Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #5: Maku & Amira

Chapter 1 - Maku Is Born

Sector 9 had learned to eat by lantern light. On the radio: Orion is dead, the shadow walks with a rebellion, expect service interruptions. Maku and his wife, Hana, sat in their narrow kitchen with the window cracked to let the storm-breath in, sharing the last orange they'd bartered that morning.

"People say he cut the spire himself," Hana said, meaning the hooded man.

"People say a lot when the lights come back on," Maku said, smiling the way a fixer smiles at myths.

The bulbs stuttered—not a flicker, a shiver. Thin glyphs slid across the plaster like frost, across Hana's cheek like light seen through water, across the cheap radio and the door latch and the nails in the beams. Implants in the building pinged as one, coughed, went silent. Three seconds stretched long enough to learn a new fear. Then the power steadied. Down the hall, neighbors clapped just because anything still worked.

"We'll ride it out," Maku said, squeezing Hana's hand.

"Like always," she said, and kissed his knuckles.

He didn't see the lattice those glyphs left inside her—hairline script settling along veins and nerves, too fine to catch until it spread.

⸻

It began as a headache. By dusk Hana was on the floor, skin unfocused, as if heat shimmer lived under it. At the clinic three blocks over, the door scanner blinked red, then white, then a single sigil crawled across the lens and the bolt slid free on its own. Inside, a young medtech with solder scars lost her poker face.

"It's happening everywhere," she said. "The stutter left... residue."

Hana seized. The monitors wrote nonsense. When Maku grabbed the bed rail he felt something touch back—not steel, but a network of light running through the room, the street, the city. For an instant he saw the world as lines: every cable with a shadow; every shadow with a rhythm; along those lines a presence listening.

"Get out," the medtech whispered—not to Maku, to the air. "Get out of her."

The lights snapped. A shockwave of glyphs rippled out from Hana—pale script racing across tile and wall. It slid up Maku's forearms and bit. He didn't scream until the second bite.

Pain wrote a map inside him—vein by vein, nerve by nerve. The glyphs didn't brush him; they bound him, stitching along the grain of grief and finding purchase in anger. Heat ran cold, cold ran hot; somewhere a dial turned and he was the instrument.

The clinic fell away.

He stood barefoot on a black metallic plain polished like oil, under a white sky hung with swaying wires that had no wind to blame. Far off, something not shaped like anything—more decision than body—turned and looked through him.

BUILD. BURN. REPEAT.

The words didn't enter ears; they arrived in bone. Frames flashed: a kitchen's lamp, Hana's face wet with pain—then back to the plain, himself kneeling with hands in wires like roots—then a woman he'd never seen, dark eyes bright with complicated sorrow, reaching across a distance he didn't understand—then the plain again, the pressure closer. The images stuttered: Hana, the wires, the unknown woman, the white sky. He tried to speak and found his mouth full of signal.

SHADOWS MUST KNEEL.

His knees hit iron that wasn't there. The pressure tuned him like a string.

YOU ARE SELECTED.
YOU WILL CARRY.
YOU WILL OBEY.

"No," he said—dumb, true, the last human technology.

Something old shifted. The binding completed—glyphs threading through cells, locking to the shape his grief made. Breath exploded out of him. The clinic snapped back. His palms smoked where they'd touched tile. The medtech yelled. Hana's heartbeat ran downhill.