00:00 did not arrive like a bell.
It arrived like a seal pressed into hot wax.
The air thickened. Not with fog. With meaning.
The street held still.
Not silent.
Still in the way a courtroom goes still when the doors open and everyone remembers they have bodies.
Across the street, the police station doors slid open.
And did not show a lobby.
They showed black water—motionless, waiting—like the inside of a drowned chamber that had kept its patience.
The officers who had been laughing a second ago froze mid-step. Their mouths stayed open, teeth catching the fluorescent light. Their breath did not fog.
Statues in uniforms.
Above the entrance, the station's sign didn't change shape.
It changed weight.
Letters bled out of their safe municipal font and restacked themselves into something too clean to be paint.
JURISDICTION: LOW TIDE
He stared.
His brain offered a dozen explanations—electrical failure, gas leak, mass hysteria, sleep deprivation.
None of them explained the salt on his tongue.
None of them explained the water inside the doors.
Behind him, the person from the café—the one on the phone—laughed at something on the other end of the line, careless and alive.
Then they said the full name again.
Clear. Confident.
A signature tossed into the air.
The streetlight above them flickered once.
Their shadow stuck.
Not metaphor.
Fact.
It flattened against the pavement and did not follow when they shifted their weight.
They looked down, confused.
Confusion became panic.
"Hey—what the—?" Their voice broke. "Officer! Help me—"
They tried to say another name.
A full one.
The syllables made it to their teeth—
—and died.
The Low Tide took the sound and left the mouth moving without it.
From the darkness between streetlights, something stepped out.
Tall. Thin.
A long coat that didn't flutter because the wind had forgotten its job. Shoes too clean for the sidewalk. A face that looked like it had been erased and redrawn until it stopped being convincing.
In one hand, it carried a sheet of paper.
Pale. Clean. Too bright without catching any light.
It didn't rush.
It didn't have to.
Each step felt like a line item being added to a bill.
His phone vibrated in his palm.
INJUNCTION I: NO FULL NAMES.
The line sat on the screen like a stamped order.
Under it, faintly embedded into the lock screen, the Case ID watermark glimmered.
LT-00:00-001
He didn't know if it was for him.
Or if it was the first file in an infinite cabinet.
The trapped stranger's eyes found his.
Please.
No words. Just the look.
His instincts screamed to move.
His instincts screamed louder to not be noticed moving.
He took one step forward anyway.
Then stopped.
Because he understood the trap.
Ask their name? An open question. A hook.
Shout for help? A name would slip.
Run into the station? The station opened into water.
The tall thing reached the stranger.
It raised the paper.
In the hush of the Low Tide, he heard a whisper that wasn't breath—ink running through a pen.
"Service."
The paper touched the stranger's chest.
The stranger jerked like they'd been shocked.
Their eyes went glassy, as if reading something only they could see.
Then their shadow—still nailed—began to pull.
Not down.
Sideways.
As if the pavement was a door and someone on the other side had opened it.
The stranger's fingers scrabbled on asphalt. Nails tore. Blood smeared a wet red line.
They tried to form words.
He moved before thought could veto him.
Not heroic. Practical.
He lunged and grabbed their wrist.
Skin cold. Weight wrong.
The moment his fingers closed, his phone warmed in his palm—an ugly, living heat.
The Case ID watermark pulsed once.
Not a notification.
A heartbeat that wasn't his.
A line appeared beneath the injunction, typed without any app owning it.
ADDITIONAL PARTY IDENTIFIED.
His stomach turned.
The tall thing's blank face angled toward him.
Not looking.
Recording.
The stranger's arm went slack in his grip.
Their shadow tore free from the pavement with a sound like wet paper ripping.
And then the stranger was gone.
Not dragged.
Not swallowed.
Simply… removed.
A faint shimmer remained where they'd been, like heat haze over asphalt.
The dropped phone on the sidewalk kept ringing.
No one was there to answer it.
The tall thing folded its paper once, neat and final, like a clerk finishing a task.
It took a step toward him.
He stepped back.
His heel hit the curb.
Behind the café glass, people still laughed. Still typed. Still lived.
The normal world continued like a show he no longer had access to.
Inside, the server glanced at the door.
Her eyes slid over him.
Didn't focus.
Didn't recognize.
It wasn't that she didn't see him.
It was that he wasn't hers anymore.
The tall thing took another step.
He turned and ran.
Not into the station.
Away from it.
He ran past flickering lamps and frozen cars, past a bus stopped mid-lane like its driver had been paused. Street names blurred, then snapped back—too sharp, too close—as if the world couldn't decide how much distance to admit.
He looked back once.
The tall thing wasn't chasing.
It walked.
And the street edited itself to keep up.
At an intersection, he skidded to a stop.
The traffic lights were dead.
In their place hung a single lantern, pale and steady, suspended from nothing.
It shone straight down.
Not light.
Attention.
Where the beam touched asphalt, the road looked… annotated.
Highlighted.
Like the city had become a document and someone had started marking what mattered.
He ducked out of the circle, heart hammering.
His phone vibrated again.
A new line appeared with the calm of customer support.
NOTICE: YOU HAVE BEEN SEEN.
RECOMMENDATION: SEEK SHELTER.
Recommendation.
Like he'd asked for directions.
Like this was a service desk and not a sentence.
He spun, scanning for anything that wasn't street and glass and the open mouth of the station behind him.
That was when he saw the stairs.
They hadn't been there at 23:59.
They were there now.
A broad stone staircase rising from the asphalt as if the street had cracked open to make room. Wet stone. Barnacle scars. Old salt stains.
At the top stood a doorway with no building attached.
Just a frame.
A threshold hanging in the air like a mistake.
Above it, carved into nothing, were words that made his molars ache.
SEA-BED COURT
The stairs descended, too.
Not into a basement.
Into depth.
When he looked down the stairwell, streetlights in his peripheral vision dimmed as if someone had lowered them with a finger. The surf-sound turned into pressure.
Behind him, the lantern's beam swept again.
It brushed the top step.
The stone seemed to flinch—subtle, real—as if the court itself disliked being noticed.
The beam slid away.
Missed him by inches.
He backed toward the stairs.
The wet grit under his shoes felt like sand left behind when a tide receded.
He took one step down.
The air changed immediately.
His ears popped like an elevator dropping too fast.
He inhaled—and for the first time since midnight, his lungs didn't feel like they were filling with water.
Cold clarity spread through his chest, sharp enough to sting.
A whisper scraped along the inside of his skull.
Not the tall thing.
Not the lantern.
Something else.
Old. Dying. Starved.
Breathe.
Not comfort.
Instruction.
He breathed again.
On his phone, a new line appeared under the Case ID.
Not a message.
A status.
TEMPORARY RIGHT GRANTED: BREATHING.
Granted.
By whom?
The answer arrived as a weak pressure behind his eyes, like the world itself trying to lift a hand and failing.
A sick organism summoning a foreign cell.
He didn't have time to understand.
He had time to move.
He went down faster.
Above, at the top of the stairs, the tall thing appeared.
It stood at the threshold like a clerk who had followed the wrong hallway.
Another pale sheet of paper rested in its hand.
Its blank face angled down toward him.
And in the air between them, a syllable formed.
Wrong. Rough. Close to his name but not there yet.
It tried again.
Better.
He kept descending.
Each step felt like crossing a line drawn in law rather than stone.
Halfway down, the city above vanished behind darkness.
Not a wall.
A boundary.
He crossed it.
And the pressure in his skull eased, as if something had finally stopped pressing his face against glass.
Below, the stairs opened into a wide chamber.
Not a room.
A space carved out of absence.
Columns rose from a floor like dried seabed—cracked, pale. Shelves lined the walls, packed with folders and sealed boxes swollen by damp.
Salt. Mold. Old paper.
Evidence left to rot.
In the center stood a desk.
A judge's bench that had never met a judge.
On the desk lay a single object.
Small.
White.
A piece of chalk worn down almost to nothing.
Beside it sat an empty form.
No ink. No signature line.
Just a title printed in clean, brutal letters:
DOCKET
His phone vibrated once more.
He flinched, expecting another injunction.
Instead, the screen displayed a single line.
FILE OPENED.
His mouth went dry.
Behind his ribs, that weak voice stirred again—fainter, but present, like a dying engine trying to turn.
Outsider, it said without sound.
Don't let it write you first.
He reached for the chalk.
His fingers hovered.
Pick it up, and he would be participating.
Refuse, and he would be missing.
He picked it up.
Cold.
It left faint white dust on his fingertips like residue from a verdict.
On the docket form, a new line appeared by itself, as if written by an unseen hand.
SUBJECT: [PENDING IDENTIFICATION]
His throat clenched.
He did not speak his name.
He did not write it.
He stared at the blank space until it stopped being empty and started being a battlefield.
Somewhere above, beyond the boundary, the lantern searched.
Somewhere above, a clerk prepared another notice.
Down here, in the Sea-Bed Court, the silence had a different texture.
Not threat.
Opportunity.
He set the chalk down.
Then picked it up again with a steadier grip.
Outside the jurisdiction, the world was learning his name.
Inside, he would learn how to keep it unserved.
And somewhere, very far away, something enormous listened—waiting for the next sound that could be used as an address.