[center][hr][img]https://fontmeme.com/permalink/260530/237525d2.png[/img][hr][/center]

[center][sup][color=#B87333][b]LOWER EAST CALDER.
A HALF-COLLAPSED APARTMENT BLOCK.
NOW.[/b][/color][/sup][/center]


By the time Richard arrived, the interesting part was already over. (That was how people usually described it, anyway.)

The hero had already made their exit. The villain, or powered lunatic, or misunderstood victim of the week had already been dragged away in cuffs. The news drones had gotten their best angles of the impact site, the broken windows, the smoke, the crying residents wrapped in foil blankets. Reporters had already said words like tragedy, miracle, accountability, and infrastructure concerns with the kind of practiced gravity that made them sound almost expensive.

Now came the ugly part. Now came the dust. Now came the smell of ruptured pipes, burnt insulation, old cooking oil, and wet concrete. Now came the firefighters checking floor by floor to make sure nobody had been missed. Now came the city inspectors with tablets in hand, already deciding which sections were too dangerous to enter. Now came residents trying to argue their way past police tape because their medication was upstairs, or their cat was upstairs, or their whole life was upstairs.

[color=gold]Now came him.[/color]

Richard stood across the street with his hood up, one hand curled around the strap of his work bag as he looked at the building. Six stories of tired brick leaned slightly to the left, the center of the facade punched inward like something huge had put its fist through the ribs of the place. Hairline cracks spread from the impact point in pale branching lines. To most people, they probably looked random.

They were not random, after all Richard could feel them. Not like sound. Not exactly. More like pressure behind his teeth. A low, grinding ache that crawled up his wrists and settled behind his eyes. Every fracture had a direction. Every load-bearing wall had an argument it was losing. Every bent support beam was a sentence ending badly.

The building was still standing because nobody had told it to fall yet.

“Hey,” one of the cops called as Richard ducked under the tape. “Authorized personnel only.”

Richard pulled the badge from inside his jacket without looking at him. Foundation credentials. Temporary municipal clearance. Rallis-Reynolds emergency response seal stamped in gold at the bottom, because of course it was.

The cop looked at it, then at him.

Recognition arrived a second later, and with it, the usual change in expression. Not awe. Not relief. Something more irritating.

“Oh. You’re Sunbeam.”

Richard’s jaw tightened.

[color=e8b923]“Orichalcum,”[/color] he said.

The cop blinked.

“What?”

[color=e8b923]“Name changed.”[/color]

“Right.” The cop glanced toward the building. “You with your mother’s people?”

No, Richard thought. Unfortunately, yes.

[color=e8b923]“Something like that.”[/color]

He kept walking before the man could ask anything else.

A city engineer met him near the entrance, a woman in a yellow hard hat with concrete dust on one side of her face and the hollow-eyed look of someone who had been awake for too many consecutive disasters.

“You the reinforcement guy?”

Richard almost laughed.

[color=e8b923]“Sure.”[/color]

She did not seem to have the energy to care about his tone. She pointed through the ruined lobby. “Main stairwell is compromised between floors two and four. There are three residents unaccounted for, possibly trapped on the fifth. Fire says they can maybe get up through the rear, but if that central column shifts, we lose the whole east side.”

Richard looked past her.

The lobby had once been ugly in a normal way. Mailboxes. Peeling paint. A fake plant knocked onto its side. Now the ceiling had cracked open and vomited plaster across the floor. One elevator door had buckled outward. Somewhere above, metal groaned with the threat of collapse.

He could see the stress running through the place in invisible gold.

[color=e8b923]“There,”[/color] he said, pointing to a support column near the back wall. [color=e8b923]“And there. The stairwell’s bad, but that column goes first.”[/color]

The engineer followed his gesture, frowning. “You sure?”

[color=e8b923]“No.”[/color] That got her attention.

Richard stepped forward, tugging off his gloves. [color=e8b923]“But the building is.”[/color]

He pressed his bare palm against the nearest crack. For one second, nothing happened. Then gold bled from his skin.

It did not shine like sunlight. It did not burst or flare. It seeped into the damaged concrete in thin molten threads, following every split and fracture with unsettling precision. The crack filled, hardened, and spread into a jagged seam that looked almost beautiful if nobody thought too hard about why it was there.

The pressure in Richard’s skull sharpened but He breathed through it.

Another seam opened across his wrist beneath the skin, faint and golden, tracing an old stress line through bone and tendon. He flexed his fingers until the stiffness passed. Behind him, someone muttered, “That’s creepy.”

Richard did not turn around. [color=e8b923]“Yeah,”[/color] he said. [color=e8b923]“But so is being crushed to death.”[/color]

Nobody had much to say after that.

He moved deeper into the building, palm to wall, palm to column, palm to cracked stair rail. Gold followed him in broken lines. Not clean. Not symmetrical. Not the polished, photogenic arches his sister could raise in the middle of a press conference while cameras caught her from below like she had been designed by God and a marketing team.

Richard’s work was uglier.

It crawled through damage. It admitted something had failed. It left scars where everyone could see them. That was the part his mother hated most.

Helena Rallis-Reynolds had built a career on restoration. On making disasters look temporary. On standing in front of ruins and promising Calder City that everything broken could be remade brighter, cleaner, stronger, and preferably with her family name tastefully visible somewhere in the background.

But Richard did not remake things. He held them together. There was a difference. People noticed it, even when they did not know how to say it...

A child cried somewhere above and Richard stopped. The building shifted. Dust fell in a soft gray curtain from the ceiling.

For a heartbeat, everyone froze. Firefighters. Cops. Residents outside the tape. The engineer beside him.

Richard felt the central column begin to give.

[color=e8b923]“Out,”[/color] he said.

The engineer stared at him. “What?”

[color=e8b923]“Everybody out of the lobby. Now.”[/color]

To her credit, she did not ask twice.

People moved.

Richard ran toward the column.

Pain lanced through both arms as he slapped his hands against the concrete and forced the gold deeper. Not across the surface this time. Into it. Through it. Down through the fractures and into the rebar, chasing every point of failure he could feel. His shoulders locked. His knees almost buckled.

The building groaned above him.

[color=e8b923]“Come on,”[/color] he hissed through his teeth. [color=e8b923]“Come on, you miserable piece of shit.”[/color]

Gold burst across the column in thick, uneven bands. For a moment, it looked like it would not be enough. Then the pressure shifted. Not gone. Not fixed.

Held.

Richard let out a breath that sounded worse than he wanted it to. His hands shook when he pulled them away. Beneath the dust, thin golden lines had crawled halfway up his forearms, vanishing under his sleeves like cracks in a statue someone had tried to repair from the inside.

Outside, one of the reporters had noticed him because of course they had.

A camera drone turned slowly, its little red recording light blinking through the dust-choked lobby.

Richard stared at it and for a second, he considered swatting it out of the air.

Instead, he lifted one gold-marked hand and gave it the smallest, ugliest wave he could manage.

[color=e8b923]“Try to get my good side,”[/color] he muttered.

The engineer returned to the doorway, watching him with an expression that was not quite gratitude and not quite concern. “Can you keep it stable long enough for a fifth-floor extraction?”

Richard looked up the stairwell. Every crack in the building looked back. His arms hurt. His head hurt. His family name was probably already crawling across social media attached to some caption about Sunbeam’s rebrand or Helena’s troubled son or whether Orichalcum was a terrible hero name.

Gods He hated this city and He hated that he cared what it thought but what He hated, most of all, that the building was still full of people and he already knew he was going upstairs.

Richard adjusted his bag on his shoulder and stepped onto the first broken stair.

[color=e8b923]“Yeah,”[/color] he said. [color=e8b923]“But don’t take your time.”[/color]