Reality didn't crumble all at once. It broke in whispers, like frost spidering across a windowpane.
Leo woke up at 5:00 AM feeling like the world had shifted in his sleep. His dorm room looked normal but something was fundamentally wrong. The air was dense, as if it had forgotten how to move. He'd been seeing strange things for weeks—pencils rolling uphill on his desk, shadows that bent wrong, his reflection lingering a moment too long.
He sat up in bed, sheets damp with sweat, and checked his alarm clock. It still showed 5:01 AM, pulsing like a heartbeat. Just like yesterday. He'd already changed the batteries twice but time itself seemed stuck, watching him.
Something flickered near the electrical outlet. Two quick blinks. Dit-dit. Morse code for "I."
His phone buzzed. Unknown number: You see them now, don't you? The threads? They saw you first.
Leo stared at the message. It mentioned Jessica Winters from his calculus class—the girl who doodled galaxies in notebook margins and had looked scared yesterday, mouthing something that might have been "help" or "run."
Then he saw them. Thin glowing lines connecting objects in his room, stretching from his desk lamp to his laptop to his mini-fridge. The threads hummed with stolen voices, borrowed breaths.
"Not now," Leo muttered. "I have a midterm."
The threads pulsed brighter, and whispers started—words he couldn't understand but felt deep in his bones.
Leo looked in the bathroom mirror and saw himself: black hair, hazel eyes rimmed with dark shadows from too many sleepless nights, pale skin from too much studying. But his reflection looked wrong somehow, rippling at the edges like disturbed water.
The threads were there too, curling around the mirror's frame. One reached toward his reflection's throat and he felt phantom pressure against his windpipe. He turned away before they could do more.
His phone buzzed again: The threads are just the beginning. Watch for the Weaver in gray. He's been watching you since the storm.
The storm three months ago when the power went out for exactly 19 minutes and birds fell from the sky like rain.
The communal kitchen was empty, which was unusual for Thursday morning. Leo's roommate Javi stood at the stove making pancakes, but Leo hadn't heard him come in. The silence felt oppressive, wrong.
"Blueberries or chocolate chips?" Javi asked.
For a moment, Javi's face flickered—replaced by a swirling void with faces trapped inside like insects in amber. Then it was normal again.
"Blueberries," Leo said, sliding into his usual seat.
"Christ on a bicycle," Javi muttered, looking at his phone. "That's the third one this week."
"Third what?"
"Jessica Winters. She disappeared last night. Campus security found her backpack but she was gone." A thin thread slithered from Javi's sleeve, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
Leo's fork clattered to his plate. He'd seen threads wrapped around Jessica's wrist yesterday.
"They'll find her," Javi said, but his tone was too bright, too forced.
"They won't," Leo said quietly. "Just like they won't find Katie Chen, or Professor Peterson, or any of the others."
Javi stared at him, his expression taking too long to change, like a video buffering. "What others?"
Leo couldn't explain about the threads taking people, stealing them piece by piece. "Nothing. I'm late for class."
In the library, Leo tried to study but couldn't focus. A silver thread stretched between the bookshelves, barely visible, winding through the air like a whisper of something unseen.
"Hey, you good?" Jessica Winters stood beside his table.
Leo blinked. Jessica was supposed to be missing, but here she was, dark hair falling across her face, shadows clinging to the hollows beneath her eyes.
"Yeah, just tired," he lied.
"You've been staring into space for five minutes," she said. There was an edge to her voice, quiet urgency beneath her usual confidence. "You heading back to the dorms soon?"
Leo nodded.
"Walk with me?"
Something in her tone made him pause. Jessica Winters, who never looked over her shoulder, was afraid.
The campus looked normal at first. Mrs. Henderson walked her dog Meatball across the quad, except Meatball had died last spring. The campus shuttle drove by with Kenny behind the wheel, even though Kenny had already retired.
Buildings that were familiar in daylight now loomed like silent sentinels. Shadows stretched too long across the pavement.
"Have you ever felt like you're being watched?" Jessica asked as they walked.
"All the time," Leo admitted.
"It's more than that," she said, her voice dropping lower. "People are disappearing. Katie Chen, Professor Peterson, Adam Park. They didn't just vanish—they were taken."
"Taken by what?"
Before Jessica could answer, a low sound vibrated through the air. Not quite a growl, not quite a whisper. The silver thread in Leo's vision snapped taut, pulling toward the alley between buildings.
A man in a gray suit waited by the chain-link fence. His silver hair absorbed light instead of reflecting it. His smile was too wide, his teeth too sharp. Where his shadow should have been, threads writhed like dying snakes.
When he tilted his head, reality tilted with him. The world creaked and groaned like ice in spring.
Jessica screamed.
The thread wrapped around her wrist like a noose and pulled her into the darkness. Leo lunged forward but it was too late.
Jessica was gone.
The alley was empty. Only a broken thread remained, frayed at the edges.
Leo stood there, breathing hard. Then another thread appeared, reaching for him.
The man in gray was gone, but the threads remained, vibrating with a warning Leo didn't yet understand. Or maybe he did understand, but that knowledge lived in memories that tasted like static and smelled like burning time.
His phone buzzed: Welcome to the unraveling, Leo Valdez. Try not to scream—it only encourages them.
Leo knew he wasn't dreaming. This was real.
And now that he'd seen the monsters, they would never let him look away again.