I stood transfixed, mouth agape. I don’t know what it was about this boy that drew me in. I couldn’t explain it—it was like a planet’s gravity. The pull had been strong enough before, when he was unconscious. To see him awake, moving, breathing, was even more unnerving. It made him more real, somehow.

He said something, words I didn’t recognize. I waited a long moment for the System’s auto-translator to whisper his meaning in my mind, but it never came. All I had were disjointed syllables and a look of confusion on the boy’s face.

“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered, not sure what else to say.

The boy’s face scrunched up and he repeated the words again, more slowly. His voice came out like a croak, parched-sounding and cracked beneath the echo of the breathing tube. I swallowed involuntarily, reminded of my own aching throat.

“Perhaps you need some water,” I said, backing toward the door. “I’ll see about a medic—”

The boy sat up as I moved out of his line of sight, jabbering something else. The lack of response from the System panicked me. Hearing his words but not their meaning was like being thrown into the dark. I stumbled about, blindly.

“Kyrin Nadin! What are you doing in here?”

I whirled around. The medic who had treated me stood in the doorway, an amphora of water in her hand.

“I was looking for you,” I answered automatically. “But as I passed, I saw he’d awoken, and…” It was only a small lie, a harmless one. She was low-ranking enough that the System wouldn’t alert her, but I’d learned to watch my tongue, regardless, from my years of missteps.

“He—” The medic broke off, noticing her patient, fully alert, staring at her in confusion. Quickly, she hurried over to him, handing me the amphora as she passed. “We weren’t expecting him to regain consciousness for a few hours still. The System was supposed to keep him in a medical coma. Why didn’t it…?”

She began examining him while I drank, my parched throat greedy. The boy glanced back and forth between her and me and said a few more words. Once again, I habitually waited for the translation, but it still didn’t come.

“Why can’t I understand him?” I asked.

“His thought patterns are unfamiliar to the System,” replied the medic. “It could take up to a week for it to finish decoding his brain waves.”

I frowned. “But how—”

The boy interrupted me with a cry of alarm. The medic had pulled open a System panel to mark down his vitals, and the boy was staring at it, wide-eyed. He reached forward, poking the air idiotically.

“What is wrong with him?” I asked. “It’s just the System.”