You will try.

  Pain arrived before consciousness did.

  It came in fragments — a blade, the weight of it, the specific wrongness of something inside him that should not have been inside him. A street. Smoke. A man with a white mask standing over him in the ruin of something that used to be a city block. The images did not connect. They surfaced and dissolved like debris in dark water, and between them was nothing — no sequence, no logic, only the recurring certainty that he had been in the process of dying and then, without any satisfying explanation, had stopped.

  Then his skull split open.

  That was what it felt like. A pressure behind his eyes that built and built and then tore sideways across his head like something trying to force its way out through the bone. He jolted upright and rolled off the bed.

  Grass. Cold and damp against his palms.

  His stomach revolted before the rest of him had caught up. Black blood came up in thick strands, hitting the ground with a sound that was far too heavy for blood. The taste was metallic and wrong in a way that no taste should be wrong — like something that had never been meant to exist inside a human body and was now, reluctantly, leaving. He gripped the bed frame with both hands and waited until the convulsing stopped.

  He made himself look up.

  This was not a room.

  He was on a hillside. A wide, sloping hill blanketed in flowers — white and pale violet, swaying in a breeze that carried the smell of salt and open water. The sky above was a deep, cloudless blue, the kind that only exists far from cities. Below him, and on all sides, the island rolled outward in greens and grays before giving way to the sea, which stretched without interruption in every direction, flat and silver and vast. In the middle distance, partially obscured by a thin line of jungle, a collection of grey buildings rose in structured formation behind a high perimeter wall.

  It was, in a purely objective sense, beautiful.

  The bed he had woken on sat alone in the open air, its white sheets damp with dew and streaked dark in several places. A small metal table beside it held a cluster of used syringes — some bent, some stained, one snapped cleanly at the barrel. Someone had been working on him out here, in the open, on a hillside. He did not know what to do with that information.

  He stood.

  The grass shifted beneath him.

  The sound came first — a low, wet slithering just beneath the surface, like something thick moving through soil. He had half a second to register it before the vine erupted from the ground and coiled around his left leg with a grip that was not exploratory. It knew exactly what it was doing. A second followed immediately, wrapping his right ankle, and then they began to climb — winding upward past his knees, past his thighs, thorns pushing slowly outward from the vine's surface like they were growing in real time, pressing into his skin and then through it.

  He screamed.

  He grabbed the vine at his waist with both hands and pulled. The thorns dragged through flesh on the way out. He pulled harder, breath tearing out of him in ragged bursts, until something gave and the vine fell away limp. He tore the others off one by one, bleeding freely, and stood in the ruined flowers with his chest heaving and his legs shaking beneath him.

  The wounds closed.

  He did not notice. He was already moving, half-stumbling down the slope, fixing his eyes on the grey buildings in the distance and refusing to look at anything else. His legs found their rhythm. He ran.

  He did not see it coming.

  There was a flicker at the edge of his vision — just a flicker, just the suggestion of movement — and then something enormous hit him from the side with a force that emptied his lungs and lifted him entirely off the ground. He had a brief, spinning impression of sky and flowers and impact before the tree stopped him.

  The sound his ribs made was not something he would forget quickly.

  He slid down the trunk and crumpled at its base, trying to remember how to breathe. Then the rock landed on his legs.

  It was not a small rock.

  The pain that followed was beyond the threshold where the body registers it as pain and enters the territory where it registers as simply: wrong. Everything below his waist had become a single flat note of wrongness. He pressed his back against the tree and made sounds he was not entirely in control of, and it was through this that he became aware of the woman walking toward him through the torn flowers.

  She was unhurried. Her white coat moved lightly in the breeze, and the vines that coiled around her arms and shoulders moved with her the way a second set of limbs would — not attached, exactly, but integrated. Her mask was black, marked with two white etched eye dots that caught the light faintly. She looked at him the way someone looks at a problem they have solved before and found only mildly interesting.

  "Not the smartest move," she said, "sprinting toward a military facility when you look like that."

  Her voice was rough and carried the particular flatness of someone who had long ago stopped performing patience. She tilted her head, studying him.

  "Honestly? You look more like an aberrant right now than a vessel. I'd have shot you on principle."

  He spat blood. He intended to say something measured and coherent. What came out was a glare.

  She watched, mildly, as the bones beneath the rock began to shift.

  "Hm." She sounded almost impressed. Then she flicked her hand.

  The rock lifted. The vines took its place — wrapping him from ankle to shoulder in one efficient motion, pinning his arms to his sides, hoisting him into the air with a smoothness that suggested she had done this precise thing before and had refined the technique. Blood ran down the vines from his wounds and dripped onto her coat.

  "Shit," she muttered, examining a stain near her sleeve. "You're messy."

  "Put me down," he said.

  "No."

  She turned and walked toward the jungle line, carrying him.

  * * *

  The facility gates were visible through the trees — grey metal, tall, flanked by a guard tower on either side. They moved toward them at a pace she clearly found acceptable and he found infuriating. Every thirty seconds or so, with no apparent trigger, the vines tightened. Bone gave. He screamed. She waited for it to pass, then continued walking as though nothing had interrupted them.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?" he finally managed, between one crack and the next gasp for air. "I said I'm not trying to escape! I'm not fighting anyone!"

  "I know," she said.

  "Then WHY—"

  "Because I don't know when you'll turn," she said, with the tone of someone explaining something to a child who is upset but not wrong to be upset. "Aberrant conversion isn't always clean. You could be fine right now and different in ten minutes. I'm not gambling on that shit."

  "Turn into what?"

  She glanced back at him. "An aberrant. One killed you. Does that ring anything?"

  He tried. Fragments surfaced — the smell of smoke, a sound like reality being cut — and dissolved before he could hold them.

  "No," he said.

  "Blade aberrant fused with you when it ran you through. That's the working theory for why you're alive and why you're here." She paused. "Congratulations, by the way."

  She tightened the vines.

  "STOP! I'm going to—" He vomited again, black, down the side of the vine.

  "Regenerated already," she said, almost to herself. There was something in her voice then — not quite warmth, but the specific register of a person encountering something that has exceeded their expectations and finding that they don't entirely hate it. The vines tightened a fraction more.

  "I WILL REMEMBER THIS," he shouted, as the crack echoed through the trees.

  "Most people don't," she said pleasantly. "The pain tends to blur together."

  She waved at the guard tower. The heavy doors slid open.

  * * *

  Inside the perimeter, the world changed register entirely.

  The paths were clean and ordered, lined with low functional lighting that had just switched on against the deepening afternoon. White-uniformed personnel moved between buildings with the purposeful quiet of people who had somewhere to be and the competence to get there. Nobody ran. Nobody raised their voice. The whole compound had the atmosphere of a place where emergencies were expected and had been planned for, which made it feel, paradoxically, more controlled than calm.

  A woman was already walking toward them from the main entrance.

  She wore a decorated white uniform, her short orange hair catching the last of the day's light, and she moved with a precision that suggested each step was placed rather than taken. Her eyes went to Janus immediately and stayed there — not scanning him, exactly, but studying him with the focused, unhurried attention of someone who has been waiting for a specific thing to arrive and is now, quietly, confirming that it has.

  "Xandra," she said, still looking at Janus. "You never disappoint me."

  "You know me too well, Ms. Leian." Xandra released the vines in one smooth motion, and Janus dropped onto a stretcher that two employees had materialized from somewhere with practiced timing. "I put effort into my work."

  "I can tell." Leian's gaze moved once across his injuries — the closed wounds, the dark staining, the general condition of someone who had died recently and was being inconvenienced by it — and something shifted briefly in her expression. Not concern. Closer to recognition. She looked at him the way a scholar looks at a primary source. "Still alive. Good."

  They moved inside.

  The lobby fell quiet as they entered. Personnel in white, blue, black, and red stood along the walls, conversations dropping as the stretcher passed. Leian gestured once without looking at them and space opened ahead of them. They reached the elevator. An employee stepped in, pressed the lowest floor, and produced a compact syringe that caught the light once before being pressed into Janus' arm. He gasped. The employee burned the syringe to nothing with a small controlled flame and stepped back.

  "Relax," Leian said, without looking up from whatever she was reading. "You're not dying again. Not today."

  "That's a very specific reassurance," Janus said.

  She glanced at him then. A small, private thing passed across her face that was not quite a smile and might have been one.

  The elevator opened into a dim corridor that smelled of recycled air and something antiseptic underneath. They pushed him into a sealed room at the far end and the employees withdrew, closing the door behind them.

  The masked man from his last coherent memory was standing at the far wall.

  Janus stared at him. The white coat. The particular stillness of someone who has been in this room for a while and has decided not to make that obvious.

  He remembered, distantly, a street. A radio. A voice saying something that had felt, even through the haze of dying, like a revelation.

  He couldn't hold the memory. It slipped.

  * * *

  "Lieutenant Mathen," Leian said. "Brief me."

  Mathen's voice was even and deliberate, the voice of someone who had organized his words before the conversation started.

  "Janus Zokial. Elementary school teacher in Bahaks. His school was within two kilometers of ground zero during the incident." He paused. "Registered as non-Vessel, non-potential type. No prior ability manifestation on record."

  Janus watched the ceiling.

  "The Empire's initial assessment flagged him as a potential Type Two aberrant. The international committee has formally requested termination."

  The word landed in the room and stayed there.

  "So why is he here?" Leian asked. She had moved to stand beside the stretcher, and she was looking at Janus again with that same quality of attention — like she was reading something written in a language she was still learning and finding it worth the effort.

  Mathen exhaled slowly through his nose.

  "When the aberrant blade killed him, every Legion Vessel within range of the incident experienced a resonance. A divine call." He looked at Janus directly. "He is the Thirteenth Heaven's Vessel."

  Silence.

  Not the silence of people absorbing information — the silence of people absorbing something that changes the shape of a room.

  "The Empire wants him alive," Leian said. It was not a question.

  "For leverage. International negotiations. A fourth Heaven's Vessel under the Empire shifts the balance significantly." Mathen glanced at Janus. "The Captain agreed."

  Janus had been staring at the ceiling through all of this. He turned his head now and looked at both of them.

  "Do I get a say," he said, "or have we skipped that part?"

  Neither of them answered immediately.

  "I'm going to assume we've skipped that part." He pushed himself upright, slowly, his body cooperating only reluctantly. "I remember almost none of what happened. I have fragments. Smoke. A street. Something that felt like dying, which I'm apparently doing correctly since I'm here." He looked at Mathen. "And some committee wants me dead for it. That's the situation?"

  "That's accurate," Mathen said.

  "Right." Janus rubbed the side of his head. "So explain the part where I'm apparently something called a Heaven's Vessel. In plain language. Without the part where you assume I already know what any of this means."

  Leian pulled a chair close and sat down, folding her hands in her lap. She had the posture of someone settling in for something they intend to enjoy.

  "There are three types of Vessels that the public knows about," she began. "Common Vessels are the most visible — enhanced physicality, heightened senses. They function in ordinary society. Most are registered under the Empire or living quietly unregistered."

  Mathen formed a small barrier in the air beside him, compressed it into a cube without apparent effort, and sat on it.

  "Apostle Vessels are rarer. They don't just enhance themselves — they manipulate. Elements, forces, constructs. You'll find them in the military, medicine, infrastructure. Anything that requires precision and power in the same hand."

  "And Legion Vessels," Leian continued, "are what Apostles become when they stop being impressive and start being genuinely dangerous. Full mastery of their element. Not application — domination. Mathen is a Legion type." She gestured toward him. "Barriers. Offense. Containment. He can do things with those constructs that the theory says shouldn't be possible."

  Mathen said nothing. He did not appear to disagree.

  "And then there's the fourth type," Leian said. Her voice did not change register, but her attention sharpened — that quality of focus that had been on Janus since the lobby, distilling itself into something more direct. "Heaven's Vessels. The classification that exists above the other three the way a storm exists above weather. The most destructive type on record. The type that ancient texts say cannot be made — only recognized. Only arrived at." She paused. "There were twelve in the world."

  She looked at him.

  "Now there are thirteen."

  Janus was quiet for a moment.

  "Normally," Mathen said, "reaching that classification requires mastering every preceding stage. Years. Decades for some. And even then, the ancient records describe a final condition — a direct encounter with something that the texts call a Table with God. A negotiation. A threshold that cannot be forced."

  "A table with God," Janus repeated.

  "Yes."

  "As in, literally."

  "As in — we don't fully know what it means," Mathen said. "The texts are old and the language is imprecise. What we know is that every Heaven's Vessel in recorded history passed through something that matched the description. A singular event. Transformative. Not survivable by conventional understanding."

  Janus looked at his own hands. The skin was clean. No wounds. No evidence of anything that had been done to them on a street two weeks ago, or on a hillside an hour ago.

  "You skipped every prerequisite," Leian said quietly. "You arrived at the threshold overnight, from a standing start, with no prior manifestation of any ability at any stage. And you survived something that the records say no one survives without having earned the right to." She leaned forward slightly — just slightly, the posture of someone who cannot entirely contain their interest. "That's not supposed to be possible. Which means either the records are wrong, or what happened to you is something entirely new."

  She left the space after that open.

  Janus sat with it for a long moment. Outside, somewhere distant, a sea wind moved against the building. The room's ventilation hummed.

  "This Table with God," he said finally. "You're telling me every Heaven's Vessel went through it. That it's a real event, not a metaphor."

  "Correct," Mathen said.

  "So what is it? What actually happens?"

  They looked at each other.

  The pause lasted long enough to be its own answer.

  "We do not know," Leian said.