Kyle learned the workshop by listening.
Not to voices.
To stress.
Metal expanded when machines ran too long. Bearings sang before they failed. Power lines carried a faint, irregular tremor when load approached unsafe thresholds. These things were not mystical. They were measurable.
No one else bothered to measure them.
Clinton worked from habit. Sarah worked from intuition. Kyle worked from inevitability.
He didn't announce what he fixed.
He simply fixed it before it broke.
A conveyor motor that never seized again.
A press arm that stopped cracking castings.
A coolant system that ran quieter, smoother, longer.
Clinton noticed after the third week.
"You're not guessing," he said one night, wiping oil from his hands. "You're waiting."
Kyle nodded. "Everything has limits."
"And you know them?"
"I feel them."
That was the closest he came to honesty.
Sarah watched him more carefully than her father did.
She noticed how Kyle never rushed, never hesitated. How he solved problems without visible effort, like the answers were already arranged and he was simply selecting the correct one.
"You don't ask questions," she said once.
"I ask them internally."
"That's not how learning works."
Kyle met her gaze. "It is if the information is already there."
She frowned. "That doesn't make sense."
"It doesn't need to," he replied.
She didn't like that answer.
Which meant she believed it.
The city experienced another blackout.
Shorter this time. More localized.
Clinton cursed. "Grid's degrading faster than projections."
Kyle listened to the silence.
The air felt heavier during outages. Not physically — electrically. Cosmic interference bled into poorly shielded infrastructure when systems went dark.
He could feel it now.
Background energy pressing in.
Not aggressive.
Patient.
Kyle adjusted the workshop's internal wiring that night, redistributing load paths and grounding points. He didn't increase capacity. He reduced susceptibility.
The lights never flickered again.
Sarah noticed the power bill dropped.
"You didn't tell anyone," she said.
Kyle shrugged. "No one asked."
"That's not an answer."
"It is," he said quietly. "It's just not comforting."
He avoided testing himself.
That was deliberate.
The wrench incident had taught him restraint. Intent shaped outcome too easily. Without understanding the limits, any experiment risked crossing thresholds he couldn't retreat from.
Instead, he studied systems.
He read old physics texts scavenged from landfill libraries. He compared them to what he felt. Where they diverged, he noted the gap without filling it.
Not yet.
He learned that space resisted abrupt change but tolerated gradual alignment. That energy moved more willingly when given pathways rather than force.
The universe preferred cooperation.
That disturbed him.
The second anomaly came with rain.
A storm rolled in unexpectedly, heavy and charged. Lightning struck a transformer three blocks away. Power surged through aging lines, overwhelming insulation.
The workshop should have lost power.
It didn't.
Kyle felt the surge before it arrived.
He didn't stop it.
He redirected it.
The energy bled harmlessly into ground, dispersing through the scrap-laden soil like water through sand.
Sarah stared at the still-lit bulbs.
"That shouldn't be possible."
Kyle felt his pulse quicken. "It shouldn't have been stable."
She looked at him sharply. "You did something."
He considered denying it.
Instead, he said, "I prevented something."
Silence settled between them.
Clinton broke it. "Then don't let it become a habit."
Kyle nodded.
But he knew the truth.
Habits form whether you intend them to or not.
That night, Kyle dreamed.
Not memories.
Equations.
Fields intersecting. Matter responding. Energy reorganizing itself around biological frameworks that had never evolved to accommodate it.
He woke with a headache and a sense of loss, like he'd glimpsed something important and deliberately looked away.
On the roof, he watched clouds drift past the stars.
He could feel the planet's rotation now.
A slow, constant curve beneath his awareness.
He pressed his palm against the concrete.
"I'm not ready," he whispered.
The echo inside him remained silent.
Which worried him more than any response could have.