The dream began, as it always did, with the rain.
It was not a gentle rain, but a relentless, cold downpour that turned the world into a blur of gray movement and watery reflections. Liana stood on the sidewalk, though she did not feel her feet on the concrete. She was a ghost here, an observer tethered to a scene she could not alter. The air smelled of wet asphalt and the distant, metallic tang of the river.
Before her stretched the Franklin Bridge, its iron girders rising like the blackened ribs of some colossal beast against the bruised twilight sky. Cars moved in slow, glowing trails of red and white, their headlights cutting weak paths through the curtain of water. The sound was a symphony of white noise—the hiss of tires on wet pavement, the drumming on countless roofs, the low groan of the wind through the suspension cables.
She knew this place. She crossed it every Tuesday on her way to the university library. But in the waking world, it was merely a route, a practical expanse of steel and concrete. Here, it was a stage.
Her gaze, unbidden, fixed on a point midway across the bridge. A blue sedan, an older model with a distinctive crack like a lightning bolt across the rear taillight, was changing lanes. It moved with a jerky urgency. Beside it, in the adjacent lane, a city maintenance truck, painted a dull yellow, rumbled along, its bed laden with orange traffic cones and warning signs.
The details were hyper-real, painfully sharp. She could see the water beading on the blue sedan's windshield, the worn tread of the truck's tires, the faint glow of a phone screen illuminating the face of the sedan's driver—a woman with dark hair pulled into a messy bun, her features pinched with stress.
A pressure built in Liana's chest, a cold, familiar dread. *No,* she thought, the word soundless in the dream space. *Not again.*
The blue sedan swerved abruptly, overcorrecting. The tires lost their purchase on the slick asphalt. Time seemed to dilate, stretch, and then snap. The sedan spun, a slow, graceful, terrible ballet. The yellow truck's driver slammed his brakes. The massive vehicle skidded, its rear end swinging out like a mallet.
Impact.
The sound was not the explosive crash of movies, but a sickening, crunching thud of metal folding into metal, of glass shattering into a thousand crystalline droplets that mixed with the rain. The blue sedan was pinned against the guardrail, its front end compressed. The truck had come to rest at a diagonal, blocking two lanes.
Silence, for a heartbeat. Then, the screams began. Not from the vehicles, but from the dream itself, a high-pitched psychic feedback of terror and pain that vibrated through Liana's very bones. She tried to close her eyes, but the dream did not allow it. She was forced to watch as doors were flung open, as figures stumbled out, as others ran toward the wreckage.
Her focus was pulled, like a camera zooming in, through the shattered passenger window of the blue sedan. In the back seat, strapped into a car seat, was a child. A little boy, no more than three, with a head of curly brown hair. He was crying, his face red and contorted, but alive. And on the dashboard, slowly tilting with the deformed angle of the car, was a small, brightly colored toy dinosaur. A green stegosaurus.
The dream held that image: the crying child, the toy, the rain streaming down the broken window. Then, with the suddenness of a switched-off light, it ended.
***
Liana awoke with a gasp, her body jerking upright in bed. The sheets were tangled around her legs, damp with cold sweat. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. The gray light of a cloudy dawn filtered through her window, painting her modest bedroom in shades of ash and pearl.
She sat there, breathing, waiting for the residual terror to subside. It always took a few minutes to reorient herself, to untangle the vivid, emotional threads of the dream from the calm, solid reality of her waking life. She ran a hand through her damp, dark hair and glanced at the clock on her nightstand: 6:17 AM.
It was Tuesday.
The significance of the day dropped into her stomach like a stone. Her dreams were never random. They were visits to potential futures, windows into events that *could* happen, that often *did* happen, unless…
Unless she did something.
For years, since adolescence, she had carried this curse, this gift. At first, she had dismissed the dreams as intense nightmares, products of an overactive imagination. But the coincidences became too frequent, too precise. She would dream of a forgotten wallet left on a park bench and find it there the next day. She would dream of a friend's minor bicycle accident hours before it occurred. The visions were fragments, mostly trivial. But in the last two years, they had grown more potent, more consequential, and infinitely more terrifying.
The bridge. The rain. The blue sedan. The child.
She pushed the covers back and padded to her small kitchen, the worn floorboards cool beneath her feet. She filled a glass with water and drank it slowly, staring out the window at the quiet, waking city. Her apartment was on the fourth floor of an old brick building, overlooking a street lined with oak trees. It was a normal life, or she fought desperately to make it one. She was a graduate student in archival studies, a profession built on ordering the tangible past, not navigating the chaotic possible-future. She found solace in the dust of old documents, the certainty of dates and signatures.
But the dreams refused to be filed away.
She had tried ignoring them. Once, in her second year of university, she dreamed of a fire in a dormitory kitchen caused by a faulty coffee pot left on. She awoke with the smell of smoke in her nostrils, but convinced herself it was just a dream, a silly anxiety about finals. She went to her morning lecture. By noon, the dorm was evacuated, and the kitchen was a blackened shell. No one was hurt, but the guilt had eaten at her for weeks. She had *known*.
Since then, she had adopted a grim policy. If the dream was clear, specific, and involved imminent danger to people, she would intervene. But how? She couldn't go to the police. "Hello, Officer, I had a prophetic dream," was a one-way ticket to being dismissed as a crank or worse. Her interventions had to be subtle, clever, a nudge to the timeline rather than a shove.
She showered, the hot water doing little to dispel the chill left by the dream. As she dressed—jeans, a simple sweater, a waterproof jacket—she replayed the details. The Franklin Bridge. Rain. A blue sedan with a cracked taillight. A yellow city maintenance truck. A woman driver. A little boy in the back. A green stegosaurus.
The rain was forecast for the afternoon. That gave her time.
Her first class wasn't until eleven. She took the bus, her usual route, but got off two stops early, near the south approach to the Franklin Bridge. The morning was still dry, the clouds gathering with a pregnant heaviness. The bridge loomed, just as in her dream, but now bathed in flat, gray daylight, not the dramatic twilight of the vision. It was mundane, noisy, functional. The sheer normalcy of it was almost mocking.
She walked along the pedestrian pathway, her hands shoved deep in her pockets, her eyes scanning the traffic. Looking for a blue sedan. Looking for a crack in the shape of lightning.
For an hour, she walked back and forth, watching the river of vehicles. She saw blue cars, but none with the right crack. She saw maintenance vehicles, but they were white, not yellow. Doubt began to creep in. What if this was the one time the dream was wrong? What if she was standing in the cold, wasting her morning, for a figment of her subconscious?
The first drops of rain began to fall, fat and sporadic. People on the sidewalk opened umbrellas or quickened their pace. Liana pulled up her hood, her heart rate picking up. *It's happening.*
And then she saw it.
A blue Honda Civic, at least ten years old, was caught in the slow-moving traffic approaching the bridge entrance. And there, on the left rear taillight, was a clear, zigzagging crack.
Liana's breath caught. Her feet rooted to the pavement. This was it. The car from her dream. She could see the driver now—a woman, dark hair in a bun, her head tilted as if listening to something. And in the back… Liana strained her eyes. Yes, the silhouette of a child's car seat.
The car inched forward, merging onto the bridge proper. The rain began to fall in earnest, a steady drizzle that promised to become a downpour. Panic, cold and sharp, shot through Liana. The accident would happen midway across. She was still on the south end. She had to get closer, had to do… something.
She started walking quickly, then broke into a run, her boots slapping on the wet concrete of the walkway. The wind whipped at her hood, and the sound of the traffic became a roar mixed with the rain. She kept the blue sedan in sight, two lanes over, its cracked taillight a beacon.
Halfway across. The sedan was in the middle lane now. A large yellow maintenance truck rumbled up in the lane to its left. The exact configuration from her dream.
Her mind raced. What could she do? Scream? Wave? The driver wouldn't hear her, wouldn't see her. Throw something? She had nothing. She felt a surge of utter helplessness, the familiar agony of the witness.
The sedan's brake lights flashed. The traffic ahead had slowed. The sedan swerved slightly, just as in the dream. This was the moment. The overcorrection. The skid.
Without conscious thought, acting on pure, desperate instinct, Liana did the only thing she could think of. She fumbled in her jacket pocket, found her heavy set of keys, and hurled them with all her strength at the blue sedan's passenger-side window.
The keys struck the window with a loud, sharp *crack* that was audible even over the storm and traffic. They did not break the glass, but they left a visible mark and a sound that was unmistakable.
The woman driver's head jerked to the right, startled. Her hands tightened on the wheel. The slight, panicked swerve she had begun to make halted. She straightened the car, her focus abruptly pulled from the slowing traffic ahead to the source of the impact on her window.
In that crucial second of distraction and correction, the yellow truck beside her passed without incident. The moment of potential collision evaporated. The blue sedan continued forward, smoothly now, merging with the flow of traffic.
Liana stood frozen, her arm still outstretched, breathing in ragged gulps. The rain soaked through her jacket. Her keys lay somewhere on the road, likely crushed. But the blue sedan was driving away. The accident had not happened.
A strange, hollow sensation flooded her. It was relief, but a sharp, aching relief, mixed with exhaustion and the bizarre guilt of having damaged a stranger's property. She had done it. She had changed the outcome. The little boy in the back seat was safe. He would get to keep his green stegosaurus.
She turned and began the long, wet walk back the way she had come, her body trembling with spent adrenaline. She would need to call a locksmith. She would be late for her class. She felt profoundly tired.
As she reached the end of the bridge, she glanced back one last time. The traffic flowed steadily, a seamless, glittering snake in the rain. No one would ever know what almost was. No one but her.
A man in a dark coat, standing under the shelter of the bridge's massive stone anchorage, lowered a small camera. He had been photographing the river in the rain. His lens had, by chance, captured a figure on the pedestrian walkway in the moment she threw something. He zoomed in on the image on his screen, curious. A young woman, face pale and intense, caught in an act of bizarre public vandalism. He shook his head, a faint frown on his face. People did strange things. He deleted the photo. It was not the shot he wanted.
Adam Wright scrolled past the deleted image, his mind already moving to the next composition. He was a journalist, always looking for a story. But this, he thought, was just a blurry picture of a strange girl in the rain. No story there.
Liana's walk home was a trudge through a world rendered soft and blurred by the rain. The euphoria of success had faded, leaving behind a gritty residue of anxiety and physical fatigue. Her fingers, cold and stiff, fumbled with the door key she kept hidden under a flowerpot on her tiny balcony—a spare she was profoundly grateful for now. The apartment welcomed her with silence and the faint, familiar scent of old books and lemon-scented cleaning spray.
She peeled off her soaked jacket and hung it over the shower rail, then stood in the middle of her living room, dripping onto the rug. The quiet felt loud. In the stillness, the vivid echo of the dream reasserted itself: the crunch of metal, the child's cry. She squeezed her eyes shut, forcing the images back. They were just memories now. They hadn't happened. She had prevented them.
But at what cost? The question whispered at the edge of her mind. Not the cost of her keys, but a deeper, more nebulous cost. Every intervention felt like plucking a thread from a vast, intricate tapestry. She could never see the whole pattern, only the small snag she was trying to fix. What unintended consequences did her tugging create?
She pushed the thought away. It was a philosophical rabbit hole she couldn't afford to fall into. The immediate, practical consequences were enough: she was cold, wet, keyless, and had missed her morning lecture on 18th-century tax records. She needed to regain control of her ordinary day.
After a hot shower that steamed up the small bathroom, she dressed in dry clothes and made a strong cup of tea. Sitting at her small kitchen table, she opened her laptop and composed a brief, apologetic email to her professor, citing a sudden migraine. It wasn't entirely a lie; the aftermath of a powerful dream often left her with a pounding headache. She then searched for a local, reputable locksmith and scheduled an appointment for that afternoon.
The mundane tasks were a balm. They anchored her in the real, the procedural, the manageable. She reviewed notes for her afternoon seminar, her eyes tracing lines about archival preservation techniques, but her mind kept drifting back to the bridge. The woman's startled face. The specific, jagged crack in the taillight. The green toy dinosaur. The details were the anchors of the visions; they were what made them real, what allowed her to identify the tipping point in reality. Without them, she would be lost in a sea of vague premonitions.
Her phone buzzed, shattering the quiet. The screen showed her mother's name. Liana's stomach tightened with a different kind of anxiety. She let it ring three times before answering.
"Hi, Mom."
"Liana, sweetheart. I was just thinking about you. How are you?" Her mother's voice was warm, layered with the gentle concern that had become its permanent tone since Liana's teenage years—the years the "troubles," as her mother called them, had begun.
"I'm okay. Just studying. A bit of a headache." This, at least, was safe ground.
"You work too hard. Are you eating properly? Sleeping?" The question about sleep was lightly asked, but Liana heard the weight behind it.
"I'm sleeping fine," Liana said, aiming for nonchalance. It was a careful dance. Her mother knew about the dreams, of course. She had been the one to find a fifteen-year-old Liana sobbing and shaking after a particularly vivid vision of a neighborhood dog being hit by a car. They had never spoken of it in depth; it was treated as a sensitive, almost medical condition, like epilepsy. Something to be managed, medicated if possible, and certainly not discussed with outsiders. Her father, before he left, had called it an overactive imagination. Her mother called it "a sensitivity." Liana had no name for it that didn't sound like madness.
"That's good," her mother said, relief audible. "Listen, I was hoping you could come for dinner on Sunday. Your Aunt Clara is visiting."
Aunt Clara. Her mother's older sister, a sharp-eyed, no-nonsense woman who worked as a statistician. Liana had always felt subtly assessed under Clara's gaze, as if she were a flawed dataset.
"Sure, that sounds nice," Liana said, already dreading the polite interrogation about her thesis progress and future plans.
"Wonderful. I'll make that potato bake you like." Her mother paused. "Liana… everything else is alright? You'd tell me if… if you were having any problems?"
The unspoken question hung in the air: *Any more dreams?*
"Everything's fine, Mom. Really. Just busy with school."
They exchanged a few more pleasantries before hanging up. Liana put the phone down and let out a long breath. The conversation was a reminder of the wall she lived behind. The sheer isolation of her secret. There was no one she could truly talk to, no one who would understand the visceral weight of what she carried. The loneliness of it was sometimes more crushing than the fear.
The locksmith arrived promptly at two, a grizzled man in his fifties with competent, grease-stained hands. He replaced her lock and made three new keys with quiet efficiency, asking no questions beyond the practical. Liana paid him in cash, thankful for his professional silence.
With her new keys in hand, she felt a small measure of normalcy restored. She gathered her books and headed out for her afternoon seminar. The rain had eased to a misty drizzle, and the city had the slick, polished look it got after a wash. The walk to campus was familiar, a path she took nearly every day. She passed the usual cafes, the newsstand, the small park where office workers ate their lunches. It was all so solid, so real. She tried to absorb the normality, to let it steady her.
The seminar room was warm and stuffy, smelling of wet wool and coffee. Her classmates—a dozen other graduate students—were already seated around the long table, chatting quietly. Liana took her usual seat near the window, nodding greetings.
"You missed a thrilling morning," murmured Ben, the student beside her, his tone dry. "Fifty slides on watermark variations in pre-industrial paper. Riveting."
Liana managed a weak smile. "Migraine. I'll catch up."
The professor, Dr. Evans, a woman with a severe grey bob and a passionate love for dust, began the session on the challenges of digital archiving. Liana opened her notebook, her pen poised. This was her world. Ordered. Historical. Safe.
But as Dr. Evans discussed bit rot and format obsolescence, Liana's gaze drifted to the window. Across the street, on the steps of the student union building, a man was sitting, sketching in a pad. He was bundled in a dark coat, a beanie pulled over his hair. There was something vaguely familiar about the slope of his shoulders, the intent focus. She couldn't place it.
She shook her head, forcing her attention back to the lecture. She was being paranoid. The day's events had left her jumpy.
The seminar ended, and the students spilled out into the hallway. Liana was packing her bag when her phone buzzed again. This time, it was a number she didn't recognize. A local prefix. She hesitated, then answered.
"Is this Liana Marek?" A man's voice, pleasant, professional.
"Yes. Who is this?"
"My name is Adam Wright. I'm a reporter with the *Chronicle*. I was wondering if I could have a few minutes of your time?"
Ice water trickled down Liana's spine. A reporter. How? Why?
"Regarding what?" she asked, her voice carefully neutral.
"I'm working on a piece about civic engagement and public safety. I was down by the Franklin Bridge this morning, taking some photos, and a witness mentioned seeing a young woman involved in an… unusual incident on the pedestrian walkway. They gave a description that led me to you. I just wanted to get your perspective."
A witness. The man under the anchorage. He *had* seen her. And he hadn't deleted the photo. Or he had, but someone else had seen. Panic, cold and slick, rose in her throat. She thought fast.
"I'm not sure what you're referring to," she said, injecting a note of polite confusion into her voice. "I was on the bridge this morning, yes. It was raining very hard. I slipped and dropped my keys. It was quite embarrassing. I'm afraid I might have startled a driver when I reached for them. Is that the 'incident'?"
There was a pause on the other end of the line. She could almost hear him weighing her explanation. It was plausible, mundane.
"You dropped your keys," Adam Wright repeated, his tone noncommittal.
"Yes. Over the railing, unfortunately. I had to call a locksmith. It's been a very annoying day." She let a touch of genuine irritation seep into her voice. "I'm sorry, but if that's all, I really have to go. I have a thesis chapter to write."
"Of course," he said, his voice still smooth. "I apologize for bothering you. The description was just… quite vivid. The witness said it looked like you threw something at a car."
Liana's grip tightened on the phone. "In the rain, from a distance, things can look strange. I reached out when I slipped. Maybe it looked like a throw. It wasn't." She was layering the lie now, building it with details. "Like I said, just a clumsy accident. Now, I really must go."
"Alright. Thank you for your time, Ms. Marek." The line went dead.
Liana stood in the bustling hallway, feeling utterly exposed. He hadn't believed her. She could hear it in the careful neutrality of his goodbye. A reporter was sniffing around. For a story about "civic engagement"? Unlikely. He was curious. Curiosity was dangerous.
She needed to disappear, to be boring, to give him nothing else to latch onto. She walked quickly out of the building, head down, blending into the stream of students. She decided to skip her usual visit to the library and go straight home.
As she turned onto her street, the feeling of being watched prickled at the back of her neck. She glanced over her shoulder. The sidewalk was busy with people returning from work, walking dogs, heading to the corner store. No one stood out. No man in a dark coat.
She let herself into her building and climbed the stairs, her heart still beating a nervous rhythm. Inside her apartment, she locked the door and slid the deadbolt home, leaning against the wood as if to barricade herself against the outside world.
The dream had been averted, but it had sent ripples. And the ripples had reached a man with a notebook and questions. The delicate balance of her life felt threatened. She had acted to save a child, and in doing so, might have drawn a spotlight onto the very secret that allowed her to act at all.
The irony was bitter. She walked to the window, looking down at the peaceful, rainy street. The green stegosaurus was safe in a car somewhere, clutched in a little boy's hand. That was what mattered. That had to be what mattered.
Yet, as twilight deepened into evening, Liana couldn't shake the image of the reporter's face—one she'd never seen, but could easily imagine: intelligent, skeptical, persistent. Adam Wright. A new variable in her already complicated equation.
She made a simple dinner but had little appetite. She tried to read, but the words swam on the page. The silence of the apartment was no longer peaceful; it felt expectant.
Later, as she prepared for bed, she stood before the bathroom mirror. The face that looked back was pale, with shadows under dark eyes. The face of a young woman who looked ordinary in every way. No one would guess she carried futures in her head like loaded dice.
She thought of the bridge, of the moment her keys left her hand. That had been a choice. A terrifying, necessary choice. She wondered how many more such choices lay ahead, and what price she would have to pay for each one.
Turning off the light, she climbed into bed, dreading the moment she would close her eyes. Sleep was no longer a refuge; it was the gateway to her other, more fraught reality. She lay in the dark, listening to the distant hum of the city, waiting for the next dream to find her.