The first time Adrian Hale felt it, the world didn't shatter it bent. It was a Tuesday morning, spring drizzle slicking the sidewalks of Shinjuku. Students with umbrellas flowed like a tide through the station exit, chatter swallowed by the metallic groan of trains overhead. Adrian slipped through the current, his messenger bag slung over one shoulder, earbuds dangling loose. The drizzle tasted metallic on his tongue. And then the street broke.
Not literally. But for a breathless second, the crosswalk ahead flickered. The bright LED sign showing the walking man fractured into shards, like glass cracking under invisible strain. Adrian blinked hard. When his eyes reopened, the world had rearranged itself.
Cars were no longer at a standstill. They were speeding forward, horns blaring. Screams tore through the air. A cyclist's body flew across the intersection, smashing into a windshield. Blood spattered.
Adrian's pulse detonated. He stumbled back, clutching his temple and the world snapped back. The cars were motionless again. The cyclist was alive, feet balanced on pedals, humming to herself. The crosswalk light glowed steady green.
Adrian staggered. His lungs clawed for air. A group of students glanced his way, then dismissed him as another foreigner overwhelmed by Tokyo's chaos. But Adrian knew what he'd seen. He'd felt it like a splinter jammed deep into reality.
Campus life offered no mercy. By the time he reached Keisen University, the memory of the crosswalk kept playing in his head. Classmates joked around in Japanese, which he half-understood; their voices were like a muffled radio compared to the sharp echo screaming in his skull.
He slipped into the Modern History lecture, took his usual seat near the back, and tried to look invisible. His professor droned about postwar economic booms while the rain thickened against the windows.
Adrian stared at the condensation dripping down the glass until it froze.
Not frozen as in solidified. Froze as in stopped moving entirely. Droplets hung suspended mid-slide. Outside, a crow in mid-flight locked like a paused video frame.
Adrian's pen clattered to the floor. Nobody else noticed. The classroom moved on pages turned, screens lit up. Adrian's pulse thundered. His breath fogged in the sudden stillness. He leaned forward, whispering: "What the hell is happening to me?"
And then the frozen droplets crashed downward all at once. The crow flapped on, cawing harshly. Time lurched forward. Adrian pressed his palms against his eyes until stars burst behind the lids. He didn't stay for the end of class. The corridors felt too narrow, the fluorescent lights too sharp. He needed air.
The rain had stopped, leaving the campus slick and gleaming. Students streamed out in clusters, laughing, tapping at their phones. Adrian cut across the quad toward the library, head lowered.
That's when he saw her. A girl stood alone beneath a cherry blossom tree stripped bare by the season. She wasn't holding a phone. She wasn't talking. She was staring directly at him. Her eyes—no, not her eyes. The way she was still. Like she'd been waiting. Adrian faltered. The quad moved around her as if she wasn't even there. And then her lips moved, forming words he couldn't hear.
The world bent again. Suddenly he was no longer in the quad. He was standing in a hallway lined with broken mirrors. His reflection fractured into a thousand Adrians, each moving slightly out of sync. Somewhere deep in the glass, a voice whispered his name.
He stumbled, clutching his chest. The echo collapsed. He was back on the quad. The girl under the cherry tree was gone. Adrian's bag slipped from his shoulder, hitting the pavement with a dull thud. "Are you alright?" a voice asked an ordinary, human, close.
Adrian spun. A fellow student stood there, books hugged to her chest, brows knit with concern. She looked real. Grounded. A tether back to reality. "Yeah," Adrian croaked. "Just didn't sleep."
She gave him a cautious nod and walked off. Adrian retrieved his bag with shaking hands. His throat burned. His world had cracked twice in one day, and he didn't know if he was losing his mind or glimpsing something far worse.
That night, sleep betrayed him. He dreamed of the crosswalk again but this time, the cyclist's face was clear. It was the girl from under the cherry tree. She was the one who flew into the windshield, body crumpling, blood blossoming across the glass.
He woke with a shout, drenched in sweat, the neon of Shinjuku bleeding through his curtains. And someone was in his room. Not exactly, more like standing in the reflection of his window. A figure, tall and indistinct, cloaked in shadow. Its face was smudged like charcoal dragged across paper.
It lifted a hand and tapped the glass. Once. Twice. A patient knocks. Adrian's breath stalled. Then his phone buzzed violently on the nightstand. He tore his gaze from the window, snatching it up. One new message. Unknown number.
"You saw it, didn't you?"
Adrian's first "echo bleed" leaves him rattled, but now someone or something knows he's aware. The message confirms he is not hallucinating.