He woke up in the wrong body, in the wrong world, surrounded by twelve-year-olds who belonged there.
The system gave everyone a number. A rank. A place in the structure that governed every district, every job, every right a person could hold in the city of Krethavar.
It gave him a word instead.
Unranked.
No district. No rights. No protection. And somewhere in the Sovereign Ranking Authority's upper floors, a Counsel-level administrator who had made two people with the same classification disappear before they understood what they were looking at.
Davan Keir understood what he was looking at.
He had eighty-one days before the system caught up with him. He used them to map a network, find the pattern, build the evidence, and construct a filing that four hundred years of institutional history had never seen.
The system said he had no rights.
He filed a challenge that proved the system had been lying.