Chapter 2: A Crack in the World

Leo stared at his reflection until his eyes watered, willing the impossible green to fade back to familiar brown. But the mirror refused to lie, showing him a face that was his and wasn't, eyes that belonged to a stranger wearing his skin.

"Leo! Breakfast!" Mom's voice echoed from downstairs, carrying the same musical Tennessee drawl it always had, but even that sounded slightly off-key now, like a song played in the wrong tempo.

He splashed cold water on his face, hoping the shock might reset whatever cosmic joke was being played on him. The green eyes stared back, unblinking, accusatory. What are you? they seemed to ask.

Downstairs, Mom stood at the stove scrambling eggs, her graying hair pulled back in the same messy ponytail she'd worn for as long as Leo could remember. She hummed under her breath—an old hymn that Leo recognized but couldn't name. Everything looked normal, felt normal, except for the way the morning light seemed too bright, too sharp, like someone had adjusted the contrast on reality itself.

"Sleep okay, baby?" she asked without turning around, the way she always did.

"Yeah," Leo lied, sliding into his usual chair at the kitchen table. The wood grain looked different somehow, the scratches and water rings arranged in patterns he didn't recognize. "Mom, can I ask you something?"

"Course you can." She turned, and Leo's breath caught. Her eyes were still the soft hazel they'd always been, thank God, but something in her expression shifted when she looked at him. A flicker of uncertainty, maybe even fear. "What is it?"

"My eyes," Leo said carefully. "Have they always been... this color?"

Mom set down her spatula and really looked at him then, her face going pale beneath her summer tan. For a long moment, she didn't speak, just stared like she was seeing him for the first time.

"Your daddy had green eyes," she said finally, her voice barely above a whisper. "Pretty green eyes, just like yours."

Leo felt the world tilt. His father had died when Leo was three—a car accident on a rainy night that Mom never talked about. But he'd seen pictures, old Polaroids tucked away in Mom's jewelry box, and Dad's eyes had been brown. Deep, warm brown, just like Leo's had been yesterday.

"But Mom—"

"Eat your eggs," she said, turning back to the stove with jerky, too-quick movements. "They're getting cold."

The eggs tasted like ash in his mouth, but Leo forced them down, studying his mother's rigid shoulders and the way her hands shook slightly as she cleaned the already-spotless counter. She was scared. Not confused or concerned—scared. Which meant she knew something was wrong too.

James thundered down the stairs like a small earthquake, all elbows and knees and morning hair that stuck up in twelve different directions. His eyes—those impossible green eyes—were bright with the kind of energy that came from sleeping well and waking up without the weight of cosmic dread pressing down on your chest.

"Morning, sunshine," he said, ruffling Leo's hair as he passed. "You look like hell. Bad dreams?"

You have no idea, Leo thought, but just shrugged. "Something like that."

The rest of breakfast passed in uncomfortable silence, Mom's hymn humming replaced by the scratch of forks on plates and the distant drone of the television from the living room. Leo caught fragments of words—breaking news—New York—unprecedented attack—but they felt distant, unreal, like sounds from another dimension bleeding through.

It wasn't until James cranked up the volume that the full horror hit.

The Twin Towers were gone.

Leo stared at the television screen, watching the endless loop of planes striking steel and glass, of people running through streets choked with dust and debris. The date stamp in the corner read September 11, 2001, and something cold and terrible settled in the pit of his stomach.

"Jesus Christ," James whispered, his face pale in the television's blue glow. "This is really happening."

But that was the problem. Leo remembered this day—not as a current event, but as history. Something that had happened years ago, when he was much younger. He remembered learning about it in school, remembered the documentaries and the memorials and the way adults got that distant, sad look when they talked about where they were when the towers fell.

Except according to every calendar in the house, according to the timestamp on the news, according to the way James and Mom were reacting with fresh shock and horror, this was happening now. For the first time.

Leo's memory of yesterday was crystal clear—September 10, 2001. But his memories of everything else felt fuzzy, like trying to recall a dream after waking. Movies he was sure he'd seen had never been made. Books he remembered reading didn't exist. Even his favorite TV shows seemed subtly different, characters with different names, plotlines that veered away from what he remembered.

It was as if he'd slipped sideways into a world that was almost his own, but not quite. A world where his eyes were green, where his father had green eyes, where history itself had been rewritten by forces he couldn't understand.

The news droned on, filling the house with images of smoke and falling steel, and Leo felt like he was drowning again. Not in creek water this time, but in a reality that no longer fit him like it should.

That night, after Mom had finally gone to bed and James had retreated to his room to blast music loud enough to drown out the world's ending, Leo lay staring at the ceiling. The house felt different in the darkness—the familiar creaks and sighs had been replaced by sounds he didn't recognize, like the building itself was adjusting to accommodate an unwelcome guest.

Sleep, when it finally came, brought no peace.

Leo found himself trapped in his own body, awake but unable to move, unable to speak. Sleep paralysis, Mom would have called it—she'd suffered from it herself when Leo was younger, after Dad died. But this felt different, intentional, like invisible hands were holding him down.

The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees in an instant. Leo's breath came out in visible puffs, and frost began to form on the window beside his bed. Somewhere in the darkness, water dripped with the steady rhythm of a countdown clock.

Then he saw him.

Standing in the doorway, barely visible in the hall light, was a boy. An eleven-year-old boy with Leo's face and Leo's unruly dark hair and Leo's thin scar on his chin. But his eyes—his eyes burned with a fury so pure it made the air around him shimmer like heat waves.

Brown eyes. Deep, chocolate brown, exactly the color Leo's had been before his plunge into the dark water.

The boy didn't speak, didn't move, just stood there radiating hatred so intense it was like standing too close to a fire. Leo tried to scream, tried to move, tried to do anything but lie there helpless while his doppelganger studied him with those familiar-strange eyes.

The smell of creek water filled the room—not the clean, fresh scent of running water, but something darker, colder, tinged with decay. Leo felt moisture gathering on his skin, beading like condensation on a glass pulled from a freezer.

The boy took a single step into the room, and Leo's paralyzed lungs seized with terror. This wasn't a dream. This wasn't his imagination running wild after a traumatic day. This was real, as real as the creek water still lingering in his sinuses, as real as the impossible green eyes that stared back at him from every mirror.

The boy opened his mouth, and when he spoke, his voice was Leo's voice, but hollow, empty, like an echo calling up from the bottom of a well.

"You don't belong here."

Then the paralysis broke, and Leo jerked awake with a gasp that sounded like a drowning man's first breath. His sheets were soaked with sweat—or at least, he hoped it was sweat. The room smelled like creek water and something else, something rotten and wild.

Leo stumbled to the bathroom and turned on every light, needing to fill the darkness with something warm and safe. His reflection looked haunted, green eyes wide with terror, skin pale as moonlight.

But it was his reflection. His face, his eyes, his body. Whatever was happening to him, whatever game the universe was playing, he was still himself. Still Leo Morrison, even if the world around him had gone subtly, terrifyingly wrong.

He splashed water on his face and tried to convince himself it had been a dream. Just stress and trauma and his brain's way of processing the impossible changes in his life. But the smell of creek water lingered, and when he returned to his room, his sheets were still damp with something that definitely wasn't sweat.

Outside his window, the Cherokee National Forest whispered secrets in languages he didn't want to learn, and somewhere in the darkness, something with his face and burning brown eyes began planning its next visit.

The world had cracked, and Leo Morrison was falling through the spaces in between.