He didn't sleep.
The noises wouldn't let him. Not the violence — that came in waves, hours of terrible sound followed by silences that were worse because silence meant someone had won. What kept Cael staring at the ceiling was the *other* sound. The hum. Low, constant, coming from everywhere and nowhere, like the city itself was vibrating at a frequency just below hearing. The crack in the sky pulsed with it. When he pressed his palm against the apartment wall, he could feel it in the plaster.
The lines showed him the vibration's effect. Micro-fractures spreading through the building's foundation. Not fast. Not dangerous yet. But the hum was doing something to the Greymire District's infrastructure, loosening it atom by atom, and [Analyze] mapped the decay in patient, luminous detail.
He watched the ceiling and memorised the pattern of the cracks until dawn came grey and wrong.
---
Day two.
The power was out. The water still ran — for now — but the tap pressure was dropping. Cael filled every container he owned: the bathtub, two cooking pots, four water bottles, a mixing bowl. He portioned his food. Two weeks of canned goods and dry pasta if he rationed. Three weeks if he stopped eating the portions he actually wanted.
He ate a cold can of beans and worked.
The logistics report — the back of it — had become his notebook. He flipped it over and began writing in the margins, the gaps, anywhere the inventory columns left space.
What I know:
1. The sky fractured at 6:43 PM. Duration: 11 minutes, 47 seconds.
2. "Threads" of light descended and entered people. Not all people. Maybe 1 in 300? Hard to estimate.
3. Those affected received abilities. Abilities vary wildly — physical force, material manipulation, unknown categories.
4. I received [Analyze]. It shows structural/behavioural weaknesses. No offensive capability.
5. Animals are unaffected. Tested: dog (visual), cockroach (direct focus). Neither returned data.
6. I cannot read myself. No data on my own body, physiology, or psychology.
7. The fracture in the sky remains open. [Analyze] cannot read it. Either it has no weaknesses or my Permission lacks clearance.
8. The hum is real and is degrading infrastructure at a rate of approximately—
He paused. Looked at what he'd written. The handwriting was small and precise, the kind of controlled script that came from years of filling lab notebooks and logistics forms. His mother used to say his handwriting looked like it had been produced by a very anxious printer.
He kept going.
9. The number 11:47 recurs. Fracture duration. I don't know why this feels significant. It does.
He underlined it twice. Same way he'd underlined it on the wall last night.
Then he went to the window.
---
The Greymire District on day two looked like a city that had swallowed something poisonous and was trying to cough it up. Smoke rose from four separate locations — two apartment buildings, a gas station, what used to be a strip mall. The streets were empty in an organised way, as if people had divided the map into zones and agreed — wordlessly, instinctively — on which streets belonged to which kind of danger.
Cael focused on the intersection below. [Analyze] rendered it in overlapping data layers. The structural damage to the road surface. The debris pattern from last night's concussive blast. The scuff marks and blood trails that told a story he didn't want to read.
A radio was playing somewhere. Faint. He pressed his ear to the window.
"—confirmed that the event lasted exactly eleven minutes and forty-seven seconds. Government and military channels went dark within the first three minutes. No official statement has been—"
Static.
"—calling it the Fracture. Repeating: the phenomenon has been designated—"
Static again.
"—estimated that 0.3 percent of the global population has been affected. That's approximately twenty-four million people worldwide who have—"
The signal died. Cael stood at the window for ten minutes, waiting for it to return. It didn't.
Twenty-four million people. Point-three percent. In a city the size of Greymire's metro area — roughly two million — that meant six thousand newly powered individuals. In the district itself, maybe eight hundred.
Eight hundred people who could crush cars, reshape concrete, or do things he hadn't even imagined yet.
And one who could see where coffee mugs break.
He pushed the self-pity down. It tasted like metal and he was getting good at swallowing it.
---
He needed information. The phone was useless — no signal, no data, no connection to anything except its own dead screen. The internet had been down since the Fracture. Television required power. The radio fragments were intermittent and local.
That meant going outside.
Cael taped the kitchen towel tighter around his arm — the glass cut had scabbed over but pulled open when he moved wrong — and put on his boots. He took a backpack. Inside it: two water bottles, a can of soup, the logistics-report notebook, and a paring knife that felt absurd in his hand, like bringing a pen to a sword fight.
The stairwell was dark. His building had seven floors. He was on the fourth. [Analyze] mapped every surface as he descended — cracked concrete steps, a handrail pulling from its mounts on the third-floor landing, a wet patch on the second floor that his ability flagged as a burst pipe behind the wall, not blood.
Not blood. He was relieved and hated that he needed to check.
The lobby door hung open. The lock had been torn out — someone with physical strength, not a key. Recent. Cael noted the angle of the damage: force applied from outside. Someone had wanted in. He looked at the mailboxes. Three were open. The ones belonging to units on the first and second floors.
He left the building.
---
The Greymire air tasted like smoke and ozone and something sweeter, something organic, like sap from a tree that didn't exist. The hum was louder out here. Cael could feel it through his boot soles.
He moved north, toward the civic centre. If any infrastructure was still functioning — emergency services, military, local government — that's where it would be.
Two blocks in, he found the first bodies.
Three of them. A man and two women. Laid out on the sidewalk in front of a convenience store with its shutters torn open. The store had been raided — shelves visible through the gap, stripped clean. The bodies hadn't been moved. Nobody had come for them.
Cael's stomach clenched. He'd seen the tattooed man's violence yesterday — abstract, distant, happening to people he didn't know. This was different. These were people who'd died over food. Canned goods and bottled water and whatever else the store had stocked before the sky broke.
He made himself look. [Analyze] activated — not because he wanted it to, but because his brain had rewired itself overnight into a machine that couldn't look at anything without reading it.
The lines appeared on the bodies.
He didn't want them there. He didn't ask for them. But they showed him what had happened with surgical clarity. The man had been hit in the chest by a concentrated force — not a fist, not a weapon. Something that compressed inward without breaking the skin. Internal damage. The lines mapped the collapsed ribcage, the ruptured organs, the specific vector of impact.
The two women had been killed differently. Burns. But not thermal — the tissue damage pattern was wrong. The burns radiated from single contact points, as if someone had touched them and pumped energy directly through the skin. Efficient. No wasted motion.
Whoever had done this had done it quickly, cleanly, and with the casual precision of someone swatting flies.
Cael knelt beside the nearest woman. Her eyes were open. She was maybe thirty. There was a wedding ring on her finger and a can of corn in her hand. She had died holding a can of corn.
He closed her eyes. His fingers shook.
I can see exactly how you died. I can trace the vector and the force and the physics of it. I can tell you the precise mechanism that stopped your heart.
And I couldn't have stopped any of it.
He stood up. Breathed. Kept walking.
---
The civic centre was gone.
Not destroyed — occupied. A tall man stood on the steps of what had been the district's municipal building. He was flanked by four others. All of them radiated the kind of tension that Cael's [Analyze] read as ready, capable, willing. The tall man had [Harm] — Cael could see the Permission's signature in his posture, the way his hands rested at his sides like loaded weapons. The others had various abilities that manifested as subtle distortions: one had heat shimmer around his forearms, another made the ground tremble slightly with each step.
They weren't hiding. They were advertising.
A group of civilians — unawakened, Cael guessed, from their lack of data signatures — was gathered at the base of the steps. Maybe forty people. They looked up at the tall man with the specific expression reserved for people who understood that the social contract had been replaced by something older.
"The rules are simple." The tall man's voice carried. Deep. Confident. The voice of someone who had spent his life waiting for the world to admit that strength was the only currency that mattered. "You bring what you find to the centre. Food, water, medicine, tools. We keep it safe. We distribute it fair. And nobody touches you while you're under our protection."
A woman in the crowd: "And if we don't?"
The tall man looked at her. Not angry. Curious. Like a cat watching a mouse do something unexpected.
"Then you're on your own. Out there." He gestured at the smoke-stained skyline. "Your choice."
It wasn't a choice. Everyone there knew it wasn't a choice. But the fiction of the offer made it bearable — the same way every protection racket in history had dressed itself in the language of service.
Cael [Analyzed] the tall man from across the street. The lines returned dense, layered data. Physical conditioning: high. Cognitive load indicators: Green, well within safe parameters. Behavioural tells: confidence unfeigned, aggression controlled, leadership instinct genuine. This wasn't a lunatic. This was a man who believed in his own fitness to rule, and who had been handed the tools to prove it.
More dangerous than the tattooed screamer from yesterday. Much more.
Cael memorised the man's posture, his cadence, his hand positions when he spoke. Filed it all away. Then he turned and walked back the way he'd come, staying close to the walls, letting [Analyze] map escape routes through every alley and side street.
He'd come looking for information. He'd found some.
People with power were already organising.
People without power were already kneeling.
And people like Cael — the ones who could see every crack in every wall but couldn't punch through a single one — were standing in the margins, taking notes.
---
Back in his apartment, he added to the logistics report:
Day 2.
The event is called "the Fracture." Duration confirmed: 11:47.
0.3% of population affected. ~800 Awakened in Greymire District.
Municipal authority collapsed. Local strongman establishing control via [Harm] + force.
3 civilians killed over supplies. Method: concentrated impact and energy transfer.
- bilities I've identified so far:
- Physical force (compression/crushing) — tattooed male, Day 1
- Material growth/reshaping — female, Day 1, residential building
- Impact harm ([Harm]?) — tall male, civic centre
- Thermal transfer — civic centre associate
- Seismic effect — civic centre associate
My ability: [Analyze]
Can read: structural weakness, behavioural patterns, ability signatures
Cannot read: myself, animals, the Fracture itself
Combat application: zero
He stared at the last line.
Then he wrote beneath it, slowly:
But I could see the route through the alley. I could see which fire escape would hold. I could see the gap in the tattooed man's pattern that gave me one second.
One second was enough to save a boy.
Maybe combat application isn't the only application.
He set the pen down. Stared at the wall where he'd written his first note last night. Day 1. The plaster around it was threaded with luminous lines — cracks he could see, damage he could map, weaknesses he could catalogue.
Weaknesses he could eventually learn to use.
Eleven minutes and forty-seven seconds. The number burned in his mind like a brand.
The world had broken. But breaks have patterns. And patterns were the closest thing Cael Arison had to a weapon.