CHAPTER ONE — THE DAY THE SKY GLITCHED
Aiden Kimani always thought his life was painfully normal. A twenty-year-old campus student, average grades, average looks, and a quiet routine built around classes, late-night study sessions, and checking on his single mother. Nothing about him stood out—except the fear he carried that something in his life was wrong, misplaced, like a puzzle with one stubborn missing piece.
That feeling became reality the afternoon the sky glitched.
He was leaving the university library when the world froze. The air trembled. Buildings shimmered like reflections on disturbed water. The clouds above cracked into a perfect, unnatural line, revealing a second sky behind the first—darker, swirling, as if another universe was trying to bleed through.
No one reacted. Students walked past him as if nothing had happened.
But Aiden felt it.
Deep in his bones, something had shifted.
Across the city, Zara Mbeki, a young art industry prodigy, glared at her collapsing holographic screen. A strange symbol—spiral-like, alive—kept rewriting itself into her design files. Every time she deleted it, the system crashed and rebooted.
“Don’t play with me,” she snapped. Arrogant, brilliant, and stubborn, Zara hated anything she couldn’t control.
The symbol pulsed again, and an image flashed in her mind—a boy falling through a c***k in reality.
She stumbled backward, breathless.
That night, Aiden returned home to find his mother staring blankly at an old family photo. Her fingers trembled on the image of Aiden’s older brother—the one who vanished years ago after their father was murdered. She whispered a name Aiden hadn’t heard in years, a name she often forgot now because of her unexplained memory lapses.
“Mom?” Aiden asked softly.
She forced a smile, but her eyes remained clouded with confusion.
“I’m fine, honey… I just keep feeling like there’s something I should remember.”
Aiden squeezed her shoulder. He didn’t know how to comfort her—he hardly knew the truth himself.
At midnight, as he washed his face, Aiden’s reflection flickered. For a second, the person in the mirror wasn’t him. The stranger had harder eyes. An older face. A detective’s badge pinned to his chest.
Aiden blinked.
The mirror stabilized. His own image stared back.
Before he could process it, the room dissolved. He stood on an endless desert beneath a violet sky. A cloaked woman approached, holding a glowing artifact.
“You were never meant to survive this timeline,” she whispered.
The ground split.
Aiden fell.
Zara woke with a gasp, her studio spinning. Hovering above her was the ghostly outline of the same boy she’d seen earlier—Aiden—reaching out, silently screaming as he fell through a rupture in space.
Then he vanished. Reality snapped clean.
Zara pressed a trembling hand to her chest.
“Who are you?”
Aiden jolted awake on his bedroom floor, heart racing. On his nightstand was a photo that had never existed before—his lost brother, older now, eyes burning with purpose.
On his coat was a detective’s badge.
Aiden’s blood ran cold.
His brother was alive.
And somewhere out there…
he was coming for him.
