No One Looks Up

His growth did not feel like ascension from the inside. It felt like debt. Every absorbed fragment carried a history: the terror of the person who first manifested it, the arrogance of the person who abused it, the tenderness of the person who used it once to save someone and then disappeared. Kieran began to understand that Adaptive Evolution was not consumption. It was witness. If he took in a piece of someone's impossible gift without honoring the life around it, the power curdled, turning heavy and wrong. When he remembered the person, the fragment settled. The body followed the ethics. That discovery frightened Naveen more than any lab result.