It happened at 2:14 AM.
Eli was asleep in the hospital chair.
Maya's heart monitor was steady.
The city outside was quiet.
Then the machine made a sound he had never heard before.
A flat, continuous tone.
His eyes snapped open.
The line on the screen was straight.
"No—no no no—"
Nurses rushed in. Doctors followed. Voices overlapped.
"Clear!"
Her body jerked from the shock.
Nothing.
Eli stood frozen, fingers digging into the metal railing of the bed.
"Again!"
Shock.
Nothing.
The world began to tilt.
Not physically.
Existentially.
Like reality itself had taken a wrong step.
"Charge to 300—"
"MOVE!" Eli shouted, but his voice didn't sound like his.
It sounded… layered.
Like a thousand echoes speaking at once.
A nurse touched his shoulder to move him back.
The moment she did—
Time stopped.
The shock paddles froze mid-air.
The falling clipboard hung motionless.
Even the dust in the light beams stood still.
Except Eli.
And Maya.
Her body was still warm.
Her chest unmoving.
He stepped closer, trembling.
"Please…" he whispered.
Something inside him cracked open.
Not emotionally.
Structurally.
Like a sealed door inside his existence had just blown off its hinges.
The air bent inward toward him.
Gravity thickened.
The hospital lights stretched into lines.
Far above Earth, satellites shut down.
Across the solar system, space rippled.
Beyond the galaxy…
stars flickered.
Somewhere Beyond the Universe
Alarms older than time screamed.
"Power surge detected."
"Source: The Anomaly."
"Energy output exceeding dimensional threshold."
A vast presence recoiled.
"He is evolving through grief."
Back in the Frozen Room
Eli placed his hand over Maya's heart.
"I don't know what I am," he said, voice shaking,
"but you don't get to take her."
Space folded.
Not metaphorically.
The distance between his hand and her heart ceased to exist.
He didn't send energy.
He rewrote the rule that said her heart had stopped.
Reality resisted.
Hard.
The room fractured with invisible cracks.
Monitors shattered without sound.
Windows spiderwebbed.
Blood ran from Eli's nose.
"LIVE," he whispered.
The word wasn't air.
It was law.
Outside, the sky split with silent lightning.
Across the planet, people looked up in confusion.
Every clock on Earth ticked backward one second.
In the hospital room, Maya's chest rose.
Time restarted.
The doctors stumbled.
Machines rebooted.
The heart monitor screamed back to life.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Eli collapsed to his knees, gasping.
The staff stared at the screens.
"…That's impossible," one whispered.
Maya's eyes fluttered open.
"…You're crying," she said weakly.
Eli laughed and sobbed at the same time.
But he didn't see what happened above the world.
A tear in space slowly closing.
Something vast pulling away in alarm.
A realization spreading across existence:
He didn't just grow stronger.
He had just overruled death.
And the universe understood something terrifying.
It had tried to take what anchored him.
Instead…
It had removed the last limit on what he would become.