The phone felt like a block of ice in my hand. The words WE SAW THAT. DON'T MOVE. burned into my vision. Every instinct screamed at me to run, to flee the café and disappear into the city's anonymous pulse. But the command was absolute. My feet were rooted to the same spot where I'd just rewritten a man's free will.
The bell above the door chimed.
I flinched, my head snapping up. A man walked in, but he was no suit-and-tie corporate entity. He wore dark, functional clothing, his posture relaxed yet alert, his gaze sweeping the room with an unnerving efficiency before landing on me. He didn't look through me. He looked into me, as if scanning my source code.
He approached the counter, his steps silent on the tiled floor. My heart hammered a frantic rhythm against my ribs. This was it. They found me.
"Rough morning?" he asked, his voice calm, almost conversational.
I couldn't speak. I just stared, my hand still clenched around the phone.
He leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial tone. "The Julian Thorne incident. That was messy, Elara. You left a massive energy signature. Like a splatter of psychic paint on a white canvas."
My breath hitched. He knew my name. He knew about Julian. "Who are you?" I managed to whisper.
"Caleb. Think of me as… a system administrator." His eyes, a sharp, intelligent grey, held mine. "The folks who texted you? The Arbiters? They're the corporate firewall. They see a glitch, they quarantine it. Permanently."
"A glitch?" Indignation cut through my fear. "I didn't mean to—"
"Intentions are irrelevant to the code. Only output matters." He gestured toward the door. "What you did to Thorne created a reality paradox. His desire for you was real, and you just… deleted the source. That creates a leak. A instability. It needs to be patched."
"Patched? How?"
"By cleaning up your residual energy. You manifested his obsession. Now, you need to manifest its dissolution. Cleanly. Precisely." He saw the utter confusion on my face. "You're a programmer, right? Think of it as debugging. You introduced a bug into the reality script. We're going to find it and delete it."
He made it sound so logical, so clinical. It stripped the terror away and replaced it with a bizarre, technical challenge. My mind, trained for logic, latched onto the analogy.
"What do I do?" I asked, my voice steadier.
"Close your eyes," Caleb instructed, his tone becoming focused, directive. "Visualize the energy between you and Thorne not as a bond, but as a line of code. You see the variable you created. Now, select it. Backspace. Erase it. Not with fear. With certainty. With the absolute knowledge that it was an error and you are now correcting it."
I closed my eyes, shutting out the café. In the darkness of my mind, I saw it: a tangled, pulsating strand of light, connecting my core to a fading image of Julian Thorne. It looked wrong, corrupted. A bug. My fingers twitched at my side. I focused, imagining a cursor blinking at the end of that chaotic line. I took a mental breath and pressed backspace.
The strand didn't snap; it un-wrote itself, from the end back to the source, dissolving into nothingness with a soft, digital sigh. A profound sense of calm washed over me, a stillness I hadn't felt since before Nibbles. The psychic static in the air vanished.
I opened my eyes. The world seemed sharper, clearer.
Caleb was watching me, a flicker of surprise in his grey eyes. "Fast learner," he murmured, almost to himself. "Most people take weeks to achieve a clean deletion."
Before I could process the small spark of pride, his expression hardened. He looked past me, out the café's large front window. His body went taut.
"The theory lesson is over," he said, his voice low and urgent. "The Arbiters don't just send texts. They send cleaners."
I followed his gaze. A sleek, black sedan, windows tinted to absolute opacity, had pulled up silently across the street. Its doors began to open.