Fateborne

I ease my car into a parking spot outside my apartment building, a brick structure with more peeling paint than actual color left. The place is one strong wind away from being condemned, but it’s mine. I found it, I signed the lease, I help make the payments, all without touching my parents’ money, which drives them crazy. The only condition they had when I moved out was that I take their high school graduation gift with me: a gleaming sports car that sticks out in this neighborhood like a diamond in a coal mine. Which is precisely why I’m keeping it filthy. This car’s been collecting smiley faces for eight months, and I’m not about to rinse them away.

When I push through the main door, stale pizza grease mingles with lemon-scented cleaner in the air, and the elevator groans in the corner like it’s been wheezing since before my great-grandparents were born. So I bound up the stairwell, skipping steps until I finally burst onto the 7th-floor landing. When I wrench my apartment door open, perspiration beads along my hairline and something electric pulses beneath my skin, like I’ve swallowed a live wire.

“Yo!” comes a shout from the kitchen. “Thought you were at the firm all day.”

My best friend and roommate, Kira, pops her head around the fridge door, hair in a messy bun, socks mismatched, wearing a sweatshirt that says “I’m Billing You For This Conversation.”

She squints at me.

“You look like you lost a fight with a light bulb.”

“Close enough,” I mutter, dropping my bag onto our sagging couch.

She hands me a can of sparkling water and flops down beside me. “Tell Auntie Kira everything.”

So I do.

Well, not everything.

I tell her about the outage.

The sparks.

The brief chaos.

Not the part where I felt like a living power surge.

Kira whistles. “Damn. Good thing you’re not litigious.”

“I might sue the city for ugly lighting fixtures.”

She raises her can. “A noble cause.”

We settle into easy chatter, shoulders pressed together, the comfortable kind of quiet humming beneath our words.

“Third-year law,” she says at one point, voice turning soft. “Bar prep starting. And then real jobs. Like actual jobs. We’re almost there.”

I arch an eyebrow. “We’re both employed, last I checked.”

Kira’s dark hazel eyes roll skyward as she tosses her head, loose crimson curls bouncing with the movement.

“You’re employed. I just wear a paper hat and ask if they want fries with that.” She sinks deeper into the couch cushions with a dramatic sigh. “I can’t wait until we’re making real money. Enough to leave this place behind.”

Kira’s enthusiasm makes sense. She clawed her way here from nothing, the first in her family to reach college. While I had advantages, she cobbled together scholarships and assistance programs, each acceptance letter another brick in the path toward changing her family’s future. Something about her fierce determination drew me in from the start.

I still remember stumbling late to Constitutional Law that first day, bracing for the professor’s wrath, when Kira caught my eye from across the room. Without hesitation, she knocked her textbook to the floor with theatrical clumsiness, creating just enough chaos for me to slip unnoticed into an empty seat. In that moment, something clicked between us, like finding a piece of myself I never knew was lost.

Now I can’t imagine my life without her in it.

“It doesn’t feel real,” I admit.

“Because we’re not sleeping enough to form memories.”

“That too.”

She bumps my knee. “We’re going to be lawyers, Sea. You, me… the terrifying future. All of it.”

A small smile tugs at my lips. “Terrifying, yeah.”

But under her words, something twists in my gut.

A fear I can’t name.

Like the future she’s describing isn’t mine to reach.

Like something is coming.

Something that already has its hands on me.

Fuck this ominous feeling.

I push myself off the couch with a yawn. “I promised my mom I’d bring dessert tonight. Want to help me make brownies before I head over?”

Kira bounces to her feet, eyes bright. “Only if you save me a piece. I’m not slaving over a hot oven for nothing.”

I boop her nose as I pass. “Only the biggest slice for you, my friend.”

I quickly duck into my bedroom, a space barely big enough for a twin bed, a nightstand, and a wardrobe, and peel off my tight pantsuit with a groan of relief.

The moment the fabric slides off my shoulder, the birthmark prickles like it’s been waiting for air.

I pause in front of the mirror on the back of my closet door, the kind that warps everything just a little. Hips wider. Shoulders narrower. Reality slightly skewed. I angle my body, twisting to look at the top of my shoulder blade.

There it is.

Not a neat shape. Not a heart, not a star, not anything that would’ve made eighth-grade gym class easier. A knotted patch of mottled skin, soft brown and dusky rose like an old bruise that never healed right. And laced through it, pale, threadlike lines, thinner than veins and lighter than scars, branching outward in irregular little forks.

Except now they aren’t as irregular.

The center looks darker, as if the knot has tightened. And the faint threads, those ghost lines I’ve spent years pretending weren’t changing, seem sharper at the edges, pulled into clearer paths. Some reach toward my collarbone. Others curl toward my shoulder joint like they’re searching for an anchor point.

For half a second, I think I see them shift when I breathe. Not moving like skin moves. Something subtler.

I swallow hard.

“Stop it,” I whisper to my own reflection, like that’s going to make my body behave.

I turn away from the mirror with a final shake of my head, insisting on leaving these crazy thoughts and feelings behind.

I quickly swap heels for worn-in sneakers, high-waisted jeans, and a cropped tee. Once I’m comfortably human again, I head back out to the kitchen to find Kira.

Predictably, disaster is already underway.

Kira is clattering through cabinets like a gremlin on a sugar high, pulling out ingredients with reckless confidence and zero strategy. I stumble in laughing, and our words tumble over each other as I start helping her excavate mixing bowls and measuring cups from the chaos. Within minutes, flour dusts the counter like early snowfall, and Kira’s already licking batter off a spoon before I’ve even finished stirring the first bowl.

Between cups of sugar and cracking eggs, we dissect Professor Harmon’s obvious toupee.

“I swear it shifted positions mid-lecture,” Kira insists, eyes wide and deadly serious, “like it was trying to make a run for it.”

I nearly drop an egg from laughing.

Then I transition into teasing her about her most recent dating disaster.

“The crypto entrepreneur?” I say. “The one who couldn’t explain what a blockchain was?”

Kira groans, throwing her head back. “He said it was ‘like… the cloud? But angrier?’”

I snort, stirring the batter. “You date the most interesting specimens.”

She narrows her eyes. “Specimens is right. At this point, I’m convinced I’m cursed.”

She bumps her hip into mine, nearly sloshing the bowl. “I should probably just marry into your family. Rich, stable, free dessert.”

“Bold of you to assume my parents would survive you.”

She scoffs, swiping chocolate batter across her cheek without noticing. “Your mom already loves me more than she loves you.”

I tap the spoon against my chin, pretending to consider it. “Fair. Unfortunately, my brother is ten.”

She sighs dramatically. “Tragic.”

I pause, letting the beat hang just long enough.

“My uncle,” I add, innocent as sin, “is available.”

Her face twists. “No.”

“Distinguished,” I continue. “Silver-foxy.”

“How old.”

“Fifty.”

She makes a choking sound. “That’s not seasoning, that’s expiration.”

My grin is bright and real—and for half a second, it almost convinces me nothing is wrong.

Then the skin at my shoulder prickles again. Not sharp. Not urgent.

Patient.

Kira points the spoon at me. “If you ever try to set me up with your AARP relatives, I’m filing a restraining order.

We work in comfortable chaos. Music plays from Kira’s phone. Spoons clatter. The oven heats the small kitchen with warm, sugary air. Our apartment may be ancient and questionably stable, but moments like this make it feel like our own little kingdom.

When the brownies finally go into the oven, Kira hops onto the counter and lets her legs swing. “So… are you going to tell me why you’re acting weird? Weirder than usual.”

I thump the cabinet shut a little too hard. “I’m not acting weird.”

She snorts. “Lies. You walked in looking like you met God in the break room and He asked you to fill out form 37-B.”

I laugh, but it’s thin. “Just a long day.”

“Sea.” Her voice softens. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

The sincerity in her eyes tugs at something inside me.

But how do I say I think I blew out an entire office floor with something that came out of me?

I settle for, “I’m fine. Just stressed.”

She studies me a beat longer, then nudges my shoulder. “Let me know if that changes.”

“I will.”

We both know I won’t. It’s not because I don’t trust her. I’ve just always been closed off as a person, even to those I love. I don't want to burden them with my weirdness or crazy, which is exactly what I am. Crazy. Probably.

When the timer beeps, she cuts herself a square so large it could qualify as a geological formation. “For my hard work,” she declares, crumbs already clinging to her cheek.

“You’re unbelievable.”

“That’s why you love me.”

I grab my phone and keys, slipping them into my pocket before tugging on a hoodie. My phone lights up in protest, a cluster of missed calls from my mom stacked at the top of the screen. I groan, thumb hovering for a second before locking it again.

“I know, I know,” I mutter to no one. “I’ll call you back.”

I shove the phone deeper into my pocket, like that settles it, then grin toward the kitchen. “Tell the brownies I’ll be back for them.”

“They’ll miss you deeply.”

I give Kira a quick wave goodbye before the door clicks shut behind me, the sound sharper than it should be in the quiet hall.