REWIND

Cheap morning light through thin curtains. The apartment still carried detergent and the ghost of last night's instant noodles.

His last coherent memory was going slack in a fall that never found ground—then blank. When sense returned there was no void under him, only mattress weight, damp sheets, and breath scraping his throat.

Something hauled him the rest of the way awake like the end of a bad dream. Val jackknifed upright. His heart hammered; sweat had glued the sheet to his skin. His skull throbbed. Escape or only dreamed escape—he couldn't sort it yet. Every muscle still waited for a drop that never came.

No cold rush through nothing. Just a cheap ceiling and the same stale detergent air he had fallen asleep to a hundred cheap nights before.

The fan above the bed clicked in its slow circle—the first ordinary thing that felt impossible. He stared at the crack in the paint over the door until the room quit behaving like memory and started behaving like a trap. Everything was where it should be. Everything was wrong.

He rolled onto an elbow and squinted at the laptop. January 15, 2009 stared back from the tray—calendar and clock in lockstep, too calm for what his chest was doing. Regression. Time travel. A dream with teeth. He had no label that fit.

Alone, he pulled Aura up without thinking—the old reflex, still perfect. Whatever the regression had taken, the control hadn't gone with it.

He reached for his Seraph wings—the six-wing form he had carried before, not the single pair of a Messenger. Nothing answered. Divinity hung thin in the room air; inside his chest, almost none. His limbs felt borrowed—heavy, slow, the body of someone who had never cleared a gate. January 2009. He had regressed.

Before his feet could touch the floor, concealment slid on—rank tucked away, Divinity buried under the surface reading. The mask wasn't a decision; it was already habit, the way breath was habit, and it would stay that way.

Grade ten waited at a school where faces from another life would greet him like nothing had happened—and only he would know how much that hurt. His vision blurred. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and clenched his fist in the sheet until his knuckles went white. He would not waste this.