Learning to Walk at Night

He pressed his hand to the window frame and suddenly caught a faint old echo inside one of the elevated bridge beams. Not from last night. From earlier. Someone had fallen under that span before, and the strain had remained in the metal. Farther off, a row of subway gate mechanisms carried a repeating rhythm, like a regular exchange point. Ethan stood still for a full ten seconds. For the first time he understood this wasn't random hallucination. It was tied to the city itself. Steel. Rails. Pipes. Enclosed spaces. Wherever metal and vibration lived, they left residue. And he could hear it. The cost arrived with it. Within minutes his ears were bleeding. The inside of his head felt pierced with needles. White noise filled his sight.