Pins and Needles

On Caleth, an industrial planet forgotten at the edges of the Union, the air always smells of scorched metal and the days repeat like factory shifts. Oryn is just another boy with no ambitions worth the name — until the night he and his friends break into an arms dealer's house, looking for nothing more than a story to tell afterward.
Inside they find a weapon that shouldn't exist. Alien technology, forbidden, more myth than object — until Oryn touches it. He doesn't feel an explosion. He doesn't feel power. He feels only pins and needles, barely anything, an itch that fades in seconds.
The friend beside him isn't so lucky.
There's no time to understand what happened before he has to run. No time to grieve before his parents reveal a secret bigger than he is: the gene has run through his veins since birth, and his father has killed for it before — a doctor, decades ago, in a forgotten room Oryn never knew existed until now.
Fleeing Caleth means trusting a man his father knows from another life. A man with a price, not a loyalty. Oryn falls asleep under a drug that hides what he is, and wakes up in Vorne — border world, battlefield, no-man's-land between two empires — with no name, no value, no one who knows who he could become.
What Vorne will teach him is that surviving and being seen are not the same thing. And that sometimes the most dangerous thing you can be is underestimated by someone who should have been afraid.
Before the general. Before the Counselor. Before everything — pins and needles, and a body on the ground.