The ceiling was wrong.
Not in some metaphorical, existential sense. Wrong color. Wrong height. Wrong light fixture — bare bulb where there should have been fluorescent panels, the long rectangular kind that hummed at a pitch he'd learned to stop hearing after two years of staring at them above his desk at Koizumi-Tanaka Financial Services.
He sat up.
His hands were not his hands. Too young, too smooth, knuckles with no history. No calluses from a keyboard, no faint ink stain on the right middle finger that had been there since 2029 and never fully scrubbed out. He turned them over twice and watched them shake against the unfamiliar pale blue fabric of the futon beneath him.
The last thing he remembered was a spreadsheet. Cell G47 that wouldn't reconcile, the quiet of the office at eleven-thirty PM, and then a pressure behind his sternum like someone had reached inside his chest and was testing how hard they could squeeze. He'd been twenty-four years old. He'd thought: "I should get that checked." He had not, in fact, gotten that checked, because the quarter-end reports were due Friday and the cardiology appointment was six weeks out and sometimes the chest thing happened and then it stopped.
It had not stopped.
Cardiac arrest. At his desk. On a Tuesday.
He swung his legs off the futon and stood in a body that was shorter than his body should be, limbs responding with the slight wrongness of borrowed clothes, and looked at the room he was standing in.
One-room apartment. Not quite small enough to be a studio, not large enough to deserve a different description. Low table, two-burner gas stove, a microwave with a cracked display frozen on 12:00. The window let through gray morning light through curtains that were doing their best and failing. He checked the bathroom — smaller than a closet, mirror above a sink with a slow drip.
The face in the mirror was not his. Dark hair, slightly long, hanging across a forehead that had not finished growing. Jaw that hadn't fully sharpened yet. Unremarkable features that would dissolve in a crowd. The only thing wrong with the face was the eyes: dark, and too awake. The specific quality of awake that belonged to someone at hour fourteen of a shift who knew the reports still weren't done and had made a certain kind of peace with that.
He checked the cabinet under the sink.
School ID. Photo matched the mirror.
ICHIGO YAMI. AGE 15. MUSUTAFU MUNICIPAL HIGH SCHOOL, YEAR 1.
He sat on the edge of the tub and held it and did not breathe for a moment. Musutafu. That was specific. That was a specific fictional city in a specific fictional prefecture that was not, technically speaking, supposed to be real.
Below the cabinet, a folder. Lease agreement in the name Ichigo Yami. An orphan's stipend form, government-issued, with a monthly disbursement amount he clocked in about three seconds: enough for rent, food, and one small emergency, nothing more. A savings account printout. A condolence card still tied to the ribbon of dead chrysanthemums dried out on the kitchen counter — the flowers had been white once. The card was dated two years ago.
"Whoever Ichigo Yami was," he thought, setting the folder back, "he's been dead longer than I have."
He dressed in the clothes on the door hook — gray sweatpants, dark shirt, the nearest shoes — and went outside to confirm what he already half-knew and didn't yet want to say out loud.
The confirmation took eleven seconds.
A hero in a mechanical exosuit cleared the rooftop two blocks north in a single forty-meter stride, chasing something he couldn't see from street level. Civilian foot traffic on the sidewalk around him barely registered it. A woman with a grocery bag glanced up, muttered, kept moving. The teenage boy next to her didn't even turn his head. This was Tuesday morning in a world where eighty percent of the population had superpowers, and a man flying in powered armor was as remarkable as a cyclist running a red light.
He walked to the convenience store on the corner.
The television above the snack aisle ran a news segment: the symbol of peace, All Might, had resolved an incident in Kamino. The anchor was doing the voice anchors used for heroes — elevated, reverent, slightly breathless. A text ticker at the bottom of the screen confirmed a date in late November.
He bought a newspaper from the rack by the door, took it outside, and did the math standing on the sidewalk in the cold.
Three months before the UA entrance exam. Give or take a week.
He'd watched this world on a laptop screen in his apartment in Osaka, two or three episodes after twelve-hour shifts, cheap soba going cold beside him, always telling himself he'd go to bed after this one. He knew the structure of what was coming. The entrance exam. The USJ attack. The Sports Festival and everything after it. He knew which boy was supposed to receive a world-changing power from a dying hero. He knew the villain whose plans would fracture the entire society. He knew, in the abstract, nearly everything that was going to happen for the next year and a half.
He was also standing in the cold in a borrowed fifteen-year-old body with no combat training, no money beyond a monthly government stipend, and absolutely no idea if he had a quirk.
He pushed up his sleeve and stared at the inside of his wrist. Nothing announced itself. He tried concentrating, which accomplished nothing. He tried moving his fingers like he was doing something unusual, which also accomplished nothing except make him look odd to the man walking past.
Quirkless, then. Or latent. Either way, useless at present.
Back in the apartment, he found two packs of instant ramen — shrimp flavor, the budget variety — in the cabinet above the stove. His hands were still unsteady when he filled the kettle. While it boiled he inventoried the kitchen properly: three packets of soy sauce, half a bag of rice, some dried seaweed, two tangerines. He stood at the counter while the ramen cooked and ate it there when it was done because sitting at the table felt like a decision, and he hadn't finished making decisions yet.
The broth was aggressively, unpleasantly salty. He ate every drop.
He found a marker in the junk drawer and a roll of masking tape. Took the newspaper and taped it to the wall above the table, date facing outward. Found a blank sheet of paper in the school bag hanging by the door and started writing. Everything he remembered, organized the way his brain organized things when the quarter-end pressure hit and the spreadsheets started blurring — columns, categories, rough timeline. Canon events and their windows. Key locations and their relevance. People and what he knew about them.
The list filled both sides of the page and ran into a second sheet.
Under one heading, though — abilities I actually have — the page stayed white.
He looked at it for a while. The dead chrysanthemums on the counter cast small shadows in the morning light. Outside, something that might have been a news helicopter crossed the strip of visible sky through the window.
He circled the entrance exam date on the newspaper. Drew a smaller circle three weeks earlier, in the window where the Sludge Villain incident should fall, if the timeline held.
Three months. One window. Zero powers.
He'd been worse off. He was fairly sure he'd been worse off. He was trying to think of when.
He picked up the pen and started a new line under the blank section:
Things I can develop before the window opens.
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