to the trauma of the awakening. It was a rather well-documented clinical phenomenon regarding Anomalies: under the sheer shock, certain brain functions, including memory, could malfunction. The young girl's mind would eventually restore itself naturally over time.
"You will remember it, the day when everything changed, when we humans transcended our mortality, when we truly began to Exist!"
As she spoke these words, Agatha no longer had the eyes of a sweet old lady, but those of an illuminated zealot. It was as if she were reciting divine words. This sudden fervor made Emma's blood run cold, chilling her more deeply than all the horrors she had witnessed so far.
I'd better never let her know that I really didn't hear anything, Emma thought, recalling her conversation with Atlas in the amphitheater. This woman's devotion is terrifying.
"Well, let me continue," Agatha resumed, recovering her composure. "You Relics were trapped in dead zones right before the Awakening, places where reality itself no longer exists. We call them the Emptum. You were forced into hibernation there. This is how the Tohotsi protected their favorites. But even though these zones are frozen, time continues to flow within them..."
Something clicked in Emma's mind. Even though this speech sounded completely insane to her ears, the old lady's fanaticism proved she wasn't lying about these famous Original Fathers. Suddenly, everything made sense. She finally understood why her university was in ruins: the cracked walls, the omnipresent dust, this impossible decay. Time had taken its toll while they slept.
"...and no one ever knows when one of these dead zones will reappear" Agatha concluded in an awe-struck whisper.
Emma pressed a bit further, now more curious than anything else. "But how is it that some, like me, survived and not the others? There were only two of us, if I remember correctly!" she urged.
But Agatha cut her off sharply, not even taking the time to answer her question. "Two? What do you mean, two? Our records only indicate one Relic, not two!" she snapped, anger suddenly flaring in her voice.
She let out a deep breath, then forced herself to calm down. Above all, she couldn't afford to lose her temper in front of the Relic, she was far too precious... "I will answer you first, but then you must quickly tell me who the other person with you was, alright? It's very important," she said, plastering on the fakest smile she could muster.
"You... There were only two of you because all the others were consumed by the Origin."
The word landed in the room like something physical, a weight Emma hadn't braced for. She opened her mouth to ask what that meant, consumed how, consumed by what, but no sound came out. Agatha's face had shifted again, that same fervor from before flickering back across her features, except this time it wasn't joy. It was something closer to dread, quickly smothered, the kind of expression people wore when they'd said more than they meant to.
Emma swallowed hard, the word still echoing in her skull. Consumed. Not killed. Not lost. Consumed, as though the others hadn't simply died, but had been eaten by something that still, perhaps, hadn't finished its meal.