The knowing came up like a bubble in warm water, unbidden and certain.
The man with the roses is safe to trust.
Malik stopped mid-step on the corner of Elm and something-the-Hex-hadn’t-named-yet, a quiet stretch of block where the paint looked fresh but the porches sat empty.
He’d been walking nowhere in particular just moving, because standing still for too long invited the smoothing-pull and the thought arrived whole and smug, like he’d always known it.
Safe.
The rose-seller.
Trust him.
He didn’t question it.
That was the mistake.
The Dreamer’s Tell had been whispering at him in pieces since the boundary snapped up flashes of a show he half-remembered watching, dread without detail, the prickle of knowing something terrible was coming and not which thing.
But this one felt different.
Clean.
A walkthrough instruction instead of a warning, and God, he needed an edge.
Needed to know who was safe and who was a trap wearing a grin.
So when he rounded the corner and saw the man with the roses a cheerful fellow in a too-new apron, wheeling a cart stacked with blooms that smelled of nothing Malik let the certainty carry him forward.
The man looked up.
Smiled wide.
Too wide, but Malik had already committed to the beat.
“Afternoon, neighbor!
Loveliest roses on the block, fresh as the morning and twice as sweet.
Looking for something special?”
The warm hum in Malik’s teeth the Drifter’s faint, drowsy presence flickered, interested.
He felt it lean in.
A meet-cute.
The decade loved a meet-cute.
He could land this easy, use it as cover, maybe even soak up a tick of warmth for playing along.
“Just admiring,” Malik said, and his voice came out bright and period-perfect, the mask sliding up without effort.
“They’re lovely.
Really lovely.”
The rose-seller’s grin didn’t shift.
Didn’t blink.
He picked a red one from the cart the exact middle rose, like he’d been told which and held it out.
“For you, then.
No charge for a first-timer.
Everyone deserves a little beauty in their day.”
It purred in the back of his head.
Safe.
Trust him.
Malik reached for the rose.
His hand stopped an inch from the stem.
The air went thin.
Not wrong just eager.
The rose-seller’s smile held a frame too long, and under it Malik caught the faintest flicker, the same thing he’d seen in Herb’s eyes at the wall, in the Yorks’ frozen cheer: a space where a person should be, waiting to be filled.
A node.
A latch.
The certainty in his head the clean, smug fragment that had walked him straight into this flipped inside-out.
The Tell hadn’t said safe.
Or it had, and the Tell had lied.
He pulled his hand back.
Slow.
Didn’t let his face drop.
“You know what,” he said, and kept the smile warm and the panic off-camera, “I’ll save it for a special occasion.
Wouldn’t want to waste a thing this nice on a Tuesday.”
The man blinked.
Once.
His smile reset, a touch dimmer.
“…Suit yourself, neighbor.
You know where to find me.”
The cart’s wheel squeaked as the man turned it, smooth and unhurried, and rolled it up the block toward a porch that hadn’t had a rose-seller on it a minute ago.
Malik watched him go.
The thin air thickened back to normal, and the Drifter’s attention curious, a little confused wavered and settled.
He’d almost done it.
Almost picked up the rose the Hex handed him, smiled, and let it write him a role.
A man buying roses.
A man with someone to buy them for.
A slot on the block the boundary could finish.
It had walked him straight into it.
Had lied.
Or garbled.
Or the certainty had been right once and wrong now, rearranged in his head like a dubbed-over tape, and there was no way to know which.
Malik turned and walked the opposite direction, hands empty, teeth buzzing faintly with the warm hum and the first cold edge of his own stupid mistake.
He checked the memory as he walked.
His mum’s voice saying his name.
Still there.
Still whole.
The escape hadn’t cost him that one just a sliver of something smaller, something he wouldn’t notice missing until later, maybe, when he reached for a detail that used to be there and found smooth nothing.
By the time he reached his porch the afternoon light had that golden-wrong quality it always did before the Hex cut to evening.
He sat on the step.
Let his face go tired.
Nobody was watching this part the Drifter had drifted off after the rose-cart beat resolved into nothing and he could afford to let the mask down for the length of a breath.
Another whisper rose.
Quieter.
A new scrap of knowing, just as certain.
The schoolteacher knows your name.
Physically stop.
Pressed his palm flat to the porch step and held it there until the certainty bled off into the same dread-hum as everything else the Tell fed him.
Dread.
Never detail.
A silhouette where a threat should be, maybe.
A shape of danger he half-remembered, pressing against his skull.
But never clean fact.
Never a thing he could use without it coiling back on him the second he leaned his weight on it.
He’d needed an edge.
His Tell had offered one.
And the edge had been a trap wearing his own smugness, and he’d walked right into it because it felt true, and feeling true was the least trustworthy thing in this town.
Malik laughed once, low and dry, at nothing and no one.
“Right,” he said to the empty porch.
“Duly noted.”
The buzz in his teeth was gone.
The block ticked over into scripted evening porch lights, the smell of dinners nobody would eat, the Pratts’ door closing on cue.
Malik sat in it and felt foreknowledge his one supposed advantage turn to sand in his hand.
He had a gift he couldn’t trust.
A memory of a show that lied.
A skull full of warnings and no way to tell the real ones from the ones his own brain was inventing to fill the gap where certainty used to live.
He got up.
Went inside.
Made himself tea the Hex let him keep.
Sat at the kitchen table and thought about the rose-seller’s smile, and the whisper of safe, and how close he’d come to handing himself over because a voice in his own head had sounded sure.
It was still there.
Still whispering.
He could feel it at the edges, offering certainties he now knew better than to take at face value.
But God, he wanted to.
That was the worst part.
Even now, burned and wiser, he ached to believe it.
Craved the walkthrough.
Craved the certainty.
Malik drank his tea.
Let the want sit beside the knowing, two incompatible truths that would have to live in his head together now.
His Tell gave him dread.
Not data.
And every time he forgot that, it would strip away something he couldn’t get back.
He finished the tea.
Set the cup down.
Checked the eyebrow scar in the dim reflection of the window still there, still his and let the next scrap whisper up unbidden and unbelieved.
Outside, the block reset itself for night.
Inside, Malik sat with his lesson and his weakness, and knew the weakness was the more dangerous one.
The Tell lied.
He just wasn’t sure he’d remember that the next time it sounded so sure.