Book 1: The T-Factor
CHAPTER 2: THE CRACKS IN THE WALL
Two weeks after the smartboard died, Leo stood in right field, wishing he were anywhere else.
Roosevelt Field was a blur of green and dust under the muggy afternoon sun. The crack of bats, the shouts from the dugout, the smell of sunscreen and cut grass—it all felt aggressively, painfully normal. Jake had strong-armed him onto the team. "For morale," he'd said, which Leo knew really meant, So you stop feeling like a ghost in your own life.
Leo didn't like baseball. The sounds were too sharp, the movements too sudden, the attention too direct. But he went. Because normal was the armor he wore every day, and sometimes armor had to be uncomfortable.
He was watching a cloud drift lazily across the sky when the line drive came.
It wasn't headed toward him; it was headed at him. A white bullet off the bat of a burly kid from Bryant High, screaming through the air straight at Leo's chest.
Time stuttered.
Not a metaphor.
The world didn't slow. It skipped—a single, jarring frame freeze. In that frozen sliver of reality, Leo saw everything. The ball's trajectory etched itself in the air as a shimmering, golden line. He saw it impact his sternum, knocking the wind out of him. He saw himself crumple to the dirt, the dugout's laughter (not cruel, but still laughter), Jake's concerned face leaning over him.
And he saw the alternative.
His body moved before his mind engaged. He didn't flinch away. He stepped into the ball's path, his glove hand snapping up in a blur. Smack. The impact shuddered up his arm, the ball settling deep into the leather webbing with a satisfying, final thud.
Silence.
Then the dugout erupted. "NO WAY!" "DID YOU SEE THAT?!" "KAMINSKI!"
Coach blew his whistle, two sharp, disbelieving blasts. "Lucky grab," he called out, but his eyes were narrowed, calculating. Leo had never moved like that. No one moved like that.
Jake thumped him on the back hard enough to make him stumble. "Since when can you catch, man?"
"Since now," Leo muttered, his heart hammering against his ribs. His fingertips tingled, the same warm, staticky sensation he'd felt when the smartboard shorted out. Time Tap. It had worked on purpose this time. And everyone had seen.
As he trotted back to the dugout, his eyes swept the stands. He found Molly sitting on the bleachers, sketchbook in her lap. She wasn't cheering. She was staring right at him, her head tilted, her pencil frozen mid-stroke.
---
Later, in the cacophony of the cafeteria, Molly's observation landed like a stone in still water.
"Your eyes looked weird when you caught that ball," she said, pushing her salad around her plate.
Leo kept his voice casual, his eyes on his sandwich. "Weird how?"
"Like they… flashed. Just for a second. Gold-ish."
Across the table, Marcus Chen snorted into his Coke. "Maybe he's part robot. Stark's secret teen-cyborg program."
Jake laughed, a loud, easy sound. "Nah, Leo's too accident-prone for robotics. Remember when he walked into the sliding glass door?"
Leo forced a smile, but his skin prickled. Molly saw the world differently—an artist's eye for detail, for light and shadow. She saw the cracks in people's smiles, the tension in their shoulders. Too close.
"Probably just the sun," he said. "Glare off the chain-link fence."
"Maybe," Molly said, but she didn't look convinced. She went back to her sketchbook, her pencil moving in quick, anxious strokes.
Marcus leaned in, his voice dropping. "Speaking of weird—you guys hear about the blackout in Long Island City last night? Whole block went dark for like, ten minutes. ConEd says it was a squirrel in a transformer." He paused for dramatic effect. "But my cousin's a lineman. He said the transformers were fried from the inside. No burn marks, no surges from the grid. Just… dead."
Jake rolled his eyes so hard Leo thought they might get stuck. "You and your conspiracy theories, man."
"It's not a theory if it's true!" Marcus insisted, tapping his phone screen. "There's patterns. My dad's a paramedic—they got new briefings last week. 'Mass casualty event protocols.' Not for terrorism. For something else. And Stark Industries? They've been buying up industrial-grade generators and field medical kits like they're stocking a bunker."
Leo's stomach tightened into a cold knot. The high-frequency hum in his molars had intensified lately, vibrating in time with his heartbeat. His Terrain Sense had been picking up tremors that weren't seismic—deep, rhythmic pulses of energy through the bedrock beneath the city. The city was a drumskin, and something was tapping out a beat on the other side.
He excused himself, claiming he needed to ask Mr. Haskins about the quantum entanglement paper.
He needed air.
---
Mr. Haskins' office was a cluttered cave that smelled of old paper, rock dust, and the faint ozone of old electronics. Haskins was at his desk, but he wasn't grading. He was studying his laptop screen, his brow furrowed.
"Kaminski," he said without looking up. "What can I do for you?"
"I had a question about the paper," Leo began, the lie ready on his tongue.
"Close the door."
Leo did. The click of the latch sounded unnaturally loud.
Haskins turned the laptop around. On the screen was a graph, jagged and spiky. "This," Haskins said, his voice low and measured, "is the electromagnetic spectrum reading from our classroom the day the smartboard fried." He pointed to a sharp, needle-like peak. "This spike. Localized, intense, and very brief. It originated roughly…" He tapped a key. A thermal overlay bloomed on a diagram of the classroom. A single, hot red dot glowed directly over Leo's assigned seat.
Leo's mouth went dry. "Coincidence."
"Maybe," Haskins said, leaning back in his creaking chair. He studied Leo, not with anger, but with a deep, probing curiosity. "I used to work at a private research lab. Brookhaven-adjacent. We studied anomalous energy signatures. Readings that didn't match any known source." He tapped the screen again. "This matches."
He paused, and his gaze drifted to a framed photo on his desk—a younger Haskins with his arm around a grinning, lanky teenager with clever eyes. The glass was dusty.
"I had a nephew," Haskins said, his voice softening into something rough and tired. "Brilliant kid. Saw patterns in everything. Knew when the phone was going to ring. One day, men in suits with no agency badges showed up at his school. Said they were from a 'special academic outreach program.' He went with them for a 'weekend workshop.'" Haskins' jaw tightened. "We got one letter six months later, postmarked from nowhere. Then silence."
Leo's chest felt tight. "What happened to him?"
"I don't know." Haskins looked back at Leo, his eyes sharp. "But I made a promise to myself. If I ever saw signs like that again—the strange focus, the uncanny reflexes, the… technical glitches… I wouldn't just stand by. I wouldn't let someone else disappear into the silence."
He slid a plain white business card across the desk. Only a phone number was written on it in neat black ink.
"No questions asked," Haskins said, his voice barely above a whisper. "If you ever feel like you're in over your head—if men in suits show up and ask you to go with them—you call that number. It goes to a secure line. I will come."
Leo stared at the card. It felt like both a lifeline and an indictment. Haskins didn't see a superhero. He saw a kid in danger. A kid who might vanish.
"Why?" Leo whispered.
"Because someone should have been there for my nephew," Haskins said, the words heavy with old grief. "Now… you should get to class."
Leo took the card. It burned in his pocket all the way to chemistry.
---
That evening, the vibration in his teeth was a constant, grinding scream. Leo stood in the garage, staring at the shallow, hairline crack in the drywall his fist had left four days earlier.
He'd been furious—a rare, boiling-over rage at the dreams, the whispers, the relentless hum. He'd punched the wall, expecting the sharp, clean pain of broken knuckles.
Instead, the wall had cracked. But his hand had been fine. More than fine. In the instant of impact, his knuckles had shimmered with a faint, electric blue light—Tactile Telekinesis, absorbing and dispersing the kinetic energy, protecting him. He'd stared at his unmarked hand, horrified and fascinated.
The garage door rumbled open. Maya stood silhouetted against the fading evening light.
"You okay, honey?" she asked, stepping inside.
"Fine."
She came to stand beside him, following his gaze to the crack. She didn't ask how it got there. "When I was your age," she said softly, "I used to get so angry I'd break my favorite things. A music box my grandmother gave me. A framed picture. I thought if I could destroy something beautiful, it would match how I felt inside."
Leo remained silent.
"My grandmother was from Haiti," Maya continued, her voice a gentle melody in the quiet garage. "She called my dreams voye—echoes of other lives. She said some souls are old, and they carry memories of places they've been before. That the anger… sometimes it's not about now. It's an echo from a long time ago."
Leo's breath caught in his throat. Echoes of other lives. The words resonated in his bones. "Do you believe that?" he asked, his voice barely audible.
"I believe we carry more than we understand," she said, turning to face him. Her eyes were deep pools of concern. "Your father and I… we see you, Leo. The distance you keep. The way you listen to things we can't hear. The weight you carry on your shoulders. You don't have to tell us what it is. But you don't have to carry it alone, either."
For a wild, terrifying moment, the truth surged up inside him—a confession about Thera, about Taren, about the power humming under his skin. The words pressed against his teeth, desperate to be let out.
But then he saw it in her eyes—not just love, but fear. The raw, primal fear of a parent who sees their child slipping into shadows they cannot follow. If he told her, he would transplant his nightmare into her heart. She would lie awake every night, listening to the hum he heard, seeing monsters in every shadow.
He couldn't do that to her.
"I'm okay, Mom," he said, the lie tasting like ash. "Just… stressed about school. The physics paper is kicking my ass."
She searched his face, her therapist's mind wrestling with her mother's heart. After a long moment, she nodded, accepting the boundary he drew. She pulled him into a brief, tight hug. "Okay. But my offer stands. Always." She kissed his forehead. "Dinner in twenty. Your dad is attempting stir-fry. Pray for us."
She left him alone in the gloom. Leo slumped against his father's workbench, head in his hands. The harmonic frequencies from the north, the east, the harbor, had merged into a single, piercing chord that vibrated in the fillings of his teeth and the core of his skull. It was a chord of arrival.
---
1:14 AM | The Search
Letter-Factor Phenomenon.
Multiversal Genetic Memory.
The T-Factor — Myth or Mutation?
The glow of the laptop screen was the only light in Leo's room. He was deep in the digital rabbit warren of The Whispering Gallery, a forum that looked like it hadn't been updated since the dial-up era. The posts were a mix of paranoid ravings, poetic fragments, and chillingly precise descriptions.
User: Echo_Whisperer
My daughter sees numbers around people. Their age, their heartbeat, the exact time they'll die. Doctors say it's a form of synesthesia. I think she's remembering a world where time was visible.
User: Lost_Cosine
I dream in blueprints. Woke up with the schematic for a cold fusion reactor in my head. I'm a florist. Where is this coming from?
Then, the post he'd found weeks ago, now updated:
User: TheraSurvivor_01
UPDATE: The signal is harmonizing. The bridge is stabilizing. They are coming. If you have the Mark, if you remember the Sapphire Star, if your abilities are waking—you are not alone. But you are not safe. The rupture is imminent. Prepare. Or run.
Leo's hands trembled. He minimized the browser and opened a blank document. His fingers flew across the keys:
They call it the T-Factor. In Thera, it was the Mark of the Guardians. Time, Telepathy, Technopathy, Telekinesis, Terrain Sense. All T-words. All mine. I saved them. I contained the surge. I died. But my consciousness didn't end—it echoed across the bleeding edges of reality. It landed here, in this body, in this world. And now the echo is becoming a shout. The walls between the lives are cracking. And I don't know if I'm remembering Taren, or if Taren is remembering through me.
He highlighted the text and pressed delete. Then he ran a digital shredder program. The words were gone.
But the truth remained, glowing in the dark of his mind like a ghost.
---
2:47 AM | The Bathroom Mirror
Leo stood shirtless before the medicine cabinet mirror, studying his reflection. Ordinary. Brown eyes, dark circles underneath. Messy hair. A body that was all lean angles, not a hero's build. No glowing sigils on his skin. No visible sign of the storm within.
"Show me," he whispered to the glass.
Nothing happened.
"Show me," he said again, frustration rising like bile. He thought of the baseball, the smartboard, the cracked wall. He reached for the memory of Thera—the feeling of power, of connection, of being woven into the fabric of a world.
His reflection stared back, stubbornly mundane.
Anger, hot and sudden, boiled over. He slammed his palm down on the porcelain sink. Not a punch. A flat-handed smack of pure, impotent rage.
The sink cracked. A spiderweb of fissures radiated from the point of impact, spreading with a sound like ice breaking.
But Leo's hand was fine. More than fine. As he pulled it back, his skin shimmered with that same faint, electric blue light, a protective aura that flickered and died in two heartbeats.
Tactile Telekinesis. Not just protection. Not just reinforcement. A subconscious, autonomic defense.
He stared at his hand, then at the cracked sink, then at his own face in the shattered mirror. His reflection was fractured into a dozen different Leos, each one staring back with wide, frightened eyes.
"What am I?" he whispered to the broken glass.
No one answered.
But in the silence, the harmonized frequencies from the north, the east, the harbor, suddenly spiked. They tuned themselves into a single, perfect, and devastatingly clear note—a note of piercing intent. A note that drilled into his spine and whispered a single word in the language of energy:
Soon.
END OF CHAPTER 2