Noah Gray POV
I've always known I didn't belong.
Not because anyone said it, and not because I was smarter or faster than the others. Just… different.
The orphanage keeps you busy enough to forget. Names, faces, rules. They never talk about the past. Maybe they don't know. Maybe they hide it. My memories before waking up here are blank. Empty spaces. Sometimes I think the shadows themselves are my memories, twitching just out of reach.
My name doesn't feel mine. Noah Gray. I say it each morning, but it doesn't settle right in my chest. It sounds correct, fits on paper, but it isn't mine.
Other kids move in a world I can't touch. They laugh, they fight, they fall in love, and I watch. I try to join, but I always stop a step away. Their world is solid. Mine hums. Vibrates. Shifts under my skin, behind my eyes, in the silent spaces between heartbeats.
Sometimes the whispering starts, soft at first, like a voice I can't place or a vibration under the floor. And then it grows, and I can't ignore it. My head aches, a dull thud that spreads down my neck and shoulders. I press my palms to my temples, trying to quiet it, but it only hums stronger. Shadows twitch in the corners of my vision. The light flickers and I blink it away. The walls breathe and the floor tilts, and yet when I move I am always awake.
I hate noise. The chatter, the shouting, the banging doors—every sound is a blade. So I stay quiet. I keep to corners, dim rooms, edges where the world bends but doesn't break.
I see lines fraying. People moving like smoke. Threads pulling away. I notice details they never do. I shouldn't notice, but I do. It is impossible not to notice the difference, the way the world hums and twists and pulls at me.
Sometimes I feel relief in that isolation because the world is heavy and I am light. I move among them invisible, a ghost pretending to be solid.
I trace my fingers along the edges of books. The words slip past me; the meaning irrelevant. My pulse pounds in rhythm with the hum that never stops under my skin, under my skull. I sit back, my body trembling, pressed to the worn mattress, wondering if anyone ever notices the way I see the corners of the room bending and stretching.
I wonder if anyone ever feels the quiet hum that never rests, if anyone ever knows that I am different, that I have always been different. And yet I breathe, I move, I keep walking through the orphanage, through the halls that creak underfoot, through the empty rooms past doors that hide pasts I cannot reach. I keep pretending to be just like them, to move through a world that will never truly include me.
The hum grows louder and softer all at once, a rhythm I cannot name. A presence that waits in the spaces I can't see, a pulse that moves with mine.
I close my eyes, trying to anchor myself, but the room keeps moving. The air bends, the corners twist. I feel my pulse sync with the hum, like the building itself is breathing through me. My stomach tightens. I press my hands against my thighs, trying to steady it, but the rhythm doesn't slow. I can feel it in my fingers, in my toes, even in the hairs on my neck. Something unseen stretches out, touching the edges of me.
I try to speak to myself, to calm the invisible current. You are fine, I tell myself. You are okay. But the words don't settle, they just echo in the hollow space behind my eyes.
Sometimes I reach for the door, walking slowly down the hall, pretending the hum is part of the walls, part of the old paint, the warped floorboards. I glance at the other children. They chatter, their voices light and bright. I feel a sting of envy for the simplicity they take for granted. For them, the world is predictable. For me, every corner bends. Every shadow stretches. Every silence hides a weight no one else feels.
I sit in the corner of the library, the light from the small windows cutting sharp lines across the floor. Dust motes drift lazily in the sunbeams. I trace them with my eyes, noticing patterns they couldn't possibly see. A movement in the corner of a page, the way the light flares off the ink. I feel the hum there too, behind the words, inside the lines.
I remember nothing from before I came here. Nothing except the feeling of wrongness, of being out of place. I try to imagine a life before the orphanage, but it is a blank page. Faces blur into nothing. Names don't stick. My chest tightens. I think maybe there's a reason I don't remember, a reason no one has told me. Maybe some things are not meant to be known.
The afternoon stretches on. I walk the halls, careful not to touch the other children. They think I am shy, that I am quiet. They do not know I am listening to the space between their footsteps, their breathing, the subtle creak of the floorboards beneath their weight. Every sound hums differently, and I feel the shift.
I have no one to tell. No one who would understand. Even if I tried, words would fall flat. They would not capture the hum, the twist, the pressure that sits behind my eyes. I sit alone, tracing the worn edges of a desk, and wonder if the world has always been like this, or if it has only become this way for me.
The night comes, and I sit on my bed, the moonlight spilling through the window. Shadows stretch across the floor, across the walls. I press my hands to my face, trying to block it out, but it is already inside me. The hum flows along my spine, curling in my chest, settling in my head. I breathe slowly, counting heartbeats, and the room folds around me, folds into me, and I fold into it.
I am awake. I have always been awake. I have always been different. And in the quiet, in the spaces no one else notices, I feel it waiting. Something I cannot see, something I cannot name.
And though I do not know what it wants, I know that one day, I will have to meet it.