The morning smelled like rain that never came. Cloud cover hung low over campus, flattening colors and making every shadow look a little softer, a little less certain. Kayden moved through it with an odd detachment, as if he were walking through a scene he could step out of at any moment. The thin line had been tugging at him all week; it felt like a string tied to his spine, pulling him toward places he could not explain.
He found Alex where he always did—sitting on the fountain wall, headphones off for once, scrolling through his phone with the kind of casual focus that belonged to someone who hadn't been up all night wondering whether reality would peel itself away. Alex looked up when Kayden approached and grinned, relief lighting his face.
"Hey," Alex said. "You look less like a corpse today. Improvement."
Kayden tried to laugh, a quick, flat sound that died on the edge of his throat. "Progress," he said.
Alex studied him. "You sure? Phineas called last night—said he saw something weird. You were... different."
Kayden let the word slide off him. "Stress," he said. "Lots of it."
They walked together toward the dining hall, slipping through clusters of students and the scattered, indifferent noise of campus life. Alex jabbered about a paper and a group project and a girl in their chemistry class who refused to stop quoting obscure movies. Kayden listened in half, giving the gestures and occasional answers while his attention drifted inward.
Inside, the dining hall felt warmer than the outside world, packed with bodies that breathed and spoke and moved in ways that suddenly seemed foreign. Kayden kept his head down, focused on the tray he carried, counting steps to keep himself from being overwhelmed. The aftershocks had taught him how fragile the normal could be. He was learning to make his own small islands of control.
They sat opposite each other. Alex reached for a fork, then paused. He looked up at Kayden like someone noticing an unexpected detail in a familiar painting.
"Dude," Alex said slowly. "Your eye—what's up with your eye?"
Kayden blinked. He'd felt it for a few days: a tightness along the outer corner of his left eye, something like a faint pressure under the skin. He had told himself it was exhaustion, a hangover from the sensory overload. He'd trained himself to ignore phantom pains. But under Alex's gaze it felt different, exposed.
"What about it?" Kayden asked, trying to keep his voice steady.
Alex leaned in, curiosity mixing with worry. "It looks… silver. Like there's a sliver of light in it. Not normal. You didn't get punched, did you?"
Kayden brought a hand to his face without thinking, fingers brushing the corner of his eye. The skin there tingled faintly, like an afterburn. He could see the silver—only when he held his gaze in a certain way, as if the eye itself were reflecting something that wasn't there.
He swallowed. "No. I don't know. Maybe I'm tired."
Alex wasn't convinced. He reached out and, gently, took Kayden's hand. The motion was small, human, and the contact made Kayden's chest tighten. He wanted to tell Alex everything—the voice in his head, the thin line, the way the world bent for him and no one else—but he had learned the cost of saying too much. People walked away scared, or they laughed, or they called him a liar. Alex deserved better than fragments.
"Promise me," Alex said, quietly. "Promise you'll tell me if something changes. Like, actually tell me."
Kayden met his friend's eyes and saw something honest and raw there: not just concern, but a fear that the ground itself might open under them and leave one of them behind. For a long moment he hesitated, feeling the gravity of the choice—what to keep and what to share.
"Okay," he said finally. "I'll tell you."
Alex nodded, relieved. He flashed that easy grin again, but there was a stubborn crease at the corner of his mouth that showed the worry hadn't left. They ate in silence for a while; Alex tried to fill it with small talk about the project, about the weather, about the possibility of rain. Kayden answered, but the words felt remote.
Outside, the thin line pulled harder.
It started as a flicker, a breath of movement beneath the surface of the world. Kayden noticed it as a tightening in his chest and a ringing low in his ears. He looked across the courtyard and saw the edge of the world shift like a ripple through glass. For everyone else, nothing happened; they kept moving, laughing, bumping shoulders. For Kayden, the air bent, briefly, around a student walking past with a backpack slung carelessly over one shoulder.
The student's outline shimmered for a fraction of a second, like heat over asphalt. Kayden saw it—the blur, the momentary transparency where reality thinned—and he reacted without thinking. He reached forward and gripped the student's arm.
The boy yelped, startled. "Hey! What the—"
"Sorry," Kayden muttered, pulling him back. He wasn't sure what he had saved him from. The boy glared, rubbings his arm, then turned away, annoyed and already forgetting.
Alex was halfway across the courtyard before Kayden had explained anything. He had seen the movement, the way Kayden flinched, the sudden grab. Alex came running back, face white.
"You saw it," Alex said breathlessly, not as a question but as a declaration.
Kayden looked at him. "I thought I was imagining things," he admitted. "But I saw it. A shimmer. It was like someone took the world and made a slit in it for a second."
Alex's eyes were wide. "And the kid? Did he—did he feel it?"
Kayden shook his head. "No. Only me."
They moved together toward the library, away from the main flow of people. The campus, normally a comfort, felt exposed. Kayden's pulse beat a little faster; the thin line felt like a live wire now, alive and inquisitive.
"What if—" Alex started, then stopped, staring at Kayden with a new seriousness. "What if it's not just noticing you? What if it's trying to get in?"
Kayden thought of the voice that sometimes spoke in his head, calm and mechanical. He thought of the way the anomaly had recognized him. The words he'd heard before now landed like stones in his chest.
"It's thinner for me," he said quietly. "Like the boundary is easier to cross. I don't know if it's trying to get in, or trying to see out."
Alex ran a hand through his hair, trying to stitch together a theory out of panic and hope. "Can you... do anything? Can you make it stop?"
Kayden wrapped his hands around his arms, as if to anchor himself. He had tried to control the pulses before—used the system's guidance, closed his eyes, breathed slow—but this felt different: not a module to switch on, but a change in him.
"I don't know," he said. "I'm learning. That's all."
They sat on the library steps, close enough that Alex's shoulder touched his. The proximity was a tether; Kayden felt steadier with it. Around them, the campus continued its indifferent day, but now there was an undercurrent of threat—an awareness that something had shifted in the fabric of their lives.
The first sign had arrived. It wasn't dramatic; there had been no explosions, no monsters. Just a soft, silver light in his eye and a brief, translucent slit through another student's outline. Yet those small things carried a weight heavier than any weapon. They were proof that the thin line existed and that it had chosen to fray where he stood.
Alex looked at him again, voice small. "Whatever happens, I'm with you. Don't push me away."
Kayden felt something break and then re-form inside him: the old life narrowing into a path that now included secrets and danger, and someone who insisted on walking beside him anyway. He nodded.
"Okay," he said. "Stay close."
They remained on the steps until the light shifted, until the world felt thick enough to breathe in again. Kayden watched people go by—faces that would never know the slit, the shimmer, the tiny silver flash. He kept his eyes on them, cataloguing, memorizing small ordinary things he might miss once the line thinned further.
When they left, Kayden felt the thin line whisper against his skin, not as threat now but as a reminder: the world had already started to change around him. The first sign had been given. The pieces were moving. And there would be no turning back.