Phase Shift Hearts

The coffee was lukewarm and the fluorescent lights hummed like a trapped fly. That was my life now. Lukewarm coffee and buzzing lights. A desk with a nameplate that said Angélica Morales, Customer Service Representative, and a computer screen that hadn't changed in three hours.

I was watching my hand phase through the stapler again.

It happened when I got bored. My fingers would go fuzzy at the edges, then sink into whatever was in front of them like I was reaching into water. The stapler sat there, innocent and metallic, and my knuckles disappeared into its guts. I pulled back fast. Looked around. Nobody saw. They never did.

Leo texted me at 3:47 PM. *Same dream again. The void with teeth.*

I typed back: *Stop calling it that. You know it was just a hallway.*

*Hallways don't eat people, Angie.*

He was the only one who called me that. The only one who knew. We worked in the same building now, him on the fourth floor in IT, me on the second in customer service. Same building. Same city. Same boring lives we'd clawed our way back to after the circus spat us out.

I still had the numbness in my left pinky finger where the digital world had tried to keep a piece of me. A souvenir. Like a scar from a war nobody else remembers.

The thing about escaping a nightmare is that you think the hard part is over. You think you'll wake up and breathe and everything will be fine because you're not trapped anymore. But then you're sitting at a desk and the clock moves slow and the coffee is always cold and you keep waiting for the sky to crack open and reveal itself as a painted ceiling.

My supervisor, Brenda, walked past my cubicle. She had the kind of face that looked disappointed before you even spoke. "Angélica, you haven't processed the Henderson account yet."

"Working on it."

She stared at the stapler. I moved my hand away from it. "It's been three hours."

"I know."

"Then work faster."

I wanted to phase through her. Just my hand, into her chest, maybe grab something important and squeeze. But I didn't. I smiled. I said yes. I watched her walk away and felt the small death of another day settling into my bones.

At 5:01 I grabbed my bag and didn't look back.

The parking garage smelled like gasoline and wet concrete. I found Leo leaning against my car, phone in hand, his stupid rabbit grin replaced by something quieter. He'd cut his hair since the circus. Short on the sides, messy on top. He looked almost normal now. Almost human.

"You look like hell," he said.

"You look like you haven't slept in a week."

"Fair." He pushed off the car. "There's something I need to show you."

"Can it wait? I have laundry."

"No, Angie. It can't wait."

His voice had that edge. The one he used when things were serious. Jax used that voice back in the circus when the adventures got real, when the NPCs stopped being funny and started being dangerous. Leo used it now. I hated how similar they sounded.

"Fine. Where?"

"My apartment. There's a guy. He knows things."

"A guy who knows things. That's not vague at all."

"Just get in the car."

I drove. He gave directions. The city blurred past, all gray buildings and gray sky and people who didn't know that the world had cracks in it. That reality was a thin sheet of ice and we'd already fallen through once.

Leo's apartment was a mess. Empty pizza boxes. Crumpled energy drink cans. A blanket fort in the corner that I refused to ask about. But on his coffee table sat a laptop open to a video file.

"Sit," he said.

I sat.

He pressed play.

The video was security footage. A convenience store. Grainy and washed out. A man in a hoodie walked to the counter, pulled something from his pocket, but it wasn't a gun. It was a wallet. He held it up and the cashier froze. Not scared. Frozen. Like time stopped for her and kept going for everyone else.

The man took the money. Walked out. The cashier blinked and looked around like she'd missed something.

"What am I looking at?"

"That's three states away. Happened last week."

"Okay."

"There's more." Leo clicked through tabs. News articles. Missing person reports. A woman who walked through a wall during a domestic dispute. A kid who made a streetlight explode with a touch. "It's happening everywhere. People like us."

My stomach went cold. "People who were in the circus?"

"Maybe. Or maybe the circus was just the first batch. Maybe it's spreading."

"That's not possible."

"Angie, I can absorb electricity now. I touched a live wire yesterday and felt nothing. My phone hasn't died in a month." He held up his hand. A spark jumped between his fingers. "This is real. We're real. And if there are others, we need to find them before someone else does."

"Someone else?"

He pulled up another tab. A news article. *Government Sources Confirm Existence of "Anomalous Individuals." Task Force Assembled.*

"Fuck," I said.

"Yeah."

I stared at the screen. At my own reflection in the dark glass. I looked tired. I looked scared. I looked like someone who'd already survived one nightmare and couldn't believe another one was starting.

"What do we do?"

Leo sat down across from me. He looked at me the way he used to look at me in the circus. When we were alone. When the jokes stopped and the mask slipped. When he was just a scared kid pretending to be fine.

"We run," he said. "Or we fight. But we don't do nothing. I can't do nothing again."

The clock on his wall ticked. The fluorescent lights hummed. Somewhere in this city, maybe in this building, there were other people waking up to find their hands passing through solid matter. Other people remembering the void with teeth.

I looked at my own hand. Steady now. Solid.

"Show me the rest of the files," I said. "Everything you've found."

Leo smiled. Not his old grin. Something smaller. Something real.

"Welcome back, Angie."

I wasn't back. I wasn't sure I'd ever left. But maybe that was the point. Maybe you don't escape the circus. Maybe it just follows you home and waits for you to stop pretending it didn't happen.

My pinky finger tingled. The numbness spread up to my wrist.

I ignored it.