The sirens should have swallowed everything.
They didn't.
Red and blue light strobed across wet concrete, bending around a boy standing in the middle of the street like it didn't know what to do with him. People were shouting—orders, warnings, panic—but the sound thinned as it reached him, as if the air itself had decided to hold its breath.
A bus skidded to a stop inches from a collapsed barrier. A drone dipped too low, corrected, dipped again. Someone screamed a name.
The boy didn't move.
He raised one hand—just enough to be seen—and stepped half a pace to the left.
That was it.
The crowd surged where he hadn't been. The chain reaction broke. Metal stopped screaming. The moment folded in on itself, suddenly survivable.
Phones were already up. Someone whispered, "Who is that?"
The boy turned his head as if he'd heard something far away. His face was older than it should've been. Calm in a way that made people uneasy.
Then the moment cut—hard, like a film reel snapping.
Eight years earlier.
Daiso sat on the curb with his shoes off, toes curled against sun-warmed concrete. The afternoon smelled like hot dust and oil, the kind of smell that clung to your clothes and made adults complain later. Cicadas screamed from the trees in the park across the street, a constant electric whine that made silence feel impossible.
He watched the crosswalk.
The light turned green. People didn't move.
Daiso counted without moving his lips. One. Two. Three.
A car rolled through late, the driver waving an apology that came too fast and too slow at the same time. The pedestrians stepped off the curb after, annoyed, cautious, alive.
Daiso tilted his head.
He wasn't watching the cars. He was watching the space between decisions.
A woman's heel clicked against the pavement as she passed him. A man dragged a crate across the sidewalk, wood scraping, rhythm off by half a beat. Somewhere nearby, a bus hissed as it knelt.
Daiso pressed his thumb into a crack in the curb and felt the grit under his nail. Timing mattered. People acted like it didn't, but everything bent around it anyway.
"Hey," a voice said.
Daiso looked up.
Rina Loft stood a few steps away, backpack hanging off one shoulder, eyes narrowed—not unkind, just sharp. She was older. Everyone was older. She had that look adults got when they noticed something didn't fit where it was supposed to.
"You're gonna get your feet dirty," she said.
Daiso glanced down, then shrugged. "They already are."
Rina blinked. A small thing. Then she smiled, like she'd found a sentence she wanted to keep. "Fair."
Across the street, a delivery truck idled where it shouldn't. The driver checked his phone. The light cycled again.
Daiso stood.
Rina watched him without knowing why she was watching. He didn't wave, didn't signal—just stepped forward a fraction of a second before the light changed.
This time, the cars stopped clean.
The pedestrians moved together.
No one noticed the boy with dusty feet at the curb. No one thanked him. The city flowed on, satisfied with itself.
Daiso stepped back and sat again, heart steady, fingers tingling like he'd touched something live.
Rina looked from the crosswalk to him, then back again. "Did you—"
A shout cut her off. Down the block, two men were arguing over a dropped crate, voices rising, bodies angling closer. The air tightened the way it did before things tipped.
Daiso watched the space between them narrow.
He didn't know why his chest felt heavy. He just knew it always did right before something went wrong.
The argument broke apart on its own—one man laughing, the other shaking his head. Relief drifted through the block, unremarked.
Rina exhaled. She hadn't realized she'd been holding her breath.
Daiso did.
He always did.
Somewhere, far above the noise, a system logged nothing at all.