Anomaly

Chapter 11 -Threshold

The city felt different in daylight.

It wasn’t safer, not really — but it was louder, brighter, full of so much ordinary noise that for a few fragile minutes Elias almost convinced himself he could blend into it. People hurried past with shopping bags, headphones, strollers, briefcases. None of them looked at him twice. None of them saw the storm under his skin.

But he felt it.

Every breath dragged across nerves that no longer obeyed. Every sound split into layers he couldn’t turn off. The world didn’t just press against him — it vibrated with him, molecules tugging faintly at his thoughts, as if they recognized him now, waiting for orders he didn’t mean to give.

He lasted two more blocks before ducking away.

An alley. Another one. He was learning the city’s hidden veins — places where the current of people thinned and he could collapse without being seen. This one ended in the locked door of a storage building, dumpsters lined against the wall, shadows cool against the midday sun.

He dropped his backpack and sat hard on the ground. His head fell into his hands.

The phone call still gnawed at him. No answer. No message left. Just silence. He replayed it in his mind until the silence itself became unbearable. Maybe they’re afraid. Maybe they already know. Maybe they’ve already been told what I am.

The thought burned worse than hunger.

He pulled his hands away from his face. They shook, the faint shimmer curling around his fingers again, the same heat-haze distortion. He clenched them into fists, but the shimmer didn’t leave.

He swallowed hard, throat dry. I have to know.

His gaze drifted to the air around him. Dust motes floated lazily in a shaft of sunlight cutting down the alley. He reached toward them without meaning to — and the motes shifted. Not just drifted, but shifted, circling him as though caught in a hidden current.

His pulse spiked. He jerked his hand back, and the motes scattered.

But the hum didn’t stop. It stayed inside him, insistent, like pressure behind his ribs.

“Fine,” he muttered. His voice cracked. “Fine. Just… show me.”

He raised both hands this time, palms out. The air rippled faintly. Dust motes lifted again, but not just dust — the very air trembled, vibrating against itself. He could feel it, as though a hundred invisible threads were wound through his fingers.

His breath came fast, shallow, but he didn’t pull back. He pushed.

The dumpster at the end of the alley groaned. A low metallic shudder, as though something inside it had shifted without touch.

Elias froze. His hands dropped instantly. The shimmer snapped away. The silence rushed back, heavy and ordinary.

His chest heaved. Sweat beaded cold against his temple.

He stared at the dumpster, half-expecting it to move again, half-praying it wouldn’t. Nothing. Just metal and rust and quiet.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

For a long moment he sat there, trembling. He wanted to deny it, shove it back into the realm of impossible dreams. But denial didn’t move dumpsters.

This was real.

And if it was real, then he wasn’t just surviving anymore.

He was changing.

The thought terrified him.

And yet, beneath the terror, something else flickered — brief, sharp, undeniable.

A spark of wonder.

The spark faded as quickly as it came, leaving him hollow.

He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, desperate to scrub the memory away. It wasn’t strength. It wasn’t power. It was a mistake — a c***k he’d widened without meaning to.

And yet his mind replayed the groan of metal, the way the air had bent under his will.

No one had touched that dumpster. No wind had blown. That had been him.

He let his hands drop, staring at his palms as though they might show proof of what he was. They looked the same: dirty, trembling, lined with faint scars from a dozen ordinary accidents that should have hurt more than they ever did.

How far does it go?

The question hit him harder than the act itself. If he could nudge dust, tremble air, shift metal — where was the line?

He gripped his knees tight, forcing the thought away, but it clawed back. Curiosity was louder than denial.

His eyes darted to a crushed soda can near the dumpster. He stared at it until his vision blurred, until the world tunneled into that single piece of scrap. He raised a shaking hand, fingers splayed.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then the can twitched.

Just once, the faintest scrape against asphalt.

Elias gasped and yanked his hand back as though burned. The can stilled.

His chest heaved, heart pounding too fast to count.

“Stop,” he whispered hoarsely. “Stop it. You’re not—this isn’t—”

But the lie collapsed before he could finish.

He was doing it. Whether he wanted to or not.

The hum inside him had no intention of stopping.

A sharp laugh burst from his throat, broken and hollow, startling even himself. It echoed in the alley, ugly and thin. He pressed his fist to his mouth to smother it, but the sound still rattled out in short, jagged bursts until it faded into silence.

Tears pricked his eyes. He hated them. Hated the weakness, the proof that beneath whatever this was, he was still just a boy who wanted his mother to answer the phone.

He wiped his face roughly on his sleeve, forcing the tremor down.

If this was real — if the fall, the scatter, the shimmer, all of it was real — then he had two choices: deny it until it killed him, or face it before someone else did.

He stared at the can one last time. He didn’t reach for it again.

Not now. Not yet.

The crowd outside the alley moved on, oblivious. The city carried its noise forward, blind to the boy hidden in its veins, clutching his backpack and shaking with fear and wonder.

Elias pressed his forehead to his knees. His whisper was so faint even he barely heard it:

“What the hell am I becoming?”

Minutes bled into each other as he sat hunched in the alley, his forehead pressed to his knees. The ache in his muscles grew sharper, his stomach gnawed again, and the chill of the shade crept into his bones.

The city’s hum wrapped around him, distant but inescapable. Every horn blast, every shouted voice, every vibration of engines across the street carried through him, amplified until he couldn’t tell what belonged to the world and what belonged to him.

He remembered the rooftop — the fall, the scatter, the impossible return. The memory came clearer now, no longer blurred by adrenaline. He could see it: every piece of him breaking apart like sand in the wind, yet somehow still aware, still him.

The memory made his stomach twist. Part terror. Part awe.

He dragged in a breath, shaky and shallow. His hands still tingled faintly, the hum of the world refusing to quiet. He flexed his fingers, and the shimmer almost returned — like a spark under dry leaves, waiting.

“No,” he muttered, forcing his fists shut. His nails dug crescents into his palms. “Not here. Not again.”

But he knew it wasn’t gone. It never would be.

A gust of wind funneled through the alley, carrying the smell of fried food from a street vendor somewhere nearby. His stomach growled so hard it hurt. The reminder yanked him back to something almost ordinary: hunger, weakness, the simple need to keep moving.

He stood slowly, shoulders aching, knees stiff. He grabbed his backpack, slinging it across his spine, and pulled his hood lower until his face was little more than shadow.

The dumpsters loomed at the end of the alley, silent witnesses to what he’d just done. He turned from them quickly, not trusting himself to look twice.

Back to the crowd. Back to the noise. Back to the city that neither saw him nor let him go unseen.

Each step felt heavier than the last, but he forced himself forward anyway.

Because staying still was worse.

Because no matter how much he wanted to curl into the dark and pretend none of it was real, the truth hummed louder than denial.

He was changing.

And the only way to understand it — the only way to survive it — was to keep walking.

He pushed out of the alley and back into daylight.

The brightness hit him hard, forcing him to squint. Cars rattled past, horns flared, and a bus exhaled a cloud of exhaust that stung his throat. The crowd flowed around him, strangers brushing his shoulders without pause, their lives sealed in routines he could no longer imagine belonging to.

For a few paces, he let himself move with them, a single figure in the tide. Maybe, if he walked far enough, he could trick himself into believing it. Into being normal again.

But the hum beneath his skin betrayed him. Each step carried the faintest vibration, like invisible threads tugging at his bones. He felt the molecules in the air shifting with the rhythm of his breath, waiting, whispering.

He shoved his hands deep into his pockets, as though that could bury the sensation.

The smell of roasting chestnuts drifted from a cart on the corner. His stomach growled again, a sharp reminder that whatever else had changed, hunger still bound him to the same rules as everyone else. He lingered near the cart, watching coins trade hands, the vendor laugh with a customer.

Normal. Human.

He wanted it so badly it hurt.

But he didn’t step forward. He couldn’t. Every time he imagined reaching for food, imagined speaking to another person, the memory of the dumpster groaning under his will returned. The can scraping across the pavement. The air trembling around his fingers.

He turned away before the temptation to try again became too strong.

His hood shadowed his face, but not the truth.

He wasn’t blending. He wasn’t vanishing.

He was carrying something impossible inside him, and every moment among the crowd risked letting it slip.

The city swallowed him again, indifferent. But with every step, he felt the weight of the secret heavier, sharper, impossible to put down.

Elias Hale kept walking, unaware that eyes far sharper than strangers’ had already marked him — and that his steps, aimless as they seemed, were pulling him closer to a threshold he could never uncross.