Chapter 1: The Tomato Blight

The channel dial never moved from seven.

Elias Thorne had refined his evening routine to the precision of a Swiss timepiece. Six-thirty: microwave dinner removed and stirred. Six-forty-five: settle into the worn leather recliner that faced both his desk and the television. Seven o'clock sharp: Channel 7 Evening News with Brenda Vance. The blue glow of the screen was the only light he needed, casting everything in his small apartment into familiar shadows.

He opened his notebook—the same black composition book he'd used for three years—and clicked his pen twice. The sound was a comforting ritual, like a bell calling him to prayer. On the left page, he'd record the day's market data trends. On the right, notable news items. Order imposed on chaos, patterns extracted from noise. It was what he did for work, and it was what kept him sane.

"Good evening, I'm Brenda Vance with Channel 7 News." Her smile was perfectly calibrated, professional warmth that never wavered. Elias found it oddly comforting—a constant in a world that had taken away his parents when he was nineteen and left him with only a sister who called twice a month out of obligation.

The first story was typical local fare: a city council meeting about parking meters. Elias dutifully noted it, though his hand moved almost automatically while his mind focused on the subtle patterns in Brenda's delivery. Three years of watching the same anchor had taught him to read the micro-expressions behind her television smile. Tonight, she seemed... tighter somehow. A barely perceptible tension around her eyes.

"In agricultural news," Brenda continued, her teleprompter gaze steady, "Idaho farmers are baffled by a mysterious blight affecting tomato crops in the Boise Valley. The disease, characterized by distinctive black veining and rapid plant death, has destroyed over three hundred acres in just five days."

Elias paused his note-taking. Something about the story nagged at him—not the content, but the delivery. Brenda's voice had dropped half a register, and for just a moment, her professional mask had slipped. Fear. He'd seen enough of it in his own mirror to recognize it in others.

The camera cut to footage of withered tomato plants, their leaves blackened with veins that spread like ink through water. The farmer being interviewed looked haunted, describing how healthy plants had collapsed overnight, as if something had drained the life from them in hours rather than days.

"Agricultural specialists are calling it unlike anything they've previously encountered," Brenda said as the camera returned to her. "The blight appears to follow no known pattern of plant disease, spreading in perfect geometric formations that have left scientists scrambling for explanations."

Elias wrote: Idaho tomato blight - geometric pattern - 300 acres - 5 days. Below that, almost without thinking, he added: B. seemed genuinely disturbed.

The rest of the broadcast followed familiar rhythms. A feel-good story about a local high school's championship win. Weather—rain expected tomorrow. Sports scores. The comfortable predictability of it all helped settle the strange unease the blight story had triggered.

At exactly eight o'clock, Brenda delivered her standard sign-off: "That's Channel 7 News. I'm Brenda Vance. Stay safe, and we'll see you tomorrow."

Elias closed his notebook and prepared for the second half of his evening routine: a cup of chamomile tea, thirty minutes of market analysis for tomorrow's client reports, then sleep by ten-thirty. The structure of it was everything. When you lived alone in a world that seemed designed to remind you of that fact, routine became religion.

But sleep didn't come easily that night. The image of those blackened tomato plants lingered behind his eyelids, along with the memory of genuine fear flickering across Brenda Vance's perfectly composed features. He'd watched her deliver reports on murders, natural disasters, and political scandals with the same unflappable professionalism. What about dying plants in Idaho could shake someone who'd covered human tragedy without blinking?

Morning light filtered through his apartment's single window, and Elias shuffled toward the small balcony where he kept his coffee and his one concession to domesticity: a small planter box where he grew herbs for cooking. Basil, oregano, and three small tomato plants that were his pride and joy in an otherwise sterile living space.

The coffee mug slipped from his hand and shattered on the concrete floor.

The tomato plants were dying. Not the slow decline of neglect or seasonal change, but the rapid, devastating collapse he'd seen on the news just twelve hours earlier. Black veins spread through the leaves in perfect geometric patterns, exactly like the footage from Idaho. The healthy green of yesterday had become a withered map of decay that looked as if it had been drawn with ink and malice.

Elias dropped to his knees among the coffee and ceramic shards, his hands shaking as he touched the blackened stems. The plants were still warm, as if something had burned them from the inside out. The soil around them remained moist and healthy—whatever had killed them had been surgical in its precision.

His mind raced through possibilities, each more unlikely than the last. Coincidence seemed impossible. Idaho was nearly a thousand miles away, and plant diseases didn't travel overnight through apartment building air conditioning. Some kind of contamination from his building? But the neighboring plants in other balconies looked fine. A targeted attack? The paranoid thought felt ridiculous even as it formed, but the alternative—that somehow the news report had predicted or caused this—was insane.

Wasn't it?

Elias stumbled back inside and grabbed his notebook, flipping to last night's entries. Idaho tomato blight - geometric pattern - 300 acres - 5 days. Below it, his observation about Brenda's fear. He stared at the words until they seemed to blur and shift on the page.

Twenty-four hours. The news had reported the Idaho blight, and twenty-four hours later, the exact same phenomenon had appeared on his balcony. Not similar—identical. The same geometric spreading pattern, the same rapid timeline, the same surgical precision that left everything else untouched.

He reached for his phone to call Chloe, then stopped. What would he say? That his tomato plants had died in the same way as some farm disease he'd seen on the news? She already thought he was too isolated, too dependent on his routines and his television for human contact. This would only confirm her suspicions that he was losing his grip on reality.

But as he stared out at the blackened remains of his plants, Elias couldn't shake the certainty that reality had already lost its grip on him. Or perhaps, he thought with growing dread, something else had tightened its grip on reality itself.

The television sat silent in the corner, its black screen reflecting his pale face like a dark mirror. Seven o'clock was still nine hours away, but for the first time in three years, Elias found himself both dreading and desperately anticipating Brenda Vance's evening broadcast.

Whatever was happening, he had the terrible feeling that tonight's news would bring him answers he didn't want to hear.

Outside, the first drops of rain began to fall, just as the weather report had promised.