Daiso woke before the alarm.
He always did.
The ceiling fan clicked overhead, its rhythm slightly off—one blade heavier than the others. The imbalance tugged at him, a faint itch behind his eyes. He lay still, counting rotations until the sound softened into something tolerable.
The apartment was already loud in the way mornings were loud before anyone spoke. Pipes knocking. A radio bleeding through the wall. Someone coughing too hard in the bathroom next door. The city clearing its throat.
Daiso rolled onto his side and sat up.
The number was still on his wrist.
Faded a little, smudged at the edges, but there. Proof that yesterday hadn't been a dream. Proof that someone else knew he existed when things went wrong.
He stood, pulled on his shirt, and paused.
The air felt wrong.
Not dangerous. Not urgent. Just… misaligned. Like a song starting half a beat late.
Daiso pressed his palm flat against the wall. The paint was peeling, warm from the rising sun. He breathed in slowly, then out, matching the building's groan as someone flushed a toilet upstairs.
Listen, he told himself.
Outside, the street was already awake. Vendors setting up. Engines turning over. A bus hissing as it knelt at the corner. The sounds layered on top of each other, messy but familiar.
Then he heard it.
A gap.
Not silence—absence. A place where something should have been and wasn't.
Daiso's chest tightened.
He grabbed his shoes and slipped out the door without locking it, feet hitting the stairs too fast. The building protested under his weight. He took the steps two at a time, heart steady despite the pressure building behind his ribs.
On the sidewalk, the morning light was sharp and unforgiving. Shadows cut hard across cracked concrete. The smell of bread from the bakery mixed with exhaust and damp trash.
Daiso turned toward the intersection.
A delivery van was double-parked where it shouldn't be. A cyclist swerved around it, annoyed, tires skidding slightly on oil-slick pavement. A woman stepped off the curb early, phone pressed to her ear, eyes somewhere else.
The light was about to change.
Daiso felt it like a held breath.
"Hey!" someone shouted. Not at him. At the van. Too late.
Daiso moved.
He didn't think about it. Didn't count. His body knew the timing now the way lungs knew when to pull air. He stepped into the street, arm lifting—not to stop anything, just to exist in the space where things could still bend.
The cyclist corrected.
The woman hesitated.
The light turned red a half-second earlier than it should have.
The van lurched, then stilled.
No crash. No scream. Just a ripple of irritation and relief that passed through the intersection and vanished.
People cursed under their breath and kept going.
No one looked at the boy in the road.
Daiso stepped back onto the curb, pulse finally catching up to him. His hands shook this time, and he didn't hide them. He watched them tremble, watched the feeling drain out like water down a gutter.
That was close, a voice said behind him.
Daiso turned.
Rina Loft stood there with a coffee in one hand and her backpack slung the same careless way as yesterday. Her eyes flicked from the intersection to him, sharp and assessing.
"You skipping school already?" she asked.
He swallowed. "I was going."
She raised an eyebrow. "After you played traffic light?"
"I didn't—" He stopped. Words tangled when he tried to explain the gap, the absence, the sound before things broke. "It was wrong," he said instead.
Rina took a slow sip of her coffee, gaze never leaving him. "It usually is," she said. Then, quieter, "You feel it again?"
Daiso nodded.
She glanced at the intersection, then back at him. "Come on," she said. "Walk with me."
"Where?"
"Anywhere that isn't here for five minutes." She turned without waiting.
Daiso followed, the pressure easing just enough to breathe.
Behind them, the city smoothed itself out, satisfied with another near-miss it would never remember.
But as they walked, Daiso realized something new—and unsettling.
The sound hadn't gone away.
It was spreading.
And whatever was coming next wasn't going to stop at one intersection.