What I Take Stays
Lukas doesn't remember his parents. He remembers the orphanage, the cold floors, and the night he pressed his palm against a dying man's hand — and inherited something no child....
Lukas doesn't remember his parents. He remembers the orphanage, the cold floors, and the night he pressed his palm against a dying man's hand — and inherited something no child should ever carry. Every ability he touches, he keeps. Forever. Some gifts come gently: a healer's steady hands, a locksmith's clever fingers, a singer's voice that can calm a riot. Others arrive violently — torn from him in the middle of a fight, born from someone else's rage, someone else's cruelty. He doesn't choose what stays. He only learns, too late, what it costs. By eighteen, Lukas has spent a lifetime hiding what he is. Now he walks from town to town, using what he's gathered to save the people the world has already given up on — even when saving them means breaking something in himself he can't put back together. But Lukas is not the only one who can take a gift and keep it. Somewhere beyond the roads he walks, a bloodline has been doing exactly what he does for generations — collecting, hoarding, weaponizing — and they have already noticed him. He believes he is the only one of his kind. He has no idea how wrong he is, or how close "his kind" really is. What I Take Stays is a story about power that comes with no instructions, about the weight of every gift you can never give back, and about a boy who has to become his own warning before he can become anyone's hope.