Chapter 2

 “Hey, I almost forgot to ask….”

 Jesse spoke with an overwhelming curiosity in his voice.

 “Whats your name?”

 She stopped momentarily to turn to him with a shy pale glint in her eyes.

 “Why is that important?”

 She spoke softly with such a heart piercing whisper in her tone. The girl gave a short huff of a sigh, an almost forced seeming smile.

 “Well, I suppose…. They used to call me Stevie Rae.”

 The first thing Jesse noticed wasn’t her voice—it was the deafening silence she left behind. She turned back to her slow drift forward, towards whatever destination she had in mind. Not absent, but removed. Like a needle pulled from a record groove. The low thrum of Peoria’s downtown traffic—the distant wail of a siren, the clatter of a late-night food truck. The rhythmic, thump-thump-thump, of bass bleeding from a basement bar—didn’t fade. It stopped, cleanly, as if severed by a blade of stillness. And in the vacuum of it all, Stevie Rae turned.

  She stood beneath the fractured sodium-orange glow of a streetlamp whose bulb flickered like a dying star. Her hair—long, impossibly long, a cascade of glimmering silver, shot through with strands that caught the light like tarnished copper—fell past her waist. Shifting as she moved, alive with its own slow current. Her face held the ghostly resemblance of what Jesse remembered to be the image of an old friend. The soft, sun-warmed freckles dusting her cheeks and nose, now faded to faint, cinnamon-colored smudges beneath her skin that seemed both translucent and deeply rooted, like river-polished stone. Her eyes weren’t the warm deep hazeled green that he’d known in high school biology labs and shared library silences. They were the color of storm-wet asphalt, holding depths that didn’t reflect the streetlight. They absorbed it, and something else, something older and colder, pulsed faintly behind the surface.

 He hadn’t seen her in seven years. Not since the night the old Murray Baker Bridge groaned, buckled, and folded in on itself—not collapsed, but unwound. Like a ribbon of steel and concrete dissolving into shimmering, silent static, before vanishing entirely into the cold current of the Illinois river. A night Stevie Rae had vanished from, too. Officially, she’d transferred. Unofficially, whispers in the cracked concrete alleys and hushed corners of the Rust Belt’s forgotten corners spoke of the Shades. Those who slipped between the city’s crumbling layers. And the Fades, who left them a mere shadow of what was. Only cold, deadening, impressionless creatures, the scent of decay and burnt flesh filling the air around them.

 Jesse felt his phone buzz. Not a ring, not a chime. Only a single, sharp vibration against his thigh. He fumbled it out, almost dropping it. Stevie stopped ahead, looking back at him with a distant tone in her expression. No caller ID. Just a text, stark white on black glistened against the dark of the night.

 His breath hitched as he read the message aloud.

 “You have a message?”

 Stevie asked, pretending to be inquisitive of the broken look on Jesse’s face.

 “I…. Wha…. It makes no sense.”

 Jesse found himself fumbling for words. Because he hadn’t sent a message. Not tonight, not in years, not to this number. Jesse had only stared at her old number, frozen in his contacts, like a digital tombstone.

  Trepidation, cold and slick, coiled in his gut. But beneath it, a fierce, electric excitement surged—like the first jolt before a lightning strike, pure and terrifying. His fingers trembled as he tapped the screen, not to reply, but to trace the words. The sharp vibration stopped. The streetlamp above Stevie Rae flared brightly for a brief moment, then died, plunging her into near-black darkness. Yet she remained visible, outlined by a faint, pearlescent luminescence that seemed to emanate from her skin, not reflect light.

  She didn’t speak. She simply turned and walked, bare feet silent on the cracked asphalt, her long hair flowing like liquid shadow. Jesse’s feet moved before his mind caught up. He followed.

 The downtown district, usually a grid of weary brick and glass, felt wrong. Not abandoned, but not people friendly. Store fronts glowed with sterile, empty light, but no reflections moved through the window panes. A delivery van sat idling at an intersection, engine humming, yet the driver’s seat was vacant. The steering wheel turns slowly, autonomously, as if guided by unseen hands. The air grew thick, tasting of damp concrete and something metallic, like licking a battery.

  They turned down an alley choked with the rotting stench of overflowing dumpsters. Graffiti pulsed faintly on the walls. Not paint, but light, shifting symbols that converged into jagged, geometric patterns before dissolving. Stevie Rae paused before a rusted chain-link fence, its gate hanging open on one hinge that was poorly bolted to the concrete wall of its structure. Beyond it rose the skeletal silhouette of the old West Peoria parking deck; Tower 7. Abandoned since the ‘05 floodwaters breached its mangled foundations. Its concrete ribs cracked and weeping a moldy looking black water. The upper levels were swallowed by a permanent, low-hanging fog that didn’t move with the wind like you’d see a thick smoke or the stuff you see after a warm summer rain.

  Jesse’s pulse hammered in his ears. This is where it ends, he thought, all rational parts of his mind screaming. This is where you're supposed to turn back, call the cops, call your therapist, call your mother. Yet his feet still carried him forward, drawn by the impossible stillness of Stevie’s back. By the memory of her laugh—bright, but quietly raspy. The chilling, undeniable fact that the city around them wasn’t just quiet. It was as if it were holding its breath in complete suspense.

  She stepped through the gate. Jesse followed, the chain-link rattling angrily behind him, the sound around them swallowed instantly by the fog. Inside the parking deck’s cavernous, decaying maw, the air turned ominously frigid. Jesse’s breath plumed thick and white. The fog here wasn’t just mist; it was substance, swirling with motes of cold silvery light. Stairwells yawned like black mouths.

 Rusted out, seemingly forgotten cars sat frozen in time. Coated in thick, iridescent mold that glowed with a thick, sickly green bio-luminescence. The silence was no longer empty. It pressed into every fiber, as if hungry to consume the soul. A low, subsonic thrum vibrated in his molars, a frequency making his vision blur at the edges.

  Stevie Rae stopped on the third level. She turned, her storm-like eyes locking onto Jesse’s. Up close, the freckles weren’t just faded, they were like tiny, mapped constellations of faint gold light. Tracing the same familiar patterns across her cheeks. Her voice, when it came, wasn’t loud, yet it cut through the oppressive quiet like a shard of ice.

  “Peoria doesn’t just have secrets, Jesse,”

 She said, her tone devoid of warmth, yet carrying the echo of the girl he’d once known.

 “It is the secret. A wound in the world’s skin. And Tower 7? It’s the scab, the festering truth left from the ignorance of its past.”

  She raised a hand, not towards him, but towards the fog-choked void of the deck’s central shaft. The silvery motes swirled violently, coalescing into a vertical tear in the air. A jagged, shimmering rift, like fractured glass held together by liquid mercury. Through it, Jesse didn’t see darkness. He saw in layers, a flicker of the familiar downtown street. Then a glimpse of impossible, crystalline architecture built on clouds, then a flash of a vast, starless ocean under a bruised purple sky. The Shades. And beneath them, a deeper, colder blackness, where shapes unformed and reformed, leaving trails of shimmering static in their wake.

  “The Fades are bleeding through,”

 Stevie Rae whispered, her voice dropping to a rasp that scraped against his nerves.

 “They’re not ghosts, Jesse. They’re echoes of choices unmade, paths untaken, lives unlived. And they’re getting stronger. The veil is thinning and their growing hungry.”

 She took a step towards the rift. The pearlescent light around her intensified, casting long, distorted shadows that didn’t match her form.

 “The bridge didn’t collapse. It unraveled. Because someone tried to seal the wound without proper knowledge of what they were doing. It ended badly. And now the seal is failing completely.”

 Her gaze held his, almost ancient and weary.

 “You felt it, didn’t you? That night I mean. The aching pull. The sense that something vital in time was being unwritten?”

  Jesse’s throat tightened. He knew all too well the feeling she spoke of. A dizzying vertigo, a terrifying sense of his own memories thinning. But like the pages of an old book dissolving in the rain, he’d just blamed PTSD. He’d blamed the grief of loss.

  Stevie extended her hand. Not to pull him, but to offer. Her palm was cool, her skin smooth as polished stone, yet humming with the resonance of a contained energy.

 “The stories aren’t just stories, Jesse. They are blueprints. The Shades navigate back and forth through the fractures in the void. The Fades however…. They are like entropy. And you, Jess? You are the anchor. The one who remembers the city before the wound. The only one who truly remembers me like I was.”

  The trepidation surged, a cold wave threatening to drown him. A feeling of no return. The words echoed in his thoughts, not as a warning, but as a fact. Crossing that threshold meant stepping out of the known world. Out of linear time, out of the safe, predictable reality of Peoria’s cracked sidewalks and stubbornly enduring brick. It meant embracing the impossible, the terrifying, the beautiful. The true embodiment of chaos itself.

  But then he looked up at Stevie. The familiar freckled-map, the impossible hair, her eyes that seemed to hold both galaxies and graves. He remembered the girl who’d argued passionately about the ideas behind quantum entanglement over lukewarm tea. The girl who’d sketched constellations in the margins of her biology textbook, who’d vanished not with a scream, but with a sigh that sounded like the city itself exhaling. Leaving it to weep silently in her absence.

  Excitement flared, hotter and brighter than any notions of fear. It was not just an adventure. Recognition didn’t matter in the least. A destiny he’d spent almost 15 years denying, buried under layers of sensible jobs and sensible regrets. A chance to change the outcome of what claimed the place of being both the worst and most cherished memory of his lifetime.

 He didn’t think to hesitate. Without a second to spare, Jesse placed his hand in hers. Stevie’s fingers closed, interlocking around his, cool and strong. The pearlescent light of the rift flared, blindingly. The subsonic thrum deepened, vibrating his bones. The opening pulsed, widening as if to swallow them both whole.

  Stevie Rae stepped forward, pulling him with her. The last thing Jesse saw of the familiar world was the rust stained, dripping wet concrete of Tower 7 receding. Not into darkness, but a cascade of shimmers. A veritable overlap of alternating realities. The downtown street lights flickering wildly like a bad signal. The crystalline city gleaming, the starless ocean above sighing as each image bursting forth to fade away again. The air around them tasted of ozone, burnt honey, and something else. Something very defined and distinct. The sharp, clean scent of rain on hot pavement with a wisp of burnt sage. Impossibly out of place, but impossibly real.

  The barrage of close for comfort images that sped past slammed to a halt. Revealing a similar but distinctly different view set before them. They stepped out into the depths of the night. Together, hand in hand with the unknown, the city’s oldest secret unfolding around them like a dark, magnificent, but terrifying flower. The threshold hadn’t just been crossed.

  It had been shattered.

TO BE CONTINUED IN CH 3