The city did not return to normal after the scout retreated.That was the first thing Adam noticed as they left the abandoned depot. It wasn’t obvious at first—no screaming alarms, no tearing sky—but subtle wrongness had threaded itself into everything. The streets felt narrower. The buildings leaned a little too close, like they were listening. Reflections in shop windows lagged a fraction of a second behind the people passing them.Reality had learned how to hesitate.They moved cautiously, keeping to dimmer streets, Lilith slightly ahead, Kaleb flanking the rear. Adam walked with his hands buried in his jacket pockets, shoulders tense, Malrick coiled inside him like a blade that refused to sleep.The scout’s withdrawal was not a retreat, Malrick said. It was a report.Adam didn’t respond out loud. He didn’t need to.A bus roared past them too fast for the narrow road, its headlights flaring painfully bright. For a split second, Adam saw something else reflected in the glass—figures

By morning, the city was pretending again.News vans clustered near the alley, reporters speaking in hushed urgency about a “gas explosion,” about “unidentified assailants,” about a woman hospitalized with shock and minor injuries. Authorities cordoned off the area, and by daylight the scorch marks had been scrubbed clean, brick replaced, reality cosmetically restored.But Adam could still feel it.From the rooftop where he stood, the city stretched out beneath a pale sky, traffic moving in obedient lines, people returning to their routines with the brittle determination of a species that sensed danger but refused to name it. The normalcy pressed in on him, artificial and thin, like a bandage over a wound that was still bleeding underneath.Lilith stood a few steps away, arms folded, eyes scanning the horizon. She hadn’t slept. Neither had he. Kaleb was inside the building behind them, pacing, calling contacts, trying to arrange favors he wasn’t sure existed yet.Adam flexed his finge

The city slept that night.Not peacefully—never peacefully anymore—but deeply, as if exhaustion had finally dragged it under. Streetlights hummed with a dull persistence. Apartment windows glowed and dimmed. Somewhere, a dog barked once and then fell silent, as though the sound itself had been swallowed.Adam lay awake.He was on the narrow bed in the spare room of Lilith’s apartment, staring at the ceiling fan as it rotated with a faint, uneven click. Each turn felt too slow, each shadow it cast lingering longer than it should. The room smelled faintly of dust and old paper. Normal things. Comforting things.They didn’t work.Inside him, the fracture was restless.It wasn’t thrashing or expanding—not yet—but it was no longer inert. It responded now. To thought. To proximity. To attention. Every time Adam’s mind drifted, it tugged him sideways, offering impressions that were not quite visions and not quite memories.A city folded inward like wet paper.A horizon that bled.A sky that

The storm arrived without rain.Thunder rolled across the city in slow, deliberate pulses, each one spaced too evenly to be natural. The sound didn’t come from above so much as through—through buildings, through bone, through the thin skin of reality that Adam could now feel stretching tighter by the hour.By nightfall, the city was restless.People lingered on balconies and sidewalks, staring up at the sky as if waiting for permission to panic. Emergency broadcasts cycled through vague reassurances. Power flickered in short, irritating bursts that reset clocks and wiped half-written messages from screens.Inside Lilith’s apartment, the air was tense and crowded with unsaid things.Kaleb sat at the table, laptop open, maps and data layered across the screen in messy clusters. He had been cross-referencing reports all evening—medical anomalies, unexplained blackouts, shadow distortions caught on security footage before being quietly removed.“They’re spreading,” he said finally, rubbin

The aftermath clung to the street like residue.Police cordons went up within minutes, yellow tape snapping in the wind as officers tried—and failed—to impose order on a scene that refused to behave like a normal crime site. Witnesses spoke in fragments, their stories contradicting one another in ways that made reports unusable. Shadows moving on their own. A man who looked like another man. The air turning thick, hard to breathe.Adam was already gone by the time the first official camera crews arrived.Lilith’s apartment felt smaller now, its walls pressing inward as if the space itself had begun to listen too closely. Adam sat on the floor this time, back against the couch, eyes closed. His breathing was controlled, but each inhale scraped raw against something deeper than lungs.Kaleb hovered near the kitchen doorway, unsure where to put his hands, his words, himself. Lilith knelt in front of Adam, close enough to steady him if he tipped but not touching—yet.“You collapsed the pa