Chapter 3: A New One Is Waking Up

Chapter 3: A New One Is Waking Up

The hours that followed were a waking fever dream. Elara sat on the floor, her back pressed against the door as if she could physically hold the world at bay. Every creak of the building, every siren in the distance, was a potential threat. Her professional mind, her last bastion of rational thought, was in full retreat, leaving behind the smoking ruins of textbook diagnoses and clinical detachment.

Stress-induced psychosis, it whispered feebly. Coincidence. Confirmation bias.

But then the image of the man in the grocery store would flash in her mind, his right thumb rubbing slowly, deliberately, against his index finger. A gesture so small, so personal, it was like he had reached into her mind and stolen a secret. That wasn't a coincidence. It was a violation.

She couldn’t do this alone. The thought was terrifying. For months, isolation had been her goal, her shield. Now, it was a suffocating shroud. There was only one person who wouldn't immediately call the authorities or try to have her committed. The one person she had failed because she had refused to see.

Her phone lay on the small end table, a black, silent rectangle. Picking it up felt like a monumental act of surrender. Surrender to the madness, surrender to the fact that her meticulously ordered world had been a fragile illusion. Her fingers trembled as she scrolled through her contacts, past the names of former colleagues she could no longer trust, until she found his. LEO G. (CLIENT - INACTIVE).

Her thumb hovered over the call button. This was a line you didn't cross. Contacting a former client outside of a professional capacity was a cardinal sin, an ethical breach of the highest order. But what did ethics matter when reality itself was bleeding at the edges? She was no longer a support worker. She was a witness. Just like him. She pressed the button.

The phone rang twice, each tone stretching into an eternity. She was about to hang up, convinced this was a terrible mistake, when the line clicked.

“Hello?” His voice was wary, laced with the familiar tension she remembered from their sessions.

“Leo? It’s… it’s Elara Vance. From the Center.”

Silence. For a moment, she thought he’d hung up. Then, a quiet, strained reply. “Elara. Why are you calling me?” There was no warmth in it, only suspicion.

“I know this is unprofessional,” she began, the words tumbling out in a rush. “I know I’m not supposed to… but I have to ask you something. The photo. The man in the trees.”

“What about him?” he asked, his voice tightening.

“I saw him,” she whispered, the admission tearing something loose inside her. “Not in the photo. I mean, yes, in the photo, I finally saw him there. But I saw one of them. In person. Today.”

Another beat of silence, but this one was different. It wasn't suspicion; it was a held breath. “Tell me,” he said, his voice now sharp, focused.

She recounted the entire episode, from the dead-eyed stare in the cereal aisle to the impossible teleportation to the canned goods section. Her voice cracked when she described the final, horrifying detail. “He… he knew, Leo. I have this stupid nervous habit, I rub my thumb against my finger when I’m scared. And he did it. He stood there and he did it right back at me.”

She finished, panting slightly, expecting him to be shocked, perhaps even skeptical of the details. Instead, he let out a long, shuddering breath. It wasn't a sound of surprise. It was a sound of grim, soul-weary recognition.

“The mimicking,” Leo said, his voice low and intense. “They do that. It’s to let you know it’s not random. To let you know you’ve been chosen. That you’re awake.”

The validation was so absolute, so immediate, that Elara felt a wave of dizziness. She wasn't crazy. She wasn't crazy. The relief was a flood, washing away weeks of doubt and fear, leaving her weak and trembling.

“So I’m not… we’re not…”

“No,” Leo said, and for the first time, she heard a flicker of strength in his voice, the sound of a man who had passed through the fire and was still standing. “We’re not. Listen to me, Elara. I found something. After I left the Center… after I realized no one was going to believe me… I started digging. Deep.”

He told her about the forums. Obscure message boards hidden in the dark corners of the internet, encrypted and hard to find. Places where people from all over the world shared their experiences in hushed, terrified whispers. They all told the same story. The feeling of being watched. The figures at the edge of their vision. The unsettlingly normal-looking people who were anything but. They shared photos, videos, audio recordings—all containing the same strange, static-like anomalies.

“They found me, somehow,” Leo said. “Someone sent me an anonymous invitation. It’s a whole community, Elara. We’re not alone in this.”

Tears pricked Elara’s eyes. A community. Allies. For the first time since she’d slammed her laptop shut, a fragile tendril of hope began to uncurl in her chest. A new desire burned through the terror: to connect, to understand, to fight back.

“Can you… can you send me a link?” she asked, her voice thick.

“Yeah. I’m sending it now. Just… be careful. Read, don’t post. Not yet. Get the lay of the land.”

Her phone buzzed with a new message. A cryptic string of letters and numbers. She clicked it, her laptop still closed on the floor like a dormant beast. She’d have to open it again. She’d have to face the static.

“Leo, I’m looking at it now,” she said, her voice dropping as she typed the address into her browser. The site was stark, black text on a grey background, with no images. It looked like a relic from the early internet. The main page was a long list of thread titles.

”Has anyone else noticed the teeth?” ”Audio phenomenon in white noise.” ”They can affect the streetlights.” ”Mimicking incident – London Underground.”

It was a litany of shared terror, a global tapestry of the exact paranoia she used to document in her case files. She felt a profound sense of belonging that was both comforting and utterly horrifying.

“See?” Leo said softly through the phone. “You’re not losing your mind.”

“No,” she breathed, scrolling down the page, her eyes scanning the dates and locations. A post from Berlin yesterday. One from Seoul a few hours ago. This was bigger than she could have ever imagined.

Then Leo’s voice changed, losing its reassuring tone and taking on a sharp, urgent edge. “Elara. Wait. Stop scrolling. There’s a new post. It just went up. Top of the board.”

She looked. A new thread had appeared, timestamped just three minutes ago. Her blood ran cold. The location tag read: North American East Coast. Her city.

She stared at the title, her breath catching in her throat. The letters seemed to vibrate on the screen, charged with a malevolent intelligence.

“A new one is waking up.”

“Leo…” she whispered, her hand tightening on the phone. “What is this?”

“Click it,” he commanded, his voice tight with dread.

She did. The post was short, anonymous. There was no user name, just a string of random characters. But the text… the text was a chillingly perfect summary of the last hour of her life.

“Subject F-28. Former ‘helper.’ Initial awareness confirmed via IMG_7734. Secondary contact initiated at commercial food distribution point. Subject displayed standard flight response after mimicry protocol was engaged. Fled on foot, abandoning dairy product. Now barricaded in dwelling. Observation ongoing. Welcome to the static.”

Elara dropped the phone. It clattered to the floor, Leo’s distant, tinny voice calling her name. She couldn’t hear him. All she could hear was the roaring in her ears.

Subject F-28. Female, 28 years old. Former ‘helper.’ Her job. IMG_7734. Leo’s photo file. Dairy product. The milk carton she’d dropped.

They hadn't just watched her. They had documented her. Analyzed her. They were reporting on her as if she were a specimen in a lab. And this forum, this place she thought was a sanctuary for the hunted, was compromised. It was their hunting log.

The hope that had bloomed in her chest moments before was brutally extinguished, replaced by an arctic dread. She wasn’t finding allies. She had just stumbled into the enemy’s briefing room.