The streetlights didn't all go out at once.
They failed one by one, as if darkness was being approved in stages.
Aren ran.
His breath tore out of his chest as he sprinted down the street, shoes slapping against wet pavement that felt suddenly unfamiliar beneath his feet. The city was still there—cars passed, windows glowed, distant voices carried—but everything felt… delayed. Like the world was reacting a second too late to his presence.
He turned sharply and nearly crashed into a glass door.
The café.
It was back.
Relief surged through him—until his hand hit the handle.
It didn't move.
Inside, people sat frozen mid-action. A woman held a cup inches from her lips. A barista leaned forward, milk suspended in the air like it had forgotten how gravity worked.
The sign read OPEN.
Time hadn't stopped.
It had skipped him.
Aren stepped back slowly.
"You're drifting," Zane said behind him.
Aren spun around.
Zane stood beneath a flickering streetlamp, but he looked… unstable. The rain didn't fall through him anymore—it bent around his outline, like the world was unsure how solid he was supposed to be.
"What did you do to me?" Aren demanded.
Zane's eyes followed the frozen café, then the street, then Aren. "You rejected a completed correction. That leaves residue."
"Residue of what?"
"Of futures that no longer agree with each other."
The ground trembled faintly—not an earthquake, but something subtler. Like a disagreement traveling through matter.
A man stepped out of an alley nearby, phone pressed to his ear.
"—yeah, I'll be there in five—"
His face blurred.
Not visually—conceptually. Aren couldn't remember what the man looked like even while watching him. The stranger's voice cut off mid-word, and then he was simply gone.
No sound. No light.
Aren staggered back. "You erased him."
Zane shook his head. "I didn't."
Aren's stomach dropped.
"That's happening because of you," Zane continued. "Reality is prioritizing corrections.
Anything too close to your causal radius is being… trimmed."
Aren stared at the empty space where the man had stood. "I don't want this."
"I know," Zane said quietly. "None of you ever do."
Aren's phone vibrated again.
UNKNOWN CONTACT:
YOU ARE DESYNCHRONIZING.
STAY MOVING OR YOU'LL ANCHOR THE WRONG FUTURE.
"Who is sending me this?" Aren demanded.
Zane didn't answer immediately.
Instead, he stepped closer—and for the first time, Aren noticed something wrong with him.
Zane's reflection in a dark storefront window lagged behind his movements. His shadow pointed in the wrong direction.
"You weren't always an anomaly," Zane said.
"Something changes you. Somewhere ahead."
"Then why not kill that version of me?" Aren shot back.
Zane's jaw tightened.
"Because," he said, "that version no longer exists in a reachable timeline."
The café behind Aren cracked down the middle—not physically, but temporally. The frozen figures inside shattered into overlapping moments, repeating the same second again and again.
Zane raised his hand, the air around it warping.
"This timeline is collapsing faster than predicted," he said. "If you stay here, it will take the city with it."
Aren backed away. "So what— you kill me again?"
Zane hesitated.
Just for a moment.
"No," he said. "This time… I follow you."
The street twisted.
And the future opened its first fracture.