I woke to find my coffee cup in three different places at once.
One sat on my bedside table where I'd left it. Another hovered mid-air, steam rising impossibly upward. The third existed inside the wall, ceramic and wood occupying the same space without conflict. All three were the same cup. All three were real.
"Sorry!" Lira's voice came from the hallway. "I sneezed during morning practice. Reality's still settling back into place."
The floating cup dropped, shattering. The one in the wall vanished. Only the original remained, though it now had cracks that spelled out words in a language I didn't recognize. I decided not to ask.
Living with a reality-swimmer was going to be complicated.
By the time I reached the main hall, Lira had fixed most of the "hiccups," as Thorne called them. Only small things remained wrong—shadows falling the wrong direction, doorways that showed different rooms depending on your angle, a persistent smell of rain despite the clear sky.
"It's getting stronger," Senna told me, watching her daughter try to wrestle reality back into singular focus. "Every day, she sees more possibilities. But containing them..." She gestured at a chair that kept flickering between wood and metal. "That's the challenge."
Marcus found me during breakfast, looking exhausted but oddly satisfied. "I've been working with the former constructs," he said. "Their emotional awakening is... intense. But I can help them process it gradually, like opening valves instead of breaking dams."
He was finding his role—not as a leader, but as a guide through emotional territories. The coward who'd rejected Aria was becoming someone who helped others navigate their own transformations.
The morning's integration training had to be relocated twice—first when the training ground sprouted flowers that aged backward, then when it briefly became a lake that existed only on Tuesdays.
"Focus on your center," Lira instructed a group of increasingly nervous wolves. "Reality bends around me, but you're all anchors. You help me remember which world we're supposed to be in."
One of the newer pack wolves raised his hand. "What happens if you forget?"
Lira's eyes went distant, seeing possibilities we couldn't. "Then we find out if you can hunt deer that exist yesterday and tomorrow but not today."
The joke fell flat. Everyone was thinking about the implications of a gift that could fundamentally break the world's rules. Even Luna watched her new friend with careful concern.
"She needs grounding exercises," Clara suggested during our mid-morning planning session. The former construct had thrown herself into helping organize our chaotic sanctuary, her efficiency-trained mind now channeling toward community building. "In the Order, when reality-shapers emerged, they used physical anchors. Objects that existed so solidly they couldn't be changed."
"Reality-shapers?" I leaned forward. "The Order has others like Lira?"
Clara's expression darkened. "Had. They don't usually survive the efficiency training. Too many variables. Too much... possibility." She paused. "That's why they made us empty. Can't reshape reality if you can't imagine it being different."
Through the window, I watched Lira teaching Michael how to see music as color—a harmless exercise that somehow made the air taste purple. Senna hovered nearby, ready to pull her daughter back if reality started unraveling too far.
We were gathering broken powers, wounded gifts, impossible children.
Somewhere, the Order was watching. Planning.
The afternoon brought our first real crisis.
Lira was working with the twins, trying to teach them how their calm could anchor her gift, when something went catastrophically wrong. One moment she was demonstrating how she could see multiple versions of the same flower. The next, those versions started bleeding into our reality simultaneously.
"I can't—" Lira's panicked voice multiplied, speaking from seventeen different mouths as seventeen versions of her occupied the same space. Some were younger, some older, one appeared to be made of starlight, another seemed to be drowning in air. "I can't find the real me!"
The twins tried to maintain their calm, but even their gift cracked under the assault of multiplied realities. Wolves scattered as the training ground became a nightmare of overlapping possibilities—trees that were simultaneously saplings and ancient giants, ground that was both mud and stone, weather cycling through all four seasons in seconds.
Senna dove for her daughter, but her hands passed through empty air. "She's stuck between!" she screamed. "I can't reach her!"
Luna sprinted toward the chaos, but I caught her. "No! If you get caught in that—"
"The hungry friend can help!" Luna struggled against my grip. "It understands being in many places at once!"
Reality continued to shred around Lira. Windows showed different skies. Gravity pulled in three directions. Several pack wolves were aging and de-aging rapidly, caught in temporal eddies spinning off from the central disaster. Clara ran past, her construct-training letting her navigate impossible physics, trying to pull people clear of the worst distortions.
Then Marcus did something unexpected. He walked straight into the chaos, his empathy gift wide open. "Lira," he said, his voice somehow reaching all seventeen versions. "Feel what I feel. You're scared and lost, but you're still you. All of these versions are you. Stop trying to choose—just be all of them until you remember which one belongs here."
For a moment, it seemed to work. The seventeen Liras turned toward Marcus, recognition flickering across their impossibly different faces. But then the realities pushed back, each version trying to assert its truth.
"Choose the pain," Marcus gasped, blood running from his nose as he absorbed seventeen lifetimes of emotion. "Every version of you hurts differently. Find the pain that belongs here—the specific ache of being Thorne's daughter, Senna's child, Luna's friend. That's your anchor."
Slowly, agonizingly, the versions began to fade. The Lira made of starlight dissolved. The drowning one vanished. The older and younger ones flickered out like blown candles. Finally, only one remained—a terrified eleven-year-old girl who collapsed into Marcus's arms, reality snapping back around them like a rubber band.
The training ground was devastated. Trees existed at impossible angles. Several wolves were still recovering from rapid aging. But we were all alive, and Lira was singular again.
"I got lost," she sobbed into Marcus's shoulder. "There were so many mes and they all felt real."
"They were real," Marcus said quietly, still holding her as his empathy gift settled. "Just not real here. You're going to need better anchors than flowers."
Senna pulled her daughter close, but her eyes met mine over Lira's head. The message was clear: this would happen again. And next time, we might not be so lucky.
That evening, we held our first emergency protocol meeting.
"Reality anchors," Clara said, already sketching diagrams with construct efficiency. "Physical objects Lira touches every morning. Same items, same order. When she starts slipping, she finds them again."
Evelyn nodded. "In the Order, they called it 'sequential grounding.' We used it for time-shapers before they..." She stopped, unwilling to finish.
Lira sat between her parents, still shaky but listening intently. "What if I hurt someone next time? What if I pull them into a reality where they never existed?"
"Then we pull you back," Marcus said simply. His new role was crystallizing—not just empathy guide but emotional anchor for anyone whose gift threatened to consume them. "I felt all seventeen of you today. Every version was scared of losing the others. That fear is your compass."
Luna had been quiet through the discussion, but now she looked up from her drawing. "The hungry friend says reality is like water. It wants to flow where it's supposed to. Lira just makes new channels. If we mark the right shore, the water remembers where home is."
Thorne leaned forward. "The Vega line had reality-swimmers. Not many, but enough to develop practices." He glanced at his daughter. "Tomorrow, we start building your lighthouse."
"Lighthouse?"
"A mental construct. Something so deeply yours that no reality can change it. For Vega swimmers, it was usually a memory—first love, deepest loss, defining moment. Something that makes you irreversibly you."
Lira considered this. "When mom found me in the empty den. I was alone and she said—"
"'You're not alone anymore,'" Senna finished softly. "That's your lighthouse, baby."
We were learning. Not just to survive our gifts, but to thrive with them.
The next morning, we built Lira's lighthouse.
Thorne gathered stones from around the sanctuary—not special ones, just rocks that existed stubbornly in only one reality. Lira held each one, memorizing their weight, texture, temperature. "These are your foundation," he explained. "When realities multiply, find the world where these stones feel exactly like this."
While they worked, I dealt with expanding logistics. Eighty-one wolves now—a lone teenager had arrived at dawn, half-starved and clutching a note that simply said "Aria's sanctuary." Marcus had taken him in, his empathy helping ease the boy's terror at being around so many people after months alone.
Clara had transformed our supply management, her construct-efficiency creating systems that actually worked. "We need three more hunting parties," she reported. "And Michael wants to start a building crew—says his hands remember construction even if his mind forgot the blueprints."
Through the window, I watched Evelyn teaching combat forms to a mixed group. Her movements still held that eerie construct precision, but now they flowed with purpose rather than programming. Several sanctuary children mimicked her, including Kai, whose shadow-gift made him appear to be fighting in multiple places at once.
"We're becoming something," Virelle observed, appearing at my shoulder. "Not a pack anymore. Not quite a town. Something new."
She was right. Former constructs teaching efficiency with compassion. Reality-swimmers learning control through stones and memory. Empaths finding strength in shared pain.
"A sanctuary," I said. "Just like we promised."
"No," Virelle smiled, rare and sharp. "Something stranger. Something the Order won't expect."
The week passed in controlled chaos. Lira's lighthouse held, though reality still hiccupped around her when she laughed too hard or dreamed too vividly. We'd find morning frost in July, or doorways that showed tomorrow's weather. But nothing like that first catastrophic split.
Michael's construction crew had started with simple repairs and somehow evolved into architectural democracy. "Why build walls straight when curved ones sing better in wind?" he'd ask, hands remembering beauty along with function. The newest dormitory looked like a wave frozen mid-crash, but it stood solid and the acoustics were genuinely incredible.
Marcus barely slept anymore. Every new arrival needed emotional guidance, and his gift wouldn't let him turn away from pain. I found him one evening sitting with the teenager who'd arrived with the note, both of them silent in the kind of understanding that didn't need words.
"His pack tried to use him as bait," Marcus told me later. "For the Order's hunters. When he refused, they cast him out." He rubbed his tired eyes. "I'm teaching him that strength doesn't mean becoming what hurt you."
Clara intercepted me on my way to evening rounds. "We have a problem. Food stores are adequate for current numbers, but if we keep growing at this rate..." She showed me her calculations, precise and undeniable. "Two weeks before rationing. Three before real hunger."
"Solutions?"
"Expand hunting range, establish trading connections, or..." She hesitated. "Stop taking everyone who arrives."
The last option was impossible and she knew it. But mathematics didn't care about sanctuary promises.
"We'll figure it out," I said, though worry gnawed at me.
We were becoming something beautiful. Now we had to learn how to sustain it.
That night, Luna found me sitting alone, calculating impossible numbers.
"The hungry friend wants to help," she said, settling beside me with her ever-present sketchbook. "It doesn't understand hunger exactly, but it knows about empty spaces that need filling."
I smiled tiredly. "Unless it can make food appear from nothing, I don't think—"
"Not from nothing." She opened her book, showing new drawings. Not her usual symbolic art, but practical sketches—root vegetables growing in spirals, fish pools that seemed to circulate themselves, vertical gardens climbing impossible heights. "From different. The hungry friend says reality bends here anyway. Why not bend it toward abundance?"
She was right. We had a reality-swimmer, former constructs who understood efficiency, empaths who could sense what the land needed, children whose gifts defied natural law. We'd been so focused on defending against threats, we'd forgotten to build toward prosperity.
"Tomorrow," I decided. "We start reshaping this sanctuary. Not just as shelter, but as home."
Luna smiled and began drawing again. This time, her pictures showed the sanctuary transformed—gardens that grew in time-loops, hunting paths that folded distance, water systems that remembered being rain. Impossible architecture for impossible people.
"The Order builds empty efficiency," she said quietly. "We'll build full inefficiency. See which one feeds more."