The world did not know Rollo Hartmann existed.
The city had swallowed him at birth. He'd passed from one cage to the next: hospital to state home to the gothic brick mausoleum on Twelfth, its broken gargoyles forever pissing rain onto the main steps. They called it "Opportunity House" in a font stenciled halfheartedly on the mailbox. Nobody ever explained the joke.
On paper, Rollo Valentine Hartmann had a pulse and an assigned therapist. In the halls, he was a smudge—a silhouette colored in with accident tape. Nobody made eye contact. Nobody remembered him at roll call unless something in the dorm was broken, missing, or on fire. Which was usually not his fault, but the shaved lines in his brow and his history of concussions made it easier for staff to just point and say, "Handle it, Hartmann." So he handled it. Stoically. Like handling was his last name.
He was sixteen, maybe seventeen. The paperwork never matched the face. Black skin, a mohawk of stubborn braids, sharp jaw, and eyes so dark that the pupils vanished in dim light. Rollo's build belonged to a city where fighting was a language, and he'd learned to speak it in pantomime—shoulders hunched to look smaller, fists tucked in hoodie pockets, every movement calculated to avoid a collision that might actually require effort. His feet dragged. His shoes left V-shaped wounds on the linoleum. He smelled like sweat and dollar store detergent because nobody at Opportunity House had the bandwidth for more than the minimum. He was the minimum, and he wore it like armor.
"You look like you're plotting something," said his case worker one morning, sliding a carton of milk across the breakfast table.
He ignored her. She hated that.
"Rollo. Eye contact, please. Rollo?"
The milk was expired. It always was. He thumbed the cap and sniffed it, then made a show of drinking it anyway. Anything to avoid her attempts at connection.
"You can talk to me, you know." She kept her voice soft, which was supposed to be reassuring but only made him itch. "If you're having a hard time."
He stared at her long enough that she glanced away. It always ended like this. She'd mark 'unresponsive' on his chart, refill his prescription, and circle the word ANGER in her notepad for next time. After seven placements in nine years, all the adults had learned that anger was the only story he'd ever told.
The other orphans called him "Deadpool." It was supposed to be an insult. He wore it like a fuck-you badge. They'd seen him take a punch to the teeth without a sound, seen him soak up detention after detention until the staff just stopped bothering. But they'd never seen him snap. The whispers said his dad killed a guy and his mom OD'd in front of him; the truth was less interesting and more bureaucratic. The state kept sending him letters about "relatives in the system," as if blood had any say in what stuck. He threw the letters away unopened.
He had no real friends. You couldn't trust friends in a place like this. They'd sell you out for half a vape cartridge or the last pudding cup. Still, Rollo watched them—the caged animals. He catalogued their tells, mapped every territory war over the bathrooms and lounge chairs. Sometimes he thought about what would happen if he ever joined in, if he let his body off the leash just once. How fast would he end up in a hospital or the juvie box across town? Faster than anybody here, he guessed. Maybe that was why the staff always kept their distance. Maybe they could smell something feral, something ticking in his blood.
On the third Tuesday of September, the morning started ordinary and fell off a cliff. Rollo watched it all unfold with the same passive, detached interest he gave to his own pulse.
First, the teachers herded everyone to the assembly room and made them watch a motivational video about teamwork. Rollo sat at the back and counted the tiles on the ceiling, then counted how many times the Principal checked her phone. Afterward, they all shuffled back to their classrooms like cattle to a different abattoir.
Second, the new kid showed up. He was white, but his cheeks were splotched raw from crying. The House matron said his name was "Devon" and that he'd come "from a situation." By lunch, Devon had already punched a wall and been suspended from rec time. Rollo wondered if Devon would last two weeks.
Third, the sky broke.
It happened at 1:17 p.m., exactly. He'd just been sent to the storage closet for more toilet paper—a regular errand, since staff didn't trust any of the girls with keys. He was standing on the stepstool, balancing a bulk pack on his head, when the light changed. It didn't get brighter or dimmer. It got… stretched. As if the sun's color wheel had been spun to the opposite spectrum.
He heard the glass in the window crack and looked outside. There was a line in the sky. Not a vapor trail, not a plane. It was too perfect, too deliberate—like a white hair on a judge's robe. The line split, the halves twisting apart, and then a shape emerged. It hovered. Hung there like a reversed shadow: crescent, sleek, nothing like a drone or any helicopter he'd seen in the city. It looked… expensive. It looked alive.
All the air left the hallway. Rollo dropped the toilet paper. Down below, the kids in the yard were pointing, phones up, recording. But their videos would be useless. Already, his eyes were stinging, unable to focus. The crescent pulsed. Once, twice. Then something that was not a sound but an inside-out feeling ripped through the walls. The building shuddered. Alarms stuttered and died. And Rollo, for the first time in his life, felt weightless.
He stumbled. The world blurred and slowed, as if someone had swapped out the gravity. His hands couldn't find the stepstool. He floated off, arms drifting, heart clapping like a fish in his chest.
A shadow crossed the window. He blinked. It was gone. No, not gone—inside. The light was bending at the edge of his vision, like a wet mirror. He tried to move, to brace himself. Couldn't.
The roof was gone.
He saw the stars, then the crescent, then nothing at all.
He came to in bed, or at least that's what his brain decided to call it. The mattress was gone, the sheets gone. He was lying on something soft that hummed. Around him, a haze of violet mist. No walls, just shifting panels of glass or liquid that flowed where he looked, always one step ahead of his attention. He was naked. No shame, just cold. His skin prickled in the artificial air, every follicle tuned to a new frequency.
There was a figure above him.
Blue-purple skin, and hair so white it hurt to see. The face was sharp, predatory, but with a softness at the mouth that felt almost merciful. Her eyes were black, blacker than his, and they didn't blink. Not once.
She leaned in. Lips close to his ear.
"You were never theirs," she said, in a voice that purred and stung at the same time.
Her hand pressed to his chest. He tried to jerk away, but his body refused. Instead, he felt something open inside him—a second skin peeling free.
The last thing he saw, before the mist swallowed him whole, was the crescent ship reflected in her eyes.
When the mist peeled back, the first thing Rollo registered was his own heart punching the inside of his ribs. Everything was glass and blue: a chamber without corners, floor smooth as a glacier, walls flowing and collapsing in on themselves like someone had filmed reality and pressed fast-forward. The air was hot and cold in the same breath, full of static, as if he'd been shrunk and left to drown inside a plasma ball. He was still naked—this time with no pretense of dignity, not even the old battle-worn boxers as armor.
He tried to sit up. His muscles twitched, but the command never made it past his neck. He was pinned by something invisible: a pressure, a gravity that didn't care about bones or mass. The bed—if it was a bed—hummed beneath him, rising and falling with his pulse.
She was already there.
Standing over him. The woman, if the word applied.
In the alien light, her skin was pure indigo, veins swirling up from hips to clavicle in glowing filaments. She was tall—taller than him, maybe seven feet—and her body was a lesson in contradiction: muscle and curve, all strength but with lines too fluid for any human woman. Her breasts shimmered with each breath, capped by points of pale electric blue. The only clothing was a metallic wrap at her hips, fused to her so tightly it looked like an extension of her body. White hair—actual white, not bleached or silver, but colorless as snow on a TV screen—fell down her spine in a single thick rope. Every strand seemed to move with a will of its own.
Her eyes were black as a dead planet. They drank up the light, reflected nothing back.
Rollo tried to speak. No sound came out. His mouth was dry, tongue swollen.
She leaned down, bringing her face so close he could see the webbing of light inside her irises. Her scent was nothing like human sweat or perfume; it was sharp and metallic, ozone and blood and the sweet burn of coolant.
She smiled, slow and deliberate. Her teeth were perfect, almost too white.
He felt her hand slide across his chest, palm impossibly smooth, leaving streaks of warmth wherever she touched. Her thumb traced his collarbone, pressed down until it hurt. She lingered on his scars—he'd gotten two in knife fights, one from a broken window. She moved lower, dragging her fingers down his ribs, then over the flat of his stomach. The pressure was just shy of pain.
He tried to arch away. He couldn't. His body was still locked, his mind firing useless instructions.
She watched him, head tilted, curious. Then she bent and ran her lips up the side of his neck, slow as a test. Rollo shuddered. His skin felt like it was being rewritten at the genetic level.
Her voice, when it came, was less sound than texture—a purr, but with fangs.
"You'll scream for me soon enough."
He would've cursed her, if he could. Instead, a low whine built in his throat.
She climbed on top of him, straddling his hips. Her body weighed nothing and everything. He felt her thighs clamp around him, heat radiating off her skin in waves. Her pelvis pressed to his, a cool and perfect geometry that didn't quite fit, but didn't need to.
She reached between them. He couldn't look away. Her hand closed around his cock, and he felt it jolt to life—so much more than any teenage morning wood, a tidal surge of arousal mixed with terror and rage and relief. She stroked him, once, then again, her grip shifting from gentle to suffocating in a microsecond. He expected pain, but there was only pleasure—too bright, too sharp, blooming out through every cell.
Her free hand gripped his jaw, forcing his face toward hers.
"No fear, Rollo Valentine. This is what you were made for."
She lined herself up, and with one slow, predatory motion, she lowered onto him. There was no friction, no resistance—just heat, then cold, then a wild, blinding static that shorted out his thoughts.
He gasped.
She laughed, not mocking but triumphant. "Good. Breathe for me."
She rode him, slow at first, then picking up rhythm. Her inner walls clenched and flexed in patterns no human girl could match—like she was tasting him with every muscle, sampling his DNA. He felt his own rhythm sync to hers, breath for breath, pulse for pulse. The hum of the bed matched their thrusts, feeding his need right back to him.
He didn't want to like it. He tried to resist, but his body was no longer his.
Her hands mapped him, memorizing every inch: pecs, nipples, the scars on his left flank, the faded tattoo he'd given himself at twelve with a bent sewing needle. Her fingers lingered there, stroking the jagged heart until the pain flared then vanished.
"Sync is optimal," she said. Her hips crushed down. "Perfect fit."
Rollo's vision tunneled. The world shrank to her, and him, and the tidal rhythm of skin on skin. Sweat broke out along his body, beading up and running down in rivulets that steamed where they met her.
She leaned in, mouth to his ear. "Almost. Almost."
He tried to scream then—tried to tell her to stop, or maybe not to. But she was right: the scream wouldn't come out. All that escaped was a high, choking gasp.
She locked eyes with him, and in the deep black wells of her gaze, he saw everything he'd never wanted to see: his own anger, his own hollowed-out loneliness, all the broken glass inside him. She was taking it. Eating it, somehow.
Her hand found his throat, squeezed, just enough to make the edges of the world go blue.
"That's it," she whispered. "You're mine, now."
He was close. Closer than he'd ever been. But instead of building toward the edge, it felt like he was being tipped off a cliff—freefall, no control, nothing but the long, inevitable drop.
She slammed down one last time, and the climax tore through him like a grenade.
He came, hard. So hard his vision went white. So hard it felt like he was dissolving, his whole body rewired in that one, blinding instant.
The light consumed everything.
He awoke inside the white. Alone.
He felt his own body, but nothing else. No bed, no floor, no anchor. Just the aftershocks, still shivering through his spine. He was empty and overflowing at once.
And somewhere, echoing in his skull, her voice:
"You were never theirs."
He believed her.