The formula rang inside him, clear and sharp as broken glass.
A name you buried.
He squeezed his eyes shut, suspended in the hollow silence.
He didn't want to see what was coming. He didn't want to feel it. But whatever ruled this place didn't need his permission.
The pressure pulsed once, soft, merciless.
And the world around him fractured—then began stitching itself back together, shard by shard.
Smell reached him first: concrete after rain, gunpowder and old metal, the sour tang of garbage rotting nearby. Then came the light—a broken, flickering yellow from above, leaking through the air like a fading signal.
His boots touched down gently onto solid ground.
Beneath him, cracked pavement stretched out, wet and stained with grime and memory. He didn't have to look around. He already knew exactly where he stood.
The alley.
That alley.
The one sewn into every involuntary flash of his Slip. This time, though, he wasn't being dragged helplessly through the memory. Instead, he was being quietly invited—asked—to stay.
A figure slumped by the fence, blood pooled and drying beneath him. Another figure huddled near a dumpster, knees tucked up tightly to his chest, mouth open in a soundless scream.
A boy.
Himself. Twelve years old, filthy and shaking, covered in someone else's blood.
The man lying on the ground was Draymond Vance—Six.
A dealer. A pimp. A man who knew exactly how to hurt people—and had taught Zahir how to survive through those same dark lessons.
But Dray had been more than cruelty. He had been constant.
Zahir's mother had handed him over piece by piece—first errands, then drops, then jobs too heavy for a kid to carry.
And Draymond had built him back up, one brutal truth at a time.
He taught Zahir how to move through the streets. Paid his gym dues. Stood silent at the edge of the ring during his first spar. Taught him how to be fast, sharp, and in control.
Not a father. Never that. But the closest thing to it Zahir had ever known.
And that night—he was supposed to run with Dray.
He should have been there. But Six had sent him on a different route at the last minute—chasing a missing runner who didn't exist.
By the time Zahir made it back, fifteen minutes too late, it was already done.
Dray lay dead against the fence. Smoke curling from burner holes in the walls.
No sound but the ache in Zahir's lungs.
He had screamed Dray's name until his throat tore itself bloody. Until there was no breath left to call him back.
And then—
he buried it.
Buried the name.
Buried the grief.
Buried the part of himself that knew how to cry for anyone.
He never spoke it again.
Until now. Inside the memory, Zahir stood frozen, watching his younger self scream into a silence that refused to answer.
The body slumped by the fence didn't move.
The silence didn't break.
But the memory—the memory waited.
Zahir spoke quietly, deliberately:
"His name was Dray. Draymond Vance. Six."
His words cracked the air open. And suddenly sound rushed back in—distant sirens, a bottle clattering on pavement, the hum of a vehicle hovering nearby. And above it all, a voice screamed—a child's voice.
"Dray! Get up! Somebody help him!"
The cry ripped through the alley—and through him. Zahir staggered, breath locking in his throat. It felt like shrapnel under the ribs.
Even now, even here, some part of him tried to clamp down—refused to cry or crack. But the formula pulsed again—patient, insistent.
It wasn't asking for his control. It was asking for his surrender.
Then, slowly, he saw it clearly.
Standing beside the sobbing child—half in shadow, half washed by neon glow—was another figure. It matched Zahir's current height, his frame, his stance. A silhouette of himself as he was now: watching, unmoving, with arms crossed and closed off from the pain.
A silhouette of the man survival had made.
Zahir took one cautious step forward. The shadows swirled. The alley blurred. And somewhere deep in his chest, the formula clicked into place—a broken circuit finally closing.
This was the Variable.
Not the name. Not the death. The refusal to feel it.
Zahir closed his eyes. Breathed in the silence. And let the grief through.
For the first time, he didn't run from it. He let it hurt. Let it hollow him out. And in that hollow space—something else stirred.
The same force that cracked him open was also making space—space for something new, something larger than survival.
He was starting to understand: Real strength wasn't hiding from the fracture. It was carrying it forward.
Another Variable surfaced inside him:
A wound you feed.
The alley blurred, collapsing into a smaller, tighter space. Now the boy stood in a doorway—at the threshold of a cramped, hollow apartment.
His mother sat in the blue flicker of a holo-screen, her figure barely there. Her voice, when it came, was slurred and flat:
"Why you cryin'? That man ain't your daddy."
No glance. No care. Zahir's chest burned. She had sent him to Draymond. She had made him care—and now she expected him to pretend it meant nothing?
The boy in the doorway didn't cry.
He just stood there—wide-eyed, silent—as something inside him quietly broke.
Zahir felt it tear again now: a dull, hollow snap behind his ribs. The birth of a belief he never stopped carrying.
'No one's coming. I'm on my own.'
The words tasted like metal in his mouth.
That was the wound. Not the loneliness. Not even the abandonment.
The decision. The choice to build a life around it. All the risks he took. All the walls he built. All the ways he kept his crew at arm's length even when he was bleeding for them—
It had all grown from here. His hands trembled.
"All this time we spent together," he whispered, "and I never stopped being alone."
He looked up.
The boy still stood there. But now—beside him—the silhouette had shifted. Arms lowered. Guard down. Standing with him.
Something raw and vulnerable cracked open inside Zahir's chest.
No one had come for that child.
Not then.
But maybe—he could.
A ripple moved through him—quiet, final. The second Variable locked into place.
He took a slow breath, and another step toward the boy.
The formula stirred again inside him, like a bell struck in the center of his ribs:
A truth you'd kill to protect.