Ting.
The sharp sound of the notification cut through Elias' quiet morning for the fourth time.
He had stopped counting after the third. The first had been vague. The second had contradicted the first. The third had arrived only two minutes later, which alone was enough to set his teeth on edge.
Ting.
The phone vibrated again in his hand.
'Annoying,' Elias muttered inwardly.
He stood on the elevated walkway outside the subway station, his left elbow resting against the metal railing, phone in hand, the other gripping what remained of his breakfast sandwich.
Below him, traffic crawled through the intersection. Buses idled at the curb. Pedestrians flowed around one another in practiced, familiar patterns.
It was an ordinary morning.
Which was why the alerts felt so wrong.
'What is going on?'
He glanced down at his screen. A red banner stretched across the top, stark, unmistakable. An emergency format he had only ever seen during severe storms and once, years ago, during a citywide blackout.
[Civic Notice.]
[Temporary service disruptions reported. Please remain calm.]
Elias frowned.
"Remain calm," he muttered under his breath. "That is never a good sign."
He took another bite of his sandwich, chewing slowly, eyes still on the phone. Temporary service disruptions could mean anything: signal outages, transit delays, maybe a power grid hiccup.
But then his phone vibrated again.
And again.
He did not need to look this time to know something had changed.
It was not just his phone.
Across the plaza, the large digital display mounted above a clothing store flickered. The advertisement it had been playing, something about summer sales, stuttered, froze, and was replaced by the same red banner.
Above the crosswalk, the pedestrian signal blinked, then shifted from its usual countdown to a block of scrolling text. On the side of a bus idling at the curb, the LED route display glitched, briefly displaying nothing at all before filling with the same message.
"The screens..." someone muttered nearby.
It was everywhere.
At 8:08 a.m., a single headline crawled across every visible display in blunt white letters against a red background.
[Temporary service disruptions reported. Please remain calm.]
Elias lowered his sandwich and checked the timestamps on the alerts. Five minutes apart at first. Then two. Then one. A faint tightening settled in his chest. He leaned forward against the railing, scanning the plaza more carefully now.
People glanced up from their phones, irritation flickering across their faces as their routines were interrupted. A few frowned, then shrugged it off and kept moving.
But the headline returned.
Not once.
Not twice.
Again...
Persistent.
A siren rose in the distance, then another, their wails blending with the pulse of alerts until the sound seemed to come from everywhere at once.
"There is probably a protest somewhere," someone said below him. A woman in a business jacket nodded along, already scrolling through her phone. "Or a fight. These things get hyped."
"Yeah," someone else replied. "They always overreact."
Elias was not so sure. His stomach twisted with the sense that something didn't fit. 'No anchors? Where is the live explanation?'
The red banners vanished, replaced by a wide aerial shot of another section of Orbison City. Police vehicles crowded an intersection, ambulances waiting nearby. The camera was too high, too distant for details, like footage from a helicopter. But the red and blue emergency lights was visible through the image.
The siren was then cut off abruptly as a reporter's voice took over.
"--authorities are asking residents to avoid the downtown area as a precaution," the reporter said, her voice calm in the way that sounded rehearsed. "There is no cause for panic at this time."
The words no cause for panic appeared in bold text beneath the showing wide aerial shot of the Orbison City.
Elias snorted softly. He had heard that phrase before. It never meant what it said.
The voice of the reporter continued, "Reports indicate a small number of isolated incidents involving... unusual aggression and violence."
Huh.
Unusual aggression and violence.
The phrase echoed uncomfortably in Elias' mind.
His phone vibrated again, harder this time, as if the alert system itself were losing patience.
[Emergency Alert - Test]
[This is a routine system test. No action is required.]
Elias stared at the words.
A test?
The red banner was still there. The same emergency formatting. The same all-caps urgency.
He was not the only one who noticed.
A man a few steps away let out a short, humorless laugh. "That is a test?" he said, holding up his phone for his companion to see. "Since when do tests come with sirens?"
"Maybe they messed up," the companion said, though she did not sound convinced.
Elias' alert disappeared before he could dismiss it. The red banner vanished, replaced by his normal lock screen.
For half a second, the world seemed to exhale.
Then the screens changed again.
At 8:13 a.m., the headline was updated.
[Reports of sudden violence in multiple districts.]
This time, more people stopped walking.
A low murmur rippled through the plaza as conversations stalled and restarted around the new information. Phones came out in greater numbers. People checked social media, news apps, and group chats.
"Multiple districts?" someone asked.
"I have got a friend near Southbridge," another said. "She says something is going on there too."
Elias felt an odd pressure behind his eyes, a faint, persistent ache that hadn't been there a moment before. He rubbed at his temple absently, trying to shake the sensation.
Below him, a man stumbled at the base of the subway stairs.
It was subtle at first. Just a misstep, the kind that happened a dozen times a day on crowded stairways. A few people swerved around him, annoyed.
Then he fell.
Hard.
The sound of his body hitting concrete carried up to the walkway, a dull, wet thud that made Elias flinch. The man lay still; one arm twisted beneath him at an unnatural angle.
Someone shouted from below. "Hey! Ya okay?"
"Excuse me, I know a bit of first aid." A woman pushed through the crowd and knelt beside him. "Sir?"
The man's fingers twitched.
Elias leaned forward, grip tightening on the railing.
The twitching grew more pronounced. The man's shoulders jerked, his back arching as if seized by a sudden convulsion.
"He is having a seizure," said the woman.
Then, the man's head snapped up.
His eyes were unfocused, pupils blown wide. His mouth opened, jaw stretching too far, too fast.
He lunged.
"Ahhh!"
The woman screamed as he slammed into her, both of them going down in a tangle of limbs. The scream cut off abruptly, replaced by a wet, choking sound that turned Elias' stomach.
For a heartbeat, the plaza froze.
Then panic detonated.
People screamed. Someone shouted to call an ambulance. Others backed away, tripping over one another in their haste to put distance between themselves and the writhing figures on the ground.
Elias' phone slipped from his hand and clattered against the metal walkway.
The pressure behind his eyes exploded.
Pain lanced through his skull, sharp and blinding, and Elias cried out, clutching his head as the world seemed to tilt violently off its axis.
The air shimmered.
Not a heat haze. Not light.
Something else.
Translucent text tore itself into existence across his vision, hovering impossibly in midair, visible over the plaza, over the street, over the panicked crowd.
[Awakening Initiated.]
The words burned.
"What the hell is that?" someone screamed.
A man near the stairs yelled as fire burst from his hands, uncontrolled, setting off car alarms as flames licked at a parked vehicle. A translucent barrier snapped into place around a group of people, deflecting flying debris. Someone vanished in a distortion of air, reappearing several meters away and collapsing in shock.
Elias dropped to one knee, gasping.
More text slid into place at the edge of his vision, quieter, private.
[Ability Registered.]
[Mnemonic Echo - Passive.]
The moment the words appeared, the pain vanished.
And the memories came back.
Not slowly.
Not gently.
They slammed into him all at once.