The comment sat in her mind like a splinter she couldn't dig out.
When the glass breaks, it will start at his fingertips.
For two days, every time Amara walked past a window in the tower, she found herself glancing at her own hands, as if expecting cracks to spider out from her skin.
The war room had done what war rooms do: turned panic into bullet points.
Treat intel as unverified.
Watch Erikson and anyone who fit the description.
Set bait in internal reports to trace the leak.
Do not, under any circumstances, let an anonymous user with a zeroed-out avatar decide their strategy.
The last one was Eira's line. She'd said it while looking directly at Amara.
"We don't let stories dictate reality," Eira had added. "We use them. Not the other way around."
Easy to say for someone who didn't literally draw the future by accident.
Now it was upload day again, and Amara was done being haunted by a username.
She sat at her desk, tablet in front of her, blinds open to a washed-out afternoon sky. The city was a gray smear beyond the glass, the river a thin silver slash.
On the screen: Episode 48 – "Fault Lines".
The last panel was still blank.
This was supposed to be the betrayal episode.
She'd planned it weeks ago—before Subscriber000, before the gala, before seeing unsynced eyes in the crowd. The arc had been building toward it: a traitor in the boardroom. A wolf in human clothing. A crack in Gray's inner circle that would spill chaos into the corridors of power.
Originally, she'd imagined the betrayer as a composite. A nameless exec, all sleek hair and sharp suits and vague "old money" vibes. Fictional. Safe.
Then the comments started landing too close.
Then the "glass, fingertips" message.
Then the profile that sounded way too much like Erikson.
Now her story and her life were too close for comfort.
She had two options:
Fold. Draw exactly what the stranger seemed to be nudging her toward. Make Erikson's twin the traitor. Lean into the "oracle."
Do the opposite. Break their pattern. Refuse to let her panels be their megaphone.
Her stomach twisted.
"You're not the only one who can see ahead, little artist."
The arrogance of it made something in her snap.
She was tired of feeling like a puppet in her own comic.
"No," she muttered to herself. "You don't get to write my story."
She reached for the stylus.
In the storyboard, she duplicated the boardroom she knew too well by now. Long table. Glass wall with the city reflected. Wolves in human skin, spaced like chess pieces. Human directors, their power smelling like ink and cold air.
She placed Lucian's analog at the head of the table, gloved hands folded.
And then, deliberately, she pointed the pen at someone else.
Not the Erikson-figure. Not the man who stood just behind him in her mind's eye, smirking through a gala.
She chose the CFO analog instead—the younger one, recently promoted, the fandom's favorite "soft wolf-adjacent human." The one everyone wrote fix-it fic about whenever she drew him looking tired.
In the comic, tonight, he was the one who broke.
She drew him glancing at his phone under the table. Beads of sweat at his collar. The heroine's narration: "Sometimes the first fracture comes from someone you thought was harmless. That's the trick of glass: it looks solid until it doesn't."
She sketched the betrayal as a quiet thing. A mis-sent email, a data packet redirected, a confession in a stairwell. No explosions. Just trust, bleeding out in ones and zeros.
She did not draw an older man's fingers resting on metaphorical glass.
She did not draw a board member's too-wide smile.
Every line defied the hint.
Every choice was a small, petty "no" to the stranger who thought they owned her future.
When she finished, her neck ached and her head hummed, but it wasn't the stabbing pain of forcing a rewind. It was the normal ache of too many hours hunched over a tablet.
See? she told herself. I can still steer. I can still choose.
She exported the pages, sent them through the usual gauntlet—Zara checking for accidental intel, Eira giving the barest nod that meant "this won't blow up a safehouse"—and scheduled the episode.
"Happy?" she asked her reflection in the dark window.
Her reflection looked like it always did on update day: tired, wired, a little sick.
"Not really," she admitted. "But at least it's my mess."
The episode dropped at 9 p.m. sharp.
As always, the numbers surged.
Amara sat on the couch this time instead of at her desk, Zara perched upside-down on the other end like a particularly mouthy gargoyle, legs propped over the back cushions, laptop balanced on her stomach.
They watched the comment count tick up like two scientists monitoring a volatile experiment.
"Here we go," Zara murmured.
The first comments were a wave.
wolfgirl420:"OH MY GOD I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING"
PanelWitch:"Not the cinnamon-roll CFO 😭 BlackSun why"
economic_howl:"As a finance bro I can confirm the real betrayal is doing that much unpaid overtime"
Memes, grief, theories. Some fans screamed that she'd "betrayed" them by making a beloved side character corrupt. Others applauded the twist. A few argued that the betrayal was obviously coerced, and that the CFO was being set up by someone worse.
Normal chaos.
"Where is he," Amara muttered.
"Give the oracle a second," Zara said lightly, but Amara heard the tension under the joke.
Refresh.
Refresh.
There.
Subscriber000 — 00:00:09
"You picked the wrong crack on purpose. I respect the impulse."
Amara's skin prickled.
A second comment, right beneath:
"But drawings don't change where the pressure really is."
Zara whistled through her teeth.
"Okay," she said. "Rude."
"Don't," Amara said, catching her hand before she could type anything. "Protocol, remember? We don't feed it."
Zara sighed and sat on her hands.
"This still feels like watching someone throw pebbles at your window and not being allowed to flip them off," she grumbled.
Amara's jaw clenched.
The urge to reply burned in her fingertips, but Lucian's voice was in her head: They're baiting you.
She forced herself to lock her phone, shove it face-down on the coffee table, and focus on the warm, solid presence of Zara snarking about other, safer comments.
For one night, at least, she pretended that the cryptic lines were just that—cryptic, harmless.
The world, being the world, did not care what she pretended.
The board meeting was three days later.
She wasn't supposed to know that, technically. Those schedules weren't public. They were buried in Lucian's calendar, in Accord files, in the invisible pulse of city power.
But she felt it.
The morning had that particular flavor of tension that even her coffee couldn't drown. Wolves moved differently in the tower: tighter, alert. Human staff walked a little straighter, laughed a little less.
Lucian was gone before she woke up—no text, no knock. Just the faint scent of his aftershave in the hallway and the ghost of his bond humming low.
In his place: a message from Zara.
Zara:Big human-wolf mixed meeting today. Stay on floors 20 and below. Don't wander near 40+ without a buddy. Emergency channel is hot if anything feels weird. xoxo.
Amara stared at the text for a long moment, then replied:
Amara:Define weird.
Zara:Anything that smells like panic.
Or like Erikson's cologne.
Amara snorted despite herself.
Amara:That last one is just cruelty.
Zara:You're welcome.
She tried to work.
She lasted ten minutes.
Her pen dragged uselessly over blank panels. Every time she tried to focus on a line, her mind conjured images of the boardroom upstairs: gleaming table, glass wall, human faces, wolf-scent hidden under expensive deodorant.
She saw, unbidden, the panel she'd drawn for Episode 48: the CFO analog hunched in guilt, the heroine's narration about "harmless cracks."
She slammed the tablet shut.
"Okay," she told her empty apartment. "Productivity is cancelled."
She grabbed her laptop and took the elevator down, ignoring the little spike of static in her head when the floor numbers climbed past the war room level.
The media floor—somewhere between the human corporate world and the wolf dens—buzzed with nervous energy. Employees hunched over screens, drafting press releases and social posts, their words ready to be fired off depending on how the board came down on whatever financial cliff they were currently peering over.
Zara's "cave" was tucked into one corner, two doors and three keypads away from the main open-plan area. Amara let herself in with the fingerprint Lucian had authorized weeks ago.
Zara sat in front of a wall of monitors, hair in a messy knot, hoodie hood up. The room was dim, lit mostly by the glow of pixelated city maps, scrolling code, and security camera feeds.
She glanced back, saw Amara, and jerked her chin in greeting.
"Welcome to the anxiety aquarium," she said. "You want popcorn or a panic attack? We've got both."
"Any updates?" Amara asked, coming to stand behind her chair.
"Board meeting started twenty minutes ago," Zara said, nodding at one screen showing a sanitized calendar view. "No fire alarms, no sudden stock plummets, no wolves barging in with blood on their clothes. Yet."
"And our favorite subscriber?" Amara asked, trying to sound casual.
"Quiet," Zara said, tapping a window that showed a filtered feed of her comments. "No new cryptic haikus since your upload night. Honestly, that almost makes me more nervous."
Amara stared up at one screen showing a live, muted view of the lobby. Humans walked in and out. Security badges flashed. Nothing looked wrong.
"So," she said. "We're just… waiting to see who reality agrees with. The episode or the comment."
Zara winced.
"When you put it like that," she said, "I want to throw up."
Amara folded her arms.
"I chose," she said, more to herself than to Zara. "I drew a different path. Little artist, big stubbornness. The universe can deal."
The universe, somewhere, cracked its knuckles.
On the far left monitor, a tiny red icon flashed.
Zara's posture changed in an instant—slouched gamer to cold professional.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard.
"What?" Amara asked, stomach dropping.
"Security ping," Zara said. "Flagged login on an internal server. Red channel."
The screen split to show logs: IP addresses, usernames, timestamps.
One row pulsed.
USER: E_ERIKSON
ACCESS: 09:17 — RISK_BRIEF_Q4_INTERNAL (Confidential)
ACTION: EXPORT_ATTEMPT → EXTERNAL DRIVE (UNAUTHORIZED)
"Shit," Zara breathed.
Amara's vision tunneled.
"Wait," she said. "Erikson? Exterior export? That's—"
"That's exactly what he's not supposed to be doing," Zara snapped. She jabbed a key, opening a comm line. "Eira? We've got a bleed on the risk brief. Erikson's credentials. Yes, I'm sure. I'm looking at it."
On another screen, a schematic of the tower lit up. A tiny icon glowed on Floor 42, near the boardroom.
Zara zoomed.
A security camera feed filled the monitor: an empty hallway outside a door Amara recognized intimately from her brief tour of "places she was not to go alone."
The door to the smaller conference room, used for post-board debriefs.
The timestamp at the corner of the feed matched the log.
The hallway looked empty.
"Where is he?" Amara whispered.
"Inside," Zara said. "Or someone using his login from inside."
Another ping.
ACTION: TRANSFER BLOCKED — FIREWALL LOCK
STATUS: ALERT SENT (WAR-ROOM / RED)
"Firewall caught it," Zara muttered. "Thank the Moon. They didn't get the file out. But someone just tried to walk our risk projections out of the building."
Amara's heart slammed.
Her mind flashed back to the comment thread, to Subscriber000's too-calm voice rendered in text.
He's older than most of the wolves at the table but younger than the elders. Not blood, but old money. He's been here more than ten years and less than fifteen… In public, he stands two steps behind your Gray wolf. In private, he sits across from him and talks about 'controlling the narrative.' When the glass breaks, it will start at his fingertips.
Her comic, in contrast, showed a younger man hunched in guilt in a quiet stairwell.
Reality, apparently, had not read her story.
It had read the comment.
On the monitor, the hallway camera caught movement as the meeting room door opened.
Erikson stepped out.
Same silver hair, same immaculate suit, same blandly pleasant expression.
He held a tablet in one hand, a folder in the other.
His fingers rested casually on the edge of the glass wall as he glanced left and right, as if just stretching after a long session.
His fingertips.
Amara's breath hitched.
"That doesn't prove anything," she said, voice too high. "Could be an automated process. Could be a misclick. Could be someone spoofing his login. Right?"
Zara didn't answer immediately.
She was already patching into audio from Lucian's private channel, her expression tight.
Static, then voices.
"…Erikson, we've detected an unauthorized export from your account. Care to explain?"
Lucian. Calm. Cold.
A pause.
"My account?" Erikson's voice, smooth and slightly offended. "Must be a mistake. You know I don't handle the technical side personally."
"We know exactly which device it came from," Eira's voice cut in, ice over steel. "And we know it was attempting to breach a file marked 'Accord eyes only.'"
"Now hold on," Erikson said, a thread of irritation creeping in. "I've been on this board longer than most of your wolves have been out of school. You think I'd risk my stake by… what, sending your little war games to a rival? To who?"
Static crackled.
Amara pressed closer to the speaker, as if she could force the words into clarity.
Lucian again, softer this time. Dangerous.
"That's what we'd like to know," he said.
Zara muted the feed with a sharp motion.
"You shouldn't be listening to this," she said. "It's not… it's ugly."
"I draw your ugly," Amara said. "I think I can handle hearing it."
Her hands shook.
She squeezed them into fists.
Her mind wouldn't stop toggling between three images:
The CFO analog in her episode, eyes wet, whispering, "I didn't mean to—"
Erikson's fingers resting on glass in the camera feed, casual as a cat.
The text on her phone: When the glass breaks, it will start at his fingertips.
"Maybe it's a frame job," she insisted. "Maybe this is exactly what Unsynced wants. We panic, we cut him off, we implode from inside. That comment didn't cause this, it just… predicted it."
"Maybe," Zara said. "Or maybe our friendly neighborhood oracle is just reading the same patterns we are, faster."
Amara's chest hurt.
"I tried," she whispered. "I tried to steer it. I drew it differently. I changed the script."
"And reality," Zara said quietly, "didn't listen."
The words felt like a slap.
Of course reality didn't listen. It never had.
Except… it had.
Flood arcs, alley blasts, gas leaks, traps.
So many times, her panels had lined up with real events. Sometimes she'd nudged things, used a subtle edit to turn a death into a near-miss. Avery's fall on the fire escape. The spilled drink that became a near-miss when she "rewound" it.
She'd thought she was learning the rules of a game she could play.
Now, for the first time, she'd pushed back hard in the other direction—and the world had shrugged and bent toward someone else's outline.
Something throbbed behind her eyes.
She set her hands on the edge of Zara's desk to steady herself.
Her reflection stared back at her faintly in the dark monitor: eyes too wide, breath too fast.
"Amara?" Zara said. "You okay?"
"No," Amara said honestly.
She closed her eyes.
Behind her eyelids, two timelines tangled: her episode's betrayal and whatever was happening upstairs. Lines that had once overlapped now diverging, crossing, fighting for which would become fact.
For a second—a horrifying, dizzy second—she saw it like panels.
Panel 1: Her Episode 48 boardroom, with the CFO analog's hand shaking.
Panel 1b: The real boardroom, with Erikson's finger hovering over a send button.
Panel 2: Her heroine bursting into the stairwell, catching the CFO before he finished confessing.
Panel 2b: Lucian stepping into the side room, eyes gold, closing the door behind him.
Panel 3: Her narration about "harmless cracks."
Panel 3b: The phrase "When the glass breaks…" hanging over them like a subtitle she hadn't written.
Something tugged at her hand. At her mind.
She snapped her eyes open, gasping.
The pain behind her forehead eased, just a little, like someone had stopped trying to pry it open.
Zara was watching her, worry etched deep.
"That looked like your 'I'm about to pass out' face," Zara said. "Do I need to get Lucian?"
"No," Amara said quickly. Then, softer: "Not yet. Let him finish whatever he's doing. If I call him now, he'll think I'm asking him to choose between the board and me."
"And he'll choose you," Zara said without hesitation.
"That's the problem," Amara said. "He can't keep doing that."
They sat in silence for a while, watching Erikson pace in the muted hallway feed, watched security wolves quietly close in.
Eventually, Zara exhaled and leaned back, rubbing her eyes.
"They're locking him out of systems," she said. "Temporarily. Eira's running a full audit. Lucian's… not saying much."
"That's worse," Amara muttered.
On her phone, notifications popped up despite her "do not disturb" settings.
Instinctively, she looked.
Not the main app. Not public comments.
Her private messages.
A new one, from an account name her stomach now recognized like a warning siren.
Subscriber000.
Her thumb hovered, frozen.
She hadn't known they could DM her. She didn't accept DMs from anyone except a few friends and Zara and Lucian on a secret alt.
And yet the message sat there, waiting.
You drew a kinder traitor. That's very you.
Another line appeared as she watched, typing indicator never even blinking.
I told you: drawings don't change where the pressure really is.
Her pulse roared in her ears.
She didn't answer.
Didn't dare.
Instead, she screenshot the message and slid the phone across the desk to Zara without a word.
Zara's eyes flicked over it.
"Okay," she said. "Absolutely not. We're cutting off DMs. I'm locking this account down so hard it'll think it's in witness protection."
"Can you?" Amara asked. "If this is… whatever this is?"
"Human servers, human rules," Zara said, fingers already flying. "I can slam doors. Whether that keeps them out of your head is another problem."
Amara pressed her palms against her eyes.
Ignoring the oracle had felt right.
It had felt like reclaiming something.
But the world had not rewarded her rebellion with obedience.
It had done what it always did: followed gravity. And right now, the gravity seemed to be tuned to someone else's predictions.
Someone who could see ahead too.
Someone whose words didn't cause the future, but clung to it with unnerving accuracy.
Someone who was now stepping into her private space, into the space where she'd once only kept sketches and late-night self-doubt.
"Something's competing with me," she whispered.
"What?" Zara asked.
She dropped her hands.
"My pen," Amara said. "My panels. Whatever this… thing is that lets me draw ahead. I'm not alone in it. I never was. I think I just didn't notice until now because we weren't… pulling opposite ways."
Zara stared at her.
For once, she had no quick joke.
"Great," she said finally. "So we're not just in a war for the city. We're in a tug-of-war over the script."
Amara gave a weak laugh.
"Cool," she said. "Cool cool cool."
The laugh turned into something closer to a sob halfway through. She choked it back down.
"I need to draw," she said suddenly.
"Now?" Zara asked. "We just—"
"Now," Amara said. "If I don't put this somewhere, it's going to sit in my head like a tumor."
Zara hesitated, then nodded.
"Okay," she said. "Go. I'll keep watching the feeds. If Lucian does anything catastrophically dumb, I'll call you."
"Thanks," Amara said.
"Hey," Zara added as she reached the door. "Amara?"
She looked back.
"You're not losing," Zara said. "You picked a fight with a ghost armed with comments and vibes. Drawing one wrong prediction doesn't mean you've lost your… whatever this is."
"It feels like it," Amara said.
"That's because you're stubborn and dramatic," Zara said. "Now go be stubborn and dramatic on the tablet instead of in my nice quiet cave."
Back in her apartment, the silence hit like a physical blow.
No war room voices. No security feeds. No Zara commentary.
Just the city outside, the faint hum of the tower, and the blank tablet screen.
She opened a new file without naming it.
Her hand shook as she lined out the first panel.
Glass.
Of course.
A pane stretching across the canvas, reflections smeared across it. Her own face on one side, half-formed. Lines faint, like pencil smudges.
On the other side, she started to draw a second figure. The "other writer." The unseen hand. Oracle, seer, whatever they were.
Her stylus hit resistance.
Not physical—there was nothing wrong with the tablet—but the lines simply refused to hold.
The shape blurred, then evaporated as she lifted the pen, leaving behind only the faintest echo of a silhouette.
Pain surged behind her eyes, sharp and sudden.
She hissed through her teeth.
"Fine," she muttered. "You don't want a face. You don't get one."
She pulled back and changed tack.
Instead of trying to draw the stranger, she drew herself again.
Panel two: Amara at her desk, head in her hands, screens glowing around her. On one monitor, her own comic. On another, lines of text:
You're not the only one who can see ahead.
She didn't post these panels anywhere. This was private. A sketch to make sense of the chaos.
The pain in her head throbbed in time with her heartbeat.
She flipped layers off and on, watching lines appear and vanish.
Every time she tried to draw the boardroom—her boardroom, the one from Episode 48—the lines jittered. Chairs slid. Faces blurred.
When she tried to draw Erikson's silhouette, her hand cramp-locked. The tablet registered a chaotic scribble, nothing recognizable.
A thought surfaced, cold and unwelcome:
Maybe that's their space now.
Maybe, by deliberately drawing the betrayal somewhere else, she'd ceded the original incident to another hand. Another sight. Another pen.
She forced herself to breathe.
"No," she whispered. "No. That's not how this works. It's not… possession. It's just… patterns. Probabilities."
She tried again.
This time, she sketched something simpler.
Two lines running parallel across the page.
One she labelled, in tiny letters, Story.
The other: Reality.
For a while—over the past months—those lines had overlapped often enough that it had felt like one line.
Now, she drew them diverging.
In the gap between them, she scribbled a mess of shapes: eyes, question marks, little speech bubbles.
At the very center of that gap, she wrote one word:
COMPETITION
The pain behind her eyes eased a fraction.
Her hand steadied.
She added another layer.
A third line, above the others.
No label.
Just there.
Hovering.
Every time she tried to name it, the stylus skittered.
She let it stay blank.
Maybe it was Subscriber000.
Maybe it was InkBetweenLines.
Maybe it was whatever ancient current Eira's stories hinted at when she spoke of seers burned at stakes and villages "cleansed" of inconvenient storytellers.
Maybe it was the part of herself that she didn't control—the part that scribbled images in her sleep and made panels come true when she wasn't looking.
She didn't know.
All she knew was this:
When she tried to nudge Story away from that third line, Reality had followed the third line instead.
The realization was both terrifying and—if she was brutally honest—challenging.
Because if someone else was competing, they could be beaten.
Competed with.
Outdrawn.
She sat back, heart still racing but a new kind of focus sharpening.
"Okay," she said to the empty room. "Game on."
Her phone buzzed on the table.
A message from Lucian.
Lucian:Board meeting over. No casualties. Some… developments. We'll talk tonight.
She stared at it.
Her finger hovered over the keyboard for a full minute.
Then she typed:
Amara:Tell me if you broke the glass.
Three dots.
They blinked.
Stopped.
Started again.
Lucian:Not yet. But we heard it creak.
She exhaled, a half-laugh, half-sob.
Her head still hurt.
Her power still felt like it was being tugged in two directions.
But she wasn't going to let an anonymous oracle be the only one playing on that invisible third line.
As the city moved around the tower, as wolves and humans and things in between made their calculations, Amara bent over her tablet and began again.
Her pen scratched out new panels.
Not to erase what had happened.
Not to pretend that Erikson's attempted export hadn't proved the comment more right than her comic.
But to claim the next move.
Something—or someone—was competing with her pen.
Fine.
She'd just have to write sharper.
Draw faster.
And hope that, somewhere between her stubborn lines and their cryptic messages, the story of the city could still be wrestled toward a future where the glass cracked without shattering.