THE AWAKENING WITHIN

Power is not given.

It awakens.

Chapter 1 — Rain and Routine

Written by

Roviel (Testimony Aigbe)

The Manchester rain was a constant companion, a soft, insistent drumming against Sarah Smith's umbrella. It wasn't a dramatic downpour, just the typical, persistent drizzle that seemed to cling to everything, making the grey city gleam with a muted, watery light.

Sarah pulled her worn school bag higher on her shoulder, adjusting her glasses as a gust of wind threatened to whip her fringe into her eyes.

"Snickers, hurry up!"

Jack's voice, a booming counterpoint to the gentle rain, cut through the morning air.

He was already a few paces ahead, his lanky frame effortlessly navigating the slick pavement.

"You wan' us to be late for school? Mama go vex, oh."

Sarah quickened her pace, a small smile playing on her lips.

"I'm coming."

But her attention drifted to the world around her.

The patterns of condensation on shop windows.

The subtle colour changes in old brickwork.

The way raindrops clung stubbornly to lamp posts before finally falling.

Sarah noticed things.

Small things.

The sort of details everyone else seemed to miss.

And sometimes she wondered why.

Their street, a terraced row of red brick houses, was a familiar comfort. The scent of fried plantain and spices still lingered faintly from their kitchen, a testament to their mother's early morning efforts. Their Nigerian household, nestled within this very British city, was a blend of cultures, where Nollywood movies shared space with BBC News and where Pidgin English appeared whenever emotions ran high.

As they passed the corner shop, Mr Osei stood outside arranging a display of newspapers beneath a small awning.

"Morning, Sarah. Morning, Jack."

"Morning, sir," Sarah replied politely.

Jack raised a hand.

"Morning, Uncle."

The old shopkeeper smiled and returned to his work.

Further down the road, Sarah's attention caught on something unusual.

A symbol.

Sprayed onto the side of an old brick wall.

An infinity sign.

Nothing special about it.

At least that was what she told herself.

Yet something about it felt strangely familiar.

She slowed.

The symbol seemed almost deliberate among the random graffiti surrounding it.

Clean.

Perfect.

Intentional.

"Sarah."

Jack's voice snapped her attention away.

When she looked back, the symbol was still there.

Ordinary.

Just paint on a wall.

Still, a faint unease settled somewhere in her chest.

She couldn't explain why.

The school gates soon appeared ahead, crowded with students escaping the rain and gathering beneath overhangs.

St John's Secondary buzzed with its usual morning energy.

Laughter.

Conversations.

Arguments about football.

Complaints about homework.

The normal sounds of teenage life.

Jack immediately spotted his friends.

"See you later, Snickers."

He gave her shoulder a gentle shove.

"Try not to disappear into another dimension before lunch."

Sarah rolled her eyes.

"No promises."

His laughter followed him as he disappeared into a crowd of Year Eleven students.

A familiar voice called out.

"There you are."

Sarah turned.

Lily hurried toward her, pink hijab bright against the grey morning.

"You know I nearly froze waiting for you?"

"You've been waiting for three minutes."

"Three very cold minutes."

Sarah smiled.

Lily always seemed capable of finding humour in everything.

"Did you finish the maths homework?" Lily asked.

"Obviously."

"Can I copy it?"

"No."

"Wow. Some friend you are."

"You say that every week."

"And every week I mean it."

Together they entered the school building.

The familiar scent of wet coats, cleaning products, and cafeteria food greeted them.

Students flooded through the corridors.

Teachers attempted varying degrees of crowd control.

Normal.

Predictable.

Safe.

Or at least it should have been.

As they approached their classroom, Sarah noticed Jessica Robbins standing near the doorway.

Jessica was one of those people who always seemed perfectly composed.

Her uniform was immaculate.

Her hair was neat.

Even the way she stood felt deliberate.

She glanced briefly at Sarah.

Their eyes met.

For a moment Sarah felt something strange.

Not fear.

Not hostility.

Recognition.

As though Jessica knew something she didn't.

Then Jessica looked away and entered the classroom.

The moment passed.

"Still weird," Lily muttered.

"Who?"

"Jessica."

Sarah shrugged.

"She's always been like that."

"Exactly."

Lessons began.

The morning settled into routine.

Teachers talked.

Students complained.

Pens scratched against paper.

Outside, rain tapped gently against the windows.

Sarah found comfort in routine.

Comfort in predictability.

Which was why the headache terrified her.

It arrived without warning.

One moment she was reading from her exercise book.

The next, pain exploded behind her eyes.

Sharp.

Sudden.

Violent.

She gasped.

The classroom blurred.

Sounds stretched and distorted.

The teacher's voice became distant.

Like it was coming through water.

The walls seemed to ripple.

A pressure built inside her skull.

Then the vision came.

A white room.

Bright lights.

Cold metal.

A girl.

Dark hair.

Terrified eyes.

She was screaming.

Not with her voice.

With her mind.

Sarah couldn't hear words.

Only fear.

Raw.

Overwhelming.

Desperate.

Help me.

The feeling crashed into her with such force that her breath caught.

The image vanished.

The classroom returned.

Students.

Desks.

Books.

Reality.

Yet the terror remained.

Her heart hammered against her ribs.

She rose unsteadily from her chair.

"Sarah?"

Someone said her name.

She wasn't sure who.

The floor tilted.

The room spun.

A high pitched ringing filled her ears.

She stumbled into the corridor, clutching her head.

The pain intensified.

Another flash.

The white room.

The metal table.

The terrified girl.

This time Sarah saw a number on the wall.

E-17.

Then darkness surged forward.

The last thing she saw was Mrs Davies rushing toward her, concern written across her face.

Then everything disappeared.

.

Until.

---

To Be Continued...

© Roviel

The antiseptic smell hit her first.

Sharp. Clinical. The kind of clean that did not feel clean so much as feel like the absence of everything else.

Sarah blinked.

Beige ceiling tiles. A water stain in the far corner shaped vaguely like a running dog. The low hum of the strip light above her that had been flickering since Year 7 and would apparently flicker until the end of time.

The nurse's office.

She knew this room. Not well, she was not the type who ended up here regularly, but well enough. The narrow bed with the crinkly paper sheet beneath her. The cabinet of supplies she was never supposed to look in. The motivational poster on the wall with a sunset and a quote about potential that had been there longer than most of the staff.

She pushed herself upright.

Bad idea.

The room tilted. She pressed one hand flat against the bed and waited for everything to stop moving. Her head was still pounding. Not the sharp violent pain from before but the aftermath of it. The dull persistent ache of something that had burned through her and left the edges scorched. Each heartbeat pushed the throb a little further behind her eyes.

What happened?

The classroom. The exercise book open in front of her. Mrs Davies at the board. Then nothing normal after that.

The pain arriving like something breaking open.

The sounds stretching.

The walls doing something walls were not supposed to do.

And then the vision.

Sarah sat very still on the edge of the bed and tried to hold it. Tried to keep the details from dissolving the way dreams dissolved in the shower, the way anything real and strange dissolved the moment ordinary life pressed back in around it.

A white room.

Lights that were too bright. The kind designed to leave nowhere to hide.

Cold metal. A table. Restraints. The suggestion of something that had happened there repeatedly and without apology.

A girl.

Dark hair. Eyes wide with a terror that was not about dying. It was worse than that. More specific than that. The terror of someone who had been somewhere long enough to stop believing they would ever leave.

She was screaming.

Not with her mouth.

With something deeper. Something Sarah had no word for. A frequency that had bypassed her ears entirely and arrived somewhere further in. Not in her head but behind it. Behind everything. In a place she had not known existed until it was filled with someone else's fear.

*Help me.*

Not spoken. Not even thought exactly. Just present. Like a weight that had been placed inside her chest without permission.

Sarah pressed her fingers to her temples.

It had felt like a memory.

Not like something she had imagined or dreamed or invented. Like something she had been there for and somehow forgotten until this moment.

Which was impossible.

She had never been in a white room. She had never seen that girl. She had certainly never seen the number on the wall. The one that had appeared in the final second before the darkness came.

E-17.

Not a room number. Not a classroom.

A label.

The thought settled in her stomach like something cold.

*"Sarah, dear. You're awake."*

Mrs Davies appeared from the small adjoining corridor. She crossed the room quickly with the particular anxious energy of a teacher who had watched a student collapse on her watch and was still quietly processing it.

*"How are you feeling? You gave us quite a fright."*

*"I'm fine,"* Sarah said. Her voice came out rougher than she expected. She cleared her throat. *"Just a headache. I'm fine."*

*"You collapsed in the corridor, love. That is not just a headache."*

*"I stood up too fast. Low blood sugar probably."*

Mrs Davies looked at her with the expression of someone who had heard creative explanations from students for twenty years and was choosing her battles.

*"The nurse will be back in a few minutes. I want her to check you over before you go anywhere."*

*"Okay."*

*"Your friend is outside. Lily. She has been out there since they brought you in. She would not go back to class."*

Something loosened slightly in Sarah's chest.

*"Okay. Thank you, Mrs Davies."*

The teacher nodded. She smoothed the front of her cardigan the way she did when she was transitioning from concerned to composed and stepped back toward the door.

*"I will let her know you are awake."*

The door opened. Closed. The strip light hummed.

And Sarah became aware, in the specific way you became aware of something you had been avoiding, that she was not alone in the room.

She turned her head.

Jessica Robbins.

Sitting in the plastic chair in the far corner. Uniform immaculate. Blonde hair pulled back so precisely it looked considered rather than practical. She was looking down at her lap, picking at a loose thread on the hem of her skirt.

Or appearing to.

Sarah watched her for a moment.

Jessica's posture was still. Too still. Not the stillness of someone relaxed but the stillness of someone who had decided on a position and was maintaining it deliberately. Her eyes were down but there was nothing vacant about her. She was present in the way people were present when they were paying very careful attention to something they did not want you to know they were paying attention to.

*"What are you doing here?"*

The question came out more direct than Sarah intended. Not rude. Just honest. She did not have the energy for anything else.

Jessica looked up.

For just a moment, a fraction of a second, something moved across her expression. Not the usual coolness. Not the particular blankness she wore in classrooms. Something more complicated than either of those things.

Then it was gone.

*"I was passing,"* Jessica said. *"When you collapsed. I helped bring you here."*

Sarah looked at her.

*"You helped bring me here."*

*"Yes."*

*"Why?"*

Jessica held her gaze. *"Because you fell."* A pause. *"That is generally why people help."*

It was a reasonable answer.

It was also, Sarah felt in some way she could not articulate, not the whole answer.

She studied Jessica's face. The controlled expression. The blue eyes that gave nothing away. The slight tension around her jaw that suggested something being held carefully in place.

*"You were in Maths this morning,"* Sarah said. *"When Mrs Bennett—"*

*"I know what happened in Maths."*

*"You said—"*

*"I know what I said."* Not defensive. Flat. Like she was acknowledging a fact she had already catalogued. *"How is your head?"*

The change of subject was smooth enough that it took Sarah a second to register it had happened.

*"Still hurts."*

Jessica nodded once. Looked back down at her skirt.

The silence between them was strange. Not hostile. Not comfortable. Something in between. The kind of silence that had a shape to it, that took up space in the room without filling it with anything you could name.

Sarah wanted to ask something else. She was not sure what. Something about the way Jessica had looked at her in the corridor that morning. That brief moment before class when their eyes had met and Sarah had felt something she still could not name.

Recognition.

Like Jessica had seen her. Not just looked at her but actually seen her. As if Sarah were something specific and known rather than just another face moving through a corridor.

The door opened before she could find the words.

Lily came in like weather.

*"Oh thank God."*

She crossed the room in four steps and dropped into the chair beside the bed. She grabbed Sarah's hand and squeezed it with both of hers, hard enough to be felt.

*"You absolute idiot. You scared me half to death. Mrs Davies was talking about calling your mum and I had to talk her down and then—"*

She stopped.

Breathed.

*"Are you okay? Actually okay. Not just saying okay."*

*"Actually okay,"* Sarah said. *"Mostly."*

*"What happened?"*

*"Headache."*

Lily's eyes narrowed. She had a very reliable radar for insufficient answers.

*"That was not just a headache. Mia said you went completely white before you went down. Like actually white. And you were just standing there staring at nothing for a few seconds before you fell."*

*"I don't remember that."*

*"That's not reassuring, Sarah."*

*"I know."*

Lily looked at her for a long moment. She opened her mouth. Then she stopped.

She had noticed Jessica.

The room shifted slightly. The air of it. The quality of the silence.

Lily looked at Jessica. Jessica looked at Lily. Neither of them said anything for a moment. The look between them was the kind that happened between people who did not know each other well but had enough awareness of each other to tread carefully.

*"Robbins,"* Lily said. Not unfriendly. Careful.

*"She helped bring me in,"* Sarah said.

Lily looked at Sarah. Then back at Jessica. The expression on her face was the specific expression of someone filing something away rather than responding to it out loud.

*"Right,"* she said.

Then, redirecting with the ease of someone who had decided not to press something in public, she turned back to Sarah.

*"Okay. So. How are you actually feeling? On a scale."*

*"Four."*

*"Four."* Lily considered this. *"So bad enough that you're telling me four instead of lying and saying two."*

*"When did you get this perceptive?"*

*"I have always been perceptive. You have always been bad at hiding things."*

Sarah almost smiled.

From the corner of the room came the quiet sound of the plastic chair shifting. Sarah glanced over.

Jessica was standing.

She smoothed the front of her skirt and picked up her bag from the floor beside the chair and slung it over one shoulder. Her expression had returned to its default. Composed. Distant. Giving nothing.

*"Glad you're alright,"* she said.

She said it to the room rather than to anyone specifically.

Then she walked out.

The door closed quietly behind her.

Lily watched the door for a moment.

*"That,"* she said, *"was weird."*

Sarah did not answer.

She was still looking at the door.

The vision was still sitting somewhere behind her eyes. The white room. The metal table. The number on the wall. And now it had company. The expression on Jessica's face in that fraction of a second before the mask came back down. The thing that had moved through it too quickly to name.

Sarah did not know what it was.

She only knew it had not been nothing.

Outside the nurse's office window the Manchester rain continued its patient persistent work against the glass. Somewhere down the corridor the bell rang for the end of period. Footsteps picked up outside. Voices. The ordinary sounds of a school moving on.

Sarah sat on the paper crinkled bed and thought about a room she had never been in and a girl she had never met and a number that felt impossibly like it should mean something to her.

E-17.

She pressed her fingers against her temple.

The ache pulsed back.

Then something else arrived.

Not pain.

Not a vision.

Just a word.

Arriving from nowhere, or from somewhere so deep inside her it amounted to the same thing. Rising up through everything else the way a sound rose through still water.

*Live.*

Sarah sat very still.

She did not know where it had come from.

She did not know what it meant.

She only knew it had not come from her.

*To be continued.*

© Roviel (Testimony Aigbe)

Jessica Robbins did not run.

Running attracted attention. Attention compromised the assignment. These were things her father had told her when she was nine years old and they had never stopped being true.

So she walked.

Through the swinging doors of the nurse's office. Through the corridor filling back up with students now that the drama had passed and everyone had somewhere else to be. Past the Year Sevens near the water fountain who had already moved on to arguing about something on someone's phone. Past the noticeboard with its peeling edges and its posters about upcoming events that nobody would attend.

She walked at a pace that meant nothing. Not fast enough to suggest urgency. Not slow enough to suggest she was avoiding something.

She was very good at this.

She had been doing it since she was old enough to understand what it meant.

The empty classroom was on the second floor, fourth door on the left past the stairwell. Room 21. Chemistry. Mr Adeyemi's. She had identified it in September as a reliable space — he had a free period fourth lesson on Mondays and the room was never locked. She had used it twice before for check-ins and nobody had ever noticed.

She closed the door behind her.

The room smelled of old textbooks and the faint chemical residue that chemistry rooms never quite lost no matter how much they were cleaned. Rain pressed steadily against the windows. Outside, the school yard was visible below — a few students cutting across it with their hoods up, moving quickly.

Jessica stood at the window for a moment.

Not looking at them.

Thinking.

Then she pulled out her phone.

Not the one she used at school for ordinary things. The other one. Slim, black, no brand marking on the back, its interface stripped down to the essentials. Her father had given it to her on her thirteenth birthday, which was the kind of thing that told you everything you needed to know about what kind of birthday it had been.

She opened the secure channel.

Her thumbs moved efficiently across the screen. She had written reports like this enough times that the language came without effort — the clinical shorthand, the precise vocabulary, the careful removal of anything that sounded like an opinion.

*Subject: Sarah Smith.*

*Date: 01.04.2024. Time: 09.47.*

*Event: Unscheduled collapse during Period 1. Location: Main corridor, first floor.*

*Observed symptoms: Acute disorientation preceding collapse. Transient loss of consciousness. Rapid eye movement on recovery consistent with REM state intrusion. Duration of episode: approximately ninety seconds.*

*Assessment: Probable Awakening Event. Timing consistent with known environmental trigger patterns.*

*Recommendation: Observation level increase. Continued monitoring advised.*

She read it back once.

Removed the word probably from the assessment and replaced it with *probable.*

Hit send.

The message disappeared into the encrypted network. No delivery confirmation. No read receipt. That was how it worked — you sent and you waited and you trusted the infrastructure because you had no choice but to trust it.

She stood in the quiet chemistry room and waited.

The reply came in forty seconds.

Her father's messages always came fast. Not because he was always watching, he was careful to maintain the appearance that he had other things to attend to, but because he considered delayed responses to be a form of inefficiency and inefficiency was something Nathan Robbins did not tolerate.

Confirm details. Do not engage. Await further instruction.

That was all.

No acknowledgement of what she had witnessed. No question about whether she was alright, though that was not a surprise — field operatives were expected to be alright, the question would not have occurred to him. No indication of what *further instruction* would look like or when it would arrive.

Just the directive.

*Do not engage.*

Jessica stared at the screen.

She had been watching Sarah Smith since October. Four months of corridors and classrooms and carefully managed proximity. She knew Sarah's schedule better than Sarah probably knew it herself. She knew which seat she took in each lesson and why. She knew she went to the library during free periods and that the librarian knew her name. She knew about Jack, about Lily, about the glasses and the way Sarah pushed them up her nose when she was concentrating.

She knew that Sarah had been afraid this morning.

Not the ordinary afraid of a teenager having a bad day. Something deeper. The kind of fear that came from experiencing something your mind had no framework for. Jessica recognised it because she had felt it herself once, a long time ago, before she had been given frameworks for everything.

She locked the phone and slid it back into her inside pocket.

Do not engage.

She looked out at the rain.

She thought about the expression on Sarah's face in the nurse's office when she had first opened her eyes. The way her gaze had moved around the room, taking inventory, checking that reality was still where she had left it.

And then the way she had looked at Jessica.

Not with hostility. Not even with the wariness that Jessica had trained her to feel over four months of careful pressure. With something more direct than either of those things. Like she was actually seeing her. Like whatever had happened in that corridor had stripped away something and left Sarah looking at the world with less filter than before.

Jessica did not like being looked at like that.

It made things harder.

She straightened, picked up her bag from where she had set it on the nearest desk, and left the room exactly as she had found it.

The rest of the school day passed the way school days passed when you were paying attention to something other than school.

Jessica sat in lessons and wrote notes and answered questions when asked and contributed just enough to be considered a normal engaged student and not enough to be memorable. This was a calibration she had long since perfected. Invisible was not the goal , invisible people got noticed precisely because they were invisible. The goal was unremarkable. Present but not distinctive. The kind of person teachers would describe as *lovely, gets on with things* and struggle to say much more.

She sat two rows behind Sarah in English.

Sarah was quiet all lesson. She answered one question and it was technically correct but delivered without her usual precision, slightly slower than normal, like she was running at reduced capacity. Lily kept glancing at her. Jack, who shared this English class with them since year groups combined for it, sat across the room and spent most of the lesson with one eye on his sister.

Jessica noticed all of this.

She noted it internally the way she noted everything.

And said nothing.

She walked home alone.

She always walked home alone. This was not unusual enough for anyone to remark on — she was known as someone who kept to herself, who had acquaintances but not close friends, who was pleasant but somewhat private. This was by design. Close friends asked questions. Close friends noticed things. Close friends eventually wanted reciprocity , wanted you to open up in return for what they shared , and reciprocity was something Jessica could not offer.

The rain had thinned to a persistent drizzle by four o'clock.

She walked with her hood up and her hands in her pockets and her mind working through the day in the methodical way she had been taught to debrief herself. Events. Observations. Anomalies. Recommended actions.

The anomaly was Sarah's collapse.

The event was clear, the symptoms were clear, her report was accurate.

But there was something else underneath it that she had not included in the report and was not sure how to include.

The way Sarah had looked at her.

The specific quality of it.

Jessica had sat in that chair and maintained her composure and said the correct things and when the time came she had left cleanly. That was the job. That was what she was there to do.

But sitting in that chair, watching Sarah piece herself back together, she had felt something she did not have a clean clinical word for.

Not sympathy exactly.

Something closer to recognition.

She pushed it down where she kept everything else and walked faster.

The house was quiet when she arrived.

Number 19. Her father had moved them here six years ago and she had understood, later, that the address had been vetted the same way everything was vetted — its remoteness, its sight lines, its proximity to the nearest Directorate safe point. Home was a function as much as a place.

She made tea. Put her school bag down in its designated spot. Changed out of her uniform.

Her father would not be back until late. He was almost never back before eight.

She sat at the desk in her room and opened her laptop.

This was also part of the routine. She was expected to file a supplementary written report each evening after incidents of note, more detailed than the field message, cross-referenced with existing subject data. She had done this dozens of times. It was not complicated.

She opened the subject file for Sarah Smith.

It loaded the way it always loaded — the standard dossier format, the school information, the family details, the observation log she had been building since October. It was a thorough file. She was a thorough observer.

At the bottom of the file there was a section she had never paid particular attention to before. Related subjects. Links to other files in the network that the system had flagged as potentially relevant based on background data.

There was one link there that had not been there the last time she had looked.

It had appeared today.

She almost scrolled past it.

Then she stopped.

*Restricted Access. Subject Link: EMILY ROBBINS.*

The name sat on the screen in the same clean font as everything else on the Directorate's network. Neutral. Clinical. Formatted the same way every other name was formatted.

But it was not the same as every other name.

It was her sister's name.

Jessica sat very still.

Emily Robbins. Missing six years. Officially, according to everything the Directorate had ever told her family, deceased. A tragedy. A loss. The kind of thing you were encouraged to grieve properly and then move forward from because operational effectiveness depended on emotional stability and emotional stability required resolution.

She had grieved.

She had moved forward.

She had told herself, enough times that she believed it, that Emily was gone and that the best thing she could do was be what Emily never got the chance to be — disciplined, useful, effective.

Her finger hovered over the trackpad.

Restricted Access.

She knew what that meant. She knew exactly what clearance level she held and what clearance level this file required and she knew that the gap between them was not accidental. Restricted files had restricted access for reasons and those reasons were not questioned. That was another thing her father had told her. Another thing she had believed without examining it.

She clicked the link.

The screen flickered.

Warning messages cascaded too quickly to read , security protocol notifications, access violation alerts, clearance flags stacking up in a column on the right side of the screen that she was not looking at because she was looking at the image that had loaded in the centre.

A photograph.

Security camera. Low resolution, slightly overexposed from the brightness of the room it was taken in.

A white room.

A metal table.

Restraints.

And a girl on the table. Dark hair. Face turned slightly away from the camera but not enough. Not enough to make her unrecognisable. Not to someone who had grown up with that face.

Emily.

Alive.

Not six years ago. The timestamp in the corner of the image read eighteen months ago.

Alive and restrained in a white room that Jessica recognised, with a cold drop in her stomach, from the technical schematics she had once seen in a file she was not supposed to have accessed. She had been fourteen. She had thought it was a medical facility.

ACCESS TERMINATED.

The screen went black.

The file closed.

The terminal reverted to the standard login screen, blank and white and giving nothing away.

Jessica did not move.

The room was very quiet. The rain outside. The distant sound of a car somewhere on the road. The particular silence of an empty house that had never quite felt like a home.

She had spent four months watching a girl she had been told was a routine subject.

She had spent six years believing her sister was dead.

Both things, she now understood, had been lies.

The question was not whether the Directorate had lied to her.

The image had answered that with the finality of a door closing.

The question was why Sarah Smith's file had a link to Emily's.

What connected them.

What the Directorate knew that she didn't.

And whether the people who had taken her sister, who had kept her alive in a white room and told her family she was dead, were the same people who had trained Jessica to be exactly what she was.

She sat in the dark of her room for a long time.

The login screen glowed in front of her.

For the first time in years, Jessica Robbins questioned whether the Directorate had ever told her the truth.

And for the first time in years, she was afraid of the answer.

Roviel

(Testimony Aigbe)