The garage was cold enough to see your breath. The single halogen lamp buzzed faintly above the grease-stained workbench. Every surface groaned under the weight of objects that refused to be discarded: old carburetors, jars of screws labeled in meticulous handwriting, coffee cans filled with nails sorted by size, even a child's bent bicycle bell nailed to a beam. Everything was kept. Nothing forgiven. A faint vibration crawled along the metal shelves. Not sound. Not memory. A tic, barely noticeable, yet impossible to ignore. Tick tick tick.
Caspian Vance hunched over the bench, his eye pressed to a jeweler's loupe as he studied the exposed heart of a 1950s watch. The ticking stopped. Not mechanically. It was as if the universe had reconsidered. He froze. The garage felt heavier, pressure settling in by degrees. A bead of sweat traced his temple. A whisper grazed his consciousness, neither sound nor memory. Too tight. Another voice, warmer this time, overlapped. Let it drift.
He swallowed. The watch ticked again. Steady. Controlled. He exhaled and set the loupe down, parallel to the edge of the bench. Reaching for a screwdriver, a sudden rattle at the side door made him pause. Not a knock. Weight leaned into the wood. Caspian's hand slid casually, practiced, to the 24-inch pipe wrench. The rattle became a shove. The door gave. A body stumbled in.
Caspian moved. Hooking the wrench behind the intruder's knee, he yanked. Leo slammed into the concrete. Caspian dropped his weight like an engine block, pinning him. Leo gasped, too long. Then laughter, nervous, relieved. "Cas—Cas. It's me. Jesus," he said. Caspian didn't move. He studied Leo's face like a faulty part. A beat, then he released.
Leo lay on the floor, gulping air, laughing. "You're gonna kill me one of these nights," he said, rubbing his throat. "You leaned wrong," Caspian replied. Leo sat up, shaking his head. "Town's dead tonight. Even the crickets quit." Caspian lifted a microscopic spring with tweezers, too steady for comfort.
"You're vibrating the table," he said. Leo noticed his knee bouncing and cracked open a beer. Pop. The sound landed too loud, echoing in the dense garage. "Spent twenty minutes listening to my sink drip," Leo said. "Every drop felt personal." Caspian aligned the spring with precise fingers. "Did you fix it?" Leo asked. "Taped it," he admitted. "Wrapped it till it looked like a silver mummy. Still leaked."
"That's not fixed," Caspian said quietly. "It is when you're broke," Leo shot back. Caspian ignored him, adjusting the watch hands. They twitched uncertainly. "I still remember third grade," Leo said, voice soft. "Mrs.—smelled like cough syrup."
The watch hands snapped north to east. A sharp hiss sliced the air. Metal shelves shuddered. A coffee can tipped, froze, hung mid-fall, trembling. Amber light bloomed beneath Caspian's skin, molten and controlled, threading into the wrench and the floor. The air hummed, dense, pressurized. The coffee can settled. The shelves were still. The watch ticked. Perfect.
"…You saw that too," Leo whispered. Caspian let the amber fade. The pressure lifted. "You shouldn't be here tonight," he said. Leo pushed himself up. "Sarah was at the diner. Asked if you were still breathing." Caspian's hands froze. Another beat. A voice or two hovered on the edge of perception.
Leo moved toward the door, hesitated. "Something's wrong," he murmured. Not town-broke wrong. Something was testing the joints. Counting what still held. "Go home," Caspian said. "You coming?" Leo asked. Caspian reached up and killed the halogen lamp. Darkness swallowed the garage, except for the watch, ticking warmly, persistently. Caspian stood in the dark, listening to something only he could hear.
"When it breaks," a voice whispered, "you'll know what to save."
Neon buzzed outside the diner, uneven, alive. Inside, burnt decaf steamed faintly. A bell over the kitchen window dinged. Sarah moved on muscle memory, sliding the plate to Arthur. "No onions. Extra pickles."
Arthur blinked. "You remember."
"Someone has to." He reached for his fork, then paused. "You ever feel like things weigh less lately?"
"Like calories?" she asked, pouring coffee.
"Like you pick something up and it doesn't argue back."
She stopped pouring. The coffee kept flowing, then snapped upright, forming a perfect black sphere hovering above the counter. The diner went silent—no grill, no silverware, no breath. The sphere quivered, resisting gravity, undecided. Pressure built. Snap. It collapsed, soaking into the laminate. Sound slammed back in all at once.
Shaky, Sarah wiped the counter. The rag snagged. She pulled. A fresh groove carved deep into the laminate. Numbers: 42.68 N / 89.02 W. She froze. "…That's not—" She ran her thumb over it. Fresh. She didn't remember carving this.
Arthur frowned. "Not what?"
"Static shock," she said, forcing a smile. The TV played. Closed captions: "…CITY COUNCIL DISCUSSES FUTURE OF RIVERFRONT PROPERTY—" B-roll showed the riverbank. Flat. No mill. No smokestack. "That's wrong," Sarah whispered.
"No, it isn't. They tore it down years ago," Arthur said.
"No. They—" Her words vanished mid-thought. Blink. Nothing.
The diner bell jingled. A young couple entered, laughing. Normal sound returned. Arthur ate like nothing happened. Sarah's hand rested over the numbers. She didn't know why they mattered, only that letting them go felt dangerous. She pulled a pen, wrote the coordinates on a napkin, added a small dot beneath them, folded it, slipped it into her pocket. Her fingers tingled. The neon buzzed for half a second, then calmed.
Outside, Caspian sat in his idling Impala across the street, engine low, staring at the empty grass lot where the mill should be. For a split second—red. Real. Solid. Then flattened. Brick walls flickered. Erased. Amber light pulsed beneath his skin. He looked up. Sarah looked out the diner window at the same moment. Their eyes met. No wave. No recognition. Only shared pressure, shared knowing. The diner glowed behind her, a fragile island pinned to nothing. Caspian didn't smile. Neither did she. The engine idled. Waiting.