Chapter 10: The Rules Are Different Here
The first place they went to was not even a place, really. It was a street that looked like every other street in the city, except Daniel insisted it was not. He said reality is like a tired actor; it only performs properly when you are paying attention, but when nobody is watching, it gets lazy and things glitch and repeat. Norah thought that sounded stupid, until she saw it for herself.
They were standing near a small shop that had been closed for weeks when a man walked past them wearing a yellow raincoat. That was already strange, because it was not raining and the sky was dry and cracked like overbaked bread.
But what was even stranger was that five minutes later the same man passed them again, coming from the same direction, wearing the same yellow raincoat and carrying the same blue plastic bag.
This time, Norah saw it happen. Her heart dropped. It was not déjà vu. It was something like a copy-paste in the middle of real life.
Daniel did not even flinch. He just pointed and said, “That is what I mean.” Norah could not look away. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Suddenly, everything started to feel suspicious. The dogs barking in the exact same rhythm, the car horns sounding like they were stuck on a loop.
She asked Daniel how many of these glitches he had seen. He said, “Too many, and not enough.” That did not make sense, but she did not question it.
They walked to a broken park next. Daniel said this was a hotspot because kids are more sensitive and less corrupted, and sometimes they see the cracks before adults do. There was a roundabout with a swing that spun slowly, even though there was no wind, and a seesaw that moved once as if it had remembered a ghost.
Norah did not say anything, because this was not the kind of weird you could laugh off. This was the kind of weird that made you check your reflection twice.
Later that night, they sat on the edge of an empty swimming pool behind an abandoned gym. Daniel showed her more symbols from the not-map: spirals, half-suns, and crooked hourglasses. He said these showed up near latch zones. He even showed her a burn mark on his arm shaped like one of them.
Norah asked how it happened. He simply said, “The Latch opened once, and it did not like me that day.”
Then he turned to her and asked, “Do you still think this is fun?”
Norah did not answer right away. Because no, it was not fun anymore. It was terrifying and confusing and too much. And yet, it was exactly what she had been waiting for her entire life. She was not built for surface-level friendships, syllabus-driven thinking, and happily-ever-after nonsense.
This mess, this chaos, this broken fabric of reality, felt more honest than anything she had ever known. So she looked at him and said, “I do not want to wake up if this is a dream.”
Daniel looked at her like he understood exactly what she meant. He said, “Then we better keep moving, because dreams this deep tend to drown people.”
Somewhere in the distance, something buzzed, like an old machine switching on after years. The air changed again, as if the universe were shifting its weight. And Norah thought that maybe, just maybe, the rules were finally breaking the way they were always meant to.
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