(Amon's pov)
My name is Amon Vale, and the city has been trying to forget me since I was eight.
It's 2526, Johannesburg is still pretending it's the same place it was two centuries ago, and I'm sixteen with nothing but a cracked crystal monocle, a threadbare coat, and the faint buzz in my skull that says the world isn't running right.
Not the way everyone else thinks it does, anyway.I woke up in the usual spot: a maintenance alcove off the old Braamfontein mining tunnel that nobody official remembers anymore.
The air tasted like wet concrete and yesterday's rain. My back ached from the hard floor, but that was normal. What wasn't normal was the way the emergency light overhead flickered exactly three times when I opened my eyes, like it was hesitating. Like it knew I was watching.
I sat up, slipped the monocle over my right eye, and the world sharpened the way it always did lately.
Not just clearer "angled".
One extra corner in every shadow. One extra beat in every heartbeat."Morning, glitch," I muttered to myself, the same joke I'd been telling for months.Breakfast was whatever I could lift from the shelter canteen before curfew kicked in. I didn't steal much.
Just enough. A protein bar here, a half-empty water pouch there. The trick was never taking the whole thing. People notice when something's completely gone. They barely notice when a piece is… missing.
Today the line was longer than usual. Some new Accord directive about "narrative stability checks" had everyone twitchy. I heard two shelter workers whispering about it while I waited.
"Another story surge in the Drakensberg last night," the taller one said. "Gate echo, they're calling it. Kids dreaming in reverse again."The shorter one snorted. "Kids. Or street rats who think they can weave without paying the Loom."I kept my face blank, but my fingers twitched. '
Weave'. The word always landed funny in my chest, like a half-remembered song. I knew the stories the underground circles told—how certain tales could bend small things if you told them right. How the right words, at the right vein, could make a locked door forget it was locked.
But that was for Weavers. Real ones. Not tunnel rats like me.I reached the front of the line. The dispenser hummed. I smiled the lazy half-smirk that usually worked and asked for the standard ration. While the machine whirred, I let the glitch do its thing.Just a little. Just a second.The dispenser's timer skipped.
One second. Two. The bar dropped into the tray a heartbeat early. I palmed it, nodded thanks, and walked away before the worker could wonder why the count was off by one.Nobody yelled. Nobody even blinked.
That was the best part. The world kept running its script, and I kept finding the typos.I spent the rest of the morning in the tunnels, scavenging. Old fiber-optic scraps sold for decent thread-shards on the black market. Enough to trade for a hot meal or a new filter mask when the dust got bad. The deeper I went, the louder the whispers got. Not voices exactly. More like… overlapping echoes.
A woman laughing, then crying. A man promising something he never delivered. My parents' voices, maybe, from the night they vanished in the Friction eight years ago. Or maybe just the tunnels playing tricks.I rubbed the monocle with my thumb. The crystal warmed. For a second the walls lit up with faint silver threads running through the concrete like veins.
Then the black fault-lines spidered across them, thin as hair. I blinked and they were gone."Keep it together, Vale," I whispered.By late afternoon I was restless. The shelters would be doing bed checks soon, and I wasn't in the mood for another lecture about "stable living environments." So I did what I always did when the buzz in my head got too loud.I climbed.
The Zenith wasn't on any official map. It was an old service ladder at the end of a collapsed ventilation shaft that opened onto the roof of a half-abandoned comms spire near the Hillbrow edge. Twenty-three stories of rust and graffiti and city wind. Kids called it the Zenith because from up there you could see everything—the sprawl of New Jozi glowing under the evening haze, the distant purple silhouette of the Drakensberg on clear days, the faint silver shimmer in the sky on nights when the Narrative Currents ran strong.I liked it because nobody else could be bothered to make the climb twice.
My boots scraped on the rungs. Halfway up, the ladder groaned. I felt the glitch stir again time stuttering, the rung under my hand feeling farther than it should. I grinned, grabbed, and pulled. Three seconds later I was on the roof, breathing hard but smiling.The city stretched out below like a story someone else was writing. Billboards flickered with the latest Accord public-service announcements: "Your Tale Matters—Report Unstable Threads".
Hover-drones drifted past, scanning for "narrative anomalies." Somewhere down there, underground circles were probably gathering right now, sharing stories that could actually "do" things. Real Weavers, Rank 1 or 2, learning to pull on the Primordial Narrative like it was just another tool,and here I was,Sixteen, Orphan, Unawakened.
Still pretending the monocle was just a weird optical toy and the skips in time were just good luck.I sat on the edge, legs dangling over twenty-three stories of nothing. The wind tugged at my coat. The monocle caught the last of the sunset and flared once bright, almost angry. For a heartbeat the entire city grid lit up with silver threads.
Every street, every tunnel, every person down there connected in one massive, living tapestry. And running through it all, thin as cracks in glass, were the black fault-lines only I seemed to see.
I reached out without thinking and pinched two of those lines between my fingers.The world hiccuped.A drone three blocks away froze mid-scan. A pedestrian's foot paused an inch above the pavement. My own heartbeat skipped once, twice, then caught up.I let go fast. The city snapped back into motion.My hands were shaking. Not from fear, from "recognition".
Something inside me had just tasted the Loom and liked the flavor.I stood up slowly, monocle still warm against my eye. The sun was almost gone. The first stars were coming out, and for the first time I noticed they weren't just stars,they were distant anchors, points where the Primordial Narrative pooled brighter than anywhere else on this Tier 4.7 cradle of a planet.
I looked east, toward the invisible line of the Drakensberg feeder veins, and felt the pull like a hook behind my ribs.Tomorrow, I decided, I'd go deeper into the tunnels. Follow the whispers.
Find out why the world kept glitching around me and only me.Tonight I just stood at the Zenith, wind whipping my coat, and smiled the same half-smirk I always wore.
The script had a bug in it.
And I was starting to think I might be the one who wrote it.