Rehabilitation started with pain that didn't announce itself loudly, but patiently, like it knew it had time.
Ethon learned quickly that his body remembered things his mind didn't. Muscles trembled during the smallest movements, not from weakness alone, but from unfamiliar obedience. Standing felt wrong. Sitting felt wrong. Even breathing sometimes felt like something he had to relearn consciously, as though his lungs had grown used to sleeping.
The room they used for rehab smelled faintly of metal and disinfectant, but beneath that was something else — rubber mats, recycled air, and the quiet sweat of effort. The nurse who worked with him most often introduced herself as Lina, a woman with short hair and a voice that never rushed, even when he wanted her to.
"You don't need to prove anything," she told him one morning as he struggled to lift his leg an inch off the floor. "Your body's not broken. It's just… catching up."
"Catching up to what?" Ethon asked, his voice hoarse, strained by effort.
She smiled faintly. "To time."
Time. The word sat wrong in his chest.
Three years had passed. The city had not waited.
The first time they wheeled him near a window, Ethon forgot how to speak.
The city stretched endlessly, a layered mass of glass and steel and moving light, roads stacked on roads, buildings climbing into low clouds like they were trying to escape the ground altogether. Vehicles flowed through the air on invisible paths, humming softly as they passed. Screens wrapped around towers, spilling news, color, and motion into the streets below.
"This is… Earth?" Ethon asked quietly.
Lina glanced at him, amused. "Same one as always."
He didn't answer. He couldn't. Somewhere deep inside him, something rejected the sight entirely. This wasn't the world he remembered. This wasn't fields and forests and open sky. This was dense. Crowded. Loud, even when silent.
And yet…
Somewhere beneath the shock, familiarity stirred.
That disturbed him more than anything else.
—
Recovery accelerated faster than anyone expected.
Doctors whispered about it in hallways, lowering their voices when Ethon passed. Muscle density returned unusually quickly. Bone fractures healed cleanly, without complications. His endurance climbed steadily, day by day, like something inside him was quietly correcting itself.
Dr. Ivanco didn't hide his curiosity.
"You're adapting remarkably well," he said during one of their checkups, studying a tablet filled with glowing data. "Better than patients half your age."
Ethon shrugged. "I don't feel remarkable."
Ivanco smiled thinly. "Most remarkable things don't."
When Ethon was discharged weeks later, they handed him a thin tablet containing his records, a small stipend, and directions to a transitional housing district in the Average Sector.
That word followed him out the doors.
Average.
—
The city at ground level was different from above.
Down here, it breathed.
Crowds flowed constantly, people brushing past each other without contact, eyes forward, minds elsewhere. Vendors called out from narrow storefronts. Digital signs flickered between advertisements and public announcements. Drones hovered overhead, scanning, recording, watching.
Ethon stopped walking more than once just to stare.
A woman selling food noticed him lingering and laughed. "First day out?" she asked, handing him a wrapped skewer before he could answer.
He hesitated. "I… don't have—"
"Relax," she said. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
He took the food cautiously. The taste exploded across his tongue — spices, heat, something artificial and something deeply human all at once.
He swallowed hard.
I used to eat like this, a voice whispered inside him. But he didn't know when.
The housing they gave him was an abandoned structure repurposed for temporary residents. Cracked walls. Flickering lights. But it was warm, and it had a door that locked.
For the first time since waking, Ethon slept without machines humming beside him.
His dreams were quiet.
Too quiet.
—
Survival in the city was learned in fragments.
He learned how to read transport maps that updated themselves in real time. He learned which streets were safe after dark and which weren't. He learned how to trade small labor for credits — unloading shipments, cleaning tech debris, assisting local vendors who didn't ask questions.
That was how he met Jax.
Jax was loud in a way that filled space, tall and broad with a grin that suggested he'd survived by refusing to be afraid of much. He noticed Ethon struggling with a crate one afternoon and laughed.
"You lift like someone who forgot how gravity works," Jax said.
Ethon frowned. "Is there… a trick?"
"Yeah," Jax replied, hoisting the crate easily. "Don't think about it."
That became their first conversation. Then their second. Then many more.
Soon after came Mira, sharp-eyed and observant, always tapping at a wrist console, always listening even when she pretended not to. She noticed Ethon's pauses, the way he stared too long at ordinary things.
"You're not from here," she said one night as they sat on the edge of a building watching traffic flow below.
"No," Ethon replied honestly.
"Thought so," she said. "You look at the city like it might bite you."
Sometimes there was Kell, quiet, mechanical, good with broken things. He fixed devices with patience Ethon recognized instantly — the same patience his grandfather used when mending tools.
They shared food. Shared work. Shared jokes that Ethon didn't always understand but laughed at anyway.
Slowly, the city stopped feeling hostile.
It started feeling… lived in.
—
News played constantly in the background of their lives.
Political talks about the unified global administration. Arguments between the Upper Sector and the Average. Reports of ships disappearing near the southern waters, always explained away as system failures or storms.
Ethon always listened when that came on.
"Another one?" he asked once, trying to sound casual.
Jax shrugged. "Happens. South's weird. Too much open water. Too many secrets."
Ethon said nothing.
Sometimes, late at night, he visited the graves.
Marla and Henderson rested side by side beneath simple markers, surrounded by others lost to accidents, storms, and quiet tragedies. Ethon knelt there often, speaking softly, telling them about the city, about the people he'd met, about how strange everything felt.
"I'm trying," he whispered once. "I don't know to what. But I'm trying."
The wind answered him.
—
Years passed.
Four of them.
Ethon grew stronger. Smarter. More aware. He learned politics without caring for them. Learned technology without loving it. He learned how to exist among millions of people and still feel alone.
The voice did not return.
Not until one night, as he stood alone on a rooftop, watching the southern horizon flicker faintly beneath distant clouds.
Soon, it whispered.
And somewhere beyond the city lights, something watched him back.