Chapter 1: The Glitch on Gate 5

Marin Cross pressed his palms against his jeans, trying to stop the trembling that had started the moment he'd stepped through the automatic doors of JFK Airport. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with a frequency that made his teeth ache, and every announcement echoing through the terminal felt like nails dragging across his skull.

Just breathe, he told himself, adjusting the strap of his worn messenger bag. It's just an airport. Millions of people do this every day.

But Marin wasn't millions of people. At eighteen, he'd barely traveled beyond the borders of his quiet Connecticut town, and the sensory assault of one of the world's busiest airports was threatening to send him into a full-scale panic attack. The cacophony of rolling luggage, crying babies, and overlapping conversations in a dozen languages created a wall of noise that his hypersensitive hearing couldn't filter out.

He pulled his dark hoodie tighter around his slight frame and hunched his shoulders, making himself as small as possible as he navigated through the crowd. His wide eyes darted constantly—tracking movement, cataloging faces, noting every detail his anxiety-wired brain insisted might be important. It was exhausting, but he couldn't stop. He'd never been able to stop.

The departure board loomed ahead, a massive digital display cycling through flight information. Marin squinted at the scrolling text, searching for his gate assignment. There—Flight 847 to...

He blinked hard and looked again.

Nwe York.

The letters glowed amber against the black screen, and Marin felt something cold settle in his stomach. He stared at the misspelling, waiting for it to correct itself, but it remained stubbornly wrong. Around him, travelers moved with purpose, completely unbothered by what should have been an obvious error.

"Excuse me," he said to a woman in a business suit standing nearby, his voice barely audible above the terminal noise. "Do you see that? On the board?"

She glanced up briefly, then back at her phone. "What about it?"

"The... the spelling. It says 'Nwe York' instead of 'New York.'"

The woman looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language, then shrugged. "Looks fine to me, kid." She walked away, already absorbed in her next phone call.

Marin's hands began to shake more violently. He'd dealt with his sensory processing issues his entire life—the way sounds seemed too loud, lights too bright, patterns too obvious. His parents had taken him to specialists who'd used words like "high-functioning anxiety" and "hypervigilance," but none of them had ever dismissed something so clearly wrong.

He approached the information desk, where a tired-looking attendant was sorting through paperwork.

"Hi, I... there's an error on the departure board. Flight 847 shows the destination as 'Nwe York' but it should be—"

"Gate 23, sir. Boarding begins in thirty minutes." The attendant didn't even look up.

"But the spelling—"

"Gate 23." The man's voice carried a note of finality that made Marin's skin crawl.

Feeling increasingly unmoored, Marin made his way toward the gate, his analytical mind racing. In his eighteen years of noticing every tiny detail—every crooked picture frame, every slightly off-rhythm sound, every inconsistency that others missed—he'd never encountered something so blatantly wrong that everyone else seemed programmed to ignore.

The gate area was eerily quiet despite being nearly full. Passengers sat in their plastic chairs with an unnatural stillness, their faces blank and peaceful. No one was checking their phones obsessively, no children were crying, no one was complaining about delays. The normalcy of it felt profoundly abnormal.

Marin found an empty seat at the edge of the seating area and pulled out his phone, desperate for the anchor of familiarity. A text from Julian, his best friend, glowed on the screen: Can't wait to see you in NYC! College is going to be amazing.

The message should have been comforting, but something about it felt wrong too. Julian never used complete sentences in texts. He was all abbreviations and emoji, not proper punctuation and enthusiasm.

"Ladies and gentlemen, Flight 847 to Nwe York is now ready for boarding."

The gate agent's voice was perfectly modulated, professionally pleasant, and completely empty of human warmth. Marin's heart hammered against his ribs as passengers began to stand in unison, moving toward the boarding area with synchronized steps.

He remained frozen in his seat, every instinct screaming at him to run. But where could he go? This was the flight to his new life, to the college that represented his escape from the suffocating smallness of his hometown. His parents had sacrificed to pay for this opportunity. His bags were already on the plane.

You're being ridiculous, he told himself. It's just a typo. Technical glitches happen all the time.

But as he finally stood and joined the boarding line, Marin noticed that none of the other passengers had boarding passes. They simply walked past the agent, who nodded at each one with the same mechanical smile. When Marin reached the front, fumbling for his crumpled ticket, the agent looked at him with eyes that seemed to focus somewhere just past his face.

"Welcome aboard, sir. Enjoy your flight to Nwe York."

The jetway stretched ahead like a throat, and Marin felt like he was being swallowed. The other passengers had disappeared into the plane's cabin, leaving him alone in the narrow corridor. His footsteps echoed strangely, as if the sound was being absorbed before it could fully form.

The flight attendant at the cabin door had the same unsettling smile as the gate agent. "Good evening, sir. Your seat is 14F. Please make yourself comfortable."

Marin stumbled down the aisle, his hypersensitive hearing picking up something that made his blood turn to ice: nothing. No conversations, no rustling magazines, no crying babies or coughing passengers. The cabin was filled with people, but it was absolutely, impossibly silent.

He found his seat and sat down with shaking legs. The businessman next to him stared straight ahead with glassy eyes, not acknowledging Marin's presence. Across the aisle, a woman in a floral dress sat with her hands folded perfectly in her lap, not moving, not breathing as far as Marin could tell.

The plane began to taxi, and Marin gripped his armrests so tightly his knuckles went white. Through the small window, he watched the lights of JFK grow smaller, but something was wrong with the view too. The city lights formed patterns that hurt to look at directly, geometries that shouldn't exist.

As the plane lifted off the ground, carrying him toward whatever waited in "Nwe York," Marin Cross realized with crystalline clarity that he had just made the worst mistake of his life. But it was too late now. The only way out was forward, into a destination that didn't exist on any real map, filled with people who weren't really people at all.

The cabin lights dimmed, and in the growing darkness, Marin saw his reflection in the window—wide-eyed, terrified, and utterly alone. Behind him, he could swear he saw other reflections moving in ways that didn't match their owners' positions.

Welcome to Nwe York, he thought, the misspelling now feeling less like an error and more like a warning he'd been too late to heed.

The plane climbed higher into the night sky, carrying its cargo of silent passengers toward a city that existed in the spaces between reality, where typos became truth and every small detail Marin had ever noticed would become a matter of life and death.