POV: Kairo Maddox
Kairo Maddox had stopped believing in patterns a long time ago.
When you're young, the world teaches you to look for rhythm—the good following the bad, the sun after the storm, the reason behind the pain. But Kairo had learned early that sometimes the storm just stayed. And sometimes, when the sun finally showed up, it burned.
The first person who ever showed him love was his mother.
She died when he was seven.
A drunk driver ran a red light at seventy miles an hour. Kairo had been in the back seat, watching a cartoon on a tiny portable DVD player when the car spun into the guardrail. He woke up under broken glass and twisted metal, his mother's arm still across his chest.
The driver never stopped.
The second person was Ms. Langley, a foster home volunteer who taught him how to read.
She was mugged and stabbed two blocks from their center. Her body was found the next morning. Kairo cried for days, not because he understood death, but because he finally knew what it meant to lose someone worth crying over.
The third person was a homeless man named Marcus, who let Kairo sleep in his tent when he ran away from another abusive foster home.
Marcus froze to death in his sleep.
Three lives. Three kindnesses. Three graves.
So no, Kairo didn't believe in rhythm. He believed in randomness. In chaos. In a universe that didn't care if you were good or bad—just whether you were next.
7:12 AM – Manhattan, East Side
Kairo woke up on a mattress without sheets in a squatters' space three floors beneath a condemned office building. The air smelled like mold and regret. He sat up slowly, wincing at the cold that settled into his ribs overnight.
He'd been staying here since the last shelter shut down. No ID. No phone. No attachments. Just a backpack, a few clothes, and a journal filled with questions he stopped trying to answer.
He stood, pulled on a frayed hoodie, and stared at his reflection in the shattered bathroom mirror. His own face looked foreign to him. Not monstrous, just... unfinished.
He left without eating.
Morning Drift
He wandered Manhattan like a ghost. Cafés, alleyways, train stations. His body moved, but his mind drifted.
Sometimes he watched people. Imagined their lives.
That woman with the briefcase? Divorce papers in her bag.
That kid with the violin case? Terrified of auditions.
That old man on the bench? Waiting for a phone call that wouldn't come.
Kairo didn't know if any of it was true. He just liked creating meaning out of nothing. If the universe wouldn't give him answers, he'd make his own.
At noon, he stole an apple from a corner market. The owner saw him but didn't say anything. Maybe he looked too thin. Maybe he looked like a ghost.
He ate it on the steps of an abandoned church and wrote in his journal:
What if survival is the sin?
4:33 PM – Subway Terminal (Abandoned)
The entrance had been sealed for years, but Kairo knew the cracks in the city. He slipped through the rusted fence and into the dark.
This place was his sanctuary. Not because it was clean or safe, but because it was forgotten. A place the world didn't bother to ruin further.
He sat at the edge of the tracks and stared into the tunnel, breathing in the silence.
He used to fantasize about being a hero. He'd sketch suits in the margins of his notebooks. Give himself cool codenames. Dream up powers that could protect the people who kept dying around him.
But he was seventeen now.
Old enough to know better.
That dream had died with Marcus.
7:59 PM
He was writing in his journal by the flicker of a broken flashlight when the air changed.
It was subtle at first. Like the space around him had swallowed a breath and forgotten to exhale.
Then the walls began to hum.
He stood, alert.
The sound wasn't mechanical. It was alive.
A vibration, deep and cosmic, like someone was pulling strings he couldn't see. The light snapped off. Everything went black.
Then: white.
A pulse.
A blast.
Kairo was thrown back into the air like a puppet cut from its strings. Glass rained down from somewhere above—a panel, a skylight, a memory. One shard, long and jagged, pierced his chest.
Straight through. A perfect, cruel line.
He hit the ground, blood spilling like ink. Darkness crawled in from the edges of his vision.
He thought of his mother's arm. Ms. Langley's voice. Marcus's laugh.
And then: nothing.
Emergency Room – Manhattan General
Beeping. Voices. Smells he couldn't name.
Kairo blinked. His chest was on fire.
"We got him stabilized! He's bleeding internally, get the trauma kit!"
A nurse hovered over him. A woman with deep eyes and tired hands. She looked like she'd seen too many dead kids.
"You stay with me," she whispered, pressing gauze to his chest.
Later, he would learn her name.
Dr. Aisha Grant.
Elijah's mother.
Recovery
Kairo drifted in and out for days. Sedation, surgery, pain.
The glass had missed his heart by millimeters. But something had changed. Not just in his body, but in the way the world felt.
It started small.
The nurse dropped a vial of blood. It spun in the air, bounced on the edge of the counter, and landed upright, unbroken.
The power went out in the hospital—but only in the floors above him.
And then: the man in the next room flatlined. Three times. And each time, Kairo heard the nurses say, "It's impossible."
Power Awakening
The moment it clicked wasn't dramatic.
He was lying in bed, watching a bird outside the window. It had flown into the glass three times that day and lived. A fourth time, it hit the same spot. Nothing.
That night, he got out of bed.
His body still hurt. But when he walked down the hospital hallway, the lights flickered in rhythm with his heartbeat.
He walked past a man trying to buy soda from a vending machine. The machine jammed.
Kairo touched the side of it.
Every slot dumped its contents at once.
The man stared at him. Kairo walked away.
Later, he tried more. He flipped a coin twenty-seven times. It landed heads every time. He stepped into traffic, and cars swerved. He guessed the names of strangers before they spoke.
Something had changed.
He could tilt the world.
Luck bent around him like gravity.
But it wasn't free.
Moral Dilemma
When he left the hospital, he didn't go back to the shelters.
He went to a corner store. He willed the cashier to drop her guard.
She did. The till swung open.
He walked away with five hundred dollars.
Three blocks later, the store caught fire.
The news said it was faulty wiring. Said two people died.
He tried to deny the connection. But the pattern was too clean.
He was gaming the system.
And the system wanted blood.
That night, he sat on a rooftop and watched the skyline flicker.
He could be anyone now. Do anything. Fix the pain he saw everywhere.
But if every good thing he gained led to someone else's suffering... was it worth it?
Or was he just another storm waiting to happen?
He closed his eyes.