By day four she had developed a routine, which she considered a personal achievement given the circumstances.

  Wake up facing the window — she'd started sleeping that way instinctively, curled on her side with the glass in her eyeline so that consciousness arrived with infinite space rather than four close walls. Lie there for a few minutes doing flux optimization, smoothing the overnight flux leak, gathering herself back into herself. Sit up. Take stock of the hunger, which had its own daily check-in now, a morning report filed by her body whether she wanted it or not. Note the report. File it under ongoing, non-fatal, not the priority right now. Open volume two.

  Volume two was better than volume one in the way that things were better once you had the foundational knowledge to understand what you were reading. It assumed familiarity with flux perception and moved quickly — intake, generation, cycling, the relationship between biological flux capacity and what the text called flux ceiling, the natural upper limit of how much a given organism could hold at once. Her ceiling, without training, was apparently modest. The book was polite about this. It said baseline flux capacity is a workable starting point in the tone of someone trying to be encouraging about something that wasn't especially encouraging.

  She read. She took notes in the only way available to her, which was the system's memo function, a tab she'd discovered between tasks and skills that let her leave text entries. She wrote things down and then reread them and then sometimes wrote this is important next to them in case future-her forgot, which felt presumptuous but also practical.

  On day four she also read the flux manifestation skill book.

  It took five hours and her full attention, which the hunger made slightly harder to provide than it would have been a week ago. The book had a different quality than the flux manual — less textbook, more instruction, written in a style that assumed the reader was going to try things and fail at them and try again. She appreciated that. It felt honest.

  The skill unlocked when she finished the last page with the small internal click that she was beginning to associate with the system adding things to her without asking. She sat with it for a moment — the awareness of something new in her toolkit, like a muscle she hadn't known she had until she flexed it.

  Then she tried to use it.

  The first attempt produced nothing.

  The book had been clear that this was normal. Flux manifestation requires the practitioner to hold a clear conceptual model of the intended construct while simultaneously directing flux through the relevant pathways, it had said, which was the kind of sentence that made sense until you tried to do it and discovered that holding a clear conceptual model of anything while actively managing energy flow through your own body was like trying to do arithmetic while someone read you a different set of numbers.

  She sat cross-legged on the floor, facing the window, and tried again.

  The concept she was working with was simple — a sphere, small, the size of her fist. She'd chosen it deliberately. No corners, no complex geometry, just a closed surface with a consistent curve. She held the image in her mind and reached for the flux in her body and tried to do both things at the same time.

  The second attempt produced a brief flicker. Something almost cohered in the air in front of her and then dissolved immediately, leaving a faint residual glow that faded before she could examine it. Her flux reserve dropped two percent, which the system noted with the quiet judgment of a resource counter watching someone make poor decisions.

  "I saw that," she told the system.

  The system did not respond. It had apparently decided that resource readouts spoke for themselves.

  She tried again. And again. By the seventh attempt she'd developed a rhythm — reach, hold the image, direct, hold both simultaneously — and something was beginning to form. Not a sphere. Something more irregular, something that kept wanting to collapse at the edges. But something.

  On the twelfth attempt it held for three seconds before dissolving.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  She sat back and looked at her flux reserve, which had dropped to twenty-six percent, and made a note in the system memo: manifestation is expensive. Do not practice when reserve is low. Also do not practice when hungry because apparently being hungry makes it harder to concentrate, which is obvious in retrospect and I should have anticipated this.

  She stared at that last sentence for a moment.

  The hunger was worse today.

  Not dramatically worse — not the kind of worse that inspired drama, just the kind that accumulated. It had moved from background complaint to persistent foreground presence, a low continuous signal that her body was sending and she was continuously choosing to receive without acting on. She was tired in a way that sleep didn't entirely fix. Her concentration had a ceiling it hadn't had three days ago, a point where the words in volume two stopped processing cleanly and she had to reread sentences two or three times before they landed. She was doing the flux optimization but she was leaking more than she had been, she could see it — the colors drifting away from her edges more readily, her body spending energy she wasn't replacing.

  The 1HP skill sat in her passive list, active, doing its single job. She was not going to die. She was just going to feel increasingly like she was considering it.

  "Noted," she said to no one in particular. "Moving on."

  Day five she named the light fixture.

  This happened without significant premeditation. She'd been reading — volume two, chapter on flux cycling, dense and requiring attention she was finding harder to sustain — and Gerald flickered, and she looked up, and she said "stop that, Gerald" before she had consciously decided to name it anything. The name stuck. It was the right name for a light fixture that flickered at irregular intervals and hummed at a frequency that was just slightly too present to ignore.

  "Gerald," she said, experimentally, looking up at it.

  Gerald flickered.

  "I'm going to figure out why you do that," she told it. "Eventually. When I have more bandwidth. Consider that a promise."

  Gerald hummed. She went back to volume two.

  She was, she had decided, allowed to talk to the light fixture. She was also allowed to talk to the window, which she did regularly, and to the system, which talked back in its formal limited way, and to herself, which was arguably the most useful of the three. The alternative to talking was silence, and silence in a five-by-five metal room had a quality she was not interested in exploring. It pressed. She preferred not to let it press.

  On day five she also successfully held a flux construct for forty-seven seconds.

  It wasn't a sphere. It was a rough ovoid that kept wanting to be a sphere but couldn't quite commit, hovering at approximately head height in the middle of the room, glowing in the colors her perception associated with her own flux signature — which the book had told her were personal and unique, like a fingerprint. She looked at it. It looked back, insofar as an irregular lump of manifested energy could look at anything.

  "You're not impressive yet," she told it. "But you exist. That's something."

  It dissolved at forty-eight seconds. Her reserve was at twenty-two percent. She noted both things and called it a day.

  Day six arrived with the specific quality of days that had been preceded by five other days of the same conditions — the hunger sharper now, the floor no less metal, the window no less infinite, Gerald no less flickering. She had read one hundred and forty pages of volume two. She had practiced flux manifestation seventeen times. She had talked to the window, the light fixture, and herself in roughly equal measure and was considering whether introducing a conversational hierarchy would help or just be sad.

  She was mid-sentence in chapter nine of volume two — Flux cycling in low-resource conditions requires the practitioner to prioritize — when her perception caught something.

  She stopped reading.

  It was subtle. The flux currents outside moved in their slow vast patterns, the way they always did, enormous and unhurried, and she had been watching them long enough to know what normal looked like. This was not normal. There was a disturbance — small, at the edge of her perception range, a place where the currents were moving around something rather than through it.

  She stood up. Moved to the window. Pressed close to the glass and looked out, not with her regular vision but with her perception layered over it, the way the book had described and she'd been practicing — the two modes of seeing occupying the same space, physical and flux-visible simultaneously.

  The currents moved. And in the place where they moved around something rather than through it, at a distance she couldn't accurately judge because distance in open space without reference points was mostly a feeling, something was there.

  Something small. And it was moving.

  Not the way debris moved — not the passive drift of objects with no motivation. This had direction. It changed slightly as she watched, a correction, a course adjustment, the way things moved when they were going somewhere rather than just going.

  It was going toward the box.

  The system chimed in her peripheral vision, quiet and immediate:

  PROXIMITY ALERT

  Unidentified object detected

  — Sector 7-null, bearing 0-4-2

  Distance: 847 km and closing

  Classification: Pending

  Recommendation: STAND BY

  She stood at the window with her hands flat against the glass and watched the place in the currents where something moved through the void toward her, and the hunger and the floor and the five days of reading and the seventeen flux manifestation attempts all became very small and very far away.

  "Stand by," she said quietly.

  She stood by.