David shouldered his way through the swinging doors of the nearest restaurant washroom, the air inside smelling faintly of lemon disinfectant and damp mop heads. He gripped the edges of the porcelain sink, his knuckles turning white, and thrust his face under the tap.
The water was shockingly cold. He gasped, splashing it over his eyes, his cheeks, his neck, hoping the shock would reboot his system. Water dripped from his chin, staining his shirt dark, but he didn't care. Slowly, dreading what he might see, he lifted his right arm.
He stared at his wrist.
The bracelet was still there. It wasn't a trick of the light. It wasn't a hallucination born of low blood sugar. It was a physical, tangible reality coiled around his flesh. The liquid metal seemed to breathe, shifting almost imperceptibly against his pulse, cool and alien.
"It isn't a dream," he whispered to his reflection.
The face looking back at him was pale, the eyes wide and rimmed with the red of exhaustion. This was the face of a man teetering on the edge of a precipice.
When he was young, huddled under a blanket with a flashlight, he used to dream of this. He had prayed to wake up with spider powers, or to stumble upon a magic wand in the attic, or to find a crashed alien ship in his backyard. But he wasn't a child anymore. The innocence of those fantasies had long since been ground to dust by the reality of rent, tuition fees, and the crushing pressure of the job market. He knew how the world worked now. Life wasn't a movie where finding a watch turned you into Ben 10; in the real world, touching strange radioactive artifacts usually resulted in radiation poisoning, not superpowers.
"It's not a dream," he repeated, the whisper turning into a frantic mutter. "Let me think... purely logical. Let me think."
His mind raced, cycling through options that all seemed terrible. "Should I go to a hospital? The emergency room? They'll have tools. They'll know how to cut it off."
He imagined walking into the ER. The intake nurse's confusion. The doctors swarming. The phone calls to the police, then the government. No. A cold knot formed in his stomach. What if they want to study me? He saw himself in a sterile white room, strapped to a table, men in hazmat suits poking at the metal fused to his nerves. Or what if this is a break? A psychotic break? Maybe this is third-stage stress manifesting as a tactile hallucination.
Looking in the mirror, watching a droplet of water trace a path down the glass, he desperately wanted to wake up in his bed, sweating and laughing at the absurdity of it all.
"Today, I will go back to my room," he decided, his voice trembling but firm. "I'll try to remove this thing myself. Household tools. Lubricants. If I can't... I'll go to the hospital tomorrow."
He turned to leave, but his knees suddenly buckled. He had to grab the doorframe to keep from collapsing.
A pang of hunger hit him — not the polite rumble of a missed lunch, but a violent, hollow ache that felt like his stomach was collapsing in on itself. It was a predatory hunger, a void demanding to be filled immediately. Why am I starving? I just had tea.
He stumbled out of the restaurant and gravitated toward the pungent, spicy aroma of a street food stall down the block. The sizzle of onions and capsicum on a massive iron griddle filled the air.
"Gobi Manchurian," David croaked, his mouth watering painfully. "Three plates. Full."
The vendor looked at him oddly but began tossing the battered cauliflower into the wok. As David waited, his eyes drifted back to his wrist. The chain, which had been a swirling mix of silver and abyssal black earlier, was changing. The black was receding, devoured by a pristine, mercury-like silver that seemed to glow under the streetlights.
When the food came, steaming and coated in red chili sauce, David didn't wait for it to cool. He ate with a ferocity that frightened him. He ignored the burn of the spices and the heat of the food, shoveling forkful after forkful into his mouth. It wasn't enough. It felt like dropping pebbles into a canyon. He devoured three full portions — an amount that would usually leave him comatose — and scraped the paper plates clean.
Only then did the trembling in his limbs subside slightly. He wiped the red sauce from his lips, threw cash at the vendor, and practically ran to the bus stop, catching the earliest bus back to his rental room.
The journey was a blur of streetlights and paranoia. Every passenger who looked at him seemed suspicious. Did they know? Could they see the silver glint under his sleeve?
Back in his room on the fifth floor, the air was stagnant and quiet. He locked the door, threw the bolt, and scrambled to his desk.
"I need to search online," he muttered, his fingers shaking as he flipped open his laptop.
He connected to his phone's 3G hotspot, the connection frustratingly slow. The loading circle spun, mocking his panic. Finally, the search bar appeared. He started typing frantically, the keys clacking loud in the silence.
Search: liquid flowing bracelet
Search: how to remove bracelet without pain fused to skin
Search: Alien bracelet theories
Search: Ben10 watch real life medical anomalies
Search: Skin hospital nearby Hyderabad
He clicked link after link. conspiracy forums, medical journals, sci-fi fan sites. Nothing. Absolutely nothing useful.
Then, a terrifying thought struck him, colder than the water in the washroom.
The book. The strange black book in the library. It was titled Volume One.
Logic dictated that if there was a Volume One, there must be a Volume Two. And if there were books, there were owners. Powerful owners. What if they come searching for the missing volume? What if this bracelet is a beacon? What if they can track me through this silver chain pulsing against my vein?
"I have to get it off. Now."
He rushed to the small bathroom attached to his room. He tried everything. He lathered his wrist in soap until bubbles flew everywhere, pulling at the metal until his skin turned red. He poured coconut oil over it, trying to slide it off. He even tried to pry it open with the edge of a metal ruler, but the bracelet didn't have a clasp. It was a seamless loop, fused to him as if it had grown out of his own bone.
Exhausted, panting, and strangely hungry again despite the massive meal, he slumped against the bathroom wall. He gave up.
He looked at the clock. It was late evening. He lived on the topmost level of the building, isolated. The cafeteria was on the ground floor. The routine of life had to continue, or he really would go insane. He went down for dinner.
The dining hall was buzzing with the low murmur of students and young professionals, but Ajith wasn't at their usual table.
Ajith is late today. That's not like him.
David dialed his friend's number. Ajith was his anchor in Hyderabad, the only person he could trust with something this insane, though he wasn't sure he could even tell him yet.
"Ajju, where are you? Why are you so late?"
"Nothing serious, I'll be there soon," Ajith's voice crackled over the line, sounding weary and strained. "Traffic is a nightmare. There was a fire at the Central Library, so the roads were blocked. Police everywhere."
David froze. The cafeteria noise faded into a dull roar. Sweat prickled his forehead, icy and sharp. He stared at the silver band on his wrist, hidden under the table.
"What? A fire in the library? When?"
Was the fire related to this? The timing was too perfect. He had stolen the book, the bracelet had latched onto him, and now the scene of the crime was burning. Why is my hunger growing worse? Is the bracelet consuming my energy?
"The fire started in the evening," Ajith explained, oblivious to David's panic. "Hey, didn't you go to the library today? Did you see anything, or did you leave before it happened?"
David's throat went dry. "No... I came back early. Were there any casualties?"
"No, thank god. It happened after the library was closed. Just property damage."
"Oh, that's good. That's... good." David forced the words out. "Okay, I'm going to eat now and then sleep. I'll keep the door open."
He hung up, his hand trembling. He forced himself to eat dinner — another stomach-full, nearly three times his usual portion — ignoring the bewildered looks of the hostel cook.
Back in his room, the silence was oppressive. With or without this bracelet, I have to study, he told himself, clinging to the one normal thing left in his life. That's the only way to get the job I want. I can't let aliens or magic ruin my career.
He sat on his bed, textbooks spread out around him. It was January, and the Hyderabad winter seeped through the thin window panes. The cold tiled floor made his feet numb. Sitting and reading soon turned into lying down and reading. He put on some soft instrumental music to drown out his thoughts.
Within fifteen minutes, the exhaustion of the day's madness — the adrenaline, the terror, the unnatural metabolic burn — crashed over him like a tidal wave. The book slipped from his fingers.
Then, the dream began.
THE DREAM
He wakes up early in the morning, the light filtering through curtains that belong to a house he hasn't lived in for ten years. The smell of his mother's dosa batter frying fills the air. He is small again. He eats breakfast with his mom and dad, their faces younger, unlined by worry. He puts on his navy-blue school uniform, the fabric scratching his neck, and goes to stand at the end of the lane for the school bus.
Suddenly, a low rumble vibrates through the soles of his shoes.
The birds stop singing. The sky turns a bruised purple.
The ground shakes violently. With a deafening crack, the asphalt road splits open beneath him. He screams as he falls into a deep, jagged fissure. But he doesn't hit the bottom. He lands in a pit writhing with shadows.
Monsters. Creatures of oil and smoke. One of them, a beast with too many eyes and a mouth dripping with blood, leans close. Its breath smells of rotting paper.
"David," it hisses, its voice sounding like grinding stones. "How much did you score in last week's math test?"
David jolts awake in fright.
He blinks, disoriented. He isn't in the pit. He is sitting at a wooden desk. Chalk dust floats in the air. He realizes he has been dreaming in class. But... he isn't a child anymore. He looks down at his hands — they are teenage hands. He is a high school student again.
What kind of dream was that? A dream within a dream?
"Hey, Shahil, what class is this?" he asks his desk mate from eleventh grade, a boy he hasn't seen in years.
"What class? Are you crazy?" Shahil looks at him warily, closing his notebook. "We're going swimming today. Don't you remember?"
The classroom door bangs open. The teacher walks in, but he's wearing swimming goggles. Behind him, the students aren't carrying books; they are laughing, excited. Right there, in front of the chalkboard, they start changing into swimsuits.
Shahil looks at David expectantly.
"What? You want me to change here? But I don't have a swimsuit!" David feels a surge of anxiety, the specific, choking embarrassment of high school.
The laughter stops. Thirty heads turn toward him in unison.
"He doesn't have a suit," someone whispers.
"He doesn't belong," another says.
Suddenly, the students aren't students anymore. They are a mob. They rush toward him, grabbing his arms and legs. They strip him naked, his protests drowned out by their chanting. They lift him up, carrying him out of the classroom, but they don't walk into a corridor.
They throw him off a cliff into a vast, endless ocean.
The water is freezing. It fills his nose and mouth, salty and bitter. He thrashes, his limbs heavy as lead.
"Help... Help! I don't know how to swim! Somebody help!"
He sinks into the darkness, the light of the surface fading. Just as his lungs are about to burst, a rope descends from the murky sky above. It twists around his right wrist like a snake, tightening painfully, and pulls him violently out of the water.
He wakes up again.
Gasp.
This time, the rhythm is different. Clack-clack. Clack-clack.
He is sitting inside a train, the vibration rattling his teeth. There is drool on his face. He stands up, groggy, wiping his cheek. The scene is familiar — the blue upholstery of the Indian Railways, the smell of dust and chai.
Yes, this is after graduation, he realizes, the timeline slotting into place. First school, then high school, now college graduation. That means next, I will be in my job.
He frowns. But... why can't I remember having a job? What did I actually do after graduation?
The memories are blank. White noise.
The train screeches to a halt at a desolate station. David steps out, needing air. He goes to the station tap to wash his face. As the cool water hits his skin, clarity returns.
The bracelet.
He looks down. He never had a bracelet like this before.
He strokes the silver band on his right wrist. It feels different now — not cool, but vibrating.
Suddenly, it begins to glow.
It starts as a hum, then a flash of blinding white light. The metal turns searingly hot. It isn't just surface heat; it feels like the bracelet is welding itself to his bones.
"AHHH!"
His whole body is on fire. It feels like molten needles are being driven into his brain, rewiring his synapses. The pain is real, visceral, and agonizing, transcending the dream state.
"DAVID… DAVID…!" A voice calls out from a great distance, panic in its tone.
David wakes up with a gasp, his lungs heaving, the scream dying in his throat.