The sky broke while Cael was on the phone with a dead woman's insurance company.
"Sir, as I've explained, the policy lapsed sixty-three days before the claimant's passing. There's nothing—"
"She wasn't a *claimant*." His knuckles went white around the phone. Three years. Three years since she'd died in that hospital bed with no one holding her hand, and the insurance company still called once a quarter to discuss "outstanding documentation." Like she was a filing error. Like she was a number in a column that didn't balance. "She was my mother."
"I understand this is difficult, Mr. Arison. If you could—"
The sky split.
No sound. That was the part that would haunt him. No thunder, no crack, no scream from heaven. Just a seam opening in the blue above the Greymire District — a jagged line of light so white it burned through his apartment window and seared the wall behind him in hard shadow. The light hit his eyes like a fist, and the phone slipped from his fingers.
The insurance woman's voice continued from the floor. Tinny. Steady. Talking about policy numbers while the sky peeled apart like skin over a wound.
Cael's skull compressed.
Not pain — pressure. A frequency his brain had never received before, forcing itself through bone and membrane and into whatever sat beneath thought. His vision blurred. His teeth ached. Something was being installed inside him — shoved into neural pathways that hadn't existed ten seconds ago — and his body was screaming *reject reject reject* while his mind went absolutely, terrifyingly quiet.
He dropped to his knees.
Things fell from the fracture. Not debris. Not rain. Threads of visible mathematics — light with *structure*, geometry with intent — raining down through the rooftops and the apartment blocks and the pavement of the Greymire District like seeds from a hand too large to see. Some burned gold. Some were the colour of deep water. Some were the absence of colour entirely, and where those landed, the world *flinched*.
Through his window, three floors down: a woman in a yellow jacket collapsed on the sidewalk, convulsed, and when she stood up, the asphalt around her feet had melted into black glass.
A man across the street threw his hands out as if catching something — and two parked cars crumpled inward like paper. He screamed. Not fear. Ecstasy.
A child. Seven, maybe eight, standing at the intersection with a backpack and a juice box in hand, frozen and staring upward at the split sky with his mouth open and the juice leaking onto his shoes.
The tattooed man who'd crushed the cars turned toward the intersection.
Cael felt it before he understood it — a shift in his vision, like a filter clicking into place behind his eyes. Lines appeared on the window glass. Thin. Luminous. Stress patterns mapping where the thermal seal had weakened, where micro-fractures spider-webbed through the pane, where a sharp impact at the upper-left corner would shatter the entire sheet into nothing.
He blinked. The lines vanished. He focused. They came back.
Below, the tattooed man was walking toward the kid.
Cael's brain did what it always did — it started calculating. The man was thirty metres from the child. Walking speed, approximately five kilometres per hour. The child was not moving. The intersection had no cover. Time to contact: roughly twenty seconds.
Twenty seconds.
His mother's voice — the one that lived in the room he never opened, the room where the hospital bed and the flat-line beep and the insurance paperwork all lived — whispered through his skull like a draught through broken glass:
Stop looking for the answer, Cael. Just be here.
He'd been looking for the answer when she died. Sitting in his car in the hospital lot, phone pressed to his ear, arguing about a sixteen-thousand-dollar claim while her heart rate dropped in room 4B. The nurse had called his phone three times. He'd sent her to voicemail because the insurance adjuster had finally — finally — agreed to review the case, and he couldn't lose the momentum.
She died at 3:47 PM on a Tuesday. He solved the insurance problem at 3:52 PM on the same Tuesday. Five minutes too late for anyone but the paperwork.
Fifteen seconds.
The tattooed man's hand was rising. The same hand that had crushed two tonnes of steel like a beer can. The kid with the juice box hadn't moved.
Cael's eyes snapped to the apartment door. His building's stairwell was old — poured concrete, crumbling. If he ran, he could reach the street in... forty seconds. Too slow. The man would have the child in fifteen.
He looked at the window. The lines reappeared obediently — stress fractures, weak points, the exact spot where the glass would give.
He looked at the fire escape. Two metres below the window. Rusted steel. He could see lines on that too — the structural fatigue, the corroded bolts, the points where weight distribution mattered. It would hold a person. Barely. If he dropped from the window ledge and caught the railing, he'd hit the fire escape in under two seconds. Three flights down — twelve seconds if he jumped landings. Total: fourteen seconds.
One second to spare.
Just be here.
Cael punched the window at the upper-left corner.
The glass shattered exactly where the lines had told him it would. Clean. Diagonal fracture cascade. He swept his arm across the frame, slicing his forearm on a shard he hadn't mapped — the lines didn't show his own weaknesses, apparently — and threw himself through the gap.
The fire escape caught him like a steel hand. His ribs screamed. The railing held — one bolt sheared and rang off the alley wall below, but the others kept. He didn't pause. Three flights of open-grate stairs, boots hammering, the city screaming around him, threads of light still falling from the open sky like the aftermath of a wound that wouldn't clot.
He hit the ground running.
The tattooed man was ten metres from the child. His hand was up. His face was split into a grin that didn't belong on anything human — too wide, too raw, the expression of a man discovering he could break the world and loving every second of it.
Cael didn't plan what happened next. He didn't calculate it. He didn't analyse the threat vectors or the optimal approach angle or the probability distribution of outcomes.
He grabbed the kid.
One arm around the boy's chest, juice box crushed between them, and he *ran*. Not fast enough. Not nearly fast enough. The tattooed man's hand made a fist and a pressure wave — invisible, concussive — slammed into the pavement where the child had been standing. Concrete erupted upward in a hail of shrapnel. A chunk hit Cael's shoulder and spun him. He kept his feet. Barely. The kid was screaming against his chest, and the juice box was leaking grape down his shirt, and behind them the tattooed man was laughing.
Cael ran.
Around the corner. Into the alley behind the pharmacy. Through the gap between the dumpster and the wall that was barely wide enough for a person, let alone a person carrying a thirty-kilogram child who was gripping his collar so hard the fabric was tearing.
He pressed himself against the brick. The kid's face was buried in his shoulder, wet and shaking. The laughing grew louder, then — aimlessly — drifted east, toward other targets.
Cael looked down at his arm. The cut from the window glass was deep. Blood ran freely over his wrist and dripped onto the boy's backpack. The pain was distant, queued behind adrenaline.
His phone was still on the apartment floor. The insurance woman was probably still talking.
The lines appeared again — unbidden this time. The brickwork behind him lit up with luminous threads. Weak mortar joints. Hairline compression fractures. Load-bearing points and failure points and every structural secret this alley wall had been keeping for seventy years.
He focused on the tattooed man's retreating back. Different lines appeared — not structural. The asymmetric set of his shoulders. The micro-tremor in his right hand. The way his gait widened after using whatever power he'd used, as if the effort cost him balance.
The information arrived clean and cold. Like a diagnostic printout scrolled across the inside of his eyelids.
His phone — the one on the apartment floor, the one still connected to the insurance call — buzzed once. He couldn't see it. He wouldn't know until later that it had displayed a message no phone should have been able to produce:
> [PERMISSION GRANTED]
> User: Cael Arison
> Authority: Analyze
> Category: ■■■■■■
> Rank: F
>
> Fracture Depth: 0.01%
> Cognitive Load: Green
The category was redacted. Not glitched — intentionally obscured.
Above the city, the crack in the sky pulsed faintly. Slow. Almost rhythmic. Almost like breathing.
A dog trotted through the alley, sniffing at the blood on the pavement. It passed through a patch of residual light from the fracture without flinching. Not affected. Not changed. Whatever had just rewritten the rules of the world, it hadn't touched the dog.
Cael filed this away.
The boy in his arms had stopped screaming. He was hiccupping now, small and terrified and alive because someone had chosen fourteen seconds over fifteen.
One second. That was the margin.
The cut on his arm throbbed. The grape juice was soaking through his shirt. The sky was broken and it wasn't going to close and the people who'd been normal fifteen minutes ago were already tearing each other apart, and somewhere on his apartment floor, a phone that would never finish its insurance call was displaying a message about a Permission he didn't understand.
Eleven minutes and forty-seven seconds. That's how long the sky had been open. The number sat in his mind like a nail driven into wood — wrong, precise, important, unexplained.
Cael held the boy tighter. The kid smelled like grape juice and fear and laundry detergent.
Just be here.
For the first time in three years, he was.