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Part II: "Everything Makes Sense"
Summary: As he moves through the city outskirts, Elias becomes aware of his instant comprehension. He instinctively decodes traffic patterns, human behavior, city maps, and mechanical systems. He avoids a patrol car without consciously planning to.
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Part II: "Everything Makes Sense"
The sidewalk felt uneven under his sneakers—concrete seams buckled by roots, cracked where time had pulled it apart. He didn't walk fast. Fast looked suspicious. Just slow enough to seem aimless, but not so slow he looked high. That came to him without thinking. It wasn't thought.
It was something deeper.
A voice without sound, a calculation without math.
He passed a corner store with security bars welded across the windows. A kid leaned against a mailbox, head down, thumb twitching across his phone. Elias didn't look directly at him, but he noted the way the kid's posture shifted when a woman passed. The boy wasn't waiting. He was scouting.
Drug lookout.
Elias crossed the street early.
As he walked, signs read like a second language he'd already mastered. "No Parking" told him there was likely patrol traffic in fifteen-minute intervals. A tilted "Neighborhood Watch" sticker on a window told him that house didn't actually report anything—old lady inside, probably scared, not confrontational. The trash schedule on a dented can marked which houses were occupied.
Every detail spoke.
He passed an idling city bus, engine rattling, heat shimmering off the pavement. Without meaning to, he counted its camera domes—three external, one internal over the fare box. Blind spot near the rear exit. He didn't know how he knew that. He just knew.
A sudden whisper of tension pricked the back of his neck.
Blue and white.
He didn't need to look. He felt it. Police cruiser.
One block behind. Slowing at the intersection.
Without pausing, he pivoted at the next corner, down a sidewalk flanked by two narrow brick duplexes. The sun dipped behind cloud cover, cooling the air just enough that he could hear his own footsteps now. Too quick? No. Casual. Don't check over your shoulder.
At the end of the block, a broken fence opened into a side alley.
He took it.
There were beer bottles in the grass, a half-burnt couch, and a tipped shopping cart. A movement caught his eye—his own reflection in a puddle. His expression was neutral. He wasn't afraid. He wasn't even thinking.
He was acting.
At the mouth of the alley, he emerged back onto the street—two blocks down from where he'd started, now positioned to move away from the police line-of-sight.
The cruiser didn't follow.
Elias exhaled, slowly.
The city breathed with him, a rhythm he could hear now, like blood through a stethoscope.
He realized something right then, standing there in the shadow of a boarded-up nail salon.
He didn't just understand things.
He understood everything.
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Final moment/image: Elias, still, calm, watching people move through their lives like pieces in a puzzle he's already solved—utterly aware he has no explanation for his clarity, and no one to tell.
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