The first thing Lena noticed was the silence.
Not the peaceful kind—the uncomfortable kind that made her pause mid-step and wonder if something had gone wrong with her hearing.
The transit platform was crowded, as always, but for a brief moment, every sound seemed wrapped in cotton.
Then the noise rushed back in all at once.
Voices. Footsteps. The low electric hum of incoming trains.
Lena blinked and shook her head. That was strange.
She looked around. No one else seemed affected. People continued scrolling through displays, adjusting bags, complaining quietly about delays that hadn't even happened yet.
She told herself it was nothing.
But the feeling followed her.
At the research facility, Ethan felt it too.
This time, he didn't dismiss it.
His display flickered as he adjusted a temporal variance graph. The numbers jumped—only slightly, but enough to break continuity.
"Run that again," he muttered.
The system complied.
The jump vanished.
Ethan's jaw tightened.
"Log anomaly," he said.
A warning blinked back: ANOMALY BELOW REPORTING THRESHOLD.
He stared at the message longer than necessary.
Thresholds, he knew, were human decisions—not universal truths.
Lena's lecture was interrupted by a student raising her hand.
"Professor… did the lights just flicker?"
Lena hesitated. "Did they?"
A few students nodded.
Others looked confused.
The overhead lights steadied themselves, casting a clean white glow across the room.
"Probably a grid fluctuation," Lena said, though unease crept into her voice. "It happens."
But as she turned back to her tablet, she felt it again.
That pressure.
Like reality pressing inward for just a heartbeat.
That evening, the city blinked.
Every screen in Asterfall went dark.
Not for long—less than two seconds—but long enough to notice. Long enough for conversations to falter and people to glance up in shared confusion.
Then the lights returned.
Systems rebooted.
Life resumed.
Ethan stood frozen in the middle of the street, pulse pounding.
Lena grabbed his arm. "Ethan. Did you see that?"
"Yes," he said too quickly.
"That wasn't normal."
"No," he agreed.
Around them, the city murmured—people speculating, joking nervously, already moving on. Emergency notices scrolled across public displays, calm and reassuring.
MINOR SYNCHRONIZATION ERROR. NO THREAT DETECTED.
Lena didn't look reassured.
Neither did Ethan.
At home, Ethan bypassed dinner entirely.
Lena watched him pace, tension radiating from him like static.
"Talk to me," she said finally.
He stopped.
"This wasn't a power failure," he said. "It wasn't a software bug."
She folded her arms. "Then what was it?"
He hesitated.
This was the moment where explanation risked sounding like madness.
"Do you know how people describe time?" he asked.
She frowned. "As a line. A flow. A river."
"Yes," he said. "But imagine that river flowing through elastic walls.
Most of the time, it moves freely. But if something presses against it—hard enough—it stretches."
"And tonight," she said slowly, "something pressed."
"Yes."
She searched his face. "From where?"
Ethan swallowed. "I don't know."
He stayed up all night.
The data was undeniable now.
Temporal coherence graphs showed synchronized micro-disruptions across the city. The pattern wasn't random—it had a center.
And that center was disturbingly close to where Ethan had been standing when the city blinked.
His hands trembled slightly as he overlaid historical data.
This wasn't the first time.
It was just the first time it had been felt.
Someone—something—was interacting with time at a scale too small to register as catastrophe Yet.
The next day, Lena found a crack in her classroom window.
It hadn't been there before.
It wasn't large—just a thin fracture running diagonally across the glass, like a flaw in crystal.
She stared at it longer than she meant to.
For a fleeting second, she had the strangest sensation—like she had seen the crack before.
In a dream.
In a memory that wasn't hers.
She pressed her fingers lightly against the glass.
"Professor?" a student asked. "Are you okay?"
Lena withdrew her hand. "Yes," she said.
But her heart was racing.
That night, she dreamed of standing in the middle of a city she didn't recognize.
The sky was wrong. The air felt heavy. Buildings leaned at unnatural angles, half-swallowed by dust and silence.
Someone was calling her name.
She turned—
And woke up gasping.
Ethan was instantly awake, sitting up beside her.
"Lena," he said. "What happened?"
She clutched his arm. "I had a dream."
"Just a dream?"
She shook her head. "It felt… real."
Ethan's blood ran cold.
He hadn't told her.
He hadn't said anything about temporal echoes or memory bleed or unstable branches.
Yet somehow, her mind had brushed against a future that should not exist.
He forced his voice to stay calm. "What did you see?"
She hesitated. "A world that looked broken. Like something had gone very wrong."
Ethan held her tighter.
Outside, the city slept.
Inside, the first undeniable truth settled between them:
Whatever was happening wasn't confined to equations anymore.
Time wasn't just stretching.
It was leaking.
And it had begun to touch the people Ethan loved most.