Anomaly

Chapter 1 -Before The Edge

The night hadn’t started on the rooftop.

It began in the stairwell, the kind that echoed with every footstep like a drumbeat of warning. He hadn’t meant to come this high, but when adrenaline took hold, logic had no voice. Every door he tried was locked. Every landing looked the same. Up was the only direction left.

Now he was here, wind slicing against his face, the city sprawling beneath him in a haze of lights and noise.

He wasn’t alone.

The rooftop wasn’t empty like he’d prayed. A figure stood near the access door, blocking the way back, hands buried in a dark coat. The kind of posture that told him this was planned. Not an accident. Not random.

“Don’t make this harder,” the man said. His voice was calm, too calm, carrying over the wind.

His pulse hammered. “Why are you doing this?”

“You already know.”

He didn’t. Not really. There had been rumors — whispers that the tests from his childhood, the hospital visits, the unexplained episodes that no doctor could name — weren’t as innocent as they had seemed. That his parents had signed forms, desperate to fix whatever was “wrong” with him. That some research company had kept records.

But whispers weren’t supposed to chase you up a twenty-story building.

“You’ve been flagged,” the man continued, stepping closer. “An anomaly. Do you know what that means?”

The word hit harder than the wind. Anomaly. Different. Wrong. A thing to be catalogued, contained, maybe erased.

He backed toward the ledge. His heel scraped concrete. Empty air yawned behind him, vast and merciless.

“You’re making a mistake,” he said, though his voice shook. “I’m not— I’m just—”

“Stop lying to yourself. Stop pretending.”

The man’s eyes glinted, a reflection of neon from the street below. They were patient eyes, like someone who had cornered prey and was only waiting for it to exhaust itself.

“You’ll come with us,” he said. “Or you’ll fall.”

The city roared beneath them — horns, engines, sirens — but up here, it felt like silence. Like the world itself was holding its breath.

His hands curled into fists. His chest burned with the weight of choices he didn’t understand. He hadn’t asked for this. He hadn’t chosen to be whatever they thought he was.

But choice was gone now.

A shove. A slip. A leap. It hardly mattered which.

The edge was waiting.

And within seconds, he would discover just how much of an anomaly he truly was.

The wind tore at his clothes, trying to pull him forward, whispering promises of the drop. Below, traffic crawled like veins of red and white light, the heartbeat of a city too vast to notice one boy cornered on a rooftop.

He stole a glance at the ledge. Twenty stories. Concrete sidewalk. An instant, brutal end. His stomach twisted, rebellion and dread colliding.

The man in the coat stepped closer, slow, measured, as though every move had been rehearsed. He wasn’t just here to kill. No — there was precision in his words, in his stance. He was here to collect.

“Why me?” His own voice cracked, whipped away by the wind. “What did I ever do?”

“You exist.”

The answer was as cruel as it was simple. It carried weight, like a sentence already passed.

A flash of memory stabbed through his panic — hospital lights, cold instruments, voices whispering behind glass. His mother’s face pale with fear as men in white coats explained “genetic irregularities.” He had been too young to understand, too young to question why blood samples disappeared into locked cases, why needles always came in pairs.

And yet, somehow, he had always known he was different.

The man’s boots scraped against the rooftop gravel. “You don’t realize it yet, but you are dangerous. To yourself. To others. To everything.”

He swallowed hard. His back was against the ledge now, the city sprawling beneath him like an endless abyss. His fingers curled against the concrete lip, gripping it until his knuckles burned.

“Come quietly,” the man said, his voice steady, almost pitying. “You don’t have to suffer. Step forward. Choose the easy way.”

The easy way.

He almost laughed — a broken, desperate sound lost in the night. There was nothing easy about this. About being hunted for something he didn’t understand. About being asked to surrender without explanation.

He glanced once more over the edge. His heart lurched into his throat. His every instinct screamed against it — the raw, primal terror of falling, of obliteration.

But behind him, the man was closing in.

A decision made itself.

He drew in a sharp breath, wind flooding his lungs, and with it came a strange certainty: one way or another, the fall would decide everything.

The rooftop lights buzzed faintly, a dying filament’s glow washing the gravel in pale yellow. The sound barely reached him over the wind, but he clung to it all the same — as if proof that the world still followed normal rules, that electricity still hummed and bulbs still flickered.

Everything else felt unreal.

The man’s coat rippled like a shadow come alive, edges snapping in the gusts. He wasn’t out of breath from the chase up the stairwell. He wasn’t sweating. He looked carved out of the night itself, patient, methodical, inevitable.

“You don’t understand,” he tried again, desperation pushing the words out. “I’m nobody. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A slight tilt of the man’s head, as if listening to a private signal only he could hear. “You’ve already proven otherwise. The hospital records were clear. Your bloodwork, your resilience… even your so-called fevers. Did you think no one noticed?”

His chest tightened. He remembered the fevers: nights burning so hot his sheets turned damp, his skin shivering as if every cell inside him wanted to shake loose. Doctors said it was viral, then bacterial, then autoimmune. Each explanation contradicted the last. And yet, he had always survived.

Too well.

The man stepped forward. The crunch of gravel under his boots was louder than the city below. Louder than the storm of thoughts tearing through his head.

“You were never meant to slip through the cracks,” the man said. “Every anomaly gets found, eventually.”

He fought the urge to retreat further. Another inch and there would be no rooftop left beneath his shoes. His balance wavered, the void behind him tugging like gravity had suddenly grown teeth.

The city below was dizzying. Brake lights smeared across intersections like veins of molten red. Billboards flickered, faces and slogans stuttering in endless repetition. From up here, it looked almost beautiful, like a painting in motion. But beauty meant nothing when a single breath could send him tumbling into it.

The man’s voice cut through his thoughts again, steady, sharp. “Don’t look down. Look at me.”

He forced his eyes up, locking onto the stranger’s. There was no malice there, only purpose. That was worse. Malice could be reasoned with, distracted, delayed. Purpose was unshakable.

Somewhere deep inside, a spark of anger broke through the fear. “If I’m so important, if I’m what you say… then why are you threatening to kill me?”

The man didn’t blink. “Because sometimes the only way to awaken what’s inside you… is to push.”

The words hung between them, colder than the wind.

The words hit him harder than the wind. Sometimes the only way to awaken what’s inside you… is to push.

His stomach knotted. His hands trembled against the concrete lip of the rooftop. The city below blurred as fear burned the edges of his vision.

“I don’t want this,” he said, barely more than a whisper.

The man in the coat took one more step, slow and deliberate, gravel crunching underfoot. “It doesn’t matter what you want. Nature doesn’t ask permission. Neither do we.”

He felt it then — the certainty that no words, no bargains, no pleas would change what was about to happen. The rooftop wasn’t a place of choices anymore. It was a funnel, narrowing to a single outcome.

The wind gusted, strong enough to shove at his balance. He flailed an arm, panic tearing a gasp from his lungs. For one heartbeat, his toes lifted, weight dragging backward over the abyss. He wrenched forward just in time, chest colliding with the ledge, concrete scraping his ribs.

The man didn’t move to help. Didn’t even flinch.

“You can’t fight it,” the voice came, soft but immovable. “You were built for this.”

Rage lit in his chest, burning through terror for the briefest instant. Built? Like a machine? Like a weapon? His teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached. “I’m not yours.”

He lunged sideways, skirting along the edge, trying to break free of the man’s advance. But the rooftop was a box with no exits. The access door was locked behind the stranger, the fire stairs too far across the gravel, the gap between them closing with every desperate step he took.

The man’s hand emerged from the folds of his coat. Not a weapon — worse. An open palm, steady, inevitable, like a force of gravity made flesh.

The kind of gesture that said: this ends now.

His back struck the corner of the parapet. The drop behind him howled. There was no more space. No more room to retreat.

The man’s shadow loomed. His hand pressed forward.

And in that final instant — before he could decide, before he could cling to the ledge or throw himself forward — balance betrayed him. His heel slipped on gravel, momentum tilted him backward, and the rooftop vanished from beneath his feet.

Wind roared up to meet him. The skyline spun. His scream was ripped away, lost in the yawning dark.

The city swallowed him whole.