Morning arrived with its usual indecision, light pooling in the corners of the city like it always had, unsure whether to stay. Buses ground awake. Windows opened. Somewhere, a radio played a song that had already been old for years. Time, it seemed, was behaving perfectly-except it wasn’t moving forward at all. Elia Cross understood this before anyone else, though he couldn’t have explained how. He felt it in the way his coffee never cooled, in the way the woman across the street had been watering the same dying fern for what felt like an hour. Most of all, he felt it in his chest, here moments were supposed to pass through cleanly but instead piled up, heavy and unresolved. Elia had always been good at noticing things that didn’t want to be noticed. Cracks in voices. Shadows that didn’t match their owners. The quiet, persistent wrongness beneath ordinary days. It was a useless talent-until the morning the clocks froze at 8:17 and refused to budge. By noon, rumours had begun to crawl through the city.