By the time Helios was eight, the people of his neighborhood had learned to avoid his gaze.
It wasn't that he stared. He didn't. He just… watched. A soldier adjusting his sword belt would feel those golden eyes on him for a moment too long. A merchant counting coins would glance up and find the boy already looking away. A child running past would slow down, confused, as though something in the air had changed.
Helios didn't mean to make them uncomfortable. He was just curious.
In his past life, curiosity had made him rich. He had spent twenty years learning to read people—their tells, their rhythms, the small inconsistencies between what they said and what they meant. He had sat across from CEOs who lied about earnings, from politicians who smiled while stabbing allies, from competitors who pretended friendship. He had learned to see through them the way a jeweler sees through glass.
Now he was surrounded by Bronze Age humans who wore their emotions on their sleeves. It was almost too easy.
That guard is scared of his sergeant, he would think, watching a man flinch at a raised voice. That merchant is hiding a bad shipment—see how he won't let customers touch the top jar. That woman is pregnant but hasn't told her husband yet; she keeps touching her stomach when he looks away.
He didn't judge them. He just noticed. And sometimes, without meaning to, he noticed things before they happened.
---
The first time he predicted an accident, he was sitting on the roof at dawn.
An ox cart was rumbling down the street below, loaded with amphorae of olive oil. The driver was old, half-asleep. The left wheel had a visible crack—Helios had spotted it three days ago and assumed someone would fix it.
No one had fixed it.
He watched the cart bounce over a loose stone. The crack widened. The wheel wobbled.
That wheel is going to fail in about fifty feet, he thought. Right where the street narrows. If it falls inward, the cart tips. The driver gets crushed. The oil spills.
He should have felt nothing. In his past life, he had watched markets crash and companies burn. He had shorted stocks and profited from other people's disasters. He had been called a vulture more than once, and he hadn't disagreed.
But that was numbers on a screen. This was an old man with arthritis in his knuckles and a tired mule and a week's wages in olive oil.
Helios climbed down from the roof.
He walked to the cart. The driver blinked at him, surprised.
"Boy? What—"
"Your left wheel is cracked," Helios said. "Stop the cart. Fix it now."
The driver squinted. "I don't have time for—"
The wheel broke.
Not fifty feet later. Right there. The axle dropped, the cart lurched, and three amphorae slid off the side. One shattered. Oil flooded the cobblestones. The driver cursed and yanked the reins, barely keeping the cart from tipping.
He stared at the broken wheel. Then at Helios.
"How did you—"
Helios was already walking away.
His heart was beating faster than it should have. Not from fear. From something he didn't have a name for. Connection, maybe. The feeling of being tangled up in other people's lives when he had spent his whole previous existence avoiding exactly that.
I could have let it happen, he thought. I didn't have to say anything.
But he had. And that scared him more than any cracked wheel.
---
Word spread. Not far—just among the servants and laborers near the western wall. People started calling him "the boy who sees." Not to his face. Behind his back, in whispers.
Helios pretended not to notice.
But he noticed. He always noticed.
Karya began watching him differently. Not with fear—with worry. She would catch him staring at the horizon, lost in thought, and ask what he was thinking. He would smile—a small, practiced smile—and say nothing.
He couldn't tell her that he was thinking about skyscrapers. About the hum of air conditioning. About the taste of cold brew coffee on a summer morning. About a woman he had dated briefly, whose name he could barely remember but whose laugh still echoed somewhere in the back of his skull.
I had a life, he thought. A real life. And now I'm eating stale bread in a city that won't exist in three thousand years.
Some nights, that thought made him want to scream. Other nights, it made him feel nothing at all. He didn't know which was worse.
---
When he was nine, Helios made his first real friend.
Her name was Lyra. She was the daughter of a leatherworker, two years older than him, with tangled brown hair and a permanent scowl. She was also the only person in the neighborhood who didn't flinch when he looked at her.
"You're weird," she told him the first time they spoke. She was sitting on a broken barrel, scraping dried glue off a leather strap. "Everyone says so."
"I know," Helios said.
"That doesn't bother you?"
He thought about it. In his past life, he had been called worse. Shark. Predator. Emotionless bastard. He had worn those labels like armor.
"People are afraid of what they don't understand," he said. "That's not my problem."
Lyra snorted. "You sound like a old man."
"I feel like one sometimes."
She laughed—a real laugh, loud and unpolished. Helios felt something loosen in his chest. He hadn't realized he was holding his breath.
They started meeting in the afternoons, when her father was working and his mother was napping. Lyra talked about everything: her dead mother, her drunk uncle, the boy she liked who didn't know she existed. Helios listened. He didn't offer advice. He just was there.
In return, she asked him nothing. She didn't care why his eyes were gold or why he moved like a cat. She treated him like a normal person.
It was the greatest gift anyone had given him since he woke up in this world.
---
But Helios couldn't stop observing. It wasn't a choice anymore. It was a habit.
He watched the guards rotate shifts and noticed that the night watch was understaffed by two men every third day. He watched the grain merchants and calculated that Troy had maybe four months of reserves if the harvest failed. He watched the nobles ride through the streets and catalogued their alliances, their rivalries, the way one prince looked at another's wife.
He didn't want to know these things. But his brain had been trained by two decades of high-stakes investing to see patterns, to connect dots, to predict outcomes. And this world—this slow, simple, pre-industrial world—was full of dots.
One afternoon, he was walking past the stables when he saw a groom tightening a saddle strap. The leather was old. Cracked. The buckle had been repaired badly.
That strap will break, Helios thought. Not today. Tomorrow, maybe. When the rider is at full gallop.
He kept walking.
Then he stopped.
It's not your problem, he told himself. You don't know the rider. You don't owe anyone here anything.
He kept walking.
Then he turned around.
"Hey," he called to the groom. "That strap. The one on the left. It's going to fail."
The groom looked at him. "What do you know, boy?"
Helios shrugged. "Enough to save your rider a broken neck."
The groom inspected the strap. Frowned. Tugged it. The leather stretched alarmingly.
"...Huh."
He replaced the strap. Helios walked away.
This is going to become a thing, he thought, annoyed at himself. I'm going to become the creepy kid who predicts disasters. That's not a reputation I want.
But he couldn't stop. Because every time he walked past a loose stone, a weak beam, a careless hand, he saw the result—the broken bone, the spilled blood, the crying widow. And he remembered that in his past life, he had ignored those things. He had walked past homeless people without a glance. He had shorted companies knowing that thousands would lose their jobs. He had been efficient.
Efficiency felt different when you had to look the widow in the eye.
---
The accident happened on a cloudy morning.
Helios was in the agora with Karya, buying wool. He was bored—the merchant was haggling over three copper coins, and Karya was too polite to walk away. He let his gaze drift.
That's when he saw the boy.
He was maybe five years old, chasing a dog between two stalls. His mother wasn't watching. The dog darted toward the main road, and the boy followed, laughing.
A chariot was coming.
Not fast—the driver was just a messenger, not a racer. But the road was narrow, and the boy was small, and the driver was looking at a tablet in his hand instead of the street ahead.
Helios saw it all in a single heartbeat. The trajectory. The timing. The way the boy would step into the horse's path exactly three seconds before the chariot passed.
He's going to die, Helios thought.
And then he was moving.
He didn't think. He didn't calculate. He just ran.
His legs carried him faster than any nine-year-old should move. He slid between two market stalls, knocked over a basket of figs, and reached the boy just as the chariot's shadow fell over him.
Helios grabbed the boy by the collar and yanked.
They hit the ground together. The chariot thundered past, so close that Helios felt the wind of the wheels on his cheek. The driver didn't even notice.
For a moment, there was silence.
Then the boy started crying.
Helios lay on the cobblestones, breathing hard. His heart was pounding. His hands were shaking. He had just saved a child's life without a single conscious thought.
That was stupid, he told himself. You could have been killed. You don't even know if your body can survive a chariot impact. Why did you do that?
He didn't have an answer. And that scared him more than the chariot.
The boy's mother came running. She scooped up her son, sobbing, checking for injuries. Then she looked at Helios.
"You—you saved him."
Helios stood up. Brushed the dust from his tunic. His hands were still shaking.
"Watch your child," he said. His voice came out harsher than he intended. "The world doesn't stop because you're distracted."
The mother flinched. But she also nodded. And then she hugged her son and carried him away, still crying.
Karya appeared at Helios's side. She didn't speak. She just put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
He didn't pull away.
---
That night, Helios sat on the roof under the stars. He couldn't sleep. His mind kept replaying the moment—the boy's face, the chariot's shadow, the way his body had moved before his brain caught up.
I'm not a hero, he thought. I was a trader. I made money. I watched the world burn from a safe distance.
But that was another life. Another person.
He looked at his hands. Small hands. Child's hands. But they had saved someone today.
What am I becoming?
The stars didn't answer. They just blinked, cold and distant, the same way they had blinked in his old life.
He heard a soft footstep behind him. Lyra climbed onto the roof, uninvited, and sat down beside him.
"You almost died today," she said.
"I noticed."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "That was brave. What you did."
Helios shook his head. "It was stupid."
"Both can be true."
He looked at her. Her tangled hair, her crooked teeth, her sharp eyes that saw too much.
"Lyra," he said, "do you ever feel like you're not supposed to be here?"
She frowned. "Here on the roof?"
"Here. Anywhere."
She thought about it. Then she shrugged. "Sometimes. When my mom died, I thought... maybe I was supposed to go with her. But I didn't. So now I'm here."
Helios nodded slowly.
"That's a good answer," he said.
They sat in silence, watching the stars. Somewhere below, a dog barked. Somewhere beyond the walls, the sea whispered against the shore.
Lyra yawned. "I'm going to bed. Don't die before tomorrow, okay? You're the only interesting person in this neighborhood."
She climbed down. Helios stayed on the roof, alone with his thoughts.
He didn't have answers. He didn't know why he was here, or what he was supposed to become. But for the first time since waking up in this world, he felt something other than fear or calculation.
He felt present.
It wasn't comfortable. But it was real.
---
Three days later, the boy he had saved—his name was Theron—showed up at Helios's door with a small clay horse. A toy. Crudely made, painted with uneven stripes.
"For you," Theron said, thrusting it forward. "My mom said I have to say thank you."
Helios took the horse. It was ugly. The paint was already chipping.
"It's terrible," he said.
Theron's face fell.
"That's why I like it," Helios added. "Thank you."
Theron grinned and ran off.
Helios stood in the doorway, holding the ugly clay horse. He didn't know where to put it. He had never owned a gift before—not in this life, not in the last one. In his past life, he had bought things. Expensive things. Things that held no meaning.
This ugly horse meant something.
He placed it on the windowsill, facing east.
Let the sun hit it every morning, he thought. A reminder that I'm not just surviving here. I'm living.
It was a small thought. Almost childish.
But Helios was, after all, still a child.
Even if he remembered being a man.
---
END OF CHAPTER THREE
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