The pull came. Not painful — just irresistible, the way water is irresistible to water, and he poured toward something he couldn't see, filling it from the inside, settling into it
Crying.
That was the first thing. Not his own crying — someone else's. Close. Exhausted. The specific crying of a person who has been at it for a long time and hasn't stopped because there is no reason to stop.
He was very small. He understood this before he opened his eyes — the smallness was total, encompassing, a fact about the entire world rather than just his body. He was lying on something thin. The ceiling above him was cracked and stained. The air smelled of damp and cooking fat and people living too close together.
He turned his head.
A woman was sitting on the floor three feet away, her back against the corrugated iron wall, her knees drawn up, her face in her hands. She was thin. Her clothes were clean but barely holding together. She was crying with the quiet, practised grief of someone who had learned to do it without taking up too much space.
He knew her. Not from his previous life — from something deeper, something that belonged to this body, rising from below the Marcus-layer like water through rock. Her name arrived in him before he could reach for it.
Nina. His mother.
He was a baby. He was in a slum. He was Marcus Hale in a baby's body in a slum, and the woman crying three feet away was his mother in this life, and somewhere outside — he could hear it through the thin walls — a city he had never heard of was going about its morning.
Marcus Hale would have calculated. Would have assessed. Would have begun immediately the cold arithmetic of his situation and his options.
What happened instead was that the baby body he inhabited did what baby bodies do.
He cried too.
Nina looked up. Found his eyes. And despite everything — despite the thin walls and the crying and whatever grief had put her on the floor — she came to him. She picked him up. She held him against her chest and said his name softly, said 'Sid, Sid, it's alright, I've got you,' and rocked him slowly in the cold room while outside the city went on without them.
Marcus Hale had not been held like that since he was small enough that he had no memory of it.
He didn't know what to do with it.
So he cried harder, and let her hold him, and that was how Marcus Hale ended and Sid Cole began — not with a plan, not with a calculation, but with a mother's arms and a grief he didn't yet understand and the first morning of a life he hadn't asked for and could not refuse.
By the time Sid Cole was two years old he had decided, with the full conviction of a man who had spent twenty-three years being certain about everything, that this was the worst possible outcome.
Not just bad. Not just difficult. The worst. The absolute nadir of every possible trajectory his existence could have taken after the explosion and the nothing and the pull into this thin, cold, noisy, insufficient world.
He lay in his corner of the room and hated it systematically.
He hated the walls — corrugated iron and compressed cardboard and concrete, mismatched and badly fitted, letting in the cold from every direction. He hated the ceiling with its water stain shaped like a reaching hand. He hated the smell of the place: damp and cooking fat and the closeness of too many people in too little space. He hated the sounds — the baby in the building next door, the men who argued in the lane at night, the grinding of the pulley system two floors above, the wet slap of laundry.
He hated the food. Beans from a tin. Bread that was always the heel. Portions that a man of his previous experience and expectations would have categorised as a rounding error.
He hated being small. He hated it with a depth and consistency that no other hatred matched. The smallness was the worst thing — worse than the poverty, worse than the walls, worse than the food. He was trapped in a body that communicated 'small child' to every adult he encountered, and no amount of Marcus Hale's accumulated intelligence and ruthlessness could make anyone treat him as anything else.
He especially hated that he couldn't speak properly yet. That his thoughts — precise, strategic, decades-deep — came out of his mouth as the blurred approximations of a toddler's vocabulary. He had things to say. Complicated things. And the mouth would produce 'want' and 'no' and 'down' and nothing more, and Marcus Hale raged behind this child's face and the child's face showed nothing because the one thing his previous life had made him excellent at was showing nothing.
Nina tried.
He recognised this, in the coldly analytical part of his mind that was always running beneath the surface of everything. She tried very hard, with very little, and she tried without complaint and without expectation of recognition. She came home from three jobs with the specific exhaustion of someone running on insufficient everything, and she made what food there was, and she sat with them in the evenings and told small stories about what she'd seen during the day, and she touched Sid's hair sometimes with a gentleness that was entirely unrequested and entirely wasted on him.
He did not respond to it. He was not ungrateful in any active sense — he didn't push her away, didn't make it harder. He simply accepted her care the way a stone accepts rain: receiving it, unchanged by it, waiting for it to stop.
She noticed. He could see her noticing, in the way she sometimes looked at him — a careful look, slightly worried, slightly confused, the look of a woman who senses that something is not quite right with her oldest child and cannot name what it is.
He didn't care that she noticed. He didn't care about most things in those first years. He was managing. Conserving. Waiting for the body to grow enough to be useful.
Danny was different.
Danny was two years younger than Sid — a small, bright-eyed boy who had arrived in the world with the cheerful confidence of someone who had never been told they should be anything other than what they were. He smiled at everything. He collected things — stones, wire, interesting pieces of broken things he found in the lanes — and arranged them on the floor with the focused pleasure of someone engaged in important work. He talked constantly, in the fluid, half-formed way of toddlers whose thoughts outpace their words.
And he followed Sid.
Wherever Sid went in the small geography of their room and the immediate area outside it, Danny appeared behind him. Not demanding anything. Not seeking interaction. Just there, at a small distance, present in the way that very young children can be present — complete, self-contained, radiating a warmth that requires nothing in return.
Sid found this irritating.
Not aggressively irritating. Just a persistent low-level annoyance, the way background noise was annoying — he was aware of it, it was unwelcome, there was nothing to be done about it. Danny followed him and Sid ignored Danny and this arrangement continued for months without either of them showing signs of wanting to change it.
Once, when Sid was sitting in the doorway of their building watching the lane outside — studying it, cataloguing its patterns and rhythms in the way he catalogued everything — Danny appeared beside him and sat down and put a smooth stone in Sid's hand.
Sid looked at the stone. Looked at Danny.
Danny smiled. Not asking for anything. Just giving.
Sid put the stone down on the step between them. He didn't give it back. He didn't throw it away. He just put it down in the space between them and went back to watching the lane.
Danny seemed to find this acceptable. He picked up the stone and put it in his pocket and sat there beside Sid watching the lane for twenty minutes, in companionable silence, as though this were a thing they had always done together.
Sid did not think about this afterward. He had more important things to think about.
He was wrong about that, but he didn't know it yet.
Zara was born when Sid was three.
She arrived in the usual way of Ashbourne births — at home, without the equipment and attention that proper medical care would have provided, with Yusuf the neighbourhood doctor-who-wasn't-quite-a-doctor in attendance and two women from the floor below who had done this before. Sid was in the corner of the room, awake, watching with the detached attention of someone observing a process they have no stake in.
Nina was exhausted and triumphant. Danny was confused and fascinated. Yusuf was competent and quiet.
Zara arrived screaming.
She had, Sid would later understand, been screaming in some form or another ever since — not out of distress but out of the specific energy of a person who has things to say and does not see why she should wait to say them. She was loud and opinionated and interested in everything from the first week, her dark eyes moving constantly over the surfaces and objects of her small world with an intensity that was, even then, recognisable as the precursor of intelligence.
Sid looked at her from across the room on the first night.
He felt nothing.
He went back to the calculations he'd been running in his head about the water system's inefficiencies, which he had mapped from the patterns he'd observed through the window, and which he had no current use for but filed anyway because information was always worth keeping.
He was three years old and he hated everything and he was waiting, with a patience that had survived death and reincarnation intact, for the waiting to be over.