chapter 3. fracture
487 Words
Maxxi couldn’t sleep.
She never really did.
Sleep meant dreams. And dreams were just memories trying to crawl back into her skull.
She sat against a cracked column inside the mall, eyes half-shut, listening to Aiden’s quiet breathing across the room. The storm had passed. The air was heavy with dust and ozone.
She let herself drift, not fully asleep. But her mind slipped anyway.
---
Before the fall.
The city had been alive. Neon lights. Crowded trains. The sound of people laughing without fear.
Back then, she had a name that didn’t feel like a weapon.
Back then, she smiled. Sometimes.
But not often.
Her world had always been made of silence. She was a physics student at the university—a prodigy, they called her. Cold. Brilliant. Unreachable. Not cruel, just… detached. Even then, she kept her distance.
Her mother died when she was fourteen. Her father left long before that. Books and theories became her only constants. Black holes. Gravity wells. Dimensional folding.
The laws of space comforted her because they didn’t lie.
---
The lab had been government-funded, buried under a concrete university dome.
The project: AEON.
Her team wasn’t supposed to test the prototype yet.
The collider array wasn’t stable.
But the director insisted. Deadlines. Results. Funding. Politics.
Maxxi stood behind the observation glass as they initiated the pulse. A sphere the size of a basketball floated midair in the containment chamber.
It vibrated. Then… fractured.
Reality bent. The walls around the sphere twisted, like they were being pulled into a drain.
The others screamed.
She didn't remember much after that. Only the pressure. Like every molecule in her body was being rewritten, rearranged, unfolded.
Then—
Silence.
She woke up alone in the wreckage of the lab. The city above was burning. The sky was cracked. People were gone or twisted into something worse.
And Maxxi… she wasn’t the same.
---
First time she used it was instinct.
A scavenger tried to knife her for her boots. She raised her hand. Space bent.
His body folded in half without touching him.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry.
She just kept walking.
---
Maxxi opened her eyes.
The mall was still. Aiden was still breathing. The wind outside was still moaning through broken windows.
She flexed her hand. The air shimmered faintly around her fingertips. The power pulsed like a second heartbeat—deep, endless, cold.
She didn’t know if AEON changed her…
Or if it just unlocked what was already broken inside.
---
"Maxxi."
She looked up. Aiden was sitting across from her now, awake, studying her.
“You were talking in your sleep.”
She didn’t respond.
He tilted his head. “You said something about ‘the glass breaking.’”
She stood, turning away. “Don’t listen when I sleep.”
“Was it a dream?”
“No,” she said, quietly. “It was a warning.”
- Writer
