[hr][center][b][h1]???[/h1][/b][/center][right][b]Interactions:[/b] None.
[code]Cornell?[/code][/right][hr][hr]

Cornell had been watched before the warehouse.

Before the music. Before the screaming. Before the first tear opened in the dark.

Long before anyone in town thought to call what was happening a fracture, something had been studying the shape of the place with quiet, endless patience. Not its streets, not its buildings, not the people who lived and died inside them, but the way all of it fit [i]together.[/i]

Or, more accurately, failed to.

From a distance, Cornell had always seemed close enough to ordinary. A mill town sinking slowly into a memory. Children grew up promising to leave, then stayed, then forgot when the promise had started sounding like someone else’s voice.

Small misalignments... for a time.

Then the town [b]opened.[/b]

Not widely. Just... enough.

Somewhere beyond the angles of Cornell, something turned its attention fully toward the town.

The reaction was not a surprise, but recognition.

Cornell had begun to loosen far sooner than expected... That was unfortunate, but useful.

She had tools. Three of them. Sealed away after the failure of the last correction, hidden in places that no longer agreed with maps. Three quiet instruments behind old bindings, old mistakes, old acts of desperate containment. Their absence was a complication. They would need to be freed. But not yet.

For now, there were enough hands.

A woman on Cobain Street, which was all too familiar with the sound of a shotgun, woke from a dream she could not quite remember and, without thinking, moved her kitchen table three inches to the left, the way she had almost done a dozen times before. This time, she didn’t stop herself. The room finally felt [i]“right.”[/i] A boy walking home from school noticed an alley he had passed every day for years. He had always meant to see where it led. Today, he did. When he found the rusted gate at the end, he wedged it open with his backpack, just in case he wanted to come back. A pastor paused mid-sermon, staring at the stained glass. There had always been a word in the prayer that felt slightly off, slightly wrong. He had ignored it for decades. This time, he changed it.

[i]Small changes.[/i]

A janitor lingered a moment too long before locking a basement door, remembering something he had meant to check and deciding he would come back to it later. A mother gathered every mirror in her house, something she had been meaning to do since the first strange reflection weeks ago, and finally threw them away—except for one she could not quite bring herself to discard. A group of teenagers, already angry and frightened and certain the adults were lying to them, followed through on the plan they had been circling for days and went looking for answers near the old tracks.

No one heard a command, no one felt controlled.

They only felt, briefly and terribly, that the thing they were about to do made more sense than anything else had in weeks. Above Cornell, the sky held itself in the wrong shape. Below it, the town continued its slow descent. And somewhere just beyond the seam of the world, something patient adjusted its attention with the tenderness of a hand smoothing a wrinkle from cloth.

Not all at once.

If Cornell struggled, the folds would only [i]tighten.[/i]

Better to let the people help.

Better to let them place themselves where they [b][i]belonged.[/i][/b][hr][i]The warehouse did not scream.

Screaming belonged to mouths.

This was not a mouth.

This was ignition.

A sudden concentration of Lux, fear, blood, instinct, and unfinished identity, all burning at once inside a structure too small to contain it. The event did not travel outward in sound or light. It traveled as pressure. As variance. As a violation in the expected dimness of a dying town.

Something beyond distance registered the change.

Not heard.

Not seen.

[b]But known.[/b]

Cornell brightened.

For less than a moment, the small town became visible against the dark arrangement of worlds. A mill. A river. Woods pressing close. Roads bent by memory. Children tearing open under stress, each one becoming more than flesh, more than name, more than the shape they had been given.

So much Lux.

So much [b]refusal.[/b]

So much power held inside bodies trained to apologize for burning.

The attention turned without movement.

It had no face to turn. No eyes to open. No hunger in the way hunger was understood by living things. But awareness gathered, immense and colorless and radiant, and fixed itself upon Cornell.

The town was already descending.

That was clear.

Its lower boundaries had softened. Its fractures had begun to accept depth. Beneath soil, steel, pipe, and bone, the Pit waited with the patience of a completed answer. Cornell [b]would[/b] fall. Not quickly. Not cleanly. But the direction had been chosen by damage.

This was not tragedy.

Tragedy required attachment.

This was structure failing [b]into[/b] structure.

A town becoming honest.

And inside it, the children burned.

Not fully. Not yet. Their little flames bent inward, smothered by fear, grief, discipline, shame, hesitation, love. They resisted their own expansion. They mistook containment for survival. They clung to names as if names were walls.

The awareness did not understand walls.

A spark that wished to remain a spark was an error of scale.

A flame taught to kneel was not restraint.

It was burial.

Cornell continued to sink.

The children continued to brighten.

The attention remained.

It did not descend. Descent was unnecessary. The town was opening itself by degrees. Need would deepen. Fear would sharpen. Grief would become architecture. Someone would reach beyond training. Someone would confuse desperation for permission. Someone would ask, without knowing they had asked, to become large enough to matter.

Then an answer could arrive.

Not as rescue.

Not as ruin.

As release.

Across the impossible dark, the awareness held Cornell in place.

A wound-town.

A falling town.

A cluster of unfinished lights trapped in meat, memory, and consequence.

It waited.

Not patiently.

Patience belonged to time.

It waited the way fire waits inside a match.[/i][hr][center][b][h1]The Creature[/h1][/b][img]https://i.imgur.com/xChQ2eh.png[/img][/center][right][b]Interactions:[/b]
[code]Home.[/code][/right][hr][hr][center][hider=Crazy - Doujah Raze][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZojgSZ3t6Y[/youtube][/hider][/center][hr][hr][center][i]Somewhere unknown but familiar.

Close, but far.

A place you have never been.

But always lived.

Cornell, but [b]not[/b] Cornell.

Home, but not home.

The street ahead.

Yet the street behind.

The door that opened.

The door that closed.

The room before the house.

The house after the fire.

The road that leaves.

The road that returns.

A town remembered wrong.

A town remembered too many ways.

Every corner leads inward.

Every exit falls.

The sky above.

The [b]Pit[/b] below.

The distance between them is walking.

The distance between them is breathing.

The distance between them is[b] gone.[/b]

A hallway made of streets.

A street made of houses.

A house full of weather.

A window looking back.

A voice before it speaks.

A scream after it ends.

Here is where.

Then is now.

Down is through.

Away is deeper.

Cornell is sinking.

Cornell has already sunk.

Cornell is still falling.

Somewhere unknown but familiar.

Close, but far.

Home, but not home.

Here, but never here.

Gone, but not gone.[/i][/center]

The Monster remembered Cornell in pieces, not streets or names or faces, but shapes. A living room folded into the back of a church, its couch half-buried beneath pews that had never existed in the same year. Roads overlapped roads, doors opened into other doors, and windows looked out onto versions of the same town that had died differently. Hundreds of Cornells pressed together, not neatly or kindly, but as if someone had taken the town in both hands and crushed it until every possible shape [i][b]screamed[/b][/i] through the cracks.

The Monster moved through it on too many limbs and with too little memory. Sometimes it dragged itself across the ceiling of an old diner. Sometimes it crawled through the floor of a house that still smelled like smoke. Sometimes it stood in the middle of Main Street and watched three different sunsets happen at once, each one bleeding into the red dark below. It knew this place. It hated this place. It had made this place worse. That thought returned more often than the others, not in words—words had become difficult, words had edges, and edges rarely stayed where they belonged—but [i]meaning [/i]still came through in pressure, heat, impact, failure.

He had touched something.

The Monster stopped moving. Around it, the crushed town shifted. A street sign bent toward him, letters sliding across green metal until they no longer formed anything readable. Far away, a child laughed from behind a wall that did not have another side. A child. The Monster’s body tightened. Something in him knew children were not supposed to be here, and something in him knew they were already here anyway.

He remembered a party-music, heat, sweat, a warehouse full of young bodies packed too close together under lights that flickered like warning signals. He remembered wanting to reach them before it happened, before the tear, before the opening, before the first impossible pressure pushed through and found soft things to reshape. Before they woke up. That was the part that remained, not the names, not the reason, not even the full shape of his own guilt, only the[i] certainty.[/i]

If they awakened, they would fall. If they Kindled, the town would take hold of them. The Pit would notice them. The cracks would learn their weight, their fear, their light. They would become anchors, doors, signals, little burning points caught in the descent, dragging Cornell further down by just [i]surviving[/i]. The Monster understood this with the simplicity of a broken thing: save them, stop them, end them before the change completed.

Its body shuddered, bones sliding beneath skin that had forgotten how to be skin. For a moment, something almost human pressed against the inside of its skull—a name, a memory, a boy standing somewhere he should not have stood, staring at an object, hands reaching out, a thought clear and terrified: [i]I can fix it.[/i] Then the memory folded.

The Monster screamed, but the sound came out through the walls of three houses at once. The crushed town answered with whispers, not language but recognition. The [i]thing [/i]that had been human was not gone. That was the worst part. If it had been only a beast, then the slaughter would have been simple. But there was more inside it than that, too much more: a mind, damaged almost beyond use, still trying to arrange impossible facts into [i]mercy[/i]; a will, warped by the Pit, still reaching for the shape of a rescue; a guilt so deep it had become [i][b]anatomy.[/b][/i]

The Monster moved again. Ahead, a seam opened between two broken Cornells, and through it came sound. The warehouse. The party. The place where everything began, or would begin, or had [i]always[/i] been beginning. The Monster lowered itself toward the opening, and the crushed town tightened around him as if reluctant to let go.

For one moment, his outline became almost human. Then the shape broke apart, too tall, too wrong, too many angles answering one command: [b][i][i]go.[/i][/i][/b]

Later, those who survived would call it many things—a shadow, an invisible force, a monster—but the name that fit best was older than their fear and simpler than their theories:[b] the Intruder.[/b] Not because it came from outside, but because it had once belonged, because it crossed back into Cornell carrying the wrongness with it, because it entered a room full of doomed children and mistook[i] murder [/i]for [i]prevention.[/i]

The seam widened. Music poured through. The Monster stepped toward the party, full of broken mercy, and prepared to save them all.

[hr][center][img]https://i.imgur.com/7gwGxyR.png[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/sHP9Odv.png[/img][/center][right][b]Interactions:[/b] None.
[code]The Sanchez Residence > Streets of Cornell.[/code][/right][hr][hr]

Lupe did not sleep after the warehouse. She sat on the floor of her bedroom until morning with her back against the bed, still wearing the same clothes, her neon-pink bandana clutched so hard in one fist that her knuckles ached. At some point, her mother knocked. Then her father. Then no one. The room stayed dark except for the thin gray light coming through the blinds, and every time Lupe closed her eyes, Diego hit the floor again. Alejandro smiled again. The monster’s hand closed again. Her throat would tighten, her stomach would turn, and she would open her eyes before the memory finished. She didn’t cry the whole time. That was the worst part. Sometimes she did. Sometimes it came out ugly and sudden, folding her forward until her forehead touched her knees. But most of the time, she just stared at nothing, jaw locked, breathing through her nose, feeling something hot sitting under her ribs like a coal that would not go out.

By the second night, she was in the garage.

The floor was concrete. The air smelled like dust, oil, old boxes, and laundry detergent. It was the only place in the house where she could make noise without immediately seeing someone’s face crumple. Lupe dragged an old metal trash can to the center of the room, set a stack of broken cardboard inside it, and stared at her hand. Nothing happened. She stared harder. Her fingers trembled. She tried to remember what the ancestors had said. Red Lux. Elemental force. Heat. Impact. Destruction. Creation through force. It sounded simple when they said it, but they were dead, and she was alive, so of course, [i]they[/i] made it sound simple. Lupe clenched her fist until her nails bit into her palm and whispered, [color=E14BC5]"[i]Burn[/i]."[/color]

Nothing happened.

She tried again. She lifted her hand this time, palm out, like that would make a difference. [color=E14BC5]“[i]Burn.[/i]”[/color] Still nothing. Her eyes stung. Her chest tightened. She pictured the monster’s arm around Diego’s body. She pictured Alejandro’s hand reaching for her. She pictured the way neither of them moved afterward. Something sparked in her palm, tiny and red, there and gone so fast she almost thought she imagined it. Lupe froze. Her breathing stopped. Then she grabbed onto the feeling with everything she had and forced it again. Heat snapped across her fingers. It burned her skin immediately. She cursed, jerked her hand back, and kicked the trash can hard enough to dent it. [color=E14BC5]“[i]No, no, no, fuck [/i][b]that[/b][i]. Again.[/i]”[/color] She hissed to herself.

Again meant failure, and again meant sparks that died before they reached the cardboard. Again, meant heat blooming under her skin but not leaving her body. Again meant one burst that flashed bright red, hit the edge of the trash can, and left a black scorch mark before vanishing. Lupe stared at the mark for a long time. Then she laughed once, sharp and humorless, and wiped her face with the back of her wrist. She was crying again. She hated that. She hated the sound of herself breathing. She hated that Diego would have told her to stop before she hurt herself. She hated that Alejandro would have asked if fire made her cooler or just louder. She hated that they were gone, and the thing that killed them was still out there. That part stayed clean in her head. Simple. No confusion. No philosophy. No healing. There was a monster. It killed her brothers. She was going to kill it back.

She started coming to the garage every night. At first, she told herself it was training. Then she stopped dressing it up. It was not training. It was punishment with a target. She burned her palms raw trying to force heat out of them. She bruised her shoulder, throwing herself into movement because standing still made the Lux choke in her chest. She tried anger. She tried grief. She tried music, low enough that nobody upstairs could hear it, moving her feet with the beat until sweat ran down her back and her lungs scraped. That worked better. Not well. Just better. The Red Lux came easier when her body moved, when her breath found rhythm, when her rage had somewhere to go besides her throat. A snap of her wrist gave her sparks. A hard step gave her a flash of heat. A spin gave her a thin red streak of light that died before it touched anything. She did not have a spell. Not yet. The ancestors had been clear about that. Spells were made. Attempted. Failed. Refined. So Lupe failed until failure started leaving burn marks.

By the end of the week, the garage floor was littered with evidence. Scorched cardboard. Melted plastic. A cracked mirror she had thrown after seeing her own face in it. Three ruined shirts. One towel with a handprint burned into it. The trash can was blackened on one side and dented on the other. Lupe’s hands were wrapped in uneven bandages she changed twice a day and lied about whenever anyone asked. She stopped going out unless someone forced her. She stopped laughing unless it slipped out wrong. She stopped answering texts that didn’t matter. Every time someone said Diego or Alejandro too gently, like their names were glass, Lupe wanted to put her fist through a wall. They were not glass. They were her brothers. They were loud and annoying and [i]alive[/i] until something took them from her. Saying their names softly did not honor them. It made them sound already buried.

One night, the sparks finally caught.

Lupe had been at it for almost two hours. Her arms were shaking. Her throat hurt from shouting. The song on her phone had looped so many times she barely heard it anymore. She stood in the center of the garage, barefoot on cold concrete, shoulders rising and falling, eyes fixed on the cardboard inside the trash can. Her palms throbbed. Her whole body wanted to stop. That made her angrier than anything. Stop? After Diego stopped moving? After Alejandro stopped breathing? After that thing walked away like they were nothing? Lupe’s face twisted. Tears spilled down her cheeks before she could stop them. She stepped forward hard, snapped both hands out, and screamed; 

[h1][color=E14BC5]“[i]I SAID BURN, YOU BITCH![/i]”[/color][/h1]

Red Lux burst from her hands in a messy, violent flash. Not flame exactly. Not lightning. Not light. Something between all three, raw and unstable, a hot red surge that slammed into the trash can and swallowed the cardboard inside. Fire kicked up too high, licking past the rim. Heat punched the air. Lupe stumbled back, eyes wide, heart hammering so hard it hurt. For one second, she just watched it burn. Then the smoke alarm started screaming.

She laughed.

It came out broken and wet and too loud, half sob, half victory. She clamped both hands over her mouth, but it didn’t stop. The fire inside the trash can guttered unevenly, weak and ugly and uncontrolled, but it was real. Lupe looked at her bandaged hands. The wraps were smoking in places. Her skin hurt like hell. She didn’t care. She had made something happen. Not enough. Not even close. That flash would not kill the Intruder. It probably wouldn’t even slow it down. But it was more than nothing. It was the first piece of a weapon.

The garage door opened behind her.

Lupe didn’t turn around right away. She kept staring at the fire until it started to shrink. Her breathing came fast, uneven, but her eyes stayed locked on the flames.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]I’m not done,[/i]”[/color] she said in her native tongue, voice raw.

No one answered.

Maybe they didn’t know what to say. Maybe there was nothing to say.

Lupe swallowed, wiped her face with her wrist, and finally stepped forward to smother the fire before it spread. Her hands shook the whole time. Not from fear. Not only from grief. From wanting to do it again. From knowing she would do it again. Tomorrow. The next night. Every night after that until the sparks became flame, until the flame became a spell, until the spell became something that could tear into the thing that took Diego and Alejandro from her.

She looked down at the smoke curling out of the trash can and whispered, [color=E14BC5]“You’re gonna die for what you've done, fucker.”[/color]

Her voice cracked.

Then steadied.

[color=E14BC5]“I don’t care how long it takes.”[/color][hr]By the third week, Lupe had stopped pretending she was only practicing.

She had words for it when people asked. Training. Control. [i]Self[/i]-defense. All the right words. All the words that made adults nod with pain in their eyes and pretend they were not terrified of what grief was doing to her. But Lupe knew what it was. She knew it every time she slipped out after dark with her bandana tied tight around her wrist, palms wrapped under fingerless gloves, hoodie zipped over a shirt already burned in three places. She knew it every time she stood alone in an empty lot behind the old laundromat and made red heat snap between her fingers until her skin throbbed. She was not learning, so she could survive. She was learning, so something else would not.

The first real spell was ugly. That bothered her at first. She had wanted something clean, something that looked like the thing she imagined in the garage: bright neon fire, sharp and perfect, bursting from her hands like she had been born knowing how to hurt the world back. Instead, what came out of her was unstable and loud. A streak of red-white heat that cracked like bad wiring and left the air smelling like burnt pennies. It lit up her face whenever she cast it, flashing across her eyes, her teeth, the sweat on her neck. It didn’t always go where she aimed. Sometimes it scattered into sparks. Sometimes it spat fire sideways and scared her enough to make her laugh after, breathless and shaking. But it burned. That was what mattered. It burned cardboard, old wood, the side of a dumpster, the sleeve of her own hoodie, and once, the back tire of someone’s abandoned bike. It was not enough for the Intruder. Not yet. But it was something.

Cornell had changed around her while she was changing inside it. People stayed in their homes after sunset now. Streets that used to hold porch light, bad music, barking dogs, and teenagers cutting through yards had gone quiet in a way that felt [i]staged[/i]. Windows glowed from behind curtains. Cars stayed parked. The old mill groaned some nights, even when there was no wind. Things moved in the distance. Not always close enough to see. Sometimes, just shapes at the end of a road, too tall or too bent, gone when headlights passed over them. Sometimes the sound came first: dragging, clicking, wet breathing through a throat that did not fit. Lupe heard the warnings. Everyone heard them. Don’t go out alone. Don’t follow noises. [i]Don’t try to be brave.[/i] Don’t be stupid. Every warning sounded like Diego’s voice, and that made her want to disobey it more.

She found [url=https://i.imgur.com/RFYGFrZ.jpeg]the beast on Miller Street,[/url] near the empty grocery store with the broken sign.

At first, she thought it was a person.

That was the worst part. For one second, her brain tried to give it a human shape. Tall. Bent forward. Long hair hanging over its face. Arms loose at its sides. Someone hurt, maybe. Someone lost. Then the streetlight flickered and showed too much. No clothes except a black rag of fabric around its waist. Skin raw and red like the top layer had been peeled away and never grown back. Muscles moving in open ridges beneath slick, pale tissue. Arms too long, fingers too thick, hands hanging near its knees. The mouth was open even when it was not screaming, the jaw stretched in a dark oval, the teeth packed unevenly inside. It stood in the middle of the road with its head tilted toward a house where someone had left a television on too loud. It listened like it understood hunger better than sound.

Lupe stood at the corner and stared at it.

Her heart slammed once. Then again. Then steadied into something she hated because it felt almost good.

This was not the monster that killed her brother. She knew that immediately. This thing was smaller. Dumber. More physical. It moved like meat that had learned violence and nothing else. But it was still one of them. One of the things Cornell had let in. One of the things was walking around while Diego and Alejandro were in the ground. One of the things everyone else was hiding from.

Lupe’s hand tightened around the bandana on her wrist.

[color=E14BC5][i]“Okay,”[/i][/color] she whispered.

The beast’s head twitched.

It had heard her.

Good.

Lupe stepped into the street.

The spell came easier when she moved. That was the first thing she had learned that felt like hers. Standing still made the Lux gather wrong, hot and clogged in her chest. But when she moved, when her foot hit pavement, when her shoulders rolled, and her breath found rhythm, the Red Lux followed. It liked force. It had momentum. It liked when she stopped asking and started doing. So she did not stand there with her palm out like some stupid movie witch. She walked forward, then faster, then sideways, circling into the road as red sparks crawled over her fingers.

The beast turned fully toward her.

Lupe[i] smiled.[/i]

It was not a happy smile. This smile belonged to the girl who had spent three weeks burning her hands open in a garage because grief had become unbearable unless it had direction.

[color=E14BC5]“You [i]lost,[/i] papi?”[/color] she called in English, voice shaking just enough to betray her. [color=E14BC5]“Or you just ugly for free?”[/color] She laughed to herself.

The beast screamed.

The sound punched down the street hard enough to wake lights in three different houses. Curtains shifted. Somewhere, someone shouted. Lupe did not look away. She snapped her right hand outward, and the first blast of neon-pink light tore loose from her palm. It was messy, bright, and too wide. It hit the beast in the shoulder and burst across its raw skin in a spray of sparks and heat. The thing staggered one step. Smoke rose from its flesh. Lupe’s breath caught.

It worked.

It actually worked.

The beast looked down at the burn.

Then back at her.

And ran.

Lupe barely got out of the way. It crossed the distance faster than something that large had any right to move, feet slapping pavement, arms swinging low. Lupe threw herself sideways, shoulder clipping the side of a parked car. Pain burst down her arm. The beast’s claws scraped across the hood where her body had been, tearing metal with a shriek that made her teeth hurt. She stumbled, recovered, spun with the motion, and fired again from too close. Red heat slammed into its side. This time, the creature snarled and flinched harder, one arm jerking back. Lupe grinned through the fear.

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah,”[/color] she spat. [color=E14BC5]“You feel that, papi!?”[/color]

She pressed.

That was the mistake.

She should have run after the second blast. She should have tested it, learned from it, lived to try again. But the beast was hurt, and hurt looked too much like possible. Lupe saw smoke rising from its chest and forgot every warning her ancestors had given her. [i]Beasts will notice you. You begin with nothing.[b] You will be tested.[/b][/i] She remembered Diego hitting the floor. She remembered Alejandro smiling before the world took him. She remembered the monster walking away. That memory shoved her forward harder than sense could pull her back.

She came in low, feet moving with the rhythm she forced into her breath. Step, twist, cast. Step, twist, cast. Pink fire snapped from both hands in short, violent bursts. One hit the beast’s ribs. One missed and scorched the glass of a bus stop shelter. One caught its thigh and made it stumble. The street filled with light and smoke. Her arms burned. Her palms screamed. She ignored it. She kept moving because stopping felt like dying, and dying felt less frightening than letting this thing walk away.

The beast adjusted, and Lupe saw it happen too late.

Until then, it had charged like an animal. Straight lines. Big swings. Rage without planning. Then its head lowered, and something in its posture changed. It stopped chasing where she was and started cutting toward where she would be. Lupe snapped left, and the creature’s arm was already there. Its forearm caught her across the ribs and threw her into the side of the grocery store hard enough to knock all the breath out of her. Her back hit the brick. Her feet lost ground. For a second, the whole street went white.

The beast came again.

Lupe lifted her hand and... [i]Nothing happened.[/i]

Her stomach turned cold.

She tried again. Heat sparked weakly across her palm, then died. Her fingers were shaking too hard. Her breathing had lost rhythm. Her body wanted air more than revenge. The Red Lux did not care what she wanted. It needed shape, movement, and force. All she had was pain.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]No,[/i]”[/color] she gasped. [color=E14BC5]“Come on-”[/color]

The beast hit her before she finished.

Not full force. If it had been full force, she would not have gotten up. Its hand closed around the front of her hoodie and slammed her sideways into the grocery store window. The glass did not break, but it cracked in a spiderweb behind her head. Her ears rang. Her teeth cut the inside of her cheek. Blood filled her mouth, hot and metallic. The beast pulled her forward and threw her into the street. She hit pavement shoulder-first and rolled badly, skin tearing along one forearm. For a moment, she could not move, and that scared her more than the pain.

The beast stood over her, breathing through its open mouth. Strings of saliva hung between its teeth. Its burned skin smoked in patches. It was hurt. She had hurt it. That should have mattered more. Instead, all Lupe could see was how much of it was still standing. Her hands scraped against the pavement as she tried to push herself up.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]I’m not done[/i],”[/color] she whispered to herself like a prayer as her arm buckled and he fell back down.

The beast reached for her.

And for the first time since stepping into the street, Lupe understood that she might die here.

Not later. Not eventually.[i] Here.[/i] On Miller Street, three weeks after Diego and Alejandro, because she had mistaken pain for power and anger for readiness. The thought did not make her regret coming. That was the worst part. Some buried, honest piece of her looked at the beast’s hand coming down and thought, Fine. If this is what it costs, fine. If she could burn one of them before she went, if she could make one monster hurt, then maybe—

An arrow hit the beast in the side of the neck.

It did not kill it.

But the moment it struck, something green flashed- not exactly light. A pulse of power. The shaft split along its length as if something inside it had decided to exist all at once. Thin, pale vines burst outward from the wound, slick and wrong, wrapping around the creature’s throat in a tightening spiral. They weren’t clean. Some segments were too thick, others too thin, leaves forming half-shaped and curling in on themselves. But they held.

The beast choked on the sudden growth.

A second arrow followed before the first finished vibrating. This one struck one of the blistered growths along the creature’s upper back and sank deep with a wet crack. Zakira’s focus snapped into it mid-flight—Green Lux threading through the shaft—and the seed pouch ruptured on impact. Thorns erupted outward in a jagged bloom, some bending the wrong direction, others snapping off as they formed. Still, enough anchored into the creature’s flesh to tear when it moved.

The beast shrieked, twisting away from Lupe.

Across the street, Zakira Watson stood half-hidden beside a parked truck, bow raised, face pale but steady. Her stance was not dramatic. It was tight. Practical. Feet planted. Shoulders aligned. Her fingers were already reaching for another arrow from the small quiver at her hip. Thumb brushing over the small, soft pouches tied just beneath the arrowheads. She looked terrified. She also looked like that did not matter.

[color=#046904]“[i][b]Move![/b][/i]”[/color] Zakira shouted.

Lupe blinked at her, stunned and furious at the same time.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]Fuck, mami, [b]I had it![/b][/i]”[/color] she lied.

Zakira fired again.

This time, she didn’t just shoot. She pushed.

Green Lux surged down the arrow as it flew, her mind scrambling to picture something useful—roots, maybe, something that would hold. The arrow struck the beast’s shoulder, not deep enough. For a split second, nothing happened.

Then the seed pouch activated late.

A knot of roots burst outward, thick and tangled, but uneven. Some strands dissolve into fibrous mush, others harden into bark-like ridges. They didn’t anchor properly. They slid against the creature’s slick skin, tearing loose almost immediately.

Zakira’s mouth tightened.

[color=#046904]“[i]No, you didn’t.[/i]”[/color]

The beast turned and charged her.

Zakira moved before Lupe could scream. Not fast enough to outrun it, but early enough to survive the first line of attack. She cut behind the truck as the creature slammed into it, rocking the whole vehicle up on one side. Metal crumpled inward. The alarm began screaming. Zakira stumbled back, nearly lost her footing, recovered, and instead of reaching for another arrow immediately, she yanked a small pouch free and threw it low across the pavement.

It hit the ground and rolled, and came to an ungraceful stop. For a heartbeat, nothing.

Then she forced Green Lux into it.

The asphalt cracked.

A burst of moss and root matter surged upward, not elegantly or controlled. It spread too wide in one direction, too thin in another, but it was enough. The ground beneath the beast’s next step shifted, softened, tangled. Its foot sank half an inch too deep, and that was all Zakira needed.

She grabbed another arrow, drew, and fired from almost point-blank range into the creature’s face. This time, she layered it—just a flicker of venom, barely stable. The arrow grazed its cheek and buried into the corner of its mouth. The Lux-triggered toxin flared unevenly, darkening the flesh around the wound in a spreading patch that didn’t quite behave like rot, didn’t quite behave like anything natural and made the beast scream.


Lupe pushed herself up with a sound that was half sob, half curse. Her ribs burned. Her shoulder felt wrong. Blood ran down her chin from her split mouth. But the sight of Zakira standing between her and the thing she had chosen to fight made something ugly rise in her chest.

[i]Shame.[/i]

Zakira had not come here to prove anything. She had come because Lupe was about to die.

That made Lupe[i] angrier[/i] than the pain.

[color=E14BC5]“[b][i]GET OUT OF THE WAY![/i][/b]”[/color] Lupe yelled.

Zakira did not look at her. [color=#046904]“[i]Stay out of the way.[/i]”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Don’t tell me what to do!”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Then [i][b]stop [/b][/i]acting like you want to get killed!”[/color] Zakira said with a roll of her eyes.

That hit harder than the wall.

For half a second, Lupe had no answer.

The beast recovered and swung at Zakira again. Zakira ducked back, but not cleanly. One claw caught the sleeve of her jacket and tore it open, cutting shallow lines along her forearm. She hissed, dropped her bow, and stumbled against the truck. The beast loomed over her, one arm lifting.

Lupe moved because she had said it twice over Diego’s body, and now the words were making demands of her. She forced herself into motion. One step. Bad. Painful. Another. Worse. Her breath came broken, but she dragged rhythm out of it anyway. Her foot hit the pavement. Her shoulder rolled. Her hand snapped forward.

The Red Lux came out weak. Then stronger. Then [i]wrong.[/i]

It exploded from her palm in a close-range flare, not aimed at the beast’s body but at the ground beneath its feet. Heat and light burst against the pavement. The creature flinched, not burned badly, but startled enough to break its swing. Zakira threw herself sideways as the claws came down where she had been, carving sparks from the truck’s hood.

Lupe staggered, almost fell, and caught herself on one knee.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]Mami![/i]”[/color]

Zakira grabbed her bow with her injured hand, face tightening at the pain. [color=#046904]“[i]I see it.[/i]”[/color]

She did. That was the difference. Zakira saw the opening instead of the insult. She pulled an arrow, drew, and fired into the beast’s knee as it turned toward Lupe again. This time, she didn’t rush the visualization. Joint. Structure. Something that locks. The arrow sank into the knee, and the seed pouch detonated into a tight cluster of thorned vines that wrapped inward instead of outward. Not perfect, some thorns bent uselessly, some vines split, but enough coiled around the joint to resist movement.

The creature lurched forward.

Lupe, breathing hard, forced one more burst of power from her hand. Red heat struck the arrow shaft and the wound around it. The beast screamed louder this time, leg buckling.

Zakira was already moving.

[color=#046904]“[i]Again![/i]”[/color] she shouted.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]I’m trying, mami![/i]”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Try [i]faster![/i]”[/color]

Lupe almost laughed. It came out as a pained bark.

She stepped in again, not close enough to get grabbed this time. She used the distance. Used the timing. Used the fact that Zakira was watching angles instead of emotion. Zakira fired at joints, eyes, soft growths. Sometimes arrows, sometimes quick-thrown seed pouches that burst into uneven spreads of roots or thorn clusters that slowed the beast just enough. Lupe burned what the arrows opened. Neither of them was strong enough to win cleanly. Together, for a few seconds, they were enough to survive... and the beast realized that too.

It backed away first.

That was not a victory. Lupe knew that. The creature dragged one ruined leg backward, vines tearing loose from its flesh, chest heaving, arrows jutting from its body, skin smoking where Lupe’s magic had bitten into it. Its head turned between them. Its mouth opened. The sound that came out was lower this time. Not a scream. A warning.

Then it ran.

Lupe tried to follow, but her body refused.

She took one step and collapsed against the cracked window, one hand pressed to her ribs. The street tilted. Her vision was spotted at the edges. Zakira crossed to her quickly but did not touch her right away.[i] Smart.[/i] Lupe noticed that through the pain and hated that she noticed.

For a few seconds, neither of them spoke. The car alarm screamed beside them. That was the only sound until the beast’s retreating shriek faded into the dead parts of town.

Zakira was breathing hard. Her jacket sleeve hung open. Blood ran in thin lines down her forearm. She looked at Lupe’s face, her hands, the way she was barely staying upright.

[color=#046904]“You were hunting it, weren't you?”[/color] Zakira asked.

Lupe wiped blood from her mouth with the back of her hand.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]So?[/i]”[/color]

Zakira stared at her.

[i]Disappointed.[/i]

[color=#046904]“You almost died... [i]mami[/i].”[/color]

Lupe laughed once, sharp and empty.

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah? So? Everybody does. Everyone. And I mean [i]everyone[/i].”[/color]

[color=#046904]“That's not healthy.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Well, does it look like I care at this point?!”[/color]

Zakira’s jaw tightened. She looked down the street where the monster had vanished, then back at Lupe. [color=#046904]“That thing wasn’t even the one from the warehouse...”[/color]

Lupe’s expression changed.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]I know.[/i]”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Then [i]why?[/i]”[/color]

Lupe looked at her like the question was stupid. Like it offended her. Like it had dragged something private into the light. 

[color=E14BC5]“... [i]Just because.[/i]”[/color] She shrugged.

Zakira said nothing.

Lupe pushed herself off the window, failed, then forced herself upright anyway. Her legs shook. Her burned hands trembled at her sides. Her face was wet, and she did not know if it was sweat or tears or blood anymore.

[color=E14BC5]“Because they’re walking around,”[/color] she said, voice cracking despite how hard she tried to keep it steady. She tried to place her hand on her hip but the electric pain she felt was something else. [color=E14BC5]“Because they get live. They get to just... [i]be out here[/i]. Breathing. Hunting. Doing whatever the hell they want while Diego and Alejandro are—”[/color]

Her voice stopped. The silence after their names was worse than screaming.

Zakira’s face shifted, but she still did not soften too much. Maybe she knew Lupe would hate that.

[color=#046904]“[i]Lupe,[/i]”[/color] she said carefully. [color=#046904]“You're going to kill yourself at this rate picking scraps with every monster you see.”[/color]

Lupe’s eyes snapped back to her.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]Watch me.[/i]”[/color]

[color=#046904]“No.”[/color]

The word landed hard because Zakira did not raise her voice.

Lupe blinked.

Zakira stepped closer, bow still in one hand, blood still sliding down her arm. [color=#046904]"I’m not watching you die to make a point.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“It’s not a point.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Then... what is it?”[/color]

Lupe opened her mouth. Nothing came out at first because the answer was too ugly to say cleanly. Because it was not justice. Not really. Not yet. It was punishment. It was proof. It was trying to make the world balance with a scale made of fire and corpses. It was wanting something to scream because her brothers never got enough time to.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]It all what I have left,[/i]”[/color] she said finally.

Zakira’s expression tightened. That answer hurt her. Lupe could tell. [color=E14BC5]Good.[/color] some part of her thought. Then hated herself for thinking it. The adrenaline began to drain. Pain rushed in behind it. Her ribs screamed. Her shoulder throbbed. Her palms burned under the gloves. She swayed once.

Zakira caught her before she hit the ground.

Lupe flinched hard at the contact, but she did not have the strength to pull away.

[color=E14BC5]“Mami,[i] don’t,[/i]”[/color] she muttered.

[color=#046904]“I’m not asking.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“I don’t need saving. Especially not from you.”[/color]

Zakira adjusted Lupe’s arm over her shoulders and started walking her away from the street anyway. [color=#046904]“Clearly.”[/color]

Lupe wanted to fight her. Wanted to shove her off, stand on her own, chase the beast into the dark, burn until there was nothing left in her hands but bone and smoke. Instead, her knees nearly buckled again, and Zakira’s grip tightened around her waist.

The monster was long gone. 

That failure sat in Lupe’s chest like a second injury.

She looked back once, over her shoulder, toward the dark gap where it had disappeared. The streetlight flickered above the torn pavement. Smoke curled from the blackened spots where her Lux had struck. Arrows lay broken near the curb. Splintered vines and half-formed growths wilted where Zakira’s magic had tried and failed to hold. The cracked grocery store window reflected her in pieces: blood on her mouth, hair stuck to her face, eyes too wide, body half-supported by someone else.

For a second, she did not recognize herself.

Then she did.

That was worse.

[color=E14BC5]“I hurt it,”[/color] she whispered.

Zakira kept walking.

[color=#046904]“Yes.”[/color]

Lupe swallowed.

[color=E14BC5]“Not enough.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“No, but you survived... This time.”[/color]

The honesty should have made her angry, but beneath it, something else settled.

A worse kind of clarity.

She had hurt one of them. She had also almost died. Both things were true. The first truth fed the fire. The second gave it shape.

Zakira dragged her toward the safer street, away from the blood, away from the damage, away from the thing Lupe had failed to kill. Lupe let her, not because she accepted it, not because she was done, and not because she had learned some clean lesson about revenge.

[color=#046904]"Let's get you to Kersten's house. They can patch you up."[/color]

She let Zakira carry some of her weight because, for the first time since the garage, Lupe understood something she hated.

Wanting to kill the monster was not enough.

If she wanted to survive long enough to murder the thing that took her brothers, then she could not just become fire.

She had to become something that knew where to aim.



[hr][center][img]https://i.imgur.com/MrAFI3T.png[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/zS3Ugjd.png[/img]
[img]https://i.imgur.com/7gwGxyR.png[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/sHP9Odv.png[/img][/center][right][b]Interactions:[/b] None.
[code]The Sanchez Residence > Streets of Cornell.[/code][/right][hr][hr]
[quote][i]Zakira knew something was wrong before [b]anyone[/b] screamed.That was the part that stayed with her afterward.

Not the way someone’s body hit the concrete like a dropped bag of wet laundry.

It was the space [b]before[/b] it.

The half-second where the warehouse felt like it inhaled.

The lights flickered once overhead. Not all of them. Just the row closest to the broken windows. Someone laughed too loudly near the speakers. The bass shook through the floor, through the soles of Zakira’s shoes, through the bones in her ankles. She stood by the wall with a plastic cup in both hands, not drinking from it, pretending that holding something gave her a reason to be there.

She should not have come.

That thought had been in her head for the last twenty minutes.

She should not have come. She should not have listened. She should not have let someone say you need to get out more as if it were a [b]command[/b] instead of advice.

She was by the wall. She was [b]always[/b] by the wall.

The wall had peeling paint. Three layers. White over gray over something greenish underneath. There was a crack running down near the window frame, thin as a stem. Someone had kicked a bottle into the corner. There was dirt there. Actual dirt, gathered where the concrete had split.

A weed was growing through it.

That was strange.

Not impossible. Just strange.

Zakira stared at it longer than she meant to.

A little green thing, bent sideways, two leaves trembling though there was no wind.

No.

There was wind.

Not on her face, but the weed felt it.

She didn’t know why she thought that.

The weed bent again.

Away from the center of the room.

Zakira looked up.

People were dancing. Talking. Shouting over music. Bodies pressed together beneath the cheap colored lights. Everything was too loud, too close, too bright. Someone knocked into someone else and spilled beer. Someone laughed. Someone cursed. Someone said a name she didn’t know.

Then the air buckled.

That was the only word for it.

[b]Buckled.
[/b]
Like something heavy had stepped into the room from the inside.

A boy near the open space between the speakers stopped moving.

For one stupid second, Zakira thought someone had grabbed him. Some big guy behind him. A fight. A prank. Something normal. Something with hands.

But there were no hands.

There was nothing there.

The boy rose half an inch, maybe less, just enough for his sneakers to drag and squeal against the floor, and then he slammed down.

Once.

The music kept playing.

People closest to him turned.

Someone screamed.

He didn’t get back up.

Zakira’s cup bent in her hands.

She was gripping it too hard. Her fingers were wet. Punch, soda, or sweat. She couldn’t tell. Her whole body had gone cold, but her face felt hot. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even breathe right. The sound came late. The scream came late. Everything came late except the feeling.

Something was wrong.

Something was wrong in the room.

A second impact.

A girl this time.

She was not standing near the boy. That mattered. Zakira didn’t know why, but it mattered. The girl had been several feet away. No visible connection. No path. No attacker. No shadow.

Her head snapped sideways.

Her body followed.

She hit a support beam with a sound Zakira would spend the rest of the night trying not to remember.

The warehouse changed.

Everyone understood all at once.

The party broke.

People shoved toward exits. Someone fell. Someone stepped on them. Someone else yelled for everyone to move, move, move. The music still played, stupid and bright and alive, and the lights kept pulsing over faces that had stopped being faces and become open mouths, wide eyes, hands grabbing sleeves, hair, shoulders, air.

Zakira backed into the wall.

Her shoulder hit the peeling paint.

[b]Move.[/b]

She needed to move.

She knew that.

Her body did not care.

Her body had become one solid piece of waiting.

[color=#046904][b]Don’t guess.[/b][/color]

The thought came from nowhere.

[color=#046904][b]Don’t guess.[/b][/color]

She didn’t understand it. She didn’t have time to understand it. People were running. A folding table overturned. Cups rolled across the floor. The weed in the corner trembled harder, leaves shaking like tiny hands.

Look closer.

No.

No, no,[b] no, no.[/b]

She didn’t want to look closer.

Something hit the floor again.

The concrete jumped under her shoes.

Zakira flinched so hard her teeth clicked together.

A shape wasn’t there.

That was wrong. That was impossible. A shape couldn’t be there.

But there was an absence moving through the crowd.

Not invisible exactly. Invisible meant empty. This wasn’t empty. It pressed against things. It made space bend around it. People moved wrong near it, not because they saw it, but because their bodies knew they had already been touched.

There.

There.

There.

Zakira saw it and didn’t see it.

The room became too detailed all at once.

The crack in the concrete near the center of the floor ran northeast to southwest. No, not northeast. She didn’t know directions. Why was she thinking about directions? The support beam had old rust at the base. The overturned table blocked one path but not another. The door to the left was crowded. The window behind her had jagged glass along the bottom edge. There were seventeen feet between her and the side hall. Maybe less. No. Count again. Don’t count. Move.

The weed in the corner bent flat.

[b]Flat.[/b]

Pressed down by pressure no one else could see.

Zakira made a sound.

Not a scream. Not words.

Something small and useless.

The thing moved.

Toward the windows.

Toward the people trying to climb through.

Someone shouted, “Get back!”

Someone else shouted a name.

Zakira didn’t know whose.

Her heart pounded so hard it stopped being a heartbeat and became instruction.

Thump.

Look.

Thump.

Closer.

Thump.

Look.

Closer.

The world sharpened until it hurt.

A line of dust lifted from the floor. Not random. Patterned. Dragged outward by force. The invisible thing was too large. Bigger than a person. Low and high at once. Weight without shape. Impact without body.

The concrete beneath it did not crack.

It remembered cracking.

That thought made no sense.

Zakira’s hand went to her chest.

Her locket was hot.

The little dandelion seed sealed inside the glass pressed against its casing like it was trying to escape.

No. That was stupid.

Objects didn’t try.

A pressure. A wanting. A tiny impossible orientation inside the pendant.

The seed wanted down.

No.

It wanted root.

The lights flickered again.

For one second, all the green in the warehouse answered.

The weed in the corner.

The mold along the damp wall.

The moss in the broken window frame.

The crushed grass stuck to someone’s shoe.

The dead stems in the dirt outside.

The pollen on a girl’s sleeve.

The seed in Zakira’s locket.

All of it brightened in her mind.

Not with color but meaning.

A language she did not know and suddenly could not stop hearing.

She pressed both hands over the locket.

Something bloomed between her fingers.

Not a flower.

But then it changed.

The leaves didn’t just unfurl.

They arranged themselves.

Petals pushed out where petals should not have been. Pale yellow. White. Bruised green at the edges. Wrong for the weed. Wrong for the concrete. Wrong for the warehouse.

Dandelions.

Not one.

Several.

They bloomed from the same impossible stem, crowding over each other in a shaking little cluster. Some fresh and bright. Some dried into white seed-heads. Some half-rotted. Some thorned. Some dark at the center, like poison had learned how to flower.

Zakira stared.

The nearest bloom turned toward her.

It didn’t have eyes.

It didn’t have a face.

But she felt seen.

No.

[b]Known.[/b]

The difference hit harder than the fear.

Something brushed against her thoughts, not words, not sound, not a voice. A shape of feeling. A pressure behind the ribs. A memory that did not belong to her, pressing its dirty hands gently over hers.

Hands in soil.

Hands tying seed pouches shut.

Hands drawing bowstrings.

Hands cutting diseased stems with a small, sharp blade.

Hands darker than hers, lighter than hers, older than hers, all of them familiar in a way that made no sense.

Zakira’s breath caught.

For half a second, she was not only standing in the warehouse.

She was standing in the backyard.

Cemetery grass.

Roadside ditches.

Gardens behind houses with peeling paint.

Fields no one wrote down.

A woman’s palm pressed seeds into dirt.

A boy lined thorn branches along a fence.

An old man crushed leaves between his fingers and knew from the smell that something had passed through.

A girl not much older than Zakira held a flower with black sap running down the stem and understood it could heal or kill, depending on how much mercy she allowed herself.

They were not speaking.

But they were telling her.

Not in sentences.

In roots.

In pressure.

In direction.

In inheritance.

[b]Dandelion.[/b]

The meaning opened inside her without sound.

Not the flower.

Not just the flower.

A line.

A line that scattered.

A line that survived.

A line that grew where people said nothing useful could grow.

[b]Dandelion Blood.[/b]

The words were not words, and yet Zakira understood them.

The blooms trembled harder, each one turning toward the center of the room, toward the invisible pressure moving through the crowd.

Warning.

Boundary.

Poison.

Cut.

No—wait.

No—look.

No—closer.

Too many meanings at once.

Her head spun.

[color=#046904]"I-"[/color] she tried, but there was nothing to say.

The dandelions quivered in the green light. Their stems bent toward the unseen thing, then toward the broken window, then toward Zakira’s own chest.

Not ordering.

Correcting.

Like someone tapping a finger against the answer on a page.

The world tells you where it hurts.

She knew that.

The thought sank through her like a root finding water.

Then another feeling followed, sharper.

Guard the line.

And beneath that, darker.

Cut what spreads [b]wrong.[/b]

Zakira made a small sound.

She didn’t want that.

She didn’t want any of that.

The flower nearest her warped as soon as she rejected it. Its petals folded inward. The seed-heads burst too early, scattering white fluff into the air, but the seeds didn’t drift randomly. They hung there, shaking, each one pointing toward her like tiny needles.

All of them are waiting.

All of them were asking what she would do.

Zakira couldn’t answer.

She didn’t know how.

She didn’t know them.

Except for some sick, impossible part of her did.

Seedline.

Rootline.

Dandelion Blood.

[b]Hers.[/b]

The feeling fractured with her panic.

The blooms convulsed.

Thorns pushed through soft petals. Roots knotted over themselves. One flower blackened from the center outward, dripping something dark onto the concrete.

She had made it wrong.

Or she was hearing them wrong.

Or both.[/i][/quote][center][hr][hider=Mend (to fix, to repair) - E L S I A N E][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIka1GZXZUc[/youtube][/hider][hr][/center]Zakira woke up choking on air. Not screaming. She hated that part. Screaming would have made sense. Screaming would have brought someone running, maybe. Screaming would have proved that something had happened, that her body had found the correct shape for fear. Instead, she woke with both hands clamped around her locket, mouth open, breath scraping in and out of her throat like she had been drowning quietly for hours. Her room was dark. Not fully. Never fully, anymore. The streetlight outside her window leaked through the blinds in thin orange bars, striping her wall, her dresser, the pile of clothes on the chair, and the old bow case leaning against the closet. Everything looked ordinary until she stared too long. Then things stopped lining up.

Zakira sat upright. Her sheets were twisted around her legs. Her shirt stuck to her back. Her heart beat too fast, too hard, with that same terrible instruction from the warehouse. Thump. Look. Thump. Closer. She pressed her palm flat against her chest, over the locket. The dandelion seed inside was cool now. It had been cool for days. Weeks. That didn’t matter. She still felt it pointing down. Always down. Even through glass. Even through metal. Even through [i]skin.[/i] Zakira swallowed. Her throat hurt. For a few seconds, she only listened. Her room. The house. The town outside. The refrigerator hummed downstairs. Pipes clicked in the walls. Somewhere in the neighborhood, a dog barked once and then stopped like something had placed a hand over its mouth. Zakira held still. Waited. Nothing else came. That was [b]worse.[/b]

She pushed the blanket off with trembling legs and sat on the edge of the bed. Her bare feet touched the floor. The wood was cold. Too cold. She looked down. Nothing there. Just floorboards. Dust near the baseboard. A sock half under the bed. A little pale seed stuck to the hem of her blanket. Zakira stared at it. It was not from her locket. It could not be from her locket. The seed lay there anyway, thin and white, with its little feathery crown flattened against the fabric. For a moment, she thought it might move. It didn’t. She picked it up carefully between two fingers. Her hand shook. The seed felt like nothing. Barely weight. Barely real. She should throw it away. She should put it in the trash, go back to bed, and pretend she had carried it in on her clothes from outside. That was possible. Dandelions were everywhere. Seeds traveled. That was what they did. Zakira closed her fist around it before she could think too hard.

Across the hall, her parents’ bedroom door was shut. The hallway beyond her room stayed silent. No one checked on her. Not because they didn’t care. Because they were asleep. Because it was late. Because people could not wake up every time one girl forgot how to breathe. Zakira stood. Her knees nearly gave. She waited until they remembered what they were for. On the chair by her desk, she had left the clothes she told herself she would not need. Jeans. A long-sleeved shirt. A faded green hoodie. Socks rolled into one another. She dressed in the dark because turning the light on felt too much like announcing herself. Shirt over her head. Arms through sleeves. Jeans over damp skin. One sock. Then the other. Simple things. Understandable things. Her fingers fumbled with the hoodie zipper three times before it caught.

She paused at the mirror. The girl looking back looked like someone had tried to erase her, but stopped halfway through. Her hair was uneven from sleep. Her eyes looked too open. Her face had that hollow, startled stillness that came after crying, except she hadn’t cried. Not tonight. Not [i]yet.[/i] Zakira looked away first. She gathered what she needed. Not everything. Everything would have meant a plan, and yet she did not have one. She had a pressure behind her ribs and the sour certainty that staying inside was starting to feel more dangerous than going out. Phone. Keys. Wallet. Small flashlight. The little cloth pouch of seeds she had sewn badly two nights ago, stitches uneven, thread pulled too tight in places. She slid it into her hoodie pocket. Then she stopped.

Her bow case leaned in the corner. She looked at it for too long. No. Not tonight. A bow made things official. A bow meant she knew what she was doing. A bow meant she expected to shoot something. She didn’t. She only needed to go to the hardware store. That was all. The thought sounded ridiculous even inside her own head. Who went to a hardware store after waking from a nightmare? Someone who needed something sharp. Someone who needed something that did not require aim from thirty feet away. Someone who had watched a root wrap around the wrong wrist and understood, with sickening clarity, that not every mistake gave you time to correct it.

Zakira swallowed again. Her throat still hurt. She opened her bedroom door slowly. The hallway floor creaked under her first step. She froze. Nothing moved. The house held its breath. Family photos lined the wall in dark rectangles. Smiling faces trapped under glass. Her mother is at a picnic. Her father is holding a paper plate. Zakira was eight with two missing teeth and a plastic watering can. Zakira at twelve, standing stiffly at some school event, already trying to look like someone who didn’t need to be noticed. The girl in the photograph watched her pass.

The living room smelled faintly like dust and laundry detergent. The TV was off, but the black screen cast a bad reflection in the room. For one second, she thought she saw someone standing near the kitchen doorway. She spun. Nothing. Just the doorway. Just darkness. Just her own breathing again, loud enough to embarrass her even with no one there. She grabbed her sneakers by the front door and sat on the bottom step to put them on. Her fingers slipped on the laces. She tied one too loose, redid it, tied the other too tight, and gave up. At the door, she paused. Her hand rested on the lock.

There were rules now. Nobody had said them out loud, but [i]everyone[/i] in Cornell knew. Do not go near the old mill. Do not look too closely at windows after dark. Do not answer if you hear your name from the woods. Do not ask why the roads take longer coming home. Do not mention the people who disappeared unless someone else says their names first. Do not say monster. Do not say magic. [i][b]Do not go out alone. [/b][/i]Do not say [i][b]anything[/b][/i] that might make the pretending stop. Zakira unlocked the door. The click sounded enormous. She slipped outside and shut it behind her as gently as she could.

Cornell waited. The street was empty. Not quiet.[i] Empty. [/i]There was a difference. Quiet was natural. Quiet was sleep, distance, and wind settling in trees. This was an absence arranged to mimic [i]peace[/i]. The houses across the street glowed behind curtained windows. Blue television light flickered in one living room. Upstairs, a lamp snapped off as soon as Zakira looked toward it. She stood on the porch and listened. No cars. No voices. No music. Only the faint electrical buzz of a streetlight and the dry whisper of leaves moving along the curb. The air smelled wrong. Cold metal. Wet asphalt. Cut grass. And underneath it, faint but steady, something like old pennies buried in soil.

Zakira pulled her hood up. The streetlight at the corner hummed. It flickered once. She flinched so hard her shoulder hit the porch railing. Nothing happened. She hated herself for that. No. Not hated. That was too strong. She was tired of herself. Tired of being a body that startled before she decided to. Tired of seeing warnings in weeds and shadows and window reflections. Tired of knowing something was wrong and still having to walk through it like a normal street. She went down the steps. The sidewalk had a crack running through it. It had always had cracks. This one was new. She thought. Maybe. It cut diagonally across the concrete, thin and black, with pale grass pushing through despite the cold. The blades leaned toward the street instead of upward. Zakira stepped around it.

A curtain shifted in the house beside her. She did not look. That was another rule. If people wanted to pretend not to see you, [i]let them.[/i] She walked quickly, but not too quickly. Too quickly looked scared. Too slowly felt like waiting to die. Her sneakers scraped softly against the sidewalk. Every sound seemed to travel ahead of her and come back changed. The slap of her soles became another set of footsteps for half a second. Her breathing became whispering near a hedge. A loose chain on someone’s porch swing clicked in the wind and made her stop dead. She stared at it. The porch swing moved. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. Nobody sat in it. Zakira counted. One. Two. Three. The motion slowed. Four. Five. Stopped. She waited longer than she needed to. Then kept walking.

Two houses down, the Millers’ front yard was crowded with plastic Halloween decorations even though it was too early for that. A skeleton hung from the dogwood tree. Orange lights lined the porch. A witch with a collapsed hat grinned beside the mailbox. Normal decorations. Normal people did normal things when everything was normal. That was what the decorations said. Cornell had always liked pretending with objects. The skeleton swayed slightly. Zakira looked away. At the next intersection, a stop sign had been turned backward. The red face looked toward the wrong street, warning no one. Its silver back caught the streetlight and glared like a blank eye. Someone had to have noticed. Someone had to have seen it during the day. The mailman. The bus driver. The woman who walked her little white dog every morning. The city workers who came by last week fixed the pothole that had reopened by sunset. People noticed things like that. People complained about things like that. No one had fixed it.

Zakira crossed the street without stepping into the center of the intersection. She didn’t know why. She only knew she didn’t want to stand where the roads met. A sound snapped behind her. A branch breaking. Zakira’s whole body went electric. She turned so fast her hood slipped halfway off. There was nothing on the sidewalk. Nothing by the mailbox. Nothing beside the parked car with fogged windows. Then something moved under the hedge. Small. Fast. Black. Zakira stumbled backward and almost fell off the curb. Her hand flew to her pocket, fingers closing around the seed pouch. Her mind emptied and overfilled at once. Seed. Ground. Root. [i]Trap.[/i] No, no, no, too close, too close-

A pair of eyes flashed green under the hedge. Something hissed. Zakira stopped breathing. A cat crept into the open. Thin, gray-brown, one ear nicked, tail held low like it had been offended by the entire world. It stared at her with cold little judgment, then looked past her, toward the deeper street. For one second, neither of them moved. Then the cat made a small, ugly sound and darted across the sidewalk. Zakira’s legs nearly folded with relief. A laugh tried to come out of her, but it came out wrong. One broken breath. Then another. “Okay,” she whispered. The cat slipped under a parked truck and vanished. Zakira pressed her knuckles against her mouth. A housecat. She had almost tried to grow roots through someone’s lawn because of a [i]housecat[/i]. Her eyes stung. She stood there on the curb, shaking so hard her teeth wanted to chatter, and hated how badly she wanted to go home.

But home was not safe. Home was just where everyone slept while the town learned new ways to lie. So she kept walking. Past the elementary school, where all the classroom windows were dark except one. Past Saint Bartholomew’s, where the church sign read [b][code]GOD SEES ALL[/code][/b], though someone had rearranged the removable letters beneath it into [b][code]SEE GODS ALL[/code][/b], and no one had corrected it. Past the laundromat, where three washing machines spun behind the glass with no one inside watching them. Round and round. White shirts. Blue jeans. A red towel. Round and round. The same cycle forever. Zakira slowed. The laundromat lights buzzed bright and sickly. Inside, the plastic chairs sat empty. A magazine lay open on the floor. One of the machines bumped gently against the wall each time it turned. Thump. Look. Thump. Closer. Zakira walked faster.

At the end of Maple Street, an old man stood on his porch in a bathrobe, smoking. Mr. Haskell. She recognized him because everyone recognized Mr. Haskell. He yelled at the kids for cutting across his lawn. He swept his driveway every morning, whether there was anything on it or not. He had once told Zakira she was “quiet enough to be trouble,” then laughed like [i]that[/i] was friendly. Tonight, he watched the street with the cigarette burning between two fingers. Zakira wished he would go inside. He saw her. She knew he saw her. For a moment, their eyes met. His face did not change. Then his gaze slid past her, over her shoulder, to somewhere behind her. Zakira’s back went cold. She turned and when she looked back, Mr. Haskell had already gone inside. The porch light clicked off. Zakira stood very still. The cigarette remained on the porch railing, smoking by itself.

People were pretending. That was what made it worse. Not that Cornell had become strange. That would have been simple, almost. The worst thing was that Cornell had become strange, and everyone had quietly agreed to behave as though it had always been this way. Like, if they didn’t name it, it couldn’t choose them. Like if they kept going to work, taking out trash, buying milk, texting excuses, closing blinds, then the town might spare them out of [i][b]politeness[/b][/i]. Zakira understood that instinct. 

She hated that she understood it.

The hardware store sat three blocks past Main, in a squat brick building with a faded blue awning and a sign that read [b][code]RIVERSIDE HARDWARE[/code][/b] even though the river was half a mile away and nothing about it felt nearby. Its front windows were lit. That should have comforted her. It didn’t. Light meant people. People meant witnesses. Witnesses meant she had to act normal. A bell jingled above the door when she entered. The sound made her flinch. The store smelled like sawdust, rubber, metal, and fertilizer. A useful smell. Shelves rose in tight aisles on either side of her, stacked with paint cans, extension cords, buckets, screws, tape, tarps, batteries, work gloves, gardening tools, bags of soil, coils of rope. Zakira stood just inside the door, breathing.

Behind the counter, a small TV played the late news with the volume turned low. The anchor smiled without showing teeth. A headline moved silently along the bottom of the screen. [b][code]LOCAL OFFICIALS URGE CALM AFTER RECENT DISRUPTIONS.[/code][/b] Disruptions. Zakira stared at the word until it stopped looking real. Disruptions were traffic delays. Disruptions were water main breaks. Disruptions were school assemblies running long. Disruptions did not pick boys up and slam them into concrete. Disruptions did not make weeds- 

“...Can I help you?” Zakira turned. The man behind the counter was Mr. Alvarez, or maybe his nephew. She didn’t know him well enough. He had tired eyes and a flannel shirt buttoned wrong at the collar. A radio sat beside him, silent. One hand rested under the counter like he wanted it near something.

“No,” Zakira said too quickly. Then, because that sounded suspicious, “I mean. I’m okay.” He looked at her. At her hoodie. At her face. On one hand stayed in her pocket. His gaze dropped to the locket at her chest. Something changed in his expression, then he looked away. 

“Aisle four for batteries,” he said. “Garden stuff in six. Tools in the back.” 

Zakira nodded. “Thanks.” She moved before he could ask anything else. The aisles felt narrower than they should have. Her shoulders nearly brushed the shelves, though they didn’t. The overhead lights buzzed in uneven patches. One flickered above plumbing supplies. Another had gone out completely near the paint section, turning the aisle beyond into a strip of shadow. Zakira kept to the lit side.

She grabbed work gloves first. Then garden twine. Then a roll of duct tape. Her hands moved with strange, automatic purpose. She found seed packets hanging on a rotating rack near the back. Tomatoes. Basil. Marigolds. Lettuce. Coneflowers. Lavender. Sunflowers. Morning glories. She touched each packet without taking it. Names. Pictures. Promises. Grow this if the conditions are right. Grow this if you water properly. Grow this if the soil allows. There were no packets for panic. No instructions for emergency roots. No diagram explaining what to do when a dead thing bloomed in your hand and told you your bloodline had been waiting. She picked marigolds because she recognized them. Then morning glories, because vines made sense. Then yarrow because the packet said hardy. Then foxglove.

Her fingers stopped on that one. The flowers on the packet were purple and delicate, bell-shaped, almost pretty enough to hide what she remembered reading once. Poisonous. Medicinal. A matter of dosage. She heard it again, not as words, not exactly. [i]Cut what spreads wrong.[/i] Zakira put the foxglove packet back. Then took it again. Her stomach turned. She shoved it into the basket under the gloves. The hatchets were on the back wall. Of course they were. Small ones. Camping axes. Bright orange handles. Wooden handles. Cheap steel. [i]Better[/i] steel. Tools meant for clean outdoor tasks done in daylight by people who owned fire pits or pretended the world stayed ordinary if they kept buying the right things. Zakira stood in front of them and could not move. Her reflection stared back at her from the polished head of one. Small. Warped. Divided by the curve of the metal. She looked away. This was stupid. She didn’t know how to use a hatchet. She barely knew how to [i]hold[/i] one. A hatchet meant close. A hatchet meant blood on her hands instead of distance. A hatchet meant no time to aim. No time to breathe. No time to understand. But the roots had gone wrong. The roots had gone around the girl’s wrist. And if something came close enough, if seeds failed, if the ground was wrong, if she panicked, if she needed to cut through something she had made before it hurt someone. She picked [url=https://i.imgur.com/p1Nlilz.jpeg]the hatchet with the orange handle[/url]. Not the largest. Not the sharpest-looking. The one that looked most like a tool and [i]least [/i]like a weapon.

It was heavier than she expected. Her wrist dipped. She adjusted her grip and hated how quickly her body began trying to understand it. Weight. Balance. Handle length. Edge direction. The distance from her thigh if she carried it low. Don’t guess. Just look-

“... That’s kind of intense.”

Zakira almost dropped it. The voice came from the mouth of the aisle, too close and too sudden, and when she turned, [url=https://i.imgur.com/gs75fc3.jpg]Jeremy Cole[/url] was standing there with one hand curled around the strap of his backpack and the other pressed against the shelf like he had been caught leaning. He looked exactly like he always looked at school: thin with nerves, shoulders slightly hunched, hair a little messy, eyes too quick and then too still. A boy built out of almost-apologies. Someone who looked harmless until he decided his discomfort permitted him to make someone else uncomfortable. Zakira stared at him. Jeremy glanced at the hatchet, then at the seed packets in her basket, then at her face, and his mouth twitched like he had found a joke he wasn’t brave enough to say cleanly.

“Didn’t think you were the axe type,” he said. His voice trembled at the edges, but he smiled anyway. “You, uh. You [i]planning[/i] something? I mean, sorry. That sounded bad. I just meant... that’s a lot.”

[color=#046904]“[i]No.[/i]”[/color] Zakira said. Too fast. Her fingers tightened around the handle. Jeremy noticed. [i]Of course[/i] he noticed. His eyes dropped to her hand, then slid back up again, and the movement made her skin crawl even though it was small, almost deniable. Everything about him was almost deniable.

[i]“Relax.”[/i] he said, raising both hands a little. “I was just asking.”

He stepped into the aisle. Not all the way. Just enough to make the shelves feel closer. Just enough that the path behind him narrowed. Zakira looked past his shoulder toward the front counter. Mr. Alvarez was there, but half-turned toward the small TV, face blank in the low blue light. The headline moved silently along the bottom of the screen. LOCAL OFFICIALS URGE CALM AFTER RECENT DISRUPTIONS. Disruptions. Jeremy followed her eyes, then looked back at her.

“You out here by yourself?” he asked.

The question landed wrong. Wrong in the way the weed at the warehouse had bent before anything happened. Zakira’s thumb shifted on the hatchet handle.

[color=#046904]“...[i] I’m buying something.[/i]”[/color] She squeaked.

“Yeah, I can see that.” Jeremy laughed quietly, then swallowed as the sound had embarrassed him. “It’s just late. You know. [i]For you.[/i]”

[i]For you.[/i] Zakira did not know what to do with that. Some people could make a sentence ugly without changing any of the words. Jeremy had that kind of ugliness tonight. Nervous ugliness. Lonely ugliness. The kind that wanted company and punishment at the same time. He took another small step.

“I mean, I can walk you home if you want. Since you’re, like...”

He gestured vaguely at her, and the gesture was worse than if he had finished the sentence. Her hoodie. Her hair. Her face. She [i]is [/i]alone. She was visible because he had decided to look.

[color=#046904]“No,”[/color] Zakira said. [color=#046904]“[b][b]I’m fine.[/b][/b]”[/color]

Jeremy’s smile tightened.

“You don’t have to act like I’m being creepy.” He said it softly, almost wounded, like she had injured him by noticing. “I’m just trying to be nice.”

Zakira’s heart started doing the warehouse thing again. Thump. Look. Thump. Closer. The aisle sharpened. Hatchet behind her. Jeremy is in front. Seven feet, maybe less. No. Six. His right shoe angled inward. His backpack zipper is half-open. A pack of batteries in his left hand. Mr. Alvarez was at the counter, not looking but hearing. The burnt-out light above paint supplies. The smell of rubber. Sawdust. Fertilizer. Something wet beneath the floor. The dandelion seed inside her locket pressed downward until her chest ached.

[sup][color=#046904]“[i]Move.[/i]”[/color][/sup] Zakira said, but the word came out too small.

Jeremy blinked.

“What?”

[color=#046904]“I need to pay.”[/color]

“Okay,” he said, but he didn’t move. He looked at the basket again, at the gloves, the twine, the foxglove, the hatchet, and his expression shifted into something that tried to be amused and came out hungry for leverage.

“You know, people are going to think you’re weird if they see all that.”

Zakira’s mouth went dry.

[color=#046904]“... [i]They already do.[/i]”[/color]

She had not meant to say it. Jeremy’s smile faltered, then returned worse because now he had something.

“I don’t,” he said. “I mean, I notice you.”

The words made the aisle feel airless.

“At school. You’re always just kind of there. Quiet. But not in a bad way.”

His eyes flicked down again, not long enough to accuse him of anything, long enough for her body to understand.

“You’re actually kind of-”

[color=#046904]“Don’t.”[/color] Zakira said.

Jeremy’s face changed. For a second, he looked genuinely stung. Then angry because he was stung.

“I didn’t even say anything.”

[color=#046904]“You were going to.”[/color]

“You don’t know that.”

[color=#046904]“Move.”[/color]

He laughed under his breath.

“Wow. Okay. I guess I’ll just be over here, then.”

But he still didn’t move. Instead, his hand reached out and caught the edge of her basket, not pulling, not enough to be a fight, just touching what she was carrying as if that gave him a claim on the moment. Zakira went cold. Every plant name in the basket seemed to brighten at once. Marigold. Morning glory. Yarrow. Foxglove. Poisonous. Medicinal. A matter of dosage. Her fingers tightened around the hatchet until her knuckles hurt. The roots had gone wrong before. The roots had wrapped around the girl’s wrist. If she panicked here, in this narrow aisle, if something answered before she understood it, if thorns came up through linoleum or vines snapped around the wrong throat—

A bright voice cut through the aisle like a match strike.

[color=E14BC5]“Jeremy.”[/color]

Jeremy turned so fast he nearly bumped the shelf. Lupe Sánchez stood at the end of the aisle with a pack of batteries in one hand and a pink bandana tied around her wrist, not her hair. The bandana looked too bright under the hardware store lights. Everything else about her looked tired. Her eyes were shadowed. Her mouth was set in a shape that made her seem older than sixteen by several mean years. She looked at Jeremy, then at his hand on Zakira’s basket, then at the way Zakira was holding the hatchet. Something small and electric passed across her expression. Not a spark. Not yet. Just the promise of one.

[color=E14BC5]“Take your hand off her shit if you want to end the day with your hand still attached... [i][b]papi[/b][/i].”[/color]

Jeremy released the basket immediately, but tried to turn it into a shrug.

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

[color=E14BC5]“That’s crazy, because I didn’t ask. I told you to let go of her shit. [b][i]Now.[/i][/b]”[/color]

Lupe stepped closer. That was what made Jeremy shrink before she even reached him. Lupe had the kind of anger that had already decided where it was going.

[color=E14BC5]“Get out of here.”[/color]

Jeremy’s ears went red.

“I was just talking to her.”

[color=E14BC5]“And she told you no like forty times now”[/color]

Lupe tilted her head.

[color=E14BC5]"I'm not going to say it again, Jeremy. If you don't let go of her...”[/color]

Mr. Alvarez looked over from the counter then. His hand was under the counter again. Jeremy saw him see. That mattered. Boys like Jeremy loved shadows until the lights remembered them. His mouth opened, closed, opened again.

“Whatever... Everybody’s [i][b]sooooooo[/b][/i] dramatic now,” he muttered.

Lupe smiled without warmth.

[color=E14BC5]“Go be misunderstood somewhere else. Preferably in front of a train. [i][b]Dickhead.[/b][/i]”[/color]

Jeremy looked at Zakira once more. Not sorry. Not brave enough to be cruel out loud anymore. Just resentful in a way that made her feel like he would replay this later and turn himself into the victim by morning. Then he squeezed past Lupe too carefully. At the end of the aisle, he glanced back like he might say something. Lupe lifted the pack of batteries slightly, as if weighing how hard it would be to throw.

He didn’t. The bell over the front door jingled a moment later, sharp and final.

For a few seconds, neither girl said anything. The aisle seemed to expand again, though nothing had moved. Zakira realized she was still holding the hatchet up, not raised exactly, but ready enough that her wrist had begun to ache. She lowered it slowly. Her breath came in shallow pieces. Lupe watched her, and for once, Zakira did not feel like the watching was something trying to take from her. It was checking. Calibrating. Making sure the danger had actually passed.

Lupe threw a thumbs up.

[color=E14BC5]“You good?”[/color] Lupe asked.

Zakira hated that question because the answer was never [i]really[/i] yes anymore.

[color=#046904]“I’m fine,”[/color] she said automatically.

Lupe’s eyebrow lifted.

[color=E14BC5]“That’s not what I asked.”[/color]

Zakira looked down at the basket. Jeremy’s fingers had left a slight dent in the cardboard edge of the foxglove packet.

[color=#046904]“[i]I don’t know,[/i]”[/color] she said, and that felt more dangerous than lying.

Lupe nodded once, like that answer made sense. Then laughed.

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah. Same.”[/color]

From somewhere deep in the store, maybe the stockroom, came a soft scraping sound. Scrape. Pause. Scrape. Zakira looked toward it. Lupe did too, but her reaction was not fear first. It was recognition of the fact that sounds meant something now. Mr. Alvarez did not look back. That was how Zakira knew he had heard it too. The man’s hand stayed under the counter, close to whatever he had hidden there. Lupe’s jaw tightened.

[color=E14BC5]“You buying that?”[/color] she asked, nodding toward the hatchet.

Zakira looked at it.

[color=#046904]“I think so.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“You know how to use it?”[/color]

[color=#046904]“No.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Well, sounds like you're about to learn the hard way, mami,”[/color]

Zakira looked at her. Lupe shrugged, but there was (strangely) no humor in it.

They went to the register together. That was not discussed. It simply happened. Lupe walked half a step behind and to the side, not crowding her, but making it very clear that no one else was going to slip into Zakira’s space without going through her first. Mr. Alvarez rang everything up without comment. Gloves. Twine. Duct tape. Seeds. Hatchet. He paused at the foxglove packet (Only for half a second) then scanned it. Lupe put her batteries and a cheap flashlight on the counter beside Zakira’s things. The TV anchor kept smiling above them. Onscreen, footage showed Main Street in daylight. Police tape. Two officers near an alley. A reporter speaking silently into a microphone while people walked behind her, pretending not to look. The headline changed. [b][code]CORNELL RESIDENTS ENCOURAGED TO CONTINUE DAILY ROUTINES.[/code][/b] Zakira stared. Continue daily routines. Buy groceries. Go to school. Do homework. Smile at neighbors. Don’t look at the cracks. Don’t listen if the plants bend away from something you cannot see. Don’t ask why the stop signs turn themselves around. Don’t notice the lights going out one row at a time.

[color=E14BC5]“Disruptions,”[/color] Lupe said quietly.

Zakira looked at her.

[color=#046904]“What?”[/color]

Lupe nodded toward the television. Her face did not change, but her hand tightened around the flashlight.

[color=E14BC5]“That’s what they’re calling it. Disruptions. Like somebody knocked over traffic cones.”[/color]

Mr. Alvarez bagged the smaller items. His mouth pressed into a hard line.

“Thirty-six eighty-two,” he said.

Zakira fumbled with her card. It declined the first time because she inserted it incorrectly. Her face burned. Lupe did not look at her hands. That was another small mercy. Zakira tried again. [b][code]Approved.[/code][/b]] The receipt printed slowly, inch by inch, whispering out of the machine. Mr. Alvarez wrapped the hatchet in brown paper without asking. Not fully. Just enough to cover the blade. He handed it to her handle-first. Their fingers did not touch.

“... Don’t walk down Miller’s Creek,” he said.

Zakira froze. Lupe went still beside her. The TV volume seemed to lower by itself. Or maybe everything else got quiet. Mr. Alvarez looked at the window, not at either of them.

“The road’s bad that way.”

Road’s bad. That was all. Not monsters. Not rifts. Not people disappearing near the creek. Not something dragging its feet where the asphalt folded. Road’s bad. Lupe’s expression sharpened.

[color=E14BC5]“Bad like potholes, or bad like [i]Cornell[/i] bad?”[/color]

Mr. Alvarez did not answer right away. The scraping sounded again from the back. This time, there was a second sound beneath it. Breathing. Slow. Wet. Maybe pipes. Maybe the building is settling. Maybe [i]nothing[/i]. Mr. Alvarez looked at them then, finally. His face said leave. His mouth said, [i]“Have a good night.”[/i] Lupe stared at him for a second longer, then took her flashlight off the counter.

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah. You too.”[/color]

The bell above the door jingled as they stepped back outside. The cold hit first. Then the silence. Then, the feeling that the street had moved while they were inside... Just not enough for anyone to prove. But enough that the buildings across the road seemed angled differently. The laundromat sign was visible when it should not have been from here. The church steeple leaned above the rooftops two blocks away, though Saint Bartholomew’s was behind them. Zakira stood under the hardware store awning with a bag of seeds in one hand and a paper-wrapped hatchet in the other. Her locket pressed against her chest. Inside it, the dandelion seed pointed down. The sidewalk crack beside her shoe widened by a hair. Lupe saw it. Zakira knew because Lupe’s eyes flicked down, then away too quickly. Pretending, but not fully. Not like the adults. More like someone covering a wound because she had not decided who was allowed to see it yet.

[color=E14BC5]“He mess with you before, mami?”[/color] Lupe asked.

It took Zakira a second to realize she meant Jeremy and not the thing inside the store, or the road, or Cornell itself.

[color=#046904]“No,”[/color] she said. Then, because the truth had become slippery, [color=#046904]“Not like that.”[/color]

Lupe made a quiet sound through her nose.

[color=E14BC5]“He’s the kind of guy who thinks being pathetic means nobody’s allowed to call him dangerous.”[/color]

Zakira looked down at the wrapped hatchet.

[color=#046904]“He’s scared too.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah. Everyone is at this point,”[/color] Lupe’s voice hardened. [color=E14BC5]“Doesn’t give him permission to act like a fuckin creep.”[/color]

Zakira had no answer for that. She knew Lupe was right. Knowing did not stop the old reflex from trying to explain him, soften him, make him smaller so the moment would feel smaller too. Jeremy was awkward. Jeremy was lonely. Jeremy was scared. Jeremy had still blocked the aisle. Jeremy had still touched her basket. Jeremy had still looked at her like her fear was something he could use.

They stood there a moment, side by side, watching the empty street. The hardware store lights hummed behind them. Somewhere far off, a siren started and stopped after two seconds, cut short like an embarrassed cough. Lupe tucked her batteries into her jacket pocket.

[color=E14BC5]“You shouldn’t be out alone.”[/color]

Zakira almost laughed.

[color=#046904]“[i]You[/i] are.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah, and I’m stupid.”[/color]

That did make Zakira look at her. Lupe’s mouth twitched, but only barely, and the expression vanished before it could become anything generous. The hardware store lights hummed behind them. The street ahead waited, empty in the way Cornell kept being empty now, not abandoned but withheld. Zakira shifted the bag in her hand. The seed packets slid softly against one another beneath the gloves and twine. The wrapped hatchet pulled at her other wrist, brown paper crinkling over the blade whenever her fingers tightened. Lupe looked down the street, then toward the intersection, then away from it with immediate disgust, like the road had said something rude. [color=E14BC5]“... Not that way, mami.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Why?”[/color] Zakira asked, though her feet had already agreed.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]Because I don’t like it.[/i]”[/color]

[color=#046904]“That’s not a reason, Lupe.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“It is tonight.”[/color] Lupe clicked her flashlight on, then off, then on again, and rolled her eyes. The beam came out weak and yellow, trembling over the sidewalk before steadying against the curb. [color=E14BC5]“We cut behind the laundromat, then take Bell’s lot. It adds liiiiiiiiiiiike five minutes.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“You know that’s safer?”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“[i]No.[/i]”[/color] Lupe started walking anyway. [color=E14BC5]“Buuuuuuut I know the ways I’m sure as fuck not taking.”[/color]

Zakira followed because the alternative was standing outside a hardware store with a hatchet, a bag of seeds, and the feeling that the street had moved while they were inside. The cold pressed through her hoodie. Her breath made thin pale clouds in front of her face. Beside her, Lupe walked with her shoulders lifted slightly, not quite hunched, not quite relaxed, the flashlight held low in one hand and the pack of batteries stuffed into her jacket pocket. The pink bandana around her wrist moved in the wind like something alive enough to object. Neither of them spoke for the first half block. Their footsteps sounded too loud and too soft at the same time, scraping ahead of them, coming back wrong, doubling for half a second behind parked cars and under hedges. Zakira kept looking at the lawns. She tried not to, but she failed. The grass had a direction tonight. Not all of it. Not enough to prove. But enough that her eyes kept finding the lean, the subtle angle, the little pale blades bending toward some pressure beneath the street.

[color=E14BC5]“You keep looking at the ground, mami,”[/color] Lupe said. [color=E14BC5]“Everything good?”[/color]

Zakira’s stomach tightened. [color=#046904]“Sorry.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Wasn’t a complaint, mami.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Oh.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Was it doing that before?”[/color]

Zakira looked at her. Lupe did not point. She only tipped her chin toward the strip of grass growing between sidewalk slabs. It was leaning toward the curb. Not with the wind but against it. Zakira swallowed. [color=#046904]“[i]I don’t know.[/i]”[/color] Then, because Lupe had not laughed at her once yet, because Lupe had stood between her and Jeremy without turning her fear into a performance, because the town was too quiet to keep lying inside, she added, [color=#046904]“Maybe.”[/color] She shrugged.

Lupe nodded like maybe was an answer worth keeping. They passed the laundromat. The machines were still running inside, three bright circular mouths turning behind the glass. White shirts. Blue jeans. Red towel. White shirts. Blue jeans. Red towel. No attendant. No customers. No one sitting in the plastic chairs. Just the machines doing their work because machines did not know when a town had become wrong. Or maybe they did, and this was how they prayed. Lupe slowed without meaning to. Zakira felt it happen. The red towel slapped the glass once, then again, then again, each impact wet and soft behind the pane.

[color=E14BC5]“That place open all night, mami?”[/color] Lupe asked.

[color=#046904]“I think so.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Anybody in there?”[/color]

Zakira looked. She wished she hadn’t. The magazine on the floor lay open under one of the chairs. A soda bottle had rolled near the vending machine. The fluorescent lights made every surface look overexposed and sick. In the leftmost washer, the red towel came around again and struck the door like a palm. [color=#046904]“No.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“[i]Cool.[/i]”[/color]

[color=#046904]“It’s not.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“I know, mami.”[/color] Lupe’s voice was flat. [color=E14BC5]“I’m saying cool because if I say what I’m thinking, I’m gonna start screaming, and if I start screaming, [i]something[/i] is going to hear me. And we don't want that.”[/color]

They kept walking. Behind the laundromat, the alley narrowed into a service lane lined with dumpsters, stacked milk crates, weeds, and the back doors of shops that had closed before sunset. The hardware store’s light fell away behind them. Here, the dark was thicker. The kind of dark that did not simply happen because of missing light but seemed to gather in corners and press itself flat against brick. Lupe’s flashlight skimmed over a row of trash cans, a broken pallet, a spray-painted smiley face on the wall with one eye scratched out. Zakira’s locket pressed cold against her chest. The dandelion seed inside pulled down and slightly left. She almost said so. Then she didn’t. Then she did.

[color=#046904]“It’s pulling.”[/color]

Lupe stopped. [color=E14BC5]“Your necklace?”[/color]

Zakira nodded, fingers going to the glass pendant before she could stop them. [color=#046904]“Down. But also... that way.”[/color] She nodded toward the darker end of the alley, where Bell’s vacant lot opened behind a chain-link fence. The fence sagged in the middle. Beyond it, dead weeds stood waist-high around cracked asphalt and the rusted skeleton of an old sign.

Lupe stared into the lot. [color=E14BC5]“Of course it is.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“We can go another way.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Is another way better?”[/color]

Zakira did not answer.

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah.”[/color] Lupe exhaled through her teeth. [color=E14BC5]“That’s what I thought, mami.”[/color]

They moved through the break in the fence one at a time. Lupe went first. Zakira hated that she was relieved by it and hated more that Lupe seemed to know and said nothing. The lot smelled like wet weeds, old oil, and rust. Somewhere under that, faint and sour, was the penny-in-soil smell again. Zakira’s shoes crunched over broken glass. The seed packets shifted in her bag. She thought of the names printed on them. Marigold. Morning glory. Yarrow. Foxglove. Pretty names for things that could root, climb, heal, choke, poison. Pretty names for instructions she did not understand yet. Lupe swept the flashlight beam across the lot. The weeds bent away from the light. No. Not from the light. From them. Or toward something beyond them. Zakira did not know which was worse.

[color=E14BC5]“So...”[/color] Lupe said, too casually, [color=E14BC5]“Are we gonna talk about the grass doing that thing again, or are we pretending the sidewalk is just excited to see you?”[/color]

Zakira almost tripped. [color=#046904]“It’s not me.”[/color]

Lupe looked at her.

[color=#046904]“... Not on purpose. I think,”[/color] Zakira corrected, smaller.

[color=E14BC5]“Mhm, mami, [i]mhm[/i].”[/color] Lupe swept the flashlight beam across the curb. The strip of grass growing through the sidewalk seam leaned against the wind, every pale blade bent in the same direction. [color=E14BC5]“Because last time I saw plants acting weird around you, they were choking out a monster and saving my ass, mami.”[/color]

Zakira’s grip tightened around the paper-wrapped hatchet. [color=#046904]“That was different, and you know that.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Different how?”[/color]

[color=#046904]“I [i]made[/i] that happen... [i]mami,[/i].”[/color] Zakira looked down at the grass. It stayed bent toward the deeper street, patient and wrong. [color=#046904]“Or I tried to. [i]This[/i] is just happening.”[/color]

Lupe’s joking expression faded a little. [color=E14BC5][i]“Okay.[/i]”[/color] She shrugged.

Zakira glanced at her.

[color=E14BC5]“I’m listening, believe me, mami, I'm listening,”[/color] Lupe said, before Zakira could apologize for not making sense. [color=E14BC5]“Don’t make it weird.”[/color]

Zakira swallowed. The air tasted metallic. [color=#046904]“At the warehouse, before I knew anything, I saw a weed bend before the monster moved.”[/color] She touched the locket through her hoodie. [color=#046904]“Then my locket got hot. Then there were flowers. Dandelions, but wrong. Some fresh, some dead, some with thorns, some with black centers. They were trying to tell me something.”[/color]

Lupe walked slower. [color=E14BC5]“Tell you what, mami?”[/color]

[color=#046904]“I don’t know.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“You keep saying that, mami.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“[i]Because I don’t.[/i]”[/color] It came out sharper than Zakira meant. She flinched at herself. [color=#046904]“Sorry.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Don’t apologize for being freaked out.”[/color] Lupe’s voice was still sharp, but not cruel. [color=E14BC5]“You pulled vines out of arrows and poisoned a thing a few nights ago. We are past normal at this point.”[/color]

Zakira breathed in. [color=#046904]“It felt like [i]family.[/i]”[/color]

That made Lupe glance over.

Zakira kept her eyes on the ground. [color=#046904]“Not my parents. Not anyone I know. Older than that. Hands in soil. People tying seed pouches. Drawing bows. Cutting diseased plants. Making boundaries. Using poison like medicine. It wasn’t words, but I understood some of it.”[/color] Her fingers tightened around the hatchet. [color=#046904]“[i]'The world tells you where it hurts.' 'Guard the line. Cut what spreads wrong.'[/i]”[/color]

Lupe was quiet for several steps. That was rare enough that Zakira noticed.

[color=E14BC5]“... That’s not what it felt like when you saved me, mami,”[/color] Lupe said finally.

Zakira looked at her.

Lupe kept her eyes forward. [color=E14BC5]“A few nights ago. When you showed up, it looked like you were scared shitless and still aiming better than I was thinking.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“I [i][b]was [/b][/i]scared.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah. No shit.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“And I wasn’t even aiming that good. I aimed better when...”[/color] [i][color=#046904]I'm shooting targets that stand still.[/color][/i]

[color=E14BC5]“You hit the monster more than I did.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“You were hurt. I couldn't let it kill-”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“I was stupid.”[/color]

Zakira did not answer.

Lupe’s mouth tightened. [color=E14BC5]“[i][b]Don’t[/b][/i] do that quiet thing, mami.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“What quiet thing?”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Ooooooooh, I don't know. That one where you don't say you disagree because you’re just [i][b]too[/b][/i] polite.”[/color]

Zakira looked down.

Lupe laughed once, humorless and low. [color=E14BC5]“Yeah. Thought so, mami... Thought so.”[/color]

They walked past a parked car with fogged windows. Lupe’s flashlight slid over the glass and found nothing inside except the pale blur of their reflections. Zakira looked away first.

[color=#046904]“You were hunting it.”[/color] she flatly said.

Lupe’s face closed immediately.

[color=E14BC5]“I was dealing with it, mami.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“And look how that went.”[/color] Zakira said harsher than she meant. [color=#046904]“That thing almost killed you.”[/color]

Lupe stopped walking and turned on her, flashlight hanging low in her hand. The beam cut across the sidewalk instead of Zakira’s face, shaking just enough to betray her before her voice did.

[color=E14BC5]“And if I stayed home, then what, mami? It [i]oh-so politely[/i] waits outside until we’re ready?”[/color]

Zakira went quiet.

Lupe’s mouth twisted. Not quite a smile. Not even close.

[color=E14BC5]“Fuck that, mami. That’s what[i] everyone's[/i] doing. Sitting inside. Locking their doors. Closing their blinds. Turning the TV-or whatever the fuck-up whenever someone is getting ripped to shreds to the street. Acting like if we just close our eyes and pretend, [b][i]everything's[/i][/b] gonna fuckin' be okay.”[/color]

She pointed the flashlight down the street, toward houses with curtains drawn tight and porch lights left burning like offerings.

[color=E14BC5]“It won’t. You know it. I know it. And everyone knows it but are too fuckin' pussy to admit it.”[/color]

The words came out flat. Certain. Not emotional enough to be a confession. Worse, maybe, because she sounded like she had already tested the idea and hated the answer.

[color=E14BC5]“If [i]something[/i] is coming, mami, I’d rather meet it in the street than wait for it to pick a window.”[/color]

Zakira’s grip tightened around the bag. [color=#046904]“That doesn’t mean you can fight it by yourself.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Didn’t say I did a great job.”[/color] Lupe shrugged.

[color=#046904]“You almost died.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“A [i]lot[/i] of people almost died. Your fucking point?”[/color]

[color=#046904]“[i]Lupe.[/i]”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“... Don’t start with me, Mami.”[/color]

The words cut harder than the volume should have allowed. Lupe looked away first, jaw tight, eyes fixed on the dead stretch of road ahead of them.

[color=E14BC5]“Don’t say my name like you’re about to make me explain myself. Like you're my [i]madre[/i].”[/color]

Zakira swallowed. [color=#046904]“I’m not trying to be.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“[i]Good.[/i] One's already enough of a pain in my puss.”[/color]

They walked several more steps. The silence between them did not soften. It dragged behind them like something caught on a nail.

Then Lupe said, quieter but no less sharp, [color=E14BC5]“You showed up. It helped. Great. Wow. Thank you.”[/color]

Zakira glanced at her.

Lupe kept staring forward.

[color=E14BC5]“Just to remind you, I [b][i]never[/i][/b] asked for your help. So if you're going to hold that over me, then just find that monster and toss me in its fuckin' mouth.”[/color]

Zakira sighed, defeated.

[color=#046904]“Okay.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“And don’t do the quiet thing where you pretend okay means you’re not judging me.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“I’m not.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“You should be, though, mami.”[/color]

That landed strangely.

Zakira looked at her again, but Lupe’s face had already sealed back over. 

[color=E14BC5]“I was stupid. You said it without saying it. I’m saying it with my chest. Happy?”[/color]

[color=#046904]“No.”[/color]

Lupe blinked.

Zakira looked down at the sidewalk, where a thin strip of grass leaned toward the street against the wind.

[color=#046904]“I’m [i]not [/i]happy you almost died.”[/color]

For a second, Lupe had no answer.

Then she scoffed, soft and defensive.

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah, well. Same.”[/color] She shrugged.

[color=#046904]“Did it at least help?”[/color] Zakira asked.

Lupe’s jaw flexed.

[color=E14BC5]“No.”[/color]

Zakira nodded once.

[color=E14BC5]“Don’t look at me like that.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Like what?”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Like you understand.”[/color]

Zakira’s hand tightened around the bag. The seed packets whispered together. Marigold. Morning glory. Yarrow. Foxglove.

[color=#046904]“... I think I do.”[/color]

Lupe looked at her then, sharp and wounded.

Zakira continued before she could lose the nerve. [color=#046904]“At the warehouse, when I tried to climb out, someone grabbed my ankle. A girl. I don’t know who. I panicked, and something grew. A root or a vine. It wrapped around her wrist instead of the window frame.”[/color] Her voice thinned. [color=#046904]“She screamed. I didn’t mean to. I stopped thinking, and it let go, but I still hurt her.”[/color]

Lupe’s anger dimmed into something heavier.

[color=#046904]“I left after that.”[/color]

For a few seconds, there was only the sound of their shoes and the far electric buzz of a streetlight.

[color=E14BC5]“Did she get out?”[/color] Lupe asked.

Zakira stared at the sidewalk. [color=#046904]“[i]... I don’t know.[/i]”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Then how'd you know you killed her?”[/color]

[color=#046904]“I know I hurt her.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah.”[/color] Lupe’s voice lowered. [color=E14BC5]“Maybe you did. But if you're going through all these mental gymnastics to find a clean way of surviving that night-news flash; there isn't one, mami.”[/color]

Zakira’s eyes stung. [color=#046904]“That sounds like something people say when they want to excuse themselves.”[/color]

Lupe looked away.

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah,”[/color] she said. [color=E14BC5]“[i]Maybe it is.[/i]”[/color]

The honesty sat between them, heavier than comfort would have been.

Lupe started walking again. Slower this time. Zakira followed.

[color=#046904]“I’m sorry,”[/color] she said.

Lupe nodded without looking at her. [color=E14BC5]“Yeah.”[/color] Then, after another step, [color=E14BC5]“Me too.”[/color]

They crossed Bell’s lot and came out near a row of closed storefronts. A barber shop. A tax office. A pawn shop with metal bars over the windows. In the reflection of the pawn shop glass, the street behind them looked too long. Zakira saw herself and Lupe stretched thin, walking side by side with a gap between them that looked wider in the reflection than it was in real life. Behind their reflected shoulders, something pale moved across the mouth of the alley.

Zakira turned.

Nothing.

Lupe turned half a second later anyway. [color=E14BC5]“You good, mami?”[/color]

[color=#046904]“I thought I saw something.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“I love that.”[/color] Lupe lifted the flashlight. Its beam shook over brick, trash, weeds, empty air. [color=E14BC5]“Seeing things is like a fucking Olympic sport at this point, mami.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“It was probably nothing.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Well, nothing has been [i]real[/i] fuckin' busy lately, mami.”[/color]

They kept walking. The town opened around them again, but it did not feel wider. The roads curved where they should have stayed straight. Porch lights glowed behind them, and ahead of them in patterns Zakira could not place. A car sat at the curb with all four doors closed and the windshield wipers moving slowly over dry glass. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. Neither girl mentioned it. Zakira noticed Lupe noticing it too. That was becoming its own language between them. Not pretending exactly. Choosing what not to touch because there were too many wrong things and only two sets of hands.

[color=#046904]“Do you think it’s[i] all[/i] because of the warehouse?”[/color] Zakira asked.

Lupe’s laugh came out flat. [color=E14BC5]“Mami... I think the warehouse was when we stopped being able to pretend it wasn’t already happening.”[/color]

That answer chilled Zakira more than she expected. [color=#046904]“You think it was happening before?”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Don’t you?”[/color]

Zakira thought of the roads taking longer. Adults going quiet when certain places came up. The old mill looking slightly different depending on the day. The way people in Cornell talked about leaving like it was a joke they had all agreed to keep telling because the alternative was admitting nobody really did. She thought of the weed at the warehouse, already growing through concrete before the monster came. [color=#046904]“... [i]Maybe.[/i]”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“There’s that word again.”[/color] Lupe said in a sing-song.

[color=#046904]“It’s a useful word.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Well, find a new fuckin' one before I burn that bitch out of the dictionary.”[/color]

Zakira looked at her, hurt before she could hide it.

Lupe noticed. Her mouth tightened.

[color=E14BC5]“No. I don’t mean you, mami.”[/color] Her voice was still sharp, but less careless now. [color=E14BC5]“I mean everybody [i]else.[/i] The town. Adults. News people. Cops. Teachers... [i][b]Me.[/b][/i]”[/color]

She looked toward the houses with their curtains drawn tight and their porch lights glowing like nothing could be wrong.

[color=E14BC5]“Maybe [i]this.[/i] Maybe [b][i]that.[/i][/b] Maybe gas. Maybe [i]animals.[/i] Maybe [i][b]stress.[/b][/i] Maybe mass hysteria. Maybe we all just need sleep, mami.”[/color] As she walked, she gestured with her hands together on one side of her tilted head as if she were asleep. [color=E14BC5]“Maybe if we keep saying maybe, nobody has to say [i]monster.[/i]”[/color]

Zakira looked down at the sidewalk. A dandelion grew through the seam by the curb. Its yellow head had closed for the night, but it turned slightly as they passed. Not toward the moon. Not toward the streetlight. Toward her.

[color=#046904]“Monster,”[/color] she said quietly.

Lupe stopped.

The word did not echo. It did not summon anything. The street did not split open. No windows shattered. No unseen thing lunged from the dark. But Cornell seemed to listen harder.

Zakira’s pulse thudded in her ears.

Lupe looked at her. Something like approval passed over her face, brief and grim. [color=E14BC5]“[i]Yeah.[/i]”[/color]

Zakira swallowed. [color=#046904]“Or magic.”[/color]

The dandelion by the curb trembled.

Lupe breathed out. [color=E14BC5]“Yeah.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“People disappeared.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“[i]Yeah.[/i]”[/color]

[color=#046904]“The roads are wrong.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“[i][b]Yeah.[/b][/i]”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Cornell is...”[/color] Zakira stopped. The last word sat behind her teeth like a seed she was afraid to plant.

Lupe finished it for her, quieter this time. [color=E14BC5]“Fucked, mami. Possibly beyond fixing.”[/color]

They stood together under the dead eye of a streetlight that had gone out sometime while they were speaking. The darkness around it seemed circular and deliberate. Zakira realized her hands had stopped shaking. Not completely. But less. Saying the words had not fixed anything. It had not made her brave. It had not made the hatchet lighter or the road safer or the wrongness less wrong. But it had done something. It had made the pretending thinner.

[color=#046904]“What do we do?”[/color] she asked.

Lupe looked toward the direction of Miller’s Creek. Not directly. Like even looking too hard might permit the place to look back. [color=E14BC5]“First? We don’t go where the scary hardware man told us not to go.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Good.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Second? We find people who aren’t useless.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Who?”[/color]

Lupe looked at her. [color=E14BC5]“You tell me. You’re the one with the plant compass and the creepy family flower slideshow.”[/color]

Zakira almost smiled. It hurt and helped at the same time. [color=#046904]“[i]Kari.[/i]”[/color]

Lupe nodded like she had expected that. [color=E14BC5]“I haven't spoken to her since shit popped off, but okay. Better late than ever, mami.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“I talked with her. She has... some kind of information magic. I think? She can tell when monsters have been coming into Cornell. She knows things. Not everything, but more than most people.”[/color]

They started walking again. The houses here were smaller, pressed closer to the road, windows curtained tight. Somewhere behind one of them, someone laughed at a television show too loudly, the sound bright and fake and abruptly cut off. Zakira looked toward it. The curtains did not move.

[color=E14BC5]“Anyone else, mami?”[/color] Lupe asked.

[color=#046904]“Tommy, maybe.”[/color]

Lupe gave her a look. [color=E14BC5]“Weirdo Tommy?”[/color]

[color=#046904]“He can make monsters.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Of course he can.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“And Tyler can teleport.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Tyler can what?”[/color]

Zakira blinked. [color=#046904]“Teleport.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“You said that [i]tooooooo[/i] casually.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Sorry.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Don’t apologize. Just never say ‘Tyler can teleport’ like you’re telling me he finally swiped his card.”[/color]

Zakira did smile then. Barely. It vanished quickly, but Lupe saw it.

[color=E14BC5]“There she is.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Don’t.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Fine, mami.”[/color] Lupe’s own smile faded. [color=E14BC5]“Kari first, though.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“She might not answer.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Then we just gotta call her twice.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“She might think we’re crazy.”[/color]

Lupe stopped walking and stared at her until Zakira regretted saying it.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]Zakira. [b]Mami.[/b][/i]”[/color]

[color=#046904]“What?”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“... Crazy left like three weeks ago.”[/color]

That laugh came easier. Still small. Still broken around the edges. But real enough that the street seemed to hate it. A porch light across from them flickered twice, then steadied. Lupe looked at it and raised the flashlight slightly, as if daring the house to comment.

[color=#046904]“Do you think Kari will help?”[/color] Zakira asked.

[color=E14BC5]“She will... It's mami. Ol' reliable Kari. Whenever she gets the fuck out of the house, she's like the smartest bitch in town.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“When she doesn't?”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Then Jeremy gets to pretend being the only boy in the room counts as having a personality.”[/color]

Zakira almost smiled despite herself.

[color=#046904]“That’s also a low bar.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“See? You’re learning.”[/color]

They reached the corner near Zakira’s street. Her house was still several blocks away, but the route from here was familiar enough that her body recognized it before her mind did. That should have made her feel safer. It didn’t. Familiar things were worse now because they could betray you personally. A strange street did not owe you anything. Your own street did. Your own street knew where you lived.

Zakira stopped under a maple tree. Most of its leaves had not turned yet, but several lay dead around its roots, curled and black at the edges. The grass around the trunk leaned toward her in a narrow ring.

Lupe noticed. Of course she noticed now.

[color=E14BC5]“That normal?”[/color]

[color=#046904]“No.”[/color]

The answer came too quickly. No "maybe" this time. No apology.

Lupe looked at her.

Zakira looked at the grass.

The locket pulled downward.

Like whatever waited below Cornell did not need to hurry because everything above it was already falling.

[color=#046904]“We should call Kari now,”[/color] Zakira said.

Lupe’s expression sharpened. [color=E14BC5]“Now-[i]now?[/i]”[/color]

Zakira's eyes drifted towards the side. Landing on her neighbor across the street whose house was dark. Curtains closed. No lights. No sign of life. For weeks now. She wondered if he was even still alive.

[color=#046904]“... Before I talk myself out of it.”[/color]

Lupe crossed. [color=E14BC5]“Then do it, mami. We don't got forever.”[/color]

Zakira shifted the bag onto her wrist and dug her flip phone from her pocket. Her fingers were still cold. The screen lit up too bright, washing her face in pale blue. For one second, there was no service. Then one bar appeared. Then vanished. Then came back as if the phone had reconsidered. Zakira found Kari’s contact and stared at it.

She had never called Kari before. Not like this. Not outside school. Not past[i] midnight.[/i] Not while standing under a tree whose grass leaned toward her with Lupe Sánchez holding a flashlight beside her and Cornell pretending to sleep around them.

Calling felt [i]worse[/i] than texting.

A text could be edited. Softened. Deleted. A call meant breathing into the silence and hoping the other person did not hear exactly how afraid you were.

Zakira pressed the button anyway.

The phone rang.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Each ring sounded impossibly loud in the empty street.

Lupe stood beside her, close enough now that their sleeves almost touched.

On the fifth ring, the call connected.

For half a second, there was only silence.

Then Kari’s voice came through, low and wary.

[color=#eac6ae]“Zakira?”[/color]

Zakira’s heart jumped hard enough to hurt.

[color=#046904]“[i]Kari?[/i]”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“Yeah, in the flesh,”[/color] A pause. [color=#eac6ae]”I mean it's through the phone-but that's neither here nor there.”[/color]

A beat.

[color=#eac6ae]“Why are you calling so late?”[/color]

Zakira almost forgot the answer.

Not because she didn’t have one. Because Kari sounded wrong.

Not terrified. Not exactly. Kari was too controlled for that. Too careful. But there was movement under her voice. Breath tucked between words. A faint rush of air. The soft, uneven rhythm of footsteps that did not belong to someone standing in a bedroom. Zakira heard gravel. Then pavement. Then something that might have been leaves brushing against a sleeve. Kari was outside.

Or going outside.

Or already somewhere she should not be.

Zakira’s fingers tightened around the phone. [color=#046904]“... Are you home?”[/color]

There was a pause. Short. Too short to be innocent.

[color=#eac6ae]“... [i]Why?[/i]”[/color]

Lupe’s head turned.

Zakira looked at her. Lupe’s expression had sharpened instantly, all the half-smile gone from her face. She mouthed something.

[color=E14BC5][sup][sup][i]"Speaker."[/i][/sup][/sup][/color]

Zakira hesitated.

Lupe widened her eyes and pointed at the phone harder.

[color=E14BC5][sub][i]"Speaker, mami."[/i][/sub][/color]

Zakira swallowed and clicked the button. Kari’s breathing widened into the night between them, thin and staticky through the cheap little speaker. The sound made the street feel smaller. Closer. Like whatever direction Kari was walking in had opened inside Zakira’s palm.

[color=#eac6ae]“... Did you just put me on speaker?”[/color] Kari asked.

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah,”[/color] Lupe said, leaning closer. [color=E14BC5]“Hi, mami!”[/color]

Another pause, but his one was longer.

[color=#eac6ae]“... [i]Lupe?[/i]”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“In the flesh. Also through the phone. Crazy how technology works, mami.”[/color]

There was another pause. This one brief.

[color=#eac6ae]“I really can’t do this right now.”[/color]

Lupe looked at Zakira, but her locket was pulling downward.

[color=#046904]“Kari...”[/color] Zakira said. [color=#046904]“[i]...Where are you?[/i]”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I’m [i]outside.[/i]”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Yeah, mami, we got that part...”[/color] Lupe rolled her eyes, and Zakira had a feeling Kari could feel it.

[color=#eac6ae]“I’m fine.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“[i][b]Nobody[/b][/i] asked if you were fine. They asked where the fuck you were.”[/color]

Kari made a small frustrated sound. The phone crackled as she shifted it, maybe moving it from one hand to the other. Something metallic clinked faintly. Keys. A fence. A chain. Zakira did not know which. She hated that she was listening closely enough to guess.

[color=#eac6ae]“Look, I need to go.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“[b][i]No.[/i][/b]”[/color]

The word surprised Zakira as much as it seemed to surprise Kari.

Lupe glanced at her.

Zakira kept staring at the strip of grass by the maple tree. It leaned toward the street like every blade was being combed by an invisible hand.

[color=#046904]“You don’t get to say you need to go when you sound like [i]that[/i].”[/color]

Kari’s breathing hitched once, almost too faint to hear.

[color=#eac6ae]“Like [i]what?[/i]”[/color] Kari said incredulously.

[color=E14BC5]“Like you’re speed-walking into some bullshit. The bullshit we don't need right now.”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I am not speed-walking.”[/color]

A beat.

The footsteps continued quickly through the speaker. Lupe looked at Zakira and lifted her eyebrows.

[color=E14BC5]“... Ooooooooooooooooo-[i]kay[/i].”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I’m not—”[/color] Kari stopped herself, exhaled sharply, and kept moving. [color=#eac6ae]“Why did you call me?”[/color]

Zakira remembered the reason, suddenly and all at once. The hardware store. Mr. Alvarez. Road’s bad that way. The scraping in the stockroom. The TV anchor smiling while Cornell called death a disruption. The grass bending. The dandelion turning toward her. Her neighbor’s dark house. Lupe beside her with a flashlight and anger held like a match.

[color=#046904]“Something is wrong near Miller’s Creek.”[/color]

Kari went quiet.

The footsteps did not stop.

That was worse.

[color=E14BC5]“Aw fuck, here we go,”[/color] Lupe said under her breath.

[color=#046904]“Mr. Alvarez warned us not to go there.”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“Mr. Alvarez from Riverside?”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Yes.”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“What did he say?”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“He said don’t walk down Miller’s Creek because [i]'the road’s bad'[/i].”[/color]

Kari’s footsteps faltered for half a second. Then they got faster.

[color=E14BC5]“Oh, I hate that. I [b][i]FUCKING[/i][/b] hate that a lot.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Kari?”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I’m not going to Miller’s Creek.”[/color]

Lupe’s eyes narrowed.

[color=E14BC5]“That was a very specific answer, mami....”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Then where are you going?”[/color]

Kari did not answer.

The phone caught the sound of wind now, more open than before. Not neighborhood wind through porches and trees. Wider. Colder. The kind that moved across empty lots and industrial roads with nothing soft in its way. Somewhere far behind Kari, a dog barked once and stopped. Zakira’s stomach twisted.

[color=#046904]“[i]Kari.[/i]”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I said I’m not going to Miller’s Creek.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“[i][b]Mami.[/b][/i]”[/color] Lupe’s voice flattened. [color=E14BC5]“If you say ‘technically’ right now, I’m going to lose my fucking mind.”[/color]

Kari breathed out through her nose.

[color=#eac6ae]“[i]The steel mill.[/i]”[/color]

Zakira’s blood went cold.

Lupe stopped moving entirely.

For a second, Cornell seemed to stop with her. The porch lights. The wires. The dry tree branches. The faint hum of someone’s TV behind closed curtains. Everything held still around those two words.

[i]Steel mill.[/i]

Old steel mill by the river. Old steel mill near the creek. Old steel mill where adults told stories that stopped being funny if you asked too many questions. Old steel mill with the locked gates kids still climbed because teenagers loved proving a place was only dangerous in the boring way.

[color=#046904]“... Why?”[/color] Zakira asked.

Kari did not answer fast enough.

[color=E14BC5]“Kari,”[/color] Lupe said. [color=E14BC5]“[i]Why the fuck are you going to the steel mill!?[/i]”[/color]

Another metal sound came through the phone. A rattle. Chain-link, maybe. Kari’s breath pushed closer to the speaker.

[color=#eac6ae]“Camille and Kersten went there.”[/color]

Zakira’s grip slipped on the phone.

Lupe caught her wrist before she dropped it.

[color=#046904]“What?”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“They went to the steel mill.”[/color] Kari’s voice stayed low, but the control was thinning at the edges. [color=#eac6ae]“Kersten texted me twenty minutes ago asking if I knew anything about the runoff channels under the east side. I told her not to go near them. She didn’t answer. Camille sent me a picture after that.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“A picture of what?”[/color]

Kari’s breathing grew louder.

[color=#eac6ae]”Oh nothing,”[/color] Kari sarcastically said, [color=#eac6ae]“Water on the wrong side of a wall.”[/color]

Zakira did not understand at first.

Then she did, or thought she did, and wished she hadn’t.

[color=#eac6ae]“Like it was climbing,”[/color] Kari said. [color=#eac6ae]“Not spilling. Not leaking. Climbing.”[/color]

Lupe looked toward the distant shape of town beyond the houses. The steel mill was not visible from here, but everyone in Cornell knew where it sat. You [i]always[/i] knew where it sat. Even when you couldn’t see it, it lived on the edge of the skyline, a dark suggestion of pipes and rust and old smoke.

[color=#046904]“Did you call them?”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“Yes.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“And?”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“[i]Kersten[/i] didn’t pick up. But [i]Camille[/i] did.”[/color]

Kari’s footsteps slowed just enough to mean she was [i]remembering.[/i]

[color=#eac6ae]“He whispered my name. Then something hit metal near him, and the call cut off.”[/color]

The cold pressed into Zakira’s hoodie.

Lupe’s mouth opened slightly, then shut. For once, no joke came out.

[color=#046904]“Kari, [i]call the police.[/i]”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“And tell them [i]what?[/i]”[/color] Kari snapped, then lowered her voice immediately, like the sound had scared even her. [color=#eac6ae]“That two kids went somewhere stupid, and my magic thinks the building is screaming?”[/color]

The street listened.

Zakira did too.

[color=#046904]“The building is what?”[/color]

Kari cursed quietly, not loud enough for the word to matter.

[color=#eac6ae]“I don’t know how to explain it.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“[i]Try.[/i]”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I don’t have time.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Make time, mami.”[/color]

Kari’s footsteps stopped. Then Kari spoke, quieter.

[color=#eac6ae]“Something is wrong with the boundary around the mill.”[/color]

Zakira’s locket pulled harder.

[color=#eac6ae]“Not the fence. Not the property line. The place itself. It feels...”[/color]

She paused.

Zakira could imagine her face too clearly: Kari small and tense somewhere under bad light, phone pressed to her ear, eyes narrowed like she was reading something nobody else could see.

[color=#eac6ae]“[i]Thin.[/i]”[/color] Kari said. [color=#eac6ae]“Like the air has been rubbed down until there’s almost nothing left between here and somewhere else.”[/color]

Lupe whispered, [color=E14BC5]“[i]Jesús.[/i]”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I felt it from my house.”[/color]

Zakira’s breath caught.

[color=#eac6ae]“I tried to ignore it.”[/color] Kari started walking again. Faster. [color=#eac6ae]“I thought it was just another spike. There are [i]always[/i] spikes now. But then Kersten texted me. Then Camille called. And now I can feel them near it.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Feel them how?”[/color]

A pause.

[color=#eac6ae]“Wrong.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“[i]Mami.[/i]”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I said I don’t know how to explain it.”[/color] The words came sharp, then broke smaller. [color=#eac6ae]“Like their fear is moving ahead of them.”[/color]

Zakira went still.

Lupe looked at her.

Kari kept going, voice tight now, almost breathless. [color=#eac6ae]“Like [i]something[/i] there already knows where they’re going to stand before they stand there.”[/color]

The dandelion by the curb bent lower.

[color=E14BC5]“Okay, nope. Fuck that.”[/color] Lupe took a step toward the road, then stopped herself. [color=E14BC5]“Kari, [i]listen to me.[/i] You do not go in there.”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I’m not going in.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“You are absolutely going in. I can hear it in your smartass voice.”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I’m going to stop [i][b]them[/b][/i] before they go inside.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Are they inside already?”[/color]

Kari did not answer.

Zakira’s stomach dropped.

[color=#046904]“[i]Kari.[/i]”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“[u][i][b]I don’t know.[/b][/i][/u]”[/color]

There it was.

The word.

[i]Maybe’s[/i] cousin. [i]I don’t know.[/i] Honest and useless and [i]terrifying.[/i]

Lupe shut her eyes for half a second like she was physically holding back a scream.

[color=E14BC5]“Where are you right now?”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“By the service road.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Which service road?”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“East side.”[/color]

Lupe’s face changed. Recognition. Anger. Panic made practical.

[color=E14BC5]“By the drainage ditch?”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“Near it.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“That’s Miller’s Creek, dumbass.”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“It [i]feeds[/i] into Miller’s Creek... for your information.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Oh my god, I [i][b]hate[/b][/i] smart people.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Kari, wait for us.”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“No.”[/color]

The answer came instantly.

[color=#eac6ae]“I'll be in and out. I promise.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Please.”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“Zakira, they’re already there.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Then wait [i]outside.[/i]”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“If they’re inside, waiting outside means I’m listening to them get hurt.”[/color]

Zakira flinched.

Lupe’s jaw tightened.

[color=E14BC5]“You don’t know that.”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“Yes, I do.”[/color]

The quiet certainty in Kari’s voice made both of them stop.

[color=#eac6ae]“I don’t know everything. I don’t know what’s in there. I don’t know how bad it is. But I know that if I turn around right now, something happens to them and after Isabelle I can't let that happen again!”[/color] Kari's voice got louder with each word.

The wind moved through the trees above Zakira and Lupe.

For a moment, neither girl on the sidewalk answered the girl walking toward the mill.

[color=#eac6ae]“[i]That’s[/i] why I’m trying to get off the phone.”[/color] Kari filled the silence.

Lupe gave a short, humorless laugh.

[color=E14BC5]“That is the worst possible way to make me trust you, mami.”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I’m not asking you to trust me.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Good, because I don’t.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Kari,”[/color] Zakira said. Her voice sounded thin. Too thin. She hated that. [color=#046904]“Tell us how to get there.”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“No.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“[i]Giiiiiiiiiiiirl.....[/i]”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“No. If you come here, that is more people in the same place going wrong.”[/color]

[color=#046904]“We’re coming anyway.”[/color]

Lupe looked at her.

Zakira did not look back.

Her house was several blocks behind them. Her bow was in the corner of her room. Her arrows. The seed pouches tied beneath the heads. The careful things. The official things. The things she had left behind because bringing them would have meant admitting she expected the night to become this.

The night had become this anyway.

[color=#eac6ae]“[i]Zakira—[/i]”[/color]

A sound cut through Kari’s voice.

A long, low groan of metal shifting under pressure.

Kari stopped moving.

The phone filled with silence.

Then, faintly, from Kari’s end, came another sound.

A voice.

Too far away to understand.

Too afraid to be nothing.

[color=E14BC5]“Kari, where are you?”[/color]

Kari did not answer.

There was gravel under her shoes now. Fast. Then faster. Her breath burst through the speaker as she ran.

[color=#046904]“[i]Kari![/i]”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I heard them.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“No shit, [i]we[/i] heard something too, mami. Do not run toward it.”[/color]

Kari was already running.

The phone shook with each step. Wind battered the speaker. Something clanged as she hit or pushed through a gate. Chain-link rattled violently. A loose piece of metal scraped over concrete. Kari cursed under her breath.

[color=#eac6ae]“Camille!”[/color]

No answer.

Then another voice, farther away.

Kersten.

Maybe.

A shout cut short.

Kari’s breath turned ragged.

[color=#046904]“Kari, stop!”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“I can see the east entrance.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“Stay outside!”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“The door’s open.”[/color]

Lupe’s face went pale with fury.

[color=E14BC5]“Of [i]course[/i] the door’s open.”[/color]

The metal groaned again.

This time louder.

Zakira heard it through the phone and, somehow, from far away in the town itself. A deep industrial complaint rolling under the streets, too low for a normal sound and too big for one building. The grass around the maple tree flattened all at once. Not bending now. Flattening. Every blade pressed toward the soil like something had exhaled over it.

Zakira looked down.

Her locket jerked against her chest.

Hard.

[color=#046904]“Lupe.”[/color]

Lupe followed her gaze.

For once, she said nothing.

Through the phone, Kari whispered, [color=#eac6ae]“I’m at the door.”[/color]

The words came out small.

That scared Zakira more than if she had screamed.

[color=E14BC5]“Mami?”[/color]

Kari did not answer.

The phone picked up the sound of her breathing. Slow now. Careful. One step onto old concrete. Then another. The hollow interior of the mill swallowed every sound and sent it back wrong.

Somewhere inside, metal clicked.

Wetly.

[color=#046904]“Kari, leave.”[/color]

Kari took another step.

The clicking stopped.

For half a second, there was nothing.

Then Kari inhaled.

Not a gasp.

[color=#eac6ae]“No...”[/color] she whispered.

Lupe’s hand tightened around the flashlight.

[color=E14BC5]“What?”[/color]

Kari did not answer.

The phone crackled against her hand. Her breathing went thin and broken.

[color=#eac6ae]“Oh my god....”[/color]

[color=#046904]“Kari, what do you see?”[/color]

A wet dragging sound moved through the speaker.

Heavy.

Slow.

Close.

Then Kari made a sound that was almost a word and almost a sob.

[color=#eac6ae]“Camille...”[/color]

Zakira’s stomach dropped.

[color=E14BC5]“[i]Kari,[/i] get out.”[/color]

[color=#eac6ae]“It... it has him.”[/color]

The street went silent around Zakira.

[color=#eac6ae]“It ate Kersten too.”[/color]

Lupe’s mouth parted, but nothing came out.

Through the speaker came another wet click. Then a low, pulsing sound. Not chewing exactly. Worse because it was too large for that. Too slow. Something working meat and bone between parts of itself that did not sound like teeth until Zakira’s body understood them anyway.

Kari’s voice broke.

[color=#eac6ae]“[i][b]It’s eating them![/b][/i]”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“[i][b]BITCH[/b] YOU DON'T RUN![/i]”[/color] Lupe shouted.

The phone erupted with noise.

Kari screamed.

The sound tore through the speaker so sharply that Zakira nearly dropped the phone. There was a crash, then a heavy impact as Kari’s phone hit the concrete. It bounced once. Skidded. The world on Kari’s end turned distant and sideways. Kari was still screaming, farther now, warped by the hollow belly of the steel mill.

Something enormous shifted near the fallen phone.

Wet.

[i]Hungry.[/i]

Then a voice filled the speaker.

Not Kari’s.

[i]Not Camille’s.

[b]Not Kersten’s.[/b][/i]

Low and ruined and thick with something that had never needed language until something tried to take from it.

[i][h1][b]“MY FOOD!”[/b][/h1][/i]

Then the call cut.

Silence slammed into the street.

The screen glowed in Zakira’s hand.

CALL ENDED.

For a second, neither of them moved.

The little words stared up at them like a verdict.

Then Zakira turned and ran.

[color=E14BC5]“[b][i]Zakira![/i][/b]”[/color]

She did not answer. Her shoes hit the sidewalk hard, too hard, every step jarring up through her knees. The bag of hardware supplies slapped against her leg. The wrapped hatchet banged against her wrist. Lupe cursed behind her and followed.

[color=E14BC5]“Where the fuck are you going!?”[/color]

[color=#046904]“My house.”[/color]

[color=E14BC5]“This is not the time for a bedtime routine!”[/color]

[color=#046904]“[i].... My bow.[/i]”[/color]

Lupe did not argue after that.

They ran.

Cornell blurred around them in pieces. Porch lights. Dark windows. The backward stop sign shining silver. A hedge. A parked truck. The empty face of her neighbor’s house. The dead maple tree leaves scraping across the sidewalk behind them like something trying to keep up. Zakira’s lungs burned. Her heart fell back into its old instruction.

[i]Thump.

Look.

Thump.

Closer.[/i]

But this time she did not freeze.

She reached her front porch with Lupe half a step behind her and almost slammed into the door because her hands were shaking too badly to get the key into the lock.

[color=E14BC5]“Move.”[/color]

Lupe took the keys, shoved the right one in on the second try, and twisted. The lock clicked open louder than a gunshot.

Zakira pushed inside.

The house was still dark.

Still pretending.

She kicked off nothing. Took off nothing. She ran up the stairs with the hardware bag still in her hand and Lupe behind her, trying to be quiet and failing because panic had weight. The hallway family photos watched them pass. Zakira did not look at the girl with the plastic watering can. She went straight to her room.

The bow case waited against the closet.

Of course it did.

Like it had [i]known[/i] she would come back for it.

Zakira dropped the hardware bag onto the bed. Seed packets spilled across the sheets. Marigold. Morning glory. Yarrow. Foxglove. The little pale seed from her blanket lay on the nightstand where she had left it without remembering she had done so. The locket at her chest pulled toward the floor.

Lupe stopped in the doorway, breathing hard, flashlight beam shaking over the room.

[color=E14BC5]“How fast can you do this!?”[/color]

Zakira opened the case.

Her hands stopped shaking.

Not completely.

Enough.

[color=#046904]“[i]Fast enough.[/i]”[/color]

She lifted the bow.

The official weight of it settled into her palm. Familiar. Terrifying. A promise she had tried not to make. She grabbed the quiver next, fingers moving over the arrows, checking the small tied pouches beneath the heads by touch. Some were neat. Some were ugly. Some she had made half-asleep with thread pulled too tight and knots too large. They would have to be enough.

Lupe looked at the arrows.

Then at Zakira.

For once, she did not make a joke.

Zakira placed the quiver on her hip and strapped it in and grabbed the paper-wrapped hatchet too. The brown paper had torn near the blade. She tucked it through the strap of the bag because leaving it behind now felt impossible.

Downstairs, something creaked.

Both girls froze.

A single soft groan of wood under pressure.

Lupe lifted her hand - lowering it then raising the flashlight toward the hallway.

Zakira’s hand went to the bowstring.

Nothing followed.

The house held its breath.

Then, from somewhere outside, far away but not far enough, the steel mill groaned again.

Low.

Wet.

[i]Hungry.[/i]

Zakira moved first.

She ran down the stairs, through the living room, past the black TV screen, past the closed kitchen doorway, past every normal thing that had failed to protect anyone. Lupe followed her out into the cold.

The door shut behind them too loudly.

No one woke up.

No light came on.

No voice so much as called her name.

Zakira stood on the porch for half a second with her bow in one hand, arrows against her hip, hatchet at her side, and Lupe Sánchez breathing hard beside her.

The grass in every crack of the sidewalk bent toward the steel mill.

Not warning anymore.

[i]Pointing.[/i]

[color=E14BC5]“Okay, mami.”[/color] Her voice was low now. Stripped down. [color=E14BC5]“We go fast, we don’t go stupid!”[/color]

[color=#046904]A rare sentence for you.[/color] Zakira kept the comment to herself as she looked toward the dark shape of town beyond the houses.

[color=#046904]“We get Kari.”[/color]

Lupe’s jaw tightened.

[color=E14BC5]“And Camille and Kersten, if they’re still alive, that is...”[/color]

Zakira nodded once.

Neither of them said what if they weren’t.

They ran toward the steel mill.