The city feels like someone slipped a coin under one corner of the table.
Everything's off by one degree. Streetlights lean. Reflections in shop windows lag half a heartbeat behind the people walking past. Even the pigeons look confused.
Ryo walks with Mara, Sato, and Rey along the service road above the sealed tunnel. The pin sits in his pocket, quiet the way a sleeping knife is quiet.
"Central's calling it a geomagnetic bloom," Sato says, like slapping the right label on it will keep the world from sliding into the river.
Rey glances at a drone drifting overhead. "Localized bloom?"
"Localized everywhere," Ryo answers.
They all look at him.
"It's not a place," he says. "It's a direction."
Mara's jaw does that little flex it does when the world is being stupid again. "Keep walking."
So they do. The city hums like it's praying and doesn't want anyone to notice.
—
Corner of Dresden and 14th: a city bus is parked sideways across two lanes, empty, hazard lights blinking out of rhythm like a drunk trying to remember the words. Across the street, a detergent billboard shows a smiling family whose hands don't quite match their arms if you bother counting fingers.
A girl in a yellow raincoat films the sky on her phone, whispering, "You guys hear that too, right?" Her friend laughs too loud, the way you laugh when you're scared and pretending you're not.
Ryo hears it.
Not with his ears.
With the part of him that's learning to listen sideways.
It's a tug.
A line dropped into water that hasn't decided to be water yet.
—
They duck into a substation control room that smells like burnt dust and dead coffee. Kwan's face pops up on the wall screen, hair doing its usual impression of a science fair explosion.
"Fun update," he says, practically vibrating. "Citywide sensors are showing everything that wants to move is pointing the same way."
Sato folds his arms. "Which way?"
Kwan points straight at Ryo.
Ryo rubs the spot under his ribs where the hum lives when it's pretending to nap. "It's not me," he says. "I'm just the zero on the map."
"Origin of what?" Rey asks.
Ryo tastes the word that's been stalking him since the corridor.
"Return."
Mara leans on the console like she's holding the building up with her palms. "If everything's trying to 'return' to whatever called it, and the caller is the thing we met in the sideways place…"
"Then parts of the city are figuring out they were borrowed," Kwan finishes, soft. "And some of them want to go home."
Sato snorts. "So my toaster's gonna file for emancipation?"
"I'm more worried about your knives," Kwan says.
Everyone looks at Ryo's pocket.
The pin doesn't move. It doesn't need to.
—
They walk because cars feel like lies today.
In an alley, yesterday's newspapers have slid uphill in a neat pile, ink bleeding upward like it's trying to crawl back into the pen. A businessman stands frozen outside a florist, head cocked, listening to a song only he didn't ask for. When Sato says "sir," the guy jumps and starts crying without noticing.
A traffic light cycles green-yellow-red, but the shadows it throws go red-yellow-green, like reality's running the tape backward.
Kwan's voice in their earbuds: "Vector fall. Once one thing picks a direction, the next one copies. It's contagious."
Mara doesn't break stride. "Fix?"
"We need anchors," Kwan says. "Strong local vectors to re-align everything else."
"Where?"
Long pause.
"You're not gonna like it."
—
They end up exactly where none of them wanted to go: the public square where Ryo killed the first scout.
The city patched the scar with fresh pavement, new trees in boxes, and a brass plaque that says WE STOOD. AND WE WILL AGAIN.
Ryo stands on the exact spot he yanked the pin that day. The air tastes like the inside of a battery.
The seam isn't visible.
Until it is.
Just a hairline in the sky if you know how to look with the part of your eye that still believes in ghosts.
Crowds are already gathering—phones up, curious, scared, drawn the way moths are drawn to light they hope isn't fire.
Mara scans them. "No rifles," she tells Sato. Meaning: don't give panic a megaphone.
Rey kneels by the plaque, setting down four little projector discs that hum like tuning forks.
Kwan in their ears: "Resonate low and the fall pours into you. Resonate flat and it slides around. We need narrow."
"Narrow how?" Ryo asks.
"Pick one thing to be," Kwan says.
Mara, quieter: "Pick a line, not a place."
Ryo closes his eyes.
The city shrinks to arrows: people wanting to run, glass wanting to hold shape, shadows wanting to stay attached.
He picks the only line that starts inside his chest and points outward into nothing.
The pin wakes up, warm, ready.
Rey: "Anchors hot."
Mara: "Do it."
The note rises.
—
It starts small.
Exhaust from a bus curls the wrong way and follows the line like smoke looking for a chimney. A paper cup spins once to face the wrong-north. A shadow peels off someone's shoe and takes one curious step before remembering manners.
Then the fountain in the middle of the square lifts in one perfect sheet and just… hangs there.
A woman screams and can't stop, like the sound got stuck on repeat.
The seam opens—clean, thin, polite.
Something steps through.
Not a harrower. Bigger. Smoother. It carries emptiness the way a parent carries a sleeping kid.
Mara's hand finds her sidearm but doesn't draw. "Positions."
Sato plants himself between the thing and the crowd. Rey's thumb hovers over buttons. Kwan is praying in numbers.
The carrier turns its blank face toward Ryo and waits.
"Return," it says. Voice like a door closing in another room.
"No," Ryo answers.
It tilts its head. "Define no."
The anchors scream. The plaque splits clean between WE and STOOD.
Everything starts sliding toward the seam—shadows, light, sound, the edges of people's fear.
Mara's voice, low: "Ryo."
He lifts the pin.
Not at the carrier.
At the ground between them.
"Anchor," he says.
The note tightens to a wire.
Everything that was falling suddenly remembers how to be still.
The carrier waits.
Ryo feels the question land like a hand on his shoulder.
Wait for what?
"For me," he says, and hates how right it feels.
—
It doesn't last forever.
The mountain (whatever's behind the curtain) decides waiting is boring. The seam starts closing.
The fountain remembers gravity and crashes down, soaking everyone.
The carrier is just gone.
The plaque now reads WE STO.
People start breathing again and pretend they never stopped.
Mara stands in the puddle, staring at nothing.
"We're gonna get a call," she says.
Kwan's laugh is half a sob. "We're gonna get twelve."
Sato brushes water off the cracked plaque. "We stood," he says quietly. "We're still standing."
Rey sits on the curb because his legs finally won.
Ryo looks at his hand.
The pin is just warm now. Present.
He feels the tug again—gentle, curious.
Return?
He closes his fist around it.
"Define later," he tells the sky.
For once, the sky doesn't argue.
—
In the van ride back, Mara watches him in the rearview.
"What line did you pick?" she asks.
"Out," he says.
"Out where?"
He thinks about the cursor blinking behind his ribs.
"Past the version of me that says yes too easy."
She lets that sit for a block.
"And when it asks again?"
He turns the pin over in his fingers.
"I'll answer," he says. "But it's gonna cost."
Mara doesn't tell him to be careful.
She just nods, like she already put his name on the receipt.