Part XL - The Fragile Flicker
Marcus sat motionless in the van, parked across the street from The Collector's Vault. The glass door had swung shut moments ago on the boy who ran back inside. On the sidewalk, the small cluster of kids still buzzed, heads bent over the ashcan comic. He didn't understand the mechanics of what he'd just witnessed, but he knew what he'd seen: a spark.
For a moment, he just watched the kids, breath fogging the windshield. He tried to reconcile the raw excitement he'd just seen with the fear that had been paralyzing him all week. Then something inside him shifted—slow, certain, alive.
Marcus reached out and gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white against the worn plastic. The city outside immediately seemed to shimmer.
He pulled the van into traffic, his eyes already on the garage. The drive back was nothing like the one the night before. Then, he'd driven through silence; now the streetlights flared brighter, the asphalt felt newly awake. A fragile, dangerous flicker of hope burned in his chest.
When he pulled in, the engine coughed once and died, the sound shattering the tomb-still air. Maria looked up from the table where she'd been wiping an already clean surface. Her face was drawn, expecting disappointment. But when she saw him, she froze. The hollowed-out despair was gone—replaced by something fierce, uncertain, that made her stand straighter.
The slam of the van door cracked through the garage like a gunshot. He met her eyes across the concrete.
"Maria," he said, voice rough. "I saw something."
He told her everything—their laughter at first, the quiet that followed, the argument over the final page, the boy who turned and ran back inside.
Maria listened, hands tightening around the rag. Her expression stayed guarded, afraid to believe—but as he spoke, light began to break through. By the time he finished, hope had found her eyes again, thin but unmistakable.
"He really went back in?" she whispered.
Marcus nodded. "He ran."
The despair didn't vanish; it was burned away, replaced by the sharper, more painful ache of hope. They spent the rest of Day Four on a knife's edge. Marcus picked up a wrench, then set it down. Maria poured water into the coffee pot and forgot the grounds. The silence no longer felt empty; it was defiant, daring them to believe. Every hour the phone didn't ring, doubt gnawed louder, mocking the fragile faith that had taken root.
The quiet desperation of the night was worse than the frenzy of the day. They hadn't slept. The clock on the wall ticked like a hammer, its seconds striking through the heavy air of the garage. The hope that had flickered yesterday was now stretched to its breaking point—thin, trembling, painful to hold. When the first gray light crept through the windows, it didn't feel like morning. It felt like judgment.
Marcus looked across the room at Maria. His eyes said what his mouth hadn't yet dared to: this was the end. He opened his lips to speak—to finally admit defeat—
And then, the phone shrieked.
Both of them jumped. Marcus lunged for the hard-wired, wall-mounted phone in the corner, snatching the receiver off the hook. "Hello?"
Gary's voice came through like a live wire. "Marcus! They're gone—every copy! We're sold out! It was a frenzy! One kid traded a vintage action figure just to get the turtle starter!"
Gary hung up. Marcus lowered the receiver, his arm shaking, and looked at Maria. "Twenty dollars," he breathed, the words barely audible. "For the preview."
The line went dead. Silence followed—thick, breathless, unreal. Maria stared at Marcus, her hands gripping the edge of the table. For a heartbeat, they were frozen in disbelief. Then the meaning broke open between them. Marcus simply stood there, lowering the receiver, his throat working. He looked at the table, then back at Maria, and whispered a single word: "Sold."
Marcus laughed—a raw, unrestrained sound. He reached across the table and grabbed Maria's forearms, pulling her upright. She shouted, laughed, and cried all at once, holding tightly to his shoulders as the tension of the week shattered. The garage filled with motion and noise; after days of dread, life poured back in.
The celebration was short-lived. They collapsed against each other, laughing quietly until the wild energy drained away, leaving a deep, exhausting calm. Only then, in the sudden, profound silence, did Maria notice Isaiah. He hadn't moved. He sat cross-legged on the floor, crayon stubs and scraps of paper scattered around him like fallout.
"The sellout curve shouldn't look like this…" he murmured, his gaze fixed on the paper. "Even that indie comic—the one about the mutant turtles—it didn't explode until after the first print run. That took weeks, not a single day."
The words had slipped out. The pencil stilled in his small hand.
Maria frowned. "Mutant… turtles?"
She waited, expecting him to laugh or look up, but his attention was elsewhere. Isaiah didn't answer. He bent back over his notes, eyes narrowing.
"It makes sense because Dragon Ball is starting to get a local community," he said, his voice flat, purely analytical. "They're not just reading; they're claiming it. Trading for it. Building their own stories already." He erased a line, rewrote a figure, then dropped the pencil entirely. "But the numbers still don't explain it," he whispered, voice soft, almost reverent. "It's… stronger. Like it's feeding on something real."
Maria watched him in silence—this small boy surrounded by scraps of paper, trying to quantify a miracle—and felt a shiver she couldn't name. Exhaustion, heavy and absolute, finally pulled her head down to rest on the table. Marcus, slumped in his chair, was already asleep, his breathing deep and rough.
They woke not to the alarm, but to the shriek of the phone. Marcus shot upright, his body aching, his mind instantly registering the daylight streaming into the garage. Maria, her cheek imprinted with the edge of the table, lifted her head.
The hard-wired phone shrieked again, cutting through the silence and jolting them fully awake. Its ringing was sharper, somehow more frantic than the day before.
Marcus rubbed the grit from his eyes. "No," he muttered, shaking his head. "Don't answer it. Let the machine..." He trailed off, realizing they didn't have a machine.
Maria grabbed his arm, her eyes wide with terror. "It's too early, Marcus! What if it's Sarge? What if he thinks this is some kind of run-off?"
"Sarge doesn't call," Marcus said, his voice raw. He looked at the phone, vibrating violently against the wall. "But if it's Gary... we have to know."
On the third shriek, Marcus lunged for the receiver. He snatched it off the hook, holding it away from his ear for a second, bracing himself. "Hello?" It was another store owner from the next town over, his voice frantic. "Gary gave me your number! I've got parents calling me, begging me to find a copy of this thing! What is this?!"
Marcus slammed the receiver back onto the hook, the plastic cracking against the wall. He looked at Maria, his eyes finally empty of fear and instead filled with cold, calculating dread. "The next town over," he whispered. "It's already spreading."
And it didn't stop. It was a firestorm measured in minutes. The rest of the morning was a blur—a relentless, escalating assault spreading through the phone lines. The bell inside the hard-wired unit seemed to melt into one single, piercing shriek. Every minute brought a new wave of demand: calls from other stores, calls from parents, calls from people begging for a single copy of the "turtle starter" preview. Marcus grabbed a marker and began drawing crude hash marks on the wall to track the incoming orders, only to abandon the effort when the count shot past two hundred before nine o'clock. By mid-morning, Maria refused to touch the phone, leaning against the cold cinder block wall, watching the vibrating machine as if it were a bomb.
By noon, the ringing had become a physical assault. Marcus eventually found a discarded receipt and started adding up the cumulative total of all orders and pre-orders received since Day One. When he wrote the final figure—7,000 copies, and still climbing—he stared at the number, then at the single hard-wired phone, and finally at the small, dark garage they called their factory. The volume of orders was beyond anything they had ever conceived, a mathematical reality that dwarfed the small world of their garage.
Overwhelmed by the 7,000 total copies they now had to produce, Marcus needed confirmation. He left Maria staring blankly at the silent phone and drove back to The Collector's Vault, needing to see it with his own eyes. The drive was a slow-motion blur. He kept repeating the number—seven thousand—trying to reconcile the figure with the small, cracked concrete of their neighborhood.
He parked across the street, letting the van idle. For a full minute, he did nothing but stare at the glass storefront, bracing for disappointment.
But there was no disappointment. There was a solid line of kids outside the door. And it wasn't the frantic crowd he'd seen on Day Four. This was a patient, purposeful queue of parents and teenagers waiting their turn.
He watched the sidewalk, focusing on the small, huddled groups of children. They weren't just reading. They were engaged in a form of chaotic, beautiful worship. He recognized Leo, the boy who had run back into the store on Day Four. Leo and his friends weren't arguing about Dragon Ball's power levels; they were debating the core choice of the Pokémon ashcan. He saw them passing around crude drawings, not of Goku, but of the turtle, the fire lizard, and the water creature. They argued with fierce ownership, their hands tracing the lines of their own hastily created characters.
Marcus lowered his head to the steering wheel, his breath leaving a shallow fog on the plastic. The mathematics didn't matter. The money didn't matter.
"It's not ours anymore," he whispered into the wheel, the sound muffled.
He finally understood. This wasn't a successful launch. It wasn't just a business. It was a tidal wave.
Marcus lifted his head, the fog clearing from the plastic. He pulled the van into traffic, the setting sun a bruised orange smear across the windshield. The noise of the street—the horns, the shouts, the blare of a radio—all sounded distant, filtered. The excitement he'd felt on Day Four was gone, replaced by a profound, heavy awe. He wasn't driving home to safety; he was driving back to the epicenter of an expanding earthquake, and he was too tired to be afraid.
Marcus drove back to the garage in a daze. The sun had set, casting long, bruised shadows over the street. He found Maria sitting at the table, the hard-wired phone resting silent for the first time in hours.
They spent the rest of the night listening to the phone ring again, each call another wave crashing on the shore of their unbelievable new reality. They didn't even bother answering most of them. They just sat, shoulders slumped with exhaustion, watching the clock tick, processing the impossible speed of their success.
Maria looked across the table at Marcus, her eyes heavy. "What do we do now?" she whispered. "This isn't a business anymore. It's... something else."
Marcus just shook his head, running a hand over his face. "I don't know, Maria. But it means we did it. We're safe. We survived."
Maria shifted closer, her voice dropping to a low, firm sound. "He can make his Multiverse," she said, nodding toward the house where Isaiah was sleeping. "He proved that this week. But we risked everything, and I almost lost him. We need to talk to him. It goes at our pace now. I won't risk him again."
Marcus didn't argue. He knew that law was stronger than any bank ledger or cosmic blueprint. "We'll draft the new schedule," he said. "Slow, steady, and secure."
Maria nodded once, a gesture of absolute finality. The only sound left in the garage was the distant, muffled ringing of the phone.
The quiet calm finally settled when the sun rose on Day Seven. The frenzy was no longer a question; it was a legend solidifying in real-time...
The garage was silent for a long moment after the call ended. Marcus and Maria remained seated, their shoulders touching as they shared a moment of profound, wordless relief. The heavy weight of the week finally dissolved.
"We did it," Marcus whispered, the sound raw. "We made it."
Maria leaned back, her eyes finding his. The exhaustion was still there, but beneath it was a new, clear resolve.
"We need to talk to him," she said, her voice firm.
Marcus knew exactly who she meant. That part of him.
Marcus let out a long breath, the last of his week's terror leaving his lungs. "The Mind," he agreed, his voice heavy. "We nearly killed the boy."
"He was right about the plan," Maria continued, rubbing the faint imprint of the tabletop off her cheek. "He can make his Multiverse. He proved that. But look at him, Marcus. He collapsed. We risked everything, and we almost lost him."
Maria took a deep breath, the decision visible in the sudden, hard light in her eyes. "We give him his universe. We give him his second pillar. But it goes at our pace now. We won't risk him again for a deadline or a math problem. We survived the Iron Law of the Market, but we will not break the Iron Law of Motherhood again."
Marcus didn't argue. "We'll draft the new schedule," he said. "Slow, steady, and secure."
Maria gave him a faint, tired smile. "Then let's go tell our boss."
She found him in his corner, drawing as always. She sat with him on the floor.
"You were right about the plan," she said softly, her voice thick with emotion. "But you were wrong about the numbers."
Isaiah blinked, his small chin tucked down against his chest in sudden, bashful silence. He began to fidget with the crumpled edge of a sketch, trying to retreat into the world of paper.
Maria didn't wait for him to respond. She leaned forward and swept him up, pulling him into a tight, quiet hug that lifted him off the cold floor.
Isaiah's small body stiffened in her arms, and a faint blush rose on his cheeks. The sudden, unexpected pressure of the hug made the three-year-old in him want to fidget and squirm away in embarrassment. But the Titan's mind, always running computations, registered the feeling—not a crushing force, but a total, inescapable surrender to warmth. He felt the lingering, maternal scent of detergent and sweat; he felt the simple, rhythmic thump of her heart beneath his ear.
Isaiah's Mind: The data was undeniable, chilling in its clarity. His three-day collapse, the nosebleed, the tremor in his hands—it was all biological failure caused by the impossible energy conversion. The terrifying ambition of the Multiverse was literally consuming the fragile scaffolding of his body. The cost was paid not in dollars, but in flesh. I have been reborn for less than a year, the Titan conceded. I possess seventy-eight years of knowledge, but only three years of physical infrastructure. The objective does not change, but the variable of time must be adjusted. There is no need to force the world into existence in a single week. I have time now. I have decades. The architecture must be secure. The boy must survive.
He gave a single, almost imperceptible nod against her shoulder. Maria gently set him down, taking his hand. The conversation was over. The business was done.
They walked from the cold concrete of the garage into the relative quiet of their small home. For the first time, Maria wasn't seeing a titan in a child's body. She was seeing a child, confronted with a force he had observed but never truly understood. He had encountered a new variable that could not be perfectly calculated: the illogical, explosive, and beautiful power of the human heart. His victory was absolute, but his understanding of the world was, for the first time, incomplete.