Visible through the palace was a home.
But palaces—in cities that worship order—aren't built for living. They're built for detention. They trap heirs inside gold so they never step out of obedience.
Al-Muqarraḥ had awakened in this body only a few hours ago, and he'd already learned the first rule of Chen:
Everything that shines… is watching you.
He stood before an inner door leading to a wider foyer, then to corridors that led outside. He carried nothing—no weapon, no dramatic intention—only a straight gait, steady shoulders, and a head held high just enough to make servants swallow their questions.
He wore Azzam's clothes: a soft shirt, a collar that barely hid the rope mark. His throat burned, yet the voice inside remained even:
*Don't show the pain. Pain opens the door for the other.*
He opened the door.
The air in the foyer was colder. It smelled of manufactured cleanliness, as if they scrubbed the palace from the inside every hour—afraid of germs… or afraid of secrets.
He took two steps.
On the third, two shadows moved from the sides the way a hidden door moves in a wall.
Guards.
Not ordinary men with rifles slung over their shoulders. Human at the core, but their forearms were mechanical—gleaming gray, threaded with faint lines of light. Their eyes weren't quite eyes, but precise lenses with a red point flickering deep inside, like a laser you only notice when you decide to.
One stopped in front of him and dipped into a small bow—polished courtesy, the kind that keeps a knife inside a smile.
The guard spoke in an official voice, without warmth.
"Sir Azzam."
A pause, as if choosing a word that wouldn't provoke.
"Master Badr's orders are strict. Your recovery begins here."
The sentence was soft.
It was also a shackle.
Al-Muqarraḥ didn't raise an eyebrow. He didn't ask *why*; the answer was obvious. He didn't shout—shouting proves you're still a city child.
He looked not at the guard's face, but at the tiny red point in the lens. Then at the mechanical fingers that could break a neck without effort.
Then he looked beyond them—at the corridors that wouldn't open.
The right word formed in his mind:
*Containment.*
Not guarding. Not protection. Containment.
The palace wasn't Azzam's residence.
The palace was a gilded prison.
Badr didn't want news of the rope's failure turning into whispers. And he didn't want to give the thing living in his brother's body a chance to touch the world—to pick up keys, find the White, reach the summits.
He wanted him inside a frame that could be measured.
Al-Muqarraḥ smiled faintly.
In a calm, hoarse voice—deliberately weary—he said, "Recovery?"
Then he nodded as though convinced.
"Fine. Tell Badr that I… will rest."
The guards didn't move, but a tiny part of their tension loosened. The old Azzam obeyed, and they wanted to believe he still did.
Al-Muqarraḥ turned and went back inside.
The moment he slipped out of their sight, his smile died.
His mind was already working—no longer on *How do I get out?* but on a sharper question:
*Where are they watching me from… and how?*
---
He returned to his private wing. The hall where he'd nearly died was colder now. The rope still lay in the corner like an insult.
He sat on the sofa for a moment, as if agreeing to the performance. Then he stood and began moving through the room like a hunter reading the room.
He didn't look for a hidden door. He didn't look for a weapon.
He looked for an eye.
In Chen, an eye isn't always a camera. An eye can be a mirror. A lamp. A metal ornament in the ceiling. Even the air could be a device, if the world is sick enough.
He passed the large mirror. In it, he didn't only see himself—he caught the reflection of a tiny light in the upper corner.
He moved closer.
A black dot the size of a lentil, ringed by a thin metal frame.
A camera.
He wasn't surprised.
Then his gaze went to the wall display. The data didn't change smoothly; it paused for a moment when he stood before it, then resumed—as if the system registered presence.
He went to the heavy curtains and touched the hem. A strange stiffness along the lower edge—thin wire.
His breathing stayed steady, but became calculated.
*All right. The palace is a network.*
And every network, no matter how wide, has gaps—not because designers are foolish, but because a system can't watch everything at once without blinding itself.
He sat again and closed his eyes— not to sleep, but to gather sound.
Outside: distant servant footsteps. Whispering. The hum of a cleaning machine.
Inside: a faint buzzing—air conditioning… or devices.
Then, in the middle of that low noise, he felt the violet seal in his neck.
It pulsed.
A light pulse, like a finger knocking from inside on the door of his skin.
He opened his eyes.
The pulse changed when he focused on the camera. It softened when he stepped away.
*So… the seal reacts to surveillance.*
He didn't understand how. But the observation alone was a treasure.
He went to the tall window that opened onto a high balcony and pulled the curtain aside a fraction.
Outside, the city was a mass of light and shadow. Towers like knives. Neon lines. Aerial bridges running like arteries between levels.
Then he closed the curtain.
*One night.*
That was all he needed. One night to prove recovery wasn't fate.
---
Night arrived the way it arrives in industrial cities: light doesn't fade—it changes color. Neon turns blue and violet, shadows deepen, and everything becomes more honest, because night doesn't pretend to be day.
Al-Muqarraḥ didn't ask for dinner. Didn't ask for a doctor. He pretended to sleep early and let the servants see a young body lying down. Even when one of them entered to check, he moved only enough to sell the lie: exhausted, harmless.
When the palace quieted, he sat up in the dark.
He wore no watch. He knew the hour by the pipes in the walls. Every so often, pumping grew louder, as if the palace breathed through industrial arteries. When it eased, surveillance would weaken a little. Guards were still human—even if their limbs were metal.
He approached the camera in the corner. He didn't touch it. He stood beneath it.
The violet seal pulsed once.
Then twice.
On the third, he felt something fine unspool from his neck into his eyes—he didn't see, he sensed. As if the seal could read the direction of the gaze falling on him.
One step left. The pulsing eased.
One step right. It intensified.
He smiled—the smile of a man who found a crack in a prison wall.
There was a gap.
He went to the balcony.
He opened the glass door painfully slowly, so the metal wouldn't squeal, and stepped into the outside air.
Cold struck his face hard. The city's scent reached him: smoke, sharp saffron, faraway perfume, burnt oil rising from factories.
Below, the palace's metal façade stretched into darkness—smooth in places, rough in others where gilded Persian patterns wrapped around columns.
Climb down in this weak body?
If it were his old body, he would have dropped like a stone. Now he had to borrow the young man's lightness and spend it carefully, like money.
He exhaled.
Put his hand on the railing.
And began to descend.
Not like an acrobat.
Like a man learning his new body with every motion: a foot testing an edge, a hand searching for a nub, a shoulder flaring with pain, a throat burning with every inhale.
And the violet seal kept pulsing.
Each time he crossed an angle touched by a lens or a reflection, the pulse shifted—as if it veiled the watcher's gaze for a moment, or misled it. No light went out. No alarm sounded. But he felt that thin layer, like a curtain pulled between him and the eye.
*So the seal doesn't grant strength.*
*It grants a trick.*
And one trick, in a city built on the eye, can equal an army.
He slid along the cold wall. Fingers numbed. He didn't stop. A lower balcony. Another ledge. A narrow service platform beside a large pipe.
The palace behind him gleamed like an elegant grave.
He stood for a second, panting.
Then made a short jump to a neighboring rooftop—one of the side buildings.
He landed without sound.
Lifted his head.
At last… Chen stood in front of him without a glass.
---
Chen wasn't mere neon, the way future-city tales claim. It was a calculated beauty built on old bones.
Skyscrapers, yes—but above them rose turquoise domes like old mosque domes, glittering with gilded Persian motifs—not by sunlight, but by electricity. The past hadn't died. It had been wired into the future.
Aerial bridges hung between towers like roads in the sky. Their floors were digital mosaics—tiles that changed color with pedestrians, flashing arrows, advertisements, hazard symbols, then returning as if nothing happened.
And beneath it all: industrial fog. Not natural, but manufactured—hiding lower streets the way a carpet hides blood.
Chen's smell, up close, wasn't one city's smell. I was a Spartan order running on strict law, and Isfahan perfuming its death with saffron—beauty smiling with a knife behind the smile.
Al-Muqarraḥ walked along a narrow roof, then dropped into an alley between buildings. The alley stayed dark despite the neon. In Chen, light is not given fully to the poor.
He heard distant sounds: suspended vehicles over bridges, engine hum, automated announcements declaring bans in sectors, and sometimes brief human laughter, as if it were forbidden.
He lifted his head toward the summits.
High above—rings of light around them—hovering drones like metallic flies.
The White reserves.
They didn't look like storage.
They looked like shrines.
Al-Muqarraḥ smiled to himself.
*If the White is up there… I'll climb.*
Then the world shook beneath his feet.
At first, he thought it was a minor quake, or vibration from massive engines. Then came a sound much larger—a blast tearing the night's stillness like cloth.
He snapped his head up.
Near one of the summits, green light erupted.
Not red fire.
A glowing green cloud poured from a rupture in a tower and spread through the air like radiant snow.
Then sirens came—sharp electronic screams layered with announcements in multiple languages, until one sentence repeated like a verdict:
**"Breach detected in Sovereign Qat Reserves!"**
**"Infiltration of the National Qat Depots."**
The sky turned into a canvas of chaos. Red lights multiplied. Drones poured out from between towers. Aerial bridges halted, and the mosaics flashed a harsh warning crimson.
People ran on the levels he could see. They didn't know why. They ran because the system said danger.
And in the middle of it all… green particles began to fall.
Dust.
White dust.
Not earth-dust—light-dust. Each particle was a bead of powdered glow drifting down as if gravity hesitated to claim it.
He extended his hand.
Before he could catch anything, something heavier dropped nearby.
A sprig.
A pure White sprig, still damp—green in a way that hurt the eye amid all the gray. It struck the ground and came to rest at the edge of the alley like a gift thrown from the sky by mistake.
Al-Muqarraḥ stood over it, staring for a beat.
Then he raised his eyes to the summits burning green.
The violet seal in his neck throbbed violently—throbbing like hunger.
For the first time since he woke in Azzam's body, he let out a short, genuine laugh.
He bent and picked up the sprig slowly, the way a poor man picks up gold in a street full of cameras.
Then he said, low, as if addressing the entire city:
"I was looking for a single bud… and the sky handed me a whole anthology."
A scanning beam from a surveillance drone swept overhead. The light didn't touch him directly—as if something thin slid between him and the eye.
The violet seal pulsed once.
As if it said: *Now run.*
And Al-Muqarraḥ… didn't run.
He vanished into the alley, walking with calm steps, carrying the White the way a man carries his new fate—as if the turmoil above wasn't an alarm…
but the beginning of the path.