School sounded wrong.
Ren noticed it the moment he stepped off the bus.
Not visually. Everything looked normal—the wet pavement, the cluster of students rushing toward the building, and the security guard pretending not to vape near the entrance.
It was the sound.
The world was half a second late.
Footsteps hit the concrete before the tap-tap-tap followed. A locker slammed shut across the yard, and the metallic bang arrived after the vibration had already died.
Ren stopped walking. No one else noticed.
He swallowed and kept moving.
The hallway was worse.
Hundreds of students packed the corridors, laughing, complaining, and yelling over each other. Normally, the noise was a constant roar.
Now, it was… staggered.
A laugh began before the mouth opened. Words landed in Ren's ears before they finished leaving lips. Chairs scraped against the floor, and the screech followed too slowly, like reality was buffering on a bad connection.
Ren pressed his left hand against his temple and squeezed his eyes shut.
"This is fine," he whispered. "Totally fine."
He took another step—and flinched.
A bell rang.
RIIING.
Then, a full second later, the sound of the bell arrived, hitting him like a physical wave.
Several students groaned and started moving to class. None of them reacted to the delay. They moved through the lag like fish swimming in dirty water, unaware the current had changed.
Ren did.
Rule #6, a quiet voice in his mind whispered. Distortion precedes manifestation.
He forced himself to walk.
Every step down the hallway felt like moving through a poorly synced video. His shadow lagged slightly behind him—not enough to detach, just enough to feel heavy.
He reached his locker and leaned against the cold metal.
Breathe. Count. Don't look for it.
"Dude."
Jian's voice arrived before Jian did.
Then Jian appeared beside him, looking exhausted. His hair was messier than usual, his eyes ringed with dark circles that matched Ren's.
"You hear it too," Jian said, his lips moving out of sync with his voice.
Ren closed his eyes. Relief hit him so hard his knees almost buckled. "I thought I was having a stroke."
"Not yet," Jian muttered. "That comes later."
Ren opened his eyes. "What is it?"
Jian glanced around. Students passed them, oblivious.
"Sound desync," Jian said. "Early-stage spatial distortion."
"That's… bad?"
Jian winced. "Yeah."
They started walking toward class together.
"When something pushes into this layer," Jian continued, keeping his voice low, "it doesn't arrive cleanly. Space tries to correct itself. Sound is the first thing to break. Light is the second."
Ren swallowed. "So something's coming."
"Something's already here," Jian corrected. "Just not fully."
They turned a corner near the science labs.
Ren froze.
At the far end of the hallway, a group of students stood laughing near the drinking fountain.
Their laughter echoed.
Then echoed again.
Then it echoed a third time—each repetition slightly lower in pitch, slightly delayed, dragging out into a slow, metallic groan.
The students didn't react. They kept laughing, their faces frozen in joyful rictus while the sound looped around them.
Jian stopped walking. He threw an arm out, stopping Ren. "Don't cross that line."
Ren followed his gaze.
A faint ripple shimmered across the floor tiles, like heat rising off hot asphalt. The air beyond it vibrated subtly, bending the light.
"What happens if someone walks through?" Ren asked.
Jian didn't answer immediately.
A freshman did it for him.
The boy ran down the hall, late for class, his backpack bouncing. He looked at his phone, completely ignoring the ripple.
He crossed the invisible line.
Zip.
He didn't trip. He didn't scream. He simply... ceased.
One second he was there. The next, the space was empty. The air snapped shut where his body had been.
Ren's breath hitched. "He just—"
"Quiet," Jian hissed.
Ren looked around wildly. "Nobody saw that? He just vanished!"
A girl standing near the lockers blinked. She looked at the empty space where the boy had been. She frowned, confused for a microsecond.
Then she shrugged and turned back to her friend. "Did you hear something?"
"No," her friend said. "Come on, we're late."
The hallway corrected itself. The ripple vanished. Sound snapped back into sync.
Ren's heart hammered so hard it hurt his ribs. "They forgot him," Ren whispered. "Instantly."
Jian's jaw tightened. He pulled Ren away from the spot.
"The Fracture corrects the narrative," Jian said grimly. "Normals can't process the glitch, so their brains edit it out. To them, he didn't vanish. He just... took a shortcut."
"Where is he really?"
"Somewhere that hasn't finished existing yet." Jian looked at Ren. "And yeah. Before you ask—this is your fault. Your 'beacon' is tearing the wifi password to reality."
The bell rang again—this time perfectly synced.
But Ren no longer trusted it.