For three days, Leo hid in the perfect silence of space. He tended to the silent machinery of the cosmos—redirecting a solar flare, de-orbiting defunct satellites—and told himself it was vital work. But it was an escape. The void was his sanctuary, a place where the only fragile thing was his own mind. Down on Earth, there were cafes. And in one of those cafes, an assignment was waiting for him like an unexploded bomb.
Dr. Thorne's words echoed in the vacuum where sound could not travel: Go to a cafe. Sit for five minutes. Just exist.
It was a task of monumental absurdity. He could calculate the gravitational tidal forces of a binary star system in his head, but the thought of navigating a room full of breakable people and hot liquids felt like a fool's errand. The potential for catastrophe was infinite. He was a walking disaster, and his therapist had ordered him to go stand in the middle of a village.
On the fourth day, the self-loathing outweighed the fear. The thought of facing Dr. Thorne's calm, knowing gaze and admitting he was too much of a coward to even try was an agony he refused to entertain. He descended, a ghost in the pre-dawn light over Chicago, not just to complete a task, but to wage a war against himself.
This required a plan. An operation.
For hours, he performed reconnaissance from a rooftop. Finally, he chose his target: "The Daily Grind," a quiet shop nestled between a bookstore and a dry-cleaner's. Through the window, he identified the objective: a small, single-person table in the corner. Defensible.
He landed in a nearby alley, the smell of wet cardboard thick in the air. He was no longer Zenith, guardian of Earth. He was just Leo, a man in a grey hoodie, about to do the most terrifying thing he'd done in a decade.
The bell on the door chimed, a cheerful sound that landed like a gunshot. The cafe held seven people—a fact he knew instantly and hated himself for. He walked to the counter, each step a conscious effort against the tidal pull of his flight instinct. He ordered a small black coffee. As he paid, he felt the low, electric hum of the pastry display case, a complex system he could accidentally break without a thought.
He took the hot cup and made his way to the corner table. He sat, the scrape of the chair deafening in his own ears. He pulled out his phone, opened the stopwatch, and with a trembling thumb, pressed 'Start.'
The timer began. 00:01. 00:02.
He stared into the black liquid, trying to make it the anchor of his universe. But his focus was immediately fractured. Two tables over, a pair of students were whispering. One of them, a young woman with stylish, purple-framed glasses, glanced at him, then did a double-take.
She leaned over to her friend. "Zoe, you're staring," the friend mumbled, not looking up from her textbook.
"No, shut up, look," the girl named Zoe whispered back, her voice a tense hiss of excitement. "Doesn't he look like that guy? From the news?"
"The one with the bus? Kinda, I guess. It's just some random dude."
"No," Zoe insisted, her eyes narrowed with a predatory focus that made Leo's skin crawl. "Look at his eyes. It's him. The 'Angel of the Anomaly.' Get the camera."
Angel of the Anomaly. That's what some of the softer news outlets had called him after Chicago. The tragic, mysterious figure who had appeared from the dust. A ridiculous, romantic name for a monster.
Zoe's friend sighed but complied, subtly angling her phone in his direction. The dark, circular lens felt like the barrel of a sniper rifle aimed at his soul. Leo's world began to tilt. He saw the flash from last Tuesday, felt the collective gasp of the crowd, the icy wave of their fear.
The girl—Zoe—was still staring, a look of profound curiosity on her face. It was the look of someone who didn't see a man, but a story. A scoop.
Leo's control, already stretched thin as a spider's thread, snapped.
The lightbulb in the fixture directly above him didn't just flicker. It began to buzz audibly, a sound like an angry hornet trapped in glass, and its light dimmed to a sickly, pulsating orange. Simultaneously, the coffee cup in his hand became a furnace. The heat exploded against his palm, a searing, unnatural temperature. Steam poured from the lid, hissing, and the black liquid inside began to bubble.
The change was too obvious to ignore. The barista, a young man named Ben according to his name tag, was handing a cup to another customer. He stopped mid-motion, his hand hovering, and dropped the plastic lid he was holding. It clattered sharply on the countertop. The man reading the newspaper lowered it slowly, his eyes peering over the top with alarm. The couple who had been arguing stopped, and the woman instinctively pulled her chair back an inch, away from the quiet weirdness unfolding in the corner.
Zoe's phone was now held up more brazenly, its lens tracking the impossible spectacle. She wasn't just taking a picture anymore; she was recording a phenomenon.
He was a scene. A freak show. The panic was a physical weight, crushing his chest. He had to contain this. He forced his hand to place the superheated cup on the table before it burned him. He closed his eyes, shutting out the stares, and waged a silent war. He targeted the lightbulb, feeling for the chaotic energy he was pouring into the circuit, and throttled it, smoothing the current. The buzzing stopped. The light returned to normal. Next, the coffee. He couldn't just turn it off; he had to actively pull the energy out. He focused, and the bubbling subsided, the steam thinning to a wisp.
He opened his eyes. The entire ordeal had taken less than thirty seconds.
His phone vibrated. 05:00.
He stood up, his legs unsteady. There was no relief, only the bone-deep exhaustion of a catastrophe narrowly averted. He walked toward the door, feeling the weight of five pairs of eyes on his back, knowing one of them was still recording.
He pushed the door open and stumbled into the alley, leaning his forehead against the cool, damp brick, gasping for air. He had survived. But he hadn't escaped. The girl, Zoe, had a name. She had a face. And now, she had a video.
The dread that settled over him was cold and heavy. It wasn't the nebulous fear of internet exposure. It was the certainty of targeted surveillance. The global monitoring systems Madsen had in place, the A.I. that scrubbed the web for any hint of his existence, would flag that video in minutes.
It didn't matter if it got ten views or ten million. The right people would see it.
Madsen would see it. They would all see it.
And in three days, he would have to sit across from Dr. Aris Thorne and explain how her assignment—her attempt to fix him—had only proven how broken he truly was.