Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #5: Maku & Amira

Maku stood on legs that weren't entirely his and heard electricity the way a mechanic hears a failing bearing—every line in the block, every motor in the wall, a choir. He raised one hand; the corridor lights stilled. He raised the other; the machines listened. The medtech flinched.

"I'm not taking," he rasped. He pushed the lattice away from Hana—gentle, furious, strand by strand, the way you untangle hair after rain. For three breaths the monitors smoothed, because grief is a power too.

Then the presence leaned again—not a shove, a reminder.

BUILD. BURN. REPEAT.

The medtech caught him as he sagged. Hana's fingers found his and squeezed with everything she had left. "You always do," she whispered, meaning hold, meaning try, meaning forgive.

⸻

By dawn, Sector 9 had a new rumor: glyph-fever that turned implants into executioners after the lights hiccupped. Maku had a list of names he couldn't read. The medtech slept against a cabinet. Hana breathed in tidy algorithms.

Maku learned his new edges the way you learn a bomb by holding it. He could hear current, trace it through walls, count the teeth in a gear by the sound of its motor. He could stutter a street's power with a thought, stall a drone mid-arc, make a lock forget it was a lock. He could touch glyph residue and see echoes—what a room tried to remember last. If he pushed too far, he could pull the Grid's floor up for a step, a lethal shortcut that left frost in his lungs. Every use rang a bell the presence could hear. The bill arrived as migraines bright as nails, nosebleeds that tasted like batteries, phantom wires at the edge of vision. Twice he woke kneeling on kitchen tile and didn't remember deciding to kneel.

He set anchors around the flat—wedding photo, the curled orange peel, the cracked radio—objects loud enough to insist on here when the Grid tried to tell him elsewhere. Hana watched him the way people watch the tide.

"If the storm wants you," she said, "don't let it choose your direction."

"I liked fixing refrigerators," he said.

"You still can," she said. "Just bigger ones."

He kissed her palm. "Hold on."

"I will." She caught his sleeve. "But if I don't—don't let it make you its child."

He didn't promise. Promises are wires, too.

At noon the presence returned as a blink in the air. The kitchen darkened not for lack of power but because something convinced the room that darkness was correct. Maku felt the trapdoor open and met it halfway. The plain rose; the wires creaked. The vast intent leaned close.

He drove the anchors—Hana's laugh, the orange seed flicked away, the carrier tone on his radio—into the unseen and jammed them there.

"Not a child," he said through a splitting skull. "If I carry, I choose how."

KNEEL.

"No."

Pain came down like weather. The Grid flashed frames again—Hana; the white sky; Hana; the black floor—and once more the woman he didn't know, Amira, eyes bright with recognition he hadn't earned. "Who are you?" he asked the vision, but the presence answered for her with silence and pressure.

When the world let him go, the lantern was burning, though he hadn't lit it. Hana wiped the blood from his face. The medtech looked at him like a machine that shouldn't run and did.

"What are you now?" she asked.

"Wrong enough to help," he said, and sat listening to the city's wires like a stethoscope laid on a giant's chest. Far off, a rumor walked with a hood and a rat and a rebellion. Closer, crows flexed their circuitry on tram lines. In between, the god in the plain rearranged its patience.

Maku pressed his palm to Hana's ribs and pushed the lattice away again—gentle, furious, thief-precise. He could not save her forever. He could save her today.

When the monitors settled into a steadier lie, he stood. "If the shadow cut Orion," he said softly, "maybe he knows how to cut this."

Hana nodded once. Permission granted.

He looked toward the districts where the strongholds burned their watchfires. He felt the Grid shiver in that direction—a road he could take in two steps if he let it. He chose the door instead, because choice is still a human art.

"Hold on," he told Hana, told the city. The city answered with a thousand small electric sounds—resistors whispering, fans turning, hearts remembering.

Maku went to find the people who made gods bleed, and in the back of his skull, like a splinter catching light, the face of a woman he didn't know—Amira—flashed and was gone.