2026-01-15 21:29:22
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193. When the walls begin to listen
The church doors closed again behind Father Grant, the wood settling into place with a muted thud that sounded far too final for something so ordinary.Rain kept falling.Adam remained where he was, hand still pressed against the stone wall, as though removing it might cause the structure—or himself—to come apart. The fracture inside him had not quieted after Father Grant’s words. If anything, it had grown more alert, like a predator lifting its head after catching a scent it recognized.“They’re closer than you think,” Lilith repeated under her breath. “I hate sentences like that.”Kaleb glanced from the church to Adam. “Please tell me he was being metaphorical.”Adam shook his head slowly. “No. He was being honest.”That unsettled Kaleb more than if Adam had said dangerous. Honest meant choice. It meant awareness. It meant people stepping into this willingly.Malrick’s presence deepened, thickening like fog pooling in a low place. The institution learned how to listen, he said. It d
192. Fault lines beneath the skin
The rain did not stop when morning came.It softened, thinned into a gray curtain that blurred the city into something unfinished, as if the world itself had not fully decided what shape it wanted to keep. Adam woke to that sound—the persistent whisper of water against glass—and for a few seconds, he did not remember where he was or why his bones felt as if they had been hollowed out and refilled with lead.Then the fracture stirred.It no longer screamed when he surfaced from sleep. That alone unsettled him.The apartment was quiet. Too quiet. No hum from the refrigerator, no distant sirens, no muffled voices from neighboring units. The silence pressed in, dense and watchful, like the pause before something moved.Adam pushed himself upright on the couch. Every muscle protested, but he ignored it. Pain was familiar. Silence was not.Lilith sat on the floor a few feet away, back against the wall, knees drawn to her chest. She hadn’t slept. He could tell by the tension in her shoulders
191. The shape of what comes next
The ambulance lights washed the apartment walls in pulses of red and white, stretching shadows into long, distorted limbs that crawled across the ceiling. Agent Rowe was wheeled out on a stretcher, her face pale, eyes closed, chest rising and falling with the mechanical steadiness of someone who had been forcibly returned to themselves.Lilith watched from the doorway, arms crossed tight against her ribs, as if holding herself together required constant pressure.“She won’t remember,” the medic said, more statement than reassurance. “At least, not clearly. Severe dissociation. Neurological trauma consistent with prolonged fugue states.”A lie that almost passed for truth.Lilith nodded anyway and stepped back, letting the door close. The apartment fell quiet again, but it was not the same quiet as before. This one was alert. Listening.Adam stood near the window, staring out at the street below. The city looked unchanged—cars moving, people gathering, life continuing with its stubborn
190. Echoes that learn to breathe
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
189. The name that presses back
The city did not recover.By dawn, official explanations had multiplied—power surges, mass hysteria, isolated incidents exaggerated by social media—but none of them took root. People moved through the streets with the wary precision of prey that had glimpsed a shadow too large to belong to any known predator. Conversations stopped mid-sentence when thunder rolled. Windows stayed shut. Churches filled and emptied and filled again, prayers muttering toward a sky that refused to clarify itself.Adam felt every shift.He sat on the edge of the bed in Lilith’s apartment, elbows braced on his knees, staring at his hands as if they might suddenly belong to someone else. The skin looked the same. Pale. Scarred in familiar places. But beneath it, something hummed—steady, low, inexorable.Malrick was awake now. Fully.Not pressing, not dominating, but present in a way that felt irrevocable. No longer a voice that arrived when summoned—he was a constant pressure at Adam’s back, like another spin
188. The shape of a choice
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
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