Genesis

Jax barely made it back to his capsule.

Every step through the lower corridors of Megastructure Epsilon-9 sent fresh spikes of pain through his ribs. His jaw ached where Vexor’s fist had landed. Blood had dried in a thin line from the corner of his mouth down to his chin. He ignored the few people who glanced at him. In the Sprawl, a beaten human wasn’t unusual enough to warrant more than a second look.

He sealed the capsule door behind him and leaned against it for a long moment, breathing carefully. The room was exactly as he had left it—narrow cot, dented locker, single weak lamp, and the small scratched window that looked out over endless neon canyons and acid rain.

He pulled the small book from inside his jacket.

It still felt wrong in his hands. Too solid. Too old. The cracked cover gave no title, no markings, nothing to explain why a stranger with a glowing blue blade would hand it to him like it mattered.

Jax sat on the edge of the cot and opened it to the first page.

**Genesis.**

The word meant nothing to him.

He started reading anyway.

At first the sentences felt hollow, like they had been written in a language that only looked like the one he knew. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The words slid across his mind without sticking. He frowned and started over.

Second time through, something shifted.

A faint pressure built behind his eyes. The lamp seemed a little too bright. Somewhere deep in his chest, a strange hollow feeling opened up—like a space that had always been empty and had only now been noticed.

He kept reading.

By the third pass, the words began to catch. Not in meaning—he still didn’t understand most of what he was reading—but in sensation. Images flickered at the edges of his thoughts: a vast darkness that wasn’t the Sprawl’s darkness. A voice speaking light into existence. Something enormous and clean and completely foreign to everything he had ever known.

Jax’s hands started to shake.

He forced himself through the page again. And again.

Halfway through the fifth reading, a memory that wasn’t a memory hit him hard enough to make him gasp. He saw—no, *felt*—himself falling through a sky that burned white. A tall figure stood at the edge of his vision, calling a name that might have been his. The sensation vanished as quickly as it came, leaving him breathless and cold.

He stared down at the open book.

This was dangerous. He knew that much. Owning something like this, reading something like this, was the kind of thing that got people erased. Vexor’s kind didn’t need much excuse.

But he couldn’t close it.

Jax pulled his illegal journal out of its hiding place and set it beside the book. For a long time he just sat there, breathing through the pain in his ribs, looking from one to the other.

Finally he picked up the stylus and wrote a single line:

*He gave me a book that shouldn’t exist. I think it’s trying to wake something up.*

Outside, the Sprawl continued its endless mechanical grind. Neon flickered. Acid rain streaked the window. Somewhere far below, demons laughed and humans kept their heads down.

Inside the capsule, Jax turned back to the first page and began reading again.

He did not stop until the lamp burned out.