Anomaly

Chapter 10 -Fractures

By noon, Elias couldn’t keep the thought away anymore.

Home.

The word pressed on him with every step. He pictured his mother moving through the kitchen, the clink of plates, the smell of coffee. He pictured the front door, chipped paint by the handle where he’d kicked it as a child. He pictured his bed, still unmade from the morning he’d left, as if it might still be waiting.

The need to hear a familiar voice swelled until it drowned out everything else.

He ducked into another side street, the crowd thinning, and pulled out his phone. The cracked screen flickered to life, battery clinging at 8%. His thumb hovered over his mother’s number.

He pressed it before he could talk himself out of it.

The ring tone buzzed against his ear, each beat slower than the last. He waited. Hoped.

No answer.

He tried again.

And again.

Voicemail. Each time, her voice recording asked him to leave a message. He opened his mouth, but nothing came. His throat locked. What could he even say? I fell. I broke. I came back. And they’re hunting me.

The phone slipped from his hand and clattered against the pavement. He snatched it up quickly, pulse hammering, cheeks burning with sudden fury.

They weren’t answering. Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe they wouldn’t.

The anger built sharp and hot, tangled with fear until it spilled over. His hands shook, and the air around them shimmered faintly, a distortion like heat rising off asphalt.

A woman passing at the end of the street slowed, her brow furrowed. Elias jerked his hands into his hoodie pocket, trying to smother the glow, but the world bent anyway.

The glass of a shop window warped for a heartbeat, bending his reflection into something stretched and wrong before snapping back. A man across the street dropped his coffee, blinking hard, rubbing his eyes as though unsure what he’d just seen.

The distortion vanished in an instant, leaving nothing but ordinary street, ordinary glass, ordinary air.

Elias’s breath came fast, ragged. His hood clung damp to his forehead, his palms slick with sweat inside his pockets.

No one screamed. No one pointed. But whispers rippled through the thin crowd, confused glances trading back and forth.

Had they really seen it? Or had it just been a trick of the light, a glitch of tired eyes?

The doubt was enough to save him — for now.

But Elias knew. He’d slipped. He’d let it out.

And if strangers on the street were questioning their sanity, then somewhere out there, the people hunting him wouldn’t be questioning at all.

They’d know.

Elias backed deeper into the alley, pressing himself against the brick wall, willing the air to steady, willing his pulse to slow.

The small crowd out on the street was already dispersing. The man with the dropped coffee cursed under his breath, shaking his head as if to blame fatigue. The woman who’d slowed walked faster now, eyes fixed ahead, forcing herself not to glance back.

Within minutes, the moment was gone.

Or at least, it looked that way.

Elias knew better.

He sank onto the curb, clutching his phone tight in both hands, his thumb hovering again over his mother’s number. But now, staring at the screen, all he felt was cold dread. He couldn’t call again. He couldn’t risk dragging them into this, not with whatever was wrong with him bleeding out in plain sight.

If they didn’t answer, maybe it was because they already knew. Maybe the man in the coat had reached them first. Maybe the Directorate — if that’s what they were — was waiting for him to come back, to lead himself home like bait on a hook.

His jaw tightened. He shoved the phone deep into his bag, as if burying the thought with it.

A faint shimmer still clung to the air around his hands, subtle enough that anyone else might miss it, but Elias felt it like a vibration in his bones. He curled his fingers into fists, nails biting into his palms, trying to crush the sensation down.

It didn’t leave.

The molecules in the air thrummed faintly, restless under his skin, eager to respond to the storm inside him. Like a dog tugging at its leash.

His breath hitched. His chest burned.

“I can’t,” he whispered. “Not here. Not now.”

But the city pressed close, deaf to his plea.

A car horn blared somewhere nearby, jolting him upright. For a heartbeat, the sound fractured in his ears, splitting into layers — as if he could hear not just the horn but the air vibrating against itself, molecules shivering in perfect rhythm.

He slapped his palms against the wall, grounding himself, forcing the sensation back down. His head pounded, his vision swam.

When it finally passed, he staggered forward, pulling his hood lower. He couldn’t stay here. He couldn’t stay anywhere.

He blended back into the stream of pedestrians, moving fast, every step heavy with the realization that he wasn’t slipping only in public — he was slipping from himself.

And every flicker, every fracture, every uncontrolled ripple meant one thing:

It was only a matter of time before someone else saw.

Someone who would not look away.

He kept walking, one block, then another, until the city blurred into motion around him. Every step felt heavy, dragging. His thoughts tangled in loops — the unanswered calls, the shimmer of glass, the crowd’s uncertain stares.

They saw. They had to have seen.

But when he risked a glance over his shoulder, the street was just a street. People moved on. Cars passed. Nobody followed.

It should have eased him. It didn’t.

The sense of eyes never left.

He pulled his hood tighter, shoulders hunched, slipping into the anonymity of the crowd. If he could just stay small, just stay invisible, maybe the world would swallow him whole and forget he existed.

But somewhere in the city’s bones, machines watched.

Cameras blinked from lampposts, from storefronts, from the corners of traffic lights. Most people passed them without a thought. Elias never noticed the ones that lingered on him too long, their lenses flickering faintly as if trying to decide what they’d just seen.

Inside a dark van three streets away, those flickers lit up in real time.

A monitor replayed the distorted moment from the shop window. The glass bent, shimmered, straightened. The crowd around Elias looked on, their confusion caught frame by frame.

“Feed anomaly confirmed,” the analyst said softly, fingers dancing across the keyboard to tag the footage.

The room inside the van was hushed. No one spoke until Veyra leaned forward, his shadow cutting across the glow of the screen.

His eyes locked on the blurred hooded figure. The boy’s head was down, his pace too fast, his hands jammed into his pockets. He looked like nothing. Like no one.

But the footage said otherwise.

“Timestamp it,” Veyra said. His voice was calm, precise. “Send to the archive. Classification: uncontrolled slip.”

The analyst hesitated. “Do we alert the Board?”

“Not yet,” Veyra answered. His gaze never left Elias. “He’s cracking. Fear’s pushing him closer. The next slip will be bigger.”

On the screen, Elias turned down another street, swallowed by the flow of pedestrians.

Veyra leaned back slowly, folding his hands.

“He’s showing us what he is,” he murmured. “And he doesn’t even know it.”

Elias walked until his legs trembled. The sandwich sat heavy in his stomach, barely enough to quiet the hollow ache. His mind felt stretched thin, as though one more thought might split it in two.

He tried to keep his gaze low, fixed on the sidewalk, but every reflection in a window caught the corner of his eye. Every flicker of glass, every shimmer of heat, threatened to betray him again.

Keep it together, he told himself. Keep walking. Don’t stop.

But each step only drove home the truth he could no longer deny: the more he fought to be normal, the more the cracks spread.

Somewhere above the rooftops, a camera adjusted, its lens narrowing as it followed him through the crowd. A second camera picked him up half a block later. Then a third. The feeds stitched together in real time, seamless, relentless.

He never noticed.

The Directorate noticed everything.

In the van, the analysts marked his path with silent precision. Each street. Each turn. Each minute without another slip catalogued like data points on a graph.

Veyra watched it all without speaking. His expression was unreadable, but in his eyes was the certainty of a hunter who knew the quarry had already been taken.

Because Elias Hale wasn’t lost.

He was being herded.

And though he couldn’t see the walls closing in, he would soon.

Elias stopped at a corner, hood low, shoulders heavy. He pressed himself against the cold brick of a building, forcing a breath through trembling lips. The city rushed around him, oblivious, alive.

He told himself he was still free.

But somewhere deep inside, beneath fear and hunger and disbelief, a truth whispered back:

Freedom was already gone.