Doyun did not dream that night.
Sleep came late, shallow and uneven. When he woke, the sensation from the previous day had not faded. It lingered in his body, not as pressure, but as residue—something that refused to settle.
He moved through the morning carefully.
Routine helped. Coffee. The familiar route. The predictable rhythm of the city returning piece by piece. By the time he reached the plaza near the station, the feeling had thinned enough to be ignored.
That was when it aligned.
Doyun realized the change not through movement, but through alignment.
The plaza was crowded in a way that resisted organization. Food trucks lined the edges, their generators humming at uneven volumes. People crossed paths without clear lanes, adjusting instinctively to avoid collisions. Conversations overlapped, rose, and dissolved into the general noise.
It was the kind of place where patterns dissolved quickly.
Doyun stood near a concrete planter and watched.
He wasn't searching for pressure. He had learned that trying to locate it directly only distorted the sensation. Instead, he let his attention soften, spreading outward rather than focusing on a single point.
The plaza breathed.
Someone stopped short to answer a phone call. Another person stepped sideways to make room. A child tugged at an adult's sleeve, altering their path just enough to ripple outward.
Doyun felt the familiar tightening.
It was faint.Distributed.Unattached.
He shifted his weight slightly, not to test the space, but to relieve the tension in his legs.
The reaction came before he could register the movement.
A man walking across the plaza slowed, glanced to his left, then corrected his path. A woman behind him adjusted her pace to compensate. The flow bent, then settled again.
Doyun frowned.
That timing was off.
He had felt responses before. This was not new. What unsettled him was the precision. The adjustment had occurred too cleanly, as if responding to a shared cue rather than his presence alone.
He looked up.
Across the plaza, near the edge of a temporary stage, someone stood still.
She wasn't doing anything unusual. She wasn't watching him. At least, not directly. Her gaze was angled toward the center of the plaza, unfocused, as if resting rather than observing.
And yet.
Doyun felt it.
The tightening sharpened, no longer diffuse. It aligned, converging toward a point that was not him.
He didn't move.
Neither did she.
For a brief moment, the plaza stilled around them. Not completely. People continued to walk, to talk, to exist. But the micro-adjustments slowed, then recalibrated.
Someone dropped a utensil.A conversation paused mid-sentence.A delivery cart waited longer than necessary before pushing through the crowd.
Doyun's pulse quickened.
He took a step to the side.
The response did not follow him.
Instead, it traced an arc, adjusting around the space he had vacated, then stabilizing again—centered somewhere else.
Centered on her.
She shifted then, just a fraction. A change in stance rather than position. The tightening loosened immediately.
Doyun's breath caught.
It wasn't coincidence. He was certain of that much. But certainty was dangerous. He reminded himself of the corridor. Of the crossing. Of the margin of error he had already acknowledged.
Still.
The plaza felt different now. Not hostile. Not unstable. Simply aware.
He lowered his gaze and pretended to check his phone. When he looked up again, she was gone.
The space exhaled.
The flow returned to its previous state, messy and adaptive. The plaza reclaimed its noise, its lack of structure. The tightening faded until it was no more than a memory.
Doyun left.
As he walked, he replayed the moment in his mind. Not her face—he couldn't recall it clearly—but her position. Her distance. The angle at which she had stood relative to the crowd.
That night, he returned to the plaza.
It was quieter now. The food trucks were gone. The generators silent. A few people crossed the open space, their footsteps echoing faintly against the surrounding buildings.
Doyun stood where he had before.
Nothing happened.
He moved to the spot where she had been.
The space responded differently.
Not with pressure.With absence.
As if something that had been accounted for earlier was no longer there.
Doyun closed his eyes.
He imagined the plaza as it had been in the afternoon. The overlapping paths. The subtle corrections. The shared moment of alignment.
He opened his eyes again.
For the first time, the thought did not feel abstract.
What if someone else had seen it too?