Anomaly

Chapter 8 -Morning

The first thing Elias felt was the ache in his back.

Concrete wasn’t meant for sleeping, and his body reminded him with every stiff breath and sore muscle. He shifted slowly, wincing as the morning light cut into his eyes.

For a moment, the world looked painfully ordinary. Sunlight filtering between buildings. The grind of delivery trucks. The chatter of strangers rushing past overhead. His stomach knotted, sharp with hunger, a problem so basic it almost convinced him everything else had been a dream.

Almost.

He pushed himself upright, leaning against the damp stairwell wall. His clothes were cold, stiff from drying rain. His hair clung in clumps against his forehead. He looked like any other runaway — dirty, tired, invisible.

Invisible. The word clung to him, and with it came memory.

The fall.

The blur of neon and air whipping past. The certainty of death. Then the scatter — impossible, unthinkable — and the re-formation on the ground.

It hit him so vividly that his chest seized, breath catching. But even as the memory clawed at him, another voice pushed in, quieter, sharper: Did it really happen?

He squeezed his eyes shut, dragging a hand down his face. Maybe it hadn’t been real. Maybe his mind had broken under the fall, invented some dream of survival to spare him the truth. People hallucinated under trauma. People dissociated. Maybe he’d just blacked out and woken up at street level, dazed but alive.

That explanation was ugly, fragile — but it was human. It was possible. It made sense in a way the truth never could.

And yet.

His fingers brushed the concrete at his side. Dust clung to his skin — and lifted, faintly, as if repelled by his touch before settling again. The memory of last night’s raindrops, hovering against gravity, burned too sharp to dismiss.

“No,” he whispered to himself. His voice cracked. “No, I was there. I felt it.”

But even as he said it, doubt gnawed.

If it was real, what did that make him?

If it wasn’t, what had broken inside his mind to invent something so terrifying?

His stomach growled again, louder this time, grounding him in the most mundane truth: whatever else had happened, he needed food. Now.

He pulled his hood low, shouldered his bag, and climbed the steps into daylight. The city hit him all at once — sunlight too bright, streets too loud, faces too close. He flinched at every horn, every shout, every reflection in the glass that lingered a beat too long.

The world moved on as though nothing had changed.

But Elias knew better.

Something had.

The sunlight felt harsher than it should. It bounced off car hoods and glass windows, stabbing into his eyes until he pulled the hood tighter, shadowing his face. The world was too bright, too loud, too alive — as if the volume of life itself had been dialed up while he’d been gone.

Gone. The word pressed on him. How long had he really been scattered? A second? An eternity? His memory blurred at the edges, refusing to give him a clean answer.

He shook his head hard, forcing the thought away. Hunger cut deeper than doubt now. His body didn’t care about mysteries. It wanted fuel.

He drifted with the foot traffic, keeping his head down, trying to look like just another face in the crowd. His sneakers squelched with every step, drawing stares he imagined rather than saw. His fingers itched to pull at the molecules of the air again, to blur himself invisible, to vanish. But he didn’t dare.

Not here. Not now.

A corner store’s neon sign blinked weakly ahead: OPEN 24 HOURS. The thought of food — real food, not rainwater or stale gum — pulled him like gravity.

Inside, the air reeked of burnt coffee and disinfectant. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, too bright, turning every label into a smear of color. He grabbed the first thing his hand found — a packaged sandwich from the cooler, cold condensation soaking his sleeve.

When he reached the counter, the cashier barely looked at him. Just chewed gum, tapped the register, and waited. Elias fumbled for his wallet, heart pounding. His fingers shook so badly he nearly dropped the bills.

Normal, he told himself. This is normal. You’re buying food like anyone else. Nothing strange. Nothing broken.

The cashier shoved change into his palm without a word. Elias muttered a thanks he wasn’t sure was audible, then bolted outside before the fluorescent buzz could crush him further.

He ducked into a side alley, ripped open the sandwich, and devoured it in uneven bites. The bread was stale, the cheese rubbery, but it was something. His body seized it, every chew easing the hollow ache in his gut.

But even here, alone in the alley, peace didn’t last.

The brick wall opposite shimmered faintly, the mortar lines blurring for an instant before snapping back. He blinked hard, swore under his breath, pressed a hand to his temple.

“Stop it,” he whispered. “Just stop.”

But the city didn’t stop bending at the edges. His senses didn’t stop tugging at the molecules around him.

And the gnawing question returned, heavier than hunger, sharper than fear:

If this is real, what am I becoming?

The sandwich dulled the sharpest edge of his hunger, but it did nothing for the storm inside him.

He stayed in the alley a while longer, crouched against the wall, the crumpled wrapper clenched in his fist. The ordinary act of eating should have anchored him, reminded him of who he was. Instead, it only made the divide sharper. His body needed food — human food — but everything else inside him was beginning to scream that he was no longer just human.

He shoved the wrapper into a rusted bin and stepped back out to the street. The morning crowd had thickened: office workers in neat clothes, kids dragging backpacks, shopkeepers propping open their doors. He let himself be carried with them for half a block, the tide of normal life tugging at him.

For a fleeting moment, he wanted to believe he could disappear into it. That if he just kept walking, just kept his hood low, he’d blur into the rhythm of the city and nobody would ever notice him.

But his senses betrayed him.

A woman brushing past him left behind a halo of perfume that he could see in the air, molecules drifting like faint smoke. The vibrations of a bus engine rumbled not just under his feet but through his chest, his ribs aching with resonance. He caught the reflection of his own face in a shop window — and for half a heartbeat, his eyes were wrong, glowing faint at the edges before the glass snapped back to normal.

His throat tightened. He tore his gaze away, nearly stumbling into a man carrying coffee. The man cursed under his breath, but Elias barely heard.

The city wasn’t letting him vanish. It was exposing him, peeling away the pretense with every step.

He turned down another street, then another, drifting farther from the crowds, until he found himself near a public library. The old stone steps rose ahead, banners flapping faintly in the breeze. Something about it — the weight of silence promised inside, the thought of books and dust and walls that didn’t stare back — drew him in.

Inside, the air was cooler, hushed. Rows of shelves stretched in perfect order, muffling the chaos outside. Students bent over laptops, an elderly man dozed in a chair, a librarian stamped books with calm detachment.

Elias sank into a corner seat at an empty table, pressing his palms against the smooth wood. For the first time since the rooftop, he let himself breathe fully.

Maybe here, for an hour or two, he could pretend.

But even in the hush of the library, it followed him. The faint shimmer of dust in the air, turning in rhythm with his breath. The hum of fluorescent bulbs above, their frequency too sharp, drilling into his skull until he could almost taste the electricity.

He pressed his fists against his eyes, willing the sensations away.

You’re imagining it. You’re tired. You’re just tired.

But deep down, he knew.

This wasn’t imagination. This wasn’t trauma.

This was real.

And the longer he stayed among ordinary people, the more the truth bled out of him.

He pushed back from the table, chair legs scraping, drawing a shush from someone two rows over. He muttered an apology, but his voice shook.

The library had felt safe when he walked in. Now it felt like a trap. Too many eyes. Too many chances for something to slip, for someone to see.

He shoved his hands into his pockets, pulled his hood low again, and slipped back outside.

Back into isolation.

Back into the only safety he could trust: distance.

The city swallowed him again the moment he stepped outside.

The hum of traffic surged louder, the sharp angles of sunlight stabbed between buildings, and the flow of people pressed him from every side. He moved quickly, head down, though every nerve screamed that he was moving too slow, that someone was following, that every shadow stretched just a little too long.

He passed a café window and glimpsed his reflection once more. Hood low, face pale, eyes hollow. Just a boy. But for a split second, his outline blurred again, as though the glass couldn’t decide what it was seeing. He tore his gaze away before he could confirm it.

His stomach twisted, not just from hunger now but from dread.

He wanted to go home — to see his mother, to sit in his room, to bury himself in the ordinary clutter of a life that made sense. But even imagining it felt dangerous. If the man in the coat had known his name, if the whispers about “anomalies” were true, then home was the last place he could go.

He stopped at a crosswalk, the light red, cars rushing by in waves. For a heartbeat, he considered stepping into the street, daring the impossible to test itself again. Would the world break around him like it had from the rooftop? Or would it end here, messy and final, nothing but blood on asphalt?

His chest tightened. His knees locked in place. He couldn’t move.

The light turned green, and the crowd surged forward, carrying him across whether he wanted to go or not.

When he reached the far side, he pressed his back to a wall, trying to steady his breathing. The city blurred around him, voices and footsteps smearing together.

He closed his eyes.

The fall had been real. The scattering, the impossible awareness, the return — it had all been real. He could tell himself otherwise a thousand times, but the truth sat in his bones like fire.

Something inside him had changed.

And no matter how much he wanted to deny it, no matter how much he wanted to pretend he was just a boy lost in the city, he knew:

There was no going back.

Elias Hale had survived the impossible.

And survival was only the beginning.