The city did not sleep that night.It tried—lights dimmed, doors locked, televisions murmured reassurances into living rooms—but the attempt felt ceremonial, like a ritual everyone knew would fail. Beneath the surface of things, motion persisted. Pressure shifted. The world adjusted itself around a new center of mass.Adam felt it even before he opened his eyes.He lay on his bed, fully clothed, staring at the faint glow leaking through his curtains. The house was quiet—too quiet. The old ticking clock in the hallway had stopped again, its hands frozen at a time that meant nothing. He had not touched it. He had not needed to.The pull was constant now. No longer sharp, no longer alarming—just present, like gravity. He could almost forget it if he didn’t breathe too deeply, if he didn’t think too hard about the way the air seemed to slope toward him, how sound bent slightly when he spoke.Adam sat up slowly. The floor creaked in a way that didn’t match the movement. The boards answered

They did not return to the house.The decision was made without ceremony, without discussion. Adam stepped out into the night air while the structure behind him creaked and settled into its wounds, and something in him let go of the place. The pull inside him loosened just a fraction, like a knot recognizing that it would not be tightened further.That alone told him everything.Places mattered now. Proximity mattered. What stayed near him was bent by him, whether he wished it or not.The street outside was half-lit, lamps flickering in uneven patterns. Neighbors stood in doorways and on porches, murmuring to one another, staring at the cracked windows and sagging walls of Adam’s house with the unsettled awe people reserved for disasters that had narrowly missed them. No one approached. No one asked questions.Instinct kept them back.Adam felt it—the way attention slid off him when he passed, how eyes tracked him and then quickly looked away, minds nudged subtly aside by Malrick’s in

The city did not know it had survived something.That unsettled Adam more than the scout itself.Traffic resumed along distant roads. Power flickered once, then steadied. Phones buzzed back to life in pockets and handbags, their screens filled with messages that had no idea how close the world had come to folding inward like a bad thought. Even the quarry, scarred and fractured, began to settle, stone grinding softly as gravity reclaimed its confidence.Life continued.Adam stood at the edge of the pit and felt the lie of it press against his skin.“What you did back there,” Kaleb said, breaking the silence at last, “that wasn’t instinct. That was… control.”Adam didn’t turn. His eyes were unfocused, tracking patterns only he could see—residual stress lines in the air, faint distortions rippling like heat mirages where the scout’s presence had brushed reality.“It wasn’t control,” Adam said. “It was alignment.”Lilith watched him closely. “You’re splitting hairs.”“No,” Malrick said,

The night did not recover.That was the first thing Adam understood when the silence stretched too long and the air failed to settle back into anything resembling normalcy. The seam had closed, yes—but closure did not mean erasure. The sky still carried a faint discoloration, like a bruise under skin, barely visible unless one knew exactly where to look.Adam knew.He stood apart from Lilith and Kaleb now, a few deliberate steps of distance he hadn’t consciously taken. His body had moved before his mind finished deciding. The fractures inside him were not agitated, not loud—but they were alert, arranged in a configuration that felt uncomfortably like readiness.Lilith noticed the distance immediately.“Hey,” she said, sharper than before. “Don’t do that.”Adam didn’t turn at first. His gaze was fixed on the empty space where the seam had been. “I’m not leaving,” he said. “I’m adjusting.”“That’s worse,” Kaleb muttered. He rubbed his arms, as if cold, though the night was warm. Too war

Morning arrived without permission.It did not feel earned, or clean, or real in the way mornings were supposed to feel. The light crept over the city like a hesitant intruder, pale and strained, catching on glass and concrete as if unsure those surfaces would still accept it. Shadows behaved strangely—stretching too long, clinging where they shouldn’t, peeling away from objects a heartbeat too late.The world had flinched the night before.Now it was waiting.Adam woke against the same brick wall, Lilith’s jacket folded beneath his head, her presence close enough that he could feel the warmth of her body even before he opened his eyes. For a brief, fragile second, there was the illusion of normalcy: the low murmur of distant traffic, the smell of damp concrete, the ache in his muscles that came from strain rather than metaphysics.Then the pressure returned.It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t even discomfort in the traditional sense. It was the awareness of weight without mass, of an expectat