Igo: Wince

He set down his pen. Outside, the world was quiet. Too quiet. And somewhere deep below, something that should not be awake had just shifted in its sleep. Would you like a different genre or a more literal interpretation of the two words?

Igo Wince was not a man easily startled. He had spent twenty years cataloging seismic data in a windowless bunker, and his nerves had long since turned to cable. But that morning, something made him pause. A single line on the printout: anomaly detected at 3:14 a.m. The timestamp matched the moment his coffee cup had cracked — for no reason — down the middle. He stared at the tremor graph. A tiny, sharp spike. Not an earthquake. Not a blast. It looked, he thought with an unfamiliar wince, exactly like the footprint of a heartbeat. igo wince