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Sigma Klim is seven years old the first time he dies.
He's climbing a tree. His hands wrapping around the branches, feet braced against the trunk and his prize – the ball one of the other kids managed to kick in just such a way that it got stuck between the leaves – is within reach when he slips. His fingertips brush against the cheap plastic as he falls, foot snagging on the way down, sending him toppling headfirst towards the ground.
He feels his skull crack open on the pavement.
For just a moment, a fragile second of time, Sigma lies there and stares up at fluffy white clouds suspended in a backdrop of blue as something too much like brain matter leaks out of him.
As he dies.
Then he wakes up on the couch of his mom's apartment, heart hammering away inside his chest. Reflexively, he puts one hand against where the wound should be but doesn't find anything. The memory of dying is fresh in his mind then, echos resonating in angry waves and he cries. Bawls his eyes out so hard his mother checks up on him, concerned by his outburst.
She holds him and tells him it was just a bad dream. He did fall out of the tree, yes. But he hadn't been that high up. He had managed to grab onto something. He had only bruised the shoulder he landed on.
Pulling up the sleeve of his T-shirt, she shows him the proof. Kisses his forehead and wipes the tears off his cheeks until they dry completely. And by nightfall, the memory is gone – faded like snow.
Snow.
The next winter, those same friends are with him when he drowns.
They are laughing and joking, and Sigma puffs up his chest full of bold words and boyish foolishness. The ice hasn't cracked for spring yet, a perfect sheet of white with a small dusting of snow and they crouch at the lakeside first, pressing their hands against it. It doesn't make so much as a sound, not even when Sigma puts more weight on it, and then he's standing, walking out onto the frozen lake with one foot in front of the other.
His friends yell encouragements, daring him to go further. Sigma takes a few more steps and doesn't even notice the web of hairline fractures forming beneath him.
But he hears the cracks, the grinding before the ice splits beneath him like thunder across the sky. Coldness surges up to meet him, engulfs his legs and torso, and time to scream escapes him. He tries to grab hold of the splinters, use any means necessary to pull himself to safety but it's too smooth and his fingers keep slipping. His head goes under and a frightened inhale sends water up his nose and into his lungs.
It's too cold, too cold to keep his eyes open. He doesn't know what's up or down anymore and underwater it all seems the same direction. There is only deafening silence. No matter how much Sigma tries to swim, his heavy clothes drag him deeper under and bubbles escape out of his mouth.
He can't breathe.
He dies again, and wakes up in bed this time – still drenched but in cold sweat and not icy waters.
Panic grips his throat so tightly he can't cry. Curling into a ball beneath the cover he hyperventilates into his pillow, feeling like he's choking all over again. There is only darkness and quiet, just like beneath the lake. His heartbeat thrums in the back of his skull as he coughs out imaginary slick from the lake bed, embedded deep within his lungs.
Over dinner, his mother asks him why he decided to come home early. His friends went to the lake. Sigma didn't. One of them sunk through the ice near the shore and got their pants wet up to their knees.
Sigma drowned.
"I don't know," he says, but it's hard to speak when you can't breathe. "I guess I just didn't feel like going."
After that, he starts to dream a lot.
In his dreams he's always dying. He's falling from the tree or suffocating in the lake. Sometimes he is on the moon and holding onto something soft and unreal as the world obliterates around him, spraying antimatter into microscopic pieces. He is locked and strapped in and unable to escape with the hard metal of a gun pressed against the side of his head and begging at vague shapes to kill him.
Red tinges his nightmares. Blood – his own or somebody else's. Everything blurs together and in due time it becomes too hard for him to tell the difference. All Sigma knows is when he is awake and not dying.
When he is twelve, he gets hit by a car.
The air stinks of petroleum and burnt asphalt. A voice might have called his name, but all Sigma is aware of is his body crumpling, his bones crushing and poking through his skin and flesh in ways they shouldn't. His leg bents and splits and the pain is unbearable enough to make him black out right before he feels the impact of death when his internal organs splatter from the force being put on his ribcage.
His mother sits with him in the back of the ambulance and holds his hand. She squeezes it softly, to assure him she's there. He doesn't cry.
The doctor tells him he was lucky. Tells him he has really strong bones. He stays in the cast for six weeks – which isn't long at all. When they remove it, they tell him it has healed nicely and he should pick a toy on the way out, for being such a brave boy.
Sigma breaks down screaming.
Sleep medication is prescribed for his persistent, disturbing nightmares. And his mother is assured that this is just a temporary thing, part of puberty. It will go away on its own. If it doesn't, there's always therapy.
And so, Sigma is twelve years old when he realizes other people don't die as often as he does.
The pills do help. He takes them each night and doesn't dream of dying anymore. But death is relentless and chases him into the waking hours. He feels the plummet when he steps off an elevator that didn't collapse and hardly even notices.
"Are the nightmares gone?" his mother asks, tracing one hand against his cheek. Her hands are warm, scorching. They remind him of an incinerator. Sigma is cold as a corpse.
"They're gone," he answers.
He doesn't dream anymore. Just remembers now.
Holding his wife's hand as she dies – starves, body frail and shivering. Their two babies wrapped in blankets, long gone. A promise that in some other timeline they can be happy.
"I'm fine."
Sigma dies again. And by then, he has lost track of how many times that has happened now.