The dream was always the same.
It began with the sky—dim, gray, and soulless. Buildings like crooked teeth rose around a pit of endless noise. The air choked with soot and the hum of machinery; the sun was nothing but a rumor. Julian stood barefoot on the rusted balcony of the orphanage, watching, waiting for something he couldn't name. The wind didn't blow there. It howled, like a dog too long caged.
He woke with the weight of it still in his lungs.
Tick. Tick.
Julian sat up slowly. The dorm room was still dark. Ren's breathing was shallow in the bunk above. Marvo rolled over, mumbling in his sleep. George and Tae were quiet.
The ticking inside his chest sounded louder in the quiet.
He slipped from bed and padded to the bathroom. Cold water. Pale face. Same stranger in the mirror. There were moments—brief and cruel—when he forgot that something inside him wasn't real. This wasn't one of them.
He pressed his palm to his chest. Felt the faint, mechanical rhythm under skin and bone.
His heart.
No. A heart.
---
They used to live in Tower Delta-9.
If you could call it living.
In the underbelly of the city—beneath the freight lines and synthetic runoff pipelines—stood what people called the Slab Towers. Delta-9 was one of the oldest: a concrete monolith left to rot when the Central Authority moved the richer sectors skyward. The bottom floors flooded in the rainy months. The upper floors cracked from heat in the dry season. Most buildings down there were stitched together with rust, sweat, and stubbornness.
The orphanage was on Floor 17. Just high enough to escape the chemical mist from the old synth-factories, but low enough to never see the sun. Light was something you paid for—credits for UV bulbs or expensive mirrored panels. NOX grew up with shadows as their only illumination.
There were five boys. And a room.
The beds were lined against one wall like coffins, stacked in triples. The roof leaked when the upper levels used their rationed showers. The windows hadn't opened since Julian was nine. Food came in packets stamped with expiration dates that always felt like dares.
But they had each other.
Marvo, who used to pretend he could sing before he ever could.
George, who picked fights for fun and kept a box of wires like they were candy.
Ren, the only one who knew how to make anyone laugh on bad days.
Tae, who never spoke much but somehow always knew what to do when things got too quiet.
And Julian, who was the oldest. The one who lied the best. Who smiled when they needed it. Who said I'm fine even when the ticking had first started and he didn't know what it meant.
---
He was thirteen when the coughing fits started.
Fourteen when he woke in the middle of the night with his chest seizing up like it had been clamped shut from the inside. He remembered Marvo screaming. George trying to perform CPR like he'd seen in vids. Ren running to get someone, anyone. Tae just holding his hand while he blacked out.
He woke up days later in a private clinic far from Delta-9. One with clean sheets, real walls, and lights that didn't buzz. A doctor—a familiar doctor, one he could not remember like a forgotten word at the tip of his tongue. This doctor was in his forgotten memories. He was familiar. This was familiar, he'd said his name was—told him there had been a defect. A weakness. Something defective. He'd been lucky. There'd been a procedure. They had given him a newer model. They didn't explain more.
Julian didn't ask.
He knew how the world worked. The less you knew, the safer you were.
But after that, he was never the same. His chest didn't hurt when he danced too hard. Although he'd wake with a strange buzzing under his skin, he felt better than he had ever been. Ever. Sometimes, the others would joke that he had a battery in him. He laughed with them. But he never told them how close to the truth they were.
He never told them that sometimes, he couldn't feel anything at all.
---
Now, years later, in a dorm room with clean sheets and surveillance cameras tucked in the ceiling corners, Julian still felt like that boy from Delta-9.
Just better dressed.
The Star Program was already pushing them to the edge.
The days were packed with rotations, practice sets, evaluations, recording drills. The producers said it was to simulate real industry pressure. Julian knew it was to see who would break first.
And it wasn't just the schedules.
Group A—the perfect ones—moved through the halls like something out of a luxury ad. Faces sculpted. Voices modulated. Not a strand of hair out of place. Every interaction seemed filtered, rehearsed, precise. And the more Julian watched them, the more he felt the envy rise in his throat like bile.
Marvo had said it best: They've always had everything.
And they had.
Access. Education. Sunlight.
Julian had grown up washing his face with rainwater collected in cracked pans and hoping the power wouldn't cut off mid-meal. And now he was about to die.
So when one of Group A's members looked at him with something like curiosity, it set him off balance.
The boy with grey eyes.
He hadn't said much. Just that Julian's emotions were more real than most. That his timing was off. That his corrections were interesting.
But he looked at Julian like he saw him.
No one had ever done that. Not even the boys he'd grown up with.
---
Julian sat alone that night, away from the others.
The shared dorm was quiet. The lights were dimmed to a soft blue, mimicking dusk, even though outside it was always some version of night. He stared at his reflection in the glass panel.
Tick.
He had started wondering what his real heart had looked like.
He wondered where it is now.
He wondered if they knew how he was doing without it.
Then footsteps.
"You're here."
Julian turned.
The grey-eyed boy stood a few feet away, arms folded, hair tousled from sleep. In the starlight—real stars, this high up—his silver hair caught like frost. His eyes were less grey now, more storm.
Julian said nothing.
The boy approached slowly. "You think this view means anything?"
Julian shrugged. "To some people, it's everything."
"Because it's rare?"
"Because it's unreachable."
A pause.
"Even up here, I don't feel any closer to it."
The boy smiled faintly. "I get that."
They stood there, the wind whistling between them.
Then the boy said, "You don't move like them"
Julian turned sharply. "What?"
The boy looked away. "You don't move like them. You don't hurt like them."
Julian's breath caught.
"Why do you keep watching me?" he asked.
"I don't know yet."
Julian swallowed. "What's your name?"
The boy paused.
"Sol."
The name landed in Julian's chest like something warm and heavy.
He didn't know what he'd expected. But that wasn't it.
"Sol," he repeated. "Like the sun".
"Yes. Exactly like the sun." He answered.
They just looked at each other for a long time.
"I didn't mean to unsettle you," Sol said eventually.
"You didn't."
"You're lying."
Julian smiled weakly. "I'm good at it."
Sol tilted his head. "Why?"
"Because feeling things… is hard. Mimicking them is easier."
"You've been doing it a long time?."
Julian looked away. "Maybe always."
Sol didn't push. The silence stretched comfortably.
Julian spoke again before he meant to. "Do you think we could win?"
As the words came out of his mouth he wanted to stuff them back in. But. That's okay the grey eyed boy-sol, just caught him at a bad time, and it'll never happen again
Sol looked out the window, to where the towers of the elite shimmered like gods in the distance.
"I think broken things are most beautiful when they shine."
---
Later, Julian lay in bed, eyes wide open.
The ticking in his chest was steady.
Not painful.
Not loud.
But with the constant presence of approaching doom.
But this time, it didn't scare him.
Not as much.