Evil Ghost Note

Recollections: Where the Folds Meet

Agent - Palimpsest.

Jeremy’s power originates from a modest, unassuming device called the Echo Dial, a wristband engraved with faint, swirling runes. While Jeremy believes it merely hums with magic, it actually enables a unique form of dimensional manipulation, allowing him to perceive, test, and influence potential outcomes locally.

When activated, Jeremy experiences reality as if splitting into two paths. In reality, it doesn't create multiple timelines but projects vivid, brief simulations of possible event outcomes based on his choices. He can experience these as if they are real and then decide which to keep. His mind and body automatically follow that chosen path, while the memory of the rejected alternative remains as insight for future decisions.

The Echo Dial allows Jeremy to create localized time bubbles where he can speed up or slow down selected objects. A thrown bottle might crawl through the air, while falling debris might suddenly accelerate with dangerous force. He can affect multiple targets, but the more he manipulates, the harder the bubble is to control. Within these bubbles, Jeremy has limited telekinetic control. He can nudge, suspend, redirect, push, or pull objects caught inside the field, making his power strongest when reacting to motion. He can slow attacks, curve projectiles, hold doors shut, or launch debris.

Living beings resist direct manipulation, especially Paranormals with active Emotional-Fields. Jeremy can briefly stagger or slow someone, but he cannot fully freeze them unless they are weakened or caught off guard.

Recollections: Where the Folds Meet

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Interactions:
Cornell High.

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“Are you fucking serious? Is this all you could get? I worried that you, Kari, would waste time I could be spending training, but I decided to give this a shot. You know, because we all went through the same shit together. I figured that might have ignited a spark under your asses to do better, but this does not inspire confidence in your leadership. We might need a proven leader to step in at some point,”

Tyler

Kari’s pen stopped.

Before she could respond, Lupe’s chair scraped violently across the cafeteria floor.

“Lupe-”

Too late.

Lupe crossed the space between the tables in seconds and planted herself directly in front of Tyler. She was significantly shorter than him. It did not seem to occur to her that this mattered.

“... Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, bitch?” Lupe demanded, tilting her head back to glare at him. She jammed a finger directly into his chest. “Don’t walk in here dressed like you some Gatorade bottle and start talking down to Kari like she’s one of your bitches, dickhead.”

Kari rolled her eyes.

Of course.

She had spent the last few hours trying to create one room where people could exchange information without threatening, insulting, or attacking each other. Tyler had been inside for approximately thirty seconds, and Lupe was already close enough to count his eyelashes.

“Lupe.”

“No, mami. He came in here running his mouth like his knuckledraggin' ass can do anything other than throw a football.”

“Lupe,” Zakira repeated quietly.

Lupe did not move.

Kari pushed her glasses farther up her nose, looked past Lupe, and addressed Tyler herself.

“When did I say I was the leader?”

“Do you really think that you need to say ‘I am the leader’ to be considered the leader? You just,” Tyler looked at the others in the room, “know it. Sheep flock to a shepherd, and girl they flock to you. Can you keep them safe?”

“If not, I can make room for all of you and we can be done with the pretend work, and get on with fixing this city.”

Lupe’s mouth opened.

Kari raised one finger without looking at her.

“Don’t.”

Lupe slowly turned her head.

“But-”

“I just said don’t.”

Lupe stared at Kari for another second, then stepped backward. Not far. Just enough that she was no longer directly in Tyler’s face, nor could she keep her finger in her chest. She crossed her arms and remained beside Kari like an angry, five-foot-one security guard.

Kari looked back at Tyler.

“No one is making room for anyone.”

She closed her notebook.

The sound was not particularly loud, but it carried through the cafeteria now that most of the room had gone quiet.

“This isn’t football, Tyler. We’re not holding tryouts, picking captains, or deciding who gets to order everyone else around.”

Her ribs pulled when she straightened, but Kari ignored them.

“And this isn’t pretend work. People are missing. People are dead. Things are walking around Cornell that shouldn't be possible. Roads are changing, buildings are connecting to places they shouldn’t, and apparently time might be doing whatever the hell it wants to Tommy.”

Kari gestured vaguely in Tommy’s direction without taking her eyes off Tyler.

“None of us knows enough to fix the city alone. I don’t. You don’t. Nobody here does.” She punctuated her statement with a sigh.

Lupe nodded emphatically beside her.

Kari glanced toward her.

“That wasn’t an invitation.”

Lupe pressed her lips together.

Kari continued.

“The point of this meeting is to figure out what everyone knows. What happened to each of us at the warehouse. What we’ve seen since then. What our abilities can do, what they can’t do, and what happens when they go wrong.”

Her eyes moved across the occupied tables.

“Then we exchange information. We compare it. We figure out which parts match, which parts don’t, and which parts we’ve been too scared to tell anyone because they sound insane.”

A short pause.

“Then we come up with a plan.”

Kari looked back at Tyler.

“A real one. Based on what’s actually happening. Not whoever walks into the room and announces that they’re the strongest.”

Lupe made a tiny approving noise.

Kari pointed at her without turning.

The noise stopped.

“You want to help fix Cornell? Good. That’s why you were invited. Sit down, listen, and tell us what you know when it’s your turn.”

Kari opened her notebook again.

“But I never said I was the leader of... whatever this is.”

Lupe leaned closer to Kari and spoke lowly to her.

“... You sounded pretty leader-ish just now, mami.”

Kari’s eyes remained on the page.

“I will throw you out of here by your hair.”

Lupe muttered under her breath but returned to her chair. She dragged it closer to Kari’s table before sitting, positioning herself between Kari and Tyler as subtly as a brick through a window. Zakira remained where she was, leaning against the edge of another table. She had become quieter as more people entered, her gaze moving from one face to another without lingering. She said nothing else. Kari looked around the cafeteria. Most of the chairs were occupied now. Some people had responded to her invitation. Some had apparently just followed someone else inside. A few stood instead of sitting. A few looked like they were already regretting coming.

Kari mentally ran through the names.

Enough faces matched the list that something in her brain decided the count was complete.

It did not occur to her that Ella was missing.

“Okay.”

Her voice came out quieter than she intended.

Nobody immediately responded.

Kari cleared her throat.

“Okay. I think that’s everyone.”

Lupe glanced around.

^{“God help us.”}

“Lupe.”

“What? Look around, mami. We ain't the Avengers.”

Kari took a breath and looked down at her notebook.

WHAT WE KNOW.

WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW.

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW.

WHAT WE DO NEXT.

Four headings.

Simple.

Manageable.

Probably.

“The warehouse wasn’t an isolated incident.”

Kari rested both hands against the table.

“I think everyone here already knows that, but we need to stop treating everything that happened afterward like separate problems.” Or God forbid, someone else's. Kari tacked the last part on in her head.

As she spoke, Zakira pushed away from the table, and Kari glanced toward her - but Zakira gave a small motion toward the hallway with no explanation. Then she walked out of the cafeteria. Kari watched her leave for half a second before continuing.

“The creature at the warehouse... it wasn’t the only thing that came through. Some of us encountered other..." Kari paused as Lupe grimaced beside her. ”...creatures. Some of us can do things I never thought were possible. Some of us have something attached to us now.”

Her eyes briefly moved toward Daniel before returning to the notebook.

“Some people who were there are still missing. June. Isabelle. Maybe others we don’t know about.”

Kari swallowed.

“Camille and Kersten were alive after the warehouse.”

Her voice tightened despite her efforts.

Lupe shifted beside her but did not interrupt.

“They went into the steel mill. I followed them.”

Kari’s fingers pressed harder against the table.

“There was something inside. I’ve been calling it Gorge. It was strong enough to break through walls, eating made it even stronger, and nothing really stopped it. Zakira and Lupe hit it with everything they had. It didn’t matter.”

Lupe finally spoke, her voice quieter than before.

“I mean, mami, it kind of mattered...”

Kari looked at her.

Lupe shrugged one shoulder.

“We escaped.”

Kari held her gaze for a moment.

Then nodded.

“It mattered enough to escape.”

That distinction hurt.

She continued.

“What's stranger is that, in the mill... There was like another place connected to it. A jungle, or..." Kari trailed off. All eyes were on her. I'm going to sound fucking crazy right now. She briefly thought to herself before she continued. ”... Or another Cornell entirely. I don’t know.”

The cafeteria doors opened again.

Kari turned.

Zakira reappeared, walking backward as she pulled something through the doorway. The wheels squealed against the floor before a large whiteboard emerged behind her, apparently liberated from one of the nearby classrooms.

Lupe stared.

“Did you just steal a whiteboard?”

Zakira continued pulling it into the room.

“Borrowed.”

Kari looked at her.

Zakira looked back.

“Your notebook is too small.”

Kari glanced down at the page.

Then around at everyone.

She hated that Zakira was right.

“... Put it here.”

Zakira rolled the board beside the central table and locked the wheels with her shoe. A few faded equations remained in one corner from whatever class had last used it.

Lupe leaned back in her chair.

“Grand theft whiteboard, mami.”

“We're already here illegally.”

“I’m here so I don't get fined.”

“You came voluntarily.”

“Emotionally, I was coerced emotionally, mami.”

Kari stood slowly.

Zakira silently picked up a dry-erase marker from the board’s tray and held it out.

Kari took it.

“Thank you, Zakky.”

Zakira nodded and moved away from the center of the room again, returning to the edge of the gathering. She dug into her bag before pulling out an apple. She took a bite as she resumed watching.

Kari turned toward the whiteboard.

Her hand hesitated.

Then she wrote four headings in large letters.

WHAT WE KNOW.

WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW.

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW.

WHAT WE DO NEXT.

The marker squeaked beneath the final line.

Kari stepped aside so everyone could see.

“Those are the rules.”

She pointed toward the first heading.

“If you saw something, experienced anything, or can demonstrate it, it goes here.”

The marker moved to the second.

“If you think something is true but can’t prove it, it goes here.”

Then the third.

“Anything we don’t understand. Missing people, creatures, places, whatever happened to time today.”

Finally, the fourth.

“We do not touch this one until we’ve heard from everyone.”

Lupe raised her hand.

Kari stared at her.

“Yes?”

“Can ‘Tyler needs to shut the fuck up’ go under what we know?”

Kari lowered the marker.

“Lupe.”

“Demonstrable fact.” Lupe grinned.

From the edge of the room, Zakira spoke without changing her expression.

“... Wrong meeting.”

Lupe frowned.

“There’s another?”

Kari turned back toward the board before either of them could continue.

“We’re starting with the warehouse.”

She underlined the first heading.

“Everything anyone remembers. Even if it seems small. Even if it doesn’t make sense.”

Kari looked over her shoulder at the gathered faces.

“Especially if it doesn’t make sense.”

Recollections: Where the Folds Meet

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Interactions: Vicky (@Atrophy), & Tommy (@Blizz)
Cornell High.

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”The hell are you three doing up so late?”

Tommy

Kari looked up from her notebook and stared at Tommy for a second before glancing toward the cafeteria windows, where broad daylight was very obviously spilling through the glass.

“... It's like... twelve PM, Tommy.”

Lupe turned toward Kari. “Mami, maybe that's late for him.”

“Maybe he just woke up,” Zakira added with a shrug.

“Damn. Gooooooooooood morning!”

Kari sighed and returned to her notebook. “Can we please just act normal when everyone gets here...?”

Lupe and Zakira looked at one another.

“No.”

“That's wishful thinking,” Zakira rolled her eyes.

Kari closed her eyes. “Great.”

She had just started rearranging the notebook and pens on the table for the third time when someone screamed from the hallway. Kari froze, Lupe's head snapping toward the doors while Zakira's hand immediately went toward her bag. For half a second, Kari's heartbeat surged hard enough to hurt her ribs.

Then the voice continued.

Loud.

Angry.

Familiar.

Kari exhaled through her nose. “Oh my fucking God...” Placing both hands on her temples.

Zakira's hand remained near her bag. “She doesn't sound happy.”

Lupe looked at her. “She's never happy.”

“Lupe.”

“Whaaaaaaaaaat, mami.... I'm just saying.”

The heels came next.

Clack.

Clack.

Clack.

Kari looked toward the entrance as the noise approached.

Then Vicky entered.

Kari watched the tirade unfold in silence. The swim team. The pictures. The posters. The injustice. The complete and total devastation apparently brought upon Cornell by somebody rearranging a simple trophy case.-

Then came...

“-You have noooooooooooooo idea what I’ve been…”

Vicky

Kari's eyes closed.

No. Absolutely not.

Beside her, Lupe went completely still, and Kari slowly opened one eye. Just one. Lupe was no longer looking at Vicky. She was looking directly at Kari. Her head had turned almost unnaturally slowly, and an enormous smile spread across her face until it practically reached both ears.

Kari stared at her.

Lupe said nothing.

She didn't have to.

Kari raised one hand and flipped her off.

Lupe's smile somehow widened.

Zakira looked between them. “Don't.”

Lupe placed a hand against her chest and spoke completely monotone, for once, “I haven't even said anything, mami.”

“Your face is too loud.”

“I'm just observant, boo.”

Zakira's mouth twitched. “... You predicted that almost word for word.”

Kari's middle finger remained raised. “I will flip you off too if you don't quit it.”

“I didn't invite her.”

“Neither did you, Lupe!” Kari slammed both hands onto the desk, and the echo boomed through the halls, then returned. The one blood vessel in Kari's brain that Lupe had spent the morning aggravating had finally reached critical mass.

Then went back to flipping Lupe off.

Lupe's eyebrows rose. “Exactly, mami. That's the lesson here.”

“There is no lesson.”

“There is a beautiful lesson, mami.”

“Shut up. Just shut up, before I hang myself in the bathroom.”

Kari lowered her hand and tried very hard to focus on literally anything else. It did not help when the invisible bat clipped her ribs. Pain immediately bit through her side. Kari sucked in a breath and folded slightly toward the injury before catching herself against the table.

Lupe's smile disappeared immediately.

“Mami?”

“I'm fine.”

Zakira looked over. “You did the face again.”

“See? Now she gets it.”

“Sit down. Please.”

“I'm already sitting.”

Zakira looked at her.

Kari looked down.

She was, in fact, half-standing with one hand against the table.

“... Well, I was going to.”

She lowered herself carefully into the nearest chair. Lupe was still staring toward the center table now. Kari knew that expression. She had seen several different versions of it during the walk over. It was the expression Lupe made when she had just been handed an opportunity to become everybody's problem.

“Lupe.”

Lupe didn't look at her. “What?”

“No.”

“I didn't even do anything!”

“You're thinking loudly.”

Zakira glanced at Kari. “Now everyone's face is too loud...”

Lupe crossed her arms.

For several seconds, Kari genuinely believed the situation might survive...

“Lupe, you always have something to say. Why don’t you get the ball rolling?”

Vicky

Then Vicky directed the conversation toward Lupe.

Kari saw Lupe's entire body change. Her shoulders straightened. Her chin lifted. Her mouth opened.

“Oh, believe me, bitch, I didn't bring a notebook but I got a whole ass-”

“No.” Kari cut it off.

Lupe stopped and slowly looked at Kari. “Mami.”

“No.”

“She was talking to me.”

“Yes... I heard her...” Kari rolled her eyes.

“So I'm just answering-”

“You're going to start a fight. We don't need that right now.”

Lupe looked genuinely offended. “You don't know that.”

Kari stared at her.

Zakira stared at her.

Lupe looked between them.

“Okay, damn.”

Kari pushed herself carefully upright again, one hand remaining against the edge of the table. “Nobody is getting the ball rolling by starting shit... Vicky,” Her gaze moved briefly toward Vicky and then back to Lupe. “This is bigger than your stupid drama.”

Lupe threw her hands up. “Why am I getting lectured? I didn't even say anything yet, mami!”

“Because I know you.”

“That's profiling, mami. And you know it.”

“... Or pattern recognition.” Zakira rolled her eyes.

Lupe turned toward Zakira. “Zakky! Whose side are you on?”

Zakira thought about it. “... Mine.” She shrugged.

Lupe stared at her. “Cold.”

Kari rubbed at her forehead. “This is what I was trying to avoid, you know....”

Zakira glanced at her, and shrugged yet again. “I mean, so far, this is exactly what Lupe said would happen.”

Kari's head turned slowly.

“Zakira.”

“... I'm not saying she was right.”

Lupe gasped. “You don't have to, boo. Lord knows I am.”

“Lupe.”

“I'm done.”

She mimed zipping her lips.

A second passed.

Two.

“But fooooooooooooor the record-”

“... Shut up!”

“Damn!”

Kari took a breath, then another. Her ribs still hurt. Her meeting had barely started. Half the people weren't even there yet.

And Lupe had already been proven right once.

Kari hated today.

She looked toward the tables, then toward Lupe. “You wanted to get the ball rolling?”

Lupe's eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Maaaaaaaaaaaaaybe.”

“Then help Zakira finish moving the chairs.”

Lupe twisted her mouth up. “That's not what that means, mami.”

“Come on, let's just get this over with.”

Zakira grabbed a chair.

Lupe remained where she was. “This is bullshit.”

“Move the chair.”

“My sexy voice is being silenced.”

“How I wish it was right now...”

Lupe turned toward Zakira with genuine betrayal on her face.

Kari sat back down.

For the moment, at least, nobody was fighting, and she took the time to look at the first page of her notebook.

WHAT WE KNOW.

Her eyes drifted toward the room, then back to the page.

Kari picked up her pen and, beneath the heading, wrote a small note in the margin:

People are going to be a problem.

She stared at it.

Then reluctantly added:

^{Lupe was right.}

Kari immediately scratched the second sentence out so hard the pen nearly tore through the paper.

Recollections: Where the Folds Meet

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Interactions:
Kari's House.

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Kari was back in the mill.

She knew that before she opened her eyes. The sound came first: metal screaming somewhere in the dark, water dripping upward, then Camille breathing. Not speaking. Breathing. Wet and shallow and too far away. Kari tried to move, but her legs would not. The corridor stretched between them, longer every time she blinked. Camille lay beneath the red emergency lights at the other end, one hand reaching weakly toward her. Behind him, something moved. Too big for the hallway. Too hungry for the space around it.

“Camille!”

His mouth moved. She could not hear him.

The floor lengthened. Ten feet. Twenty. Fifty. The corridor stretched until Camille looked small enough to hold between two fingers. Then Kersten appeared beside him, standing, and for one second, relief hit Kari so hard she sobbed. Then Kersten looked down; there was nothing below their waist.

The rest of them was gone.

Kari screamed. The red lights blinked. Kersten disappeared, and Camille was suddenly in Gorge's hands again. Kari could feel his thread. Alive. Terrified. Pulling.

“I'm coming!”

She ran. This time her legs worked. She reached him, grabbed his arm, pulled-

And his body came apart in her hands.

Kari jerked awake.

She sat upright so quickly that pain ripped through her ribs.

“Ah-fuck!”

Her hand flew to her side. For several seconds, she did not know where she was. Dark room. Curtains. Desk. Bookshelf. Drawings taped crookedly to the wall. Cornell. Home. Her bedroom. Not the mill. Kari breathed through her nose. Once. Twice. Again. Her sheets were twisted around her legs, and sweat had soaked through the back of her shirt, leaving the fabric cold against her skin. Her friendship bracelet had wound tightly around her wrist during the night, the threads pressing faint lines into her skin.

She stared at it.

Then immediately looked away.

The clock on her nightstand read 4:17 AM.

Kari groaned and rubbed both hands over her face. Her palms smelled faintly medicinal from the ointment her mother had made her use before bed. For some reason, that almost made her cry, but she swung her legs over the side of the bed.

Bad idea.

Pain pulled through her shoulder first, sharp enough to stop her halfway upright. Her ribs answered with a deeper ache. Her bruised hip hurt when she stood, and the healing cut across her palm stretched angrily when she flexed her fingers. Kari stood there bent slightly forward.

“Okay...”

Her voice sounded awful.

“We're doing great, aren't we?”

The room did not answer.

...

...

...

This time.

She shuffled toward the bathroom; fortunately, the hallway was dark and quiet. Normal quiet. Kari hated that she had started categorizing silence: Normal quiet, Wrong quiet, and Listening quiet. The bathroom light was too bright when she turned it on. Kari winced and stared at herself in the mirror. She looked terrible. The bruise across her shoulder had darkened over the last few days, purple and yellow spreading beneath the collar of her shirt. A smaller bruise sat near her jaw. Faint scratches marked her cheek, injuries she had not noticed until the morning after the mill. Kari turned on the faucet and let the water run cold.

She watched it carefully.

Down.

It went down.

...

Good.

She cupped both hands beneath the stream and splashed water over her face. Once. Then again. The cold helped a little. Kari kept her hands against the sink and lowered her head-

Camille's arm coming apart in her hands.

Kersten standing there incomplete.

Gorge's mouth.

Lupe screaming.

Zakira telling her to move.

Kari shut her eyes.

Wrong choice.

For half a second, the bathroom light became red.

She opened them again.

White tile. Mirror. Sink.

Normal.

“Stop it...”

She whispered it to herself.

“You're home.”

Her reflection looked unconvinced. Kari reached for the bottle on the counter. Painkillers. She twisted the cap, shook two tablets into her palm, hesitated, then checked the label. She swallowed them with water from the sink and stood there waiting as they might work instantly.

They did not.

Rude.

Kari returned the bottle to the counter and stared at herself again. A few days ago, Camille had been alive. The thought arrived without warning. Kari gripped the edge of the sink.

“I... didn't leave him.”

Her reflection said nothing.

“I had to go.”

Nothing.

Her throat tightened.

“I had to.”

The second time sounded worse. She looked down at the drain. Water circled once before disappearing. Camille had been alive when she ran. Kersten had still been something she could feel before becoming... past tense. Kari had gone into the mill because she could not leave them there, and she had come out without either of them.

What was worse was that she had almost added three more names.

Lupe.

Zakira.

Herself.

Kari's grip tightened. She could still see Lupe standing in front of her in the jungle room, crying and shaking and telling Kari to stay behind her as if Lupe wasn't barely taller than she was. She could still see Zakira's hands trembling while her aim stayed steady. They had gone into that place because of her-not Camille, not Kersten-because she had gone in alone.

“Idiot.”

The word came out quietly.

She was not sure whether she meant herself or the reflection.

Probably both.

Kari pushed away from the sink and immediately regretted it when her ribs protested again. She pressed one arm against her side and breathed until the ache settled. The pills would help eventually. The bruises would fade. Her shoulder would stop hurting. Her palm would heal.

That was the problem.

Everything on the outside had an obvious direction.

Bruise.

Pain.

Medicine.

Rest.

Healing.

The rest of it did not.
Kari left the bathroom light on and returned to her room. She did not want the hallway dark behind her. Her notebook sat on the desk, she stared at it from the doorway. The last several pages were filled with mill notes. Not proper notes. Fragments.

Gorge.

Feeding = stronger?

Other creature consumed.

Damage works. Not enough.

Rot + electricity effective.

Roots conduct.

Jungle room? Another Cornell?

Camille—

Kari had stopped writing there. The pen line had dragged halfway across the page before she lifted it. She sat at the desk slowly. Her body complained the whole way down. The chair creaked. Kari opened the notebook, turned past the mill notes, past the page where she had tried to describe Gorge's movement, past the rough sketch of the jungle room, and stopped at the names.

Kersten.

Camille.

For a while, she did nothing.

Then she wrote:

I went because I thought knowing they were in danger meant I had to do something.

Kari stared at the sentence.

Then added:

I did something.

Her pen stopped.

The next sentence came harder.

It wasn't enough.

Kari's eyes burned. She blinked until the words stayed clear.

Then:

Lupe and Zakira almost died because they came after me.

The pen pressed harder into the paper, that was the part she could not rearrange. She could explain Camille. She could explain Kersten. They were already inside. Already trapped. Already hurt. But Lupe and Zakira? Kari had brought them into her mess. Her fear had pulled her into the mill. Their fear had pulled them after her. Her magic gave her relationships. Connections. Threads. She had spent so much time thinking connections were what saved people. What if connections could get people killed too? That made Kari's stomach turn. She shut the notebook too fast.

The sound cracked through the room.

She froze.

Waited.

Nothing answered.

Kari exhaled. Then, very carefully, she reached for the friendship bracelet around her wrist. Elsa's thread was there. Kari let herself feel that for one second. Only one. Then she released it. Her room stayed quiet.

The clock changed to 4:31 AM.

Kari leaned back in the chair and immediately winced at her shoulder.

“Ow.”

She laughed once. Lupe's voice came back to her.

Don't say that shit like it's funny.

Kari looked down.

“Sorry.”

She was not sure who she was apologizing to.

Lupe.

Zakira.

Camille.

Kersten.

Or herself.

Maybe all of them.

Outside her bedroom window, Cornell was dark and still.

For once, Kari did not look too closely at it. She tried for maybe thirty seconds... then her eyes drifted back toward the glass. The houses across the street sat dark beneath the trees. A car passed at the end of the block, headlights briefly stretching across wet pavement before disappearing. Somewhere farther off, a dog barked once and stopped. Nothing moved wrong. No road lengthened. No reflection lagged behind her. No voice came from somewhere it shouldn't.

Normal.

Apparently.
Kari stared until that word irritated her. Normal was what everyone kept calling it. Normal was school never reopening. Normal was adults whispering in kitchens and going quiet when their children walked in. Normal was police tape disappearing from places where people had died. Normal was the warehouse becoming a story people lowered their voices to tell. Normal was Camille and Kersten not coming home while everyone waited for somebody else to explain why.

Kari's jaw tightened. She looked away from the window and toward her notebook, the page was still open beneath her hand.

Lupe and Zakira almost died because they came after me.

Kari stared at the sentence. Then lower, where the page remained empty. Her ancestors had said something to her at the warehouse. Not everything. Most of that night was still broken into pieces in her memory. Isabelle disappearing into the woods. Ella glowing in the chaos. Nora too close to the creature. The world falling apart around her while she stood against that wall trying to understand what was happening.

Then those voices.

Old and familiar.

Far too casual for what they were telling her.

Your friends are waking up.

Kari's fingers curled around the pen.

She remembered the next part more clearly than she wanted to.

There's only one like you in Cornell.

The observer.

At the time, she had barely understood what that meant-she wasn't sure she understood now-but another line returned with uncomfortable clarity.

You're not just watching, Kari. You're responsible for what you see.

Kari closed her eyes, sighing.

“Yeah, well...”

Her voice was quiet in the room.

“You could've explained that just a little better.”

No ancestors answered.

Of course.

They had apparently mastered the family tradition of giving someone a life-altering responsibility and then becoming unavailable for follow-up questions. Kari looked down at the page again and she thought about the adults. Not her parents specifically, but all of them. Parents telling their children not to go out after dark without explaining why. Police asking questions about the warehouse like anyone could answer them without being called insane. People walking through Cornell Park while something beneath the runoff tunnel answered voices.

People shopping.

Going to work.

Opening stores.

Pretending.

Kari understood why, and that was the worst part.

Pretending was easier.

Pretending meant you could still go to sleep.

Pretending meant you did not have to ask why water climbed walls or why streets changed length or why creatures that should not exist were hunting children through abandoned buildings.

Pretending meant somebody else would deal with it.

Except nobody was.

Kari sat still for a long time.

Then she turned to a clean page.

At the top, she wrote:

WHO KNOWS?

She stared at it.

Crossed it out.

Then wrote:

WHO CAN HELP?

That was better.

Kari started with the names she knew.

Tommy.

Gold Lux. Constructs. Balor.

Zakira.

Green Lux. Plants. Venom. Roots.

Lupe.

Pink Lux? Fire. Electricity.

Tyler.

Teleportation. Trades places.

Vicky.

Magic bat?

Kari stared at the question mark.

“.. I really need better notes.”

She kept writing.

Ella?

Nora?

Others from the warehouse?

Isabelle—

The pen stopped, then she drew a line through the blank space after Isabelle's name.

Unknown.

Unreachable.

Not. Dead.

She knew the difference now. Kari turned the pen between her fingers; her ancestors had told her the others had the strength—the power.

But to stay alive, you're going to need a little more than muscle.

At the time, it had sounded almost reassuring.

Now it pissed her off.

“Then maybe everybody should know what everybody else can do.”

The idea settled slowly.

Not a team.

The word felt too dramatic.

Not a club.

Absolutely not.

A Coven?

That was just silly; she needed to get her head out of the books.

A meeting.

Information. Compare what happened; who had seen what, what creatures they encountered, what their magic did, what it couldn't do, which places in Cornell were changing, who was missing, who had heard voices, who had seen rift, who had gone somewhere that should not exist, and most importantly, how to fix things.

Kari's pen started moving faster.

WAREHOUSE.

MILL.

PARK TUNNEL.

OTHER CORNELLS?

MONSTERS.

RIFTS.

MISSING PEOPLE.

She stopped.

Then added:

NO ONE GOES ALONE.

Kari stared at that one for a long time.

The words blurred slightly.

She blinked until they sharpened again.

“Okay.”

Her heart had started beating faster as her nerves set in. That was fine. She could work with nerves. Kari reached for her phone (4:38 AM), opened her messages, and her thumb hovered over the keyboard.

She typed:

We need to talk.

Deleted it.

Typed:

I think everyone from the warehouse who has magic needs to meet.

Deleted that too.

Too insane.

^{Except insanity had stopped being a useful standard several days ago.}

Kari tried again.

I think we need to get everyone together. Everyone who changed after the warehouse. Tommy, Tyler, Vicky, whoever else we know. We need to compare what we can do and what we've seen because the adults are not doing anything and people are dying.

She stared at it.

Added:

And NOBODY is going anywhere alone anymore.

Then:

(Yes, I know what you're going to say)

Kari sent it to Lupe.

Then Zakira.

She hesitated before opening Tommy's contact.

The last thing they had done together was create Balor in the back of the library.

That somehow felt like it had happened a year ago.

She sent him a shorter version.

We need another meeting. Bigger this time. Everyone we know from the warehouse who has magic or has seen something. We need to put everything together.

Kari paused.

Then added:

Please don't make another creature before we talk.

She sent it.

For several seconds, nothing happened.

Then her phone buzzed.

Lupe.

why the fuck are you awake

Kari stared at the message.

Another appeared.

actually why the fuck am I awake

Then:

and fuck no bitch you are not organizing another field trip

Kari covered her mouth.

The laugh hurt her ribs.

She typed back.

Not a field trip. A meeting.

The reply came almost immediately.

same shit

Kari smiled despite herself.

Then Zakira replied.

Where?

Kari's expression changed.

Just like that.

No argument.

No question about whether it was necessary.

Just where?

Kari looked down at the list again-the names, the abilities, the places, the questions-or the first time since the mill, the mess in her head did not feel smaller, exactly but it had direction.

Kari typed:

Library maybe. Somewhere public. Somewhere everyone can get to.

She hesitated.

Then added:

And somewhere with more than one exit.

Zakira's response took several seconds.

Good.

Kari set the phone down. The room was still dark around her. Cornell was still outside. Gorge was still somewhere beneath or inside the mill. Camille and Kersten were still dead. Isabelle was still somewhere beyond the reach of her thread. Nothing had improved in the last ten minutes, but something had changed.

Kari looked toward the notebook.

The one who sees first.

She had hated that.

Still did.

Because seeing first meant being afraid first, knowing first, and sometimes failing first. But maybe it also meant being the first person to say something out loud. Kari picked up the pen and added one more line beneath the names.

TELL THEM EVERYTHING.

She underlined it.

Then added:

Even the parts that sound insane.

Kari sat back carefully.

Her ribs protested; she pressed one hand against her side and looked around the quiet room.

The house remained silent.

This time, Kari did not wait for it to answer.

She started planning.

---

^And...

Interactions: None.
The woods in Cornell.

---

---

Isabelle woke because something cracked.

At first, she thought it was a bone.

Her eyes opened sharply, but there was nothing to see. Darkness pressed against them from every direction, warm and close, and for one disorienting second she couldn’t understand where she was. Her cheek rested against something soft but resistant. Her arms were folded tightly against her chest. Her knees were drawn upward. She tried to move and found barely enough room to twitch her fingers.

Panic came immediately.

Her breathing—

No.

Isabelle went completely still.

Something was wrong.

She waited.

One second.

Two.

Three.

Nothing.

Her lungs did not burn, her chest did not tighten, there was no desperate reflex forcing her to inhale. Isabelle’s eyes widened in the dark, she sucked in a breath anyway. The air came reluctantly, squeezed through whatever surrounded her, damp and stale. Her chest expanded. Her lungs filled. She held it.

Five seconds.

Ten.

Twenty.

Her body remained quiet.

Isabelle released the breath in a shaky rush.

“No...”

Her voice barely existed. The word was swallowed by the enclosure around her, but the sound of it terrified her more than the silence had. She sounded normal. She swallowed and immediately became aware of how dry her mouth was. Her tongue moved slowly behind her teeth. She felt every tooth. Every ridge. Her lips. Her throat.

Normal.

Her heart-

Isabelle froze again.

She waited for it.

Nothing.
“No...”

Her hand jerked against her chest. There wasn’t enough space. Her palm scraped over herself uselessly until she forced her fingers beneath the collar of her shirt and pressed them against her sternum.

Nothing.

She pressed harder.

^Nothing.

“No, no, no, no, no, no...”

Her hand moved to the side of her neck-she missed the place at first. Tried again.

Nothing.

She dug two fingers beneath her jaw so hard it hurt.

Nothing.

Her breathing became fast now, though some distant part of her understood she was doing it herself. Her body wasn’t demanding air. She was pulling it in because she was scared. Because people breathed when they were scared. Because she was a person.

“Help.”

The word cracked.

She twisted, pushing against the walls around her. Something stretched with her movement and held.

“Help!”

Her voice came back to her muffled.

No answer; memory returned in pieces; the warehouse, the floor dipping beneath invisible weight, someone holding her wrist (Don’t leave me). Three steps. The impact. The trees. The thing in the forest.

You are damaged.

Isabelle stopped struggling.

Her entire body went rigid.

D’rryha.

The name came from somewhere that did not feel like memory.

Isabelle’s eyes darted through the darkness.

“No.”

Something moved against the back of her neck.

Not outside.

Inside.

She screamed.

Her body jerked violently, shoulder driving into the wall around her, and the enclosure cracked again. A thin line of cold air touched her face.

Isabelle stared toward it, then hit it over and over again until the wall split. Light stabbed through. She recoiled, covering her eyes, but immediately shoved at it again. Whatever surrounded her tore reluctantly, opening in stringy layers that clung to her hands and sleeves. She pushed harder, sobbing now, kicking until the thing split around her and she fell forward. Isabelle collapsed onto all fours and dragged herself away from the torn cocoon without looking back. She crawled until her hand slipped in mud and she nearly fell onto her face.

She caught herself.

Stayed there.

Hands buried in the dirt.

Hair hanging around her face.

Her shoulders moved quickly with each breath.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

She stared at the ground.

The forest was quiet.

Too quiet.

Morning light came weakly between the trees, pale and gray, though Isabelle had no idea what morning it was. She couldn’t feel the cold properly. She knew it was cold because she could see damp mist hanging low over the earth and because the air entering her lungs was sharp.

But her skin didn’t react.

No goosebumps.

No shivering.

Nothing.

Isabelle looked down at her hands.

They were dirty.

Normal hands.

Brown skin beneath dirt. Nails ragged from clawing out of the cocoon. A small split across one knuckle.

She stared at it.

A bead of something dark pushed slowly through the cut.

Isabelle leaned closer.

It wasn’t red.

The liquid was almost black.

Thick.

It sat on the wound without running.

Her face changed.

“No...”

She wiped it against the dirt.

The cut was already closing.

Isabelle stopped.

A thin movement passed beneath the skin of her hand.

She screamed and slammed it against the ground.

Once, then again.

“... Get out!”

And again.

“GET OUT OF ME!”

Her knuckles split.

Dark blood surfaced.

Something moved beneath the torn skin.

Tiny legs.

Isabelle stopped breathing.

A spider pulled itself through the wound.

Then another.

She made a sound that wasn’t quite a scream and scrambled backward so quickly she fell. The spiders remained on her hand, moving over the broken skin with horrible purpose. Thin strands stretched between them.

“No. No, no, no, no—”

She grabbed at them with her other hand.

The first spider crushed between her fingers.

She threw it away.

The second disappeared into the cut.

Isabelle stared.

The wound sealed, not like healing. It simply closed behind the thing like a door. Her hand looked normal again. Isabelle held it away from herself as if it belonged to someone else. For several seconds, she made no sound. Then she began wiping it against her jeans.

“Get off.”

Nothing was there.

“Get off me.”

She scratched at the skin.

“Get off.”

Her nails dug harder.

“Get off me!”

She tore four lines through the back of her own hand.

Movement followed beneath it.

Isabelle screamed and stopped touching herself.

She sat there with both hands raised, afraid to lower them.

Her breaths came faster.

Still unnecessary.

Still hers only because she was making them happen.

“Oh my God....”

She pressed her lips together.

Looked around.

“Mom?”

The word left her before she could stop it.

Nothing answered.

Isabelle turned slowly.

The cocoon stood between two trees behind her. It was larger than she expected. Her size. Pale strands stretched between branches, layered so thickly that the torn opening looked wet and fleshy in the morning light.

Isabelle stared at it.

She remembered being placed inside.

You will stabilize here.

Her stomach turned.

Or she thought it did.

She pressed a hand to her abdomen.

Nothing.

No nausea.

Only the memory of nausea.

That was worse.

“No.”

She stood too quickly, but her body rose with strange ease. Isabelle swayed, reaching for a tree, her hand hit the bark harder than she expected. Slowly, she stepped back, but her legs felt wrong. As though the instructions to move reached them before she consciously sent them.

She lifted one foot.

Set it down.

Lifted the other.

The movements were hers.

She knew they were hers.

But there was something beneath them.

A second rhythm.

Correction.

Isabelle took another step.

Her foot caught beneath a root.

Her body corrected before she stumbled.

She froze.

“No.”

She deliberately leaned too far to one side.

Her muscles tightened automatically. Too precisely. Yet she tried again.

Faster.

Her body corrected.

“Stop.”

She threw herself sideways and something inside her responded. Her spine twisted, her foot planted, then her balance returned instantly. She hadn’t chosen to catch herself.

She went pale.

“Stop.”

Nothing answered.

“D’rryha?”

The name sounded horrible aloud.

Silence.

Isabelle looked around.

“D’rryha?”

Nothing.

Her jaw tightened.

“Where are you?”

The answer came from inside her.

"Here"
"Here"

Isabelle’s whole body seized.

She screamed and clawed at her chest.

“No!”

Her nails caught her shirt.

“NO!”

"... You are stable."

“Get out!”

There was a pause.

"No."

Isabelle stumbled backward.

“Get out of me!”

"You will die."

“I don’t care!”

Silence.

The answer came slowly.

"That is untrue.."
"That is untrue."

Isabelle shook her head violently.

“You don’t know what I want.”

"You wanted to live."

“I wanted to go home!”

"You were dying."

“That doesn’t mean-”

Her voice broke.

Isabelle grabbed at her hair, fingers tangling painfully in the curls.

“... That doesn’t mean you can do this to me!”

D’rryha did not answer.

Isabelle waited.

“Say something!”

"You persist."

“Stop saying that!”

Her voice ripped through the forest.

A flock of birds burst suddenly from distant branches.

Isabelle flinched.

Silence returned.

She covered her mouth.

For the first time, she became aware of the taste lingering there.

Something metallic and old.

She wiped her lips.

Nothing.

Her stomach still did not move.

She could not feel hunger.

Could not feel cold.

Could not feel her heart because there was nothing there to feel.

She lowered her hands slowly.

“I need to go home.”

"No."

Her face hardened immediately.

“You don't get to tell me that.”

"You are not ready."

“I don’t care.”

Isabelle turned.

She had no idea which direction led anywhere.

That realization stopped her only briefly.

She picked one.

Started walking.

After several steps, she noticed she wasn’t getting tired.

She walked faster.

Branches scraped her jacket. One caught her cheek.

She felt the sting and her hand rose instinctively. By the time she found it, it was gone.
Isabelle stopped walking as he touched the spot again. Smooth skin. Her fingers trembled but she moved on. Faster now. Not toward anything in particular but away. The forest shifted around her in ways she couldn’t understand. Paths seemed to appear and disappear. Trees repeated. Shadows leaned in directions that had nothing to do with the morning sun.

Still she kept moving.

Eventually, she heard water.

Isabelle turned toward it.

A narrow creek cut through the woods, shallow enough that stones broke through its surface. She stumbled down the bank and dropped to her knees.

Water.

She needed water.

^{Did she?}

The thought made her hesitate, but she leaned forward anyway and cupped it between her hands. The water was cold- she knew that, but it did not hurt.

She drank.

The first mouthful tasted like dirt and leaves.

The second tasted the same.

Her body gave no response.

No relief.

No sense of thirst disappearing.

Isabelle stopped.

Water spilled between her fingers.

Slowly, reluctantly, she looked down.

Her reflection waited between the ripples.

Isabelle stared.

For one horrible second, she didn’t recognize the girl.

Then she did.

Her face.

Her eyes.

Her nose.

Her mouth.

Her hair tangled and dirty around her face.

She touched her cheek.

The girl in the water did the same.

Isabelle leaned closer.

There should have been something.

Anything.

A wound.

A scar.

A split lip.

Bruising.

Some proof of what happened.

Nothing.

She lifted her shirt, stopping before her chest... the place where the thing had punched through her body was gone. Her stomach looked exactly as it had before the warehouse. Isabelle touched it.

Nothing.

She remembered being opened.

She remembered something inside her tearing.

She remembered blood filling her mouth.

She remembered the absolute certainty that her body was finished.

And now—

Nothing.

Her fingers dragged over smooth skin.

She started shaking.

“No...”

She looked back at the water.

Her own face stared up at her.

Normal.

Completely normal.

That was when the horror truly reached her.

Not when she found the black blood.

Not when the spiders emerged.

Not when D’rryha spoke from inside her body.

This.

Her face.

She looked exactly like herself.

The same girl who had walked into the warehouse.

The same face her mother knew.

The same face her friends would recognize.

The same face that belonged to a girl with no heartbeat.

A body that did not need to breathe.

A body full of spiders.

Isabelle touched her reflection.

The water broke apart beneath her fingers.

“I look the same...”

Her voice was very quiet.

D’rryha said nothing.

“I look the same.”

She said it again, louder this time.

Her reflection reformed.

Isabelle stared into her own eyes.

Something felt missing; she couldn’t explain it. There had always been noise inside a body. A thousand little things she had never noticed until they disappeared. Pulse beneath the skin. Breath moving automatically. Warmth. Hunger. The quiet ache of staying in one position too long. The weight of fatigue behind the eyes. Her stomach shifting. Her heart speeding up before she understood she was scared.

All gone.

Her body had become silent.

Vacant.

Isabelle stared at herself(?).

The girl in the water looked alive.

She hated her.

“No...”

She hit the surface.

Water splashed over her face.

The reflection vanished.

Isabelle sat back, breathing hard because she wanted to breathe hard. Because she needed to hear something human happening.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

She pressed both hands against her chest.

Nothing.

“Come on.”

She pressed harder.

“Come on.”

Nothing.

She struck her chest once.

Again.

“Come on!”

Again.

“Come on!”

Nothing.

Her voice broke.

She curled forward.

“I can’t feel it.”

D’rryha remained quiet.

Isabelle struck herself again.

“I can’t feel anything!”

"You can feel," D'rryha said.

“Not like before!”

"You are functioning."

“I don’t want to function!”

The words echoed back from the trees.

She went still.

Her mouth remained open.

Tears finally came.

That relieved her for half a second.

Then she touched one.

Looked at the moisture on her finger.

Even crying felt like a test now.

Isabelle wiped angrily at her face.

“Am I dead?”

Silence.

“Answer me.”

"No."

“Am I alive?”

A longer pause.

Isabelle’s expression slowly collapsed.

“Answer me.”

"You persist."

She screamed.

Her fists struck the ground.

Isabelle froze.

She looked down.

Her hands had sunk several inches into mud and stone.

She pulled it free slowly.

Her fingers were unhurt.

The skin across her knuckles was perfect.

She stared.

Something shifted behind her shoulders.

Isabelle became completely still.

The sensation came again.

Pressure.

Deep beneath the skin of her back.

Growing.

“No.”

The pressure spread.

“No, no, no-”

She reached behind herself but sheouldn’t find anything. The pressure sharpened. Isabelle screamed as something forced outward beneath her shoulder blade. A long, jointed limb punched through the fabric of her jacket. Isabelle fell sideways.

Another emerged.

Then another.

Black, segmented, glistening in the morning light, their pointed ends driving into the soil around her.

She screamed until her throat hurt.

“PUT THEM BACK!”

The limbs twitched.

One lifted.

Isabelle watched it move.

Her stomach should have turned.

It did not.

“PUT THEM BACK!”

"You are frightened."

“YES! I FUCKING AM!”

"There is no threat."

“YOU'RE THE THREAT!”

The limbs went still.

Isabelle sobbed, curling into herself while the things remained arched above her.

_{“Please.”}

The word came out small.

Immediately, humiliatingly familiar.

“Please put them back.”

The limbs slowly withdrew and Isabelle screamed again as they folded into her. The torn jacket remained. Her back—

She twisted, trying to see.

Her hands reached behind.

No wounds.

Nothing.

Only torn denim.

Isabelle sat there, shivering despite not being cold.

That frightened her too.

She wrapped her arms around herself.

“I want my body back....”

D’rryha was quiet.

“I want it back.”

"It was destroyed, child."

Isabelle shut her eyes.

“No.”

"You were damaged beyond natural repair."

That word stuck out more than it should have.

“Stop.”

"You could not breathe."

“Stop.”

"Your organs were failing."

“Shut up.”

"You were dying."

“SHUT UP!”

Silence.

Isabelle lowered her forehead to her knees.

For a long time, nothing moved except the creek.

Eventually, she opened her eyes.

Her reflection was visible again from where she sat.

Still unmistakably hers.

She crawled closer.

Slowly.

Almost afraid it would change before she reached it.

It didn’t.

Isabelle looked at herself.

Her face was swollen from crying now.

Good.

She almost laughed.

Good.

At least that looked real.

Good.

She leaned closer.

“I’m... Isabelle Morgan-Sato.”

Nothing answered.

“I’m sixteen.”

Her voice trembled.

“I live in Cornell, Pennsylvania.”

The creek moved around stones.

“My mom...”

She stopped.

Tried again.

“My mom is...”

Her voice failed.

Not because she had forgotten.

Because saying her mother’s name would make home real.

And if home was real, then she had to understand what would happen if she walked through the door looking the same.

Her mother would run toward her.

Would hug her.

Would touch her.

Would feel how cold she was.

Would wait for the heartbeat that wasn’t there.

Isabelle covered her mouth.

“No.”

What would the police do?

Doctors?

Her friends?

What happened when someone saw the blood?

The spiders?

The legs?

She imagined someone reaching for her.

Holding her down.

Calling it help-

"It will be easier if you stop fighting, child."

Isabelle recoiled from the thought.

“No.”

Her reflection stared back.

She looked normal.

That was the problem.

Isabelle slowly raised a hand to her face.

The reflection copied her.

“I look at my reflection...”

Her voice disappeared.

She swallowed.

Tried again.

“I look at my reflection... and I’m not sure what’s looking back at me anymore.”

For several seconds, there was only water.

Then D’rryha answered from somewhere behind her thoughts.

"It is you, child, Isabelle Morgan-Sato," D'rryha began, "You are the same but..."

Isabelle’s face twisted.

She stared at the reflection.

D’rryha spoke again.

"... Improved. I perfected you, child. Broke the natural limitations of your body and made you into something beautiful."

Isabelle stared at herself.

For a second, she didn’t move.

Then-

“... Beautiful?”

A short laugh escaped her.

“You think this is beautiful?”

"It is stronger. Resilient. Free of the weaknesses that would have otherwise killed you."

“Stop.”

"You will no longer break so easily."

“I said stop!”

Isabelle struck the creek.

Her reflection shattered.

She stumbled backward, scrambling to her feet too quickly-

And her body caught itself.

Perfectly yet again.

She froze.

“... No,”

Isabelle threw her weight sideways yet again.

Her foot planted automatically.

She stayed upright.

“Stop doing that.”

She tried again.

The same thing.

Her muscles corrected before she could fall.

“STOP!”

"You are distressed."

“GET OUT OF MY HEAD!”

"I am not merely in your head."

Isabelle stopped.

Slowly, her hands moved to her chest.

Her stomach.

Her throat.

“... Where are you?”

"I am within you."

Something shifted beneath the skin near her spine.

Isabelle screamed.

She clawed frantically at her back.

“GET OUT! GET OUT-GET OUT-GET OUT! GET OUT OF ME!”

"... I tire of this, child."

“I DON'T CARE!”

"You wanted to live."

Isabelle went still.

Her face twisted.

“I just wanted to go home....”

She dug her nails into her arm.

Black blood surfaced.

Small shapes moved beneath the wound.

Isabelle recoiled.

“No...”

Spiders emerged and began closing the scratches.

“Stop it...”

They continued.

“Please stop...”

"You are damaged... I must correct..."

“IT'S MY BODY!”

Her voice tore through the forest.

Isabelle hit her chest with both hands.

“My body!”

Again.

“My blood!”

Again.

“My heart!”

Nothing beat beneath her fists.

She stopped.

Her hands remained pressed against her chest.

Nothing.

Her voice shrank.

“And you took it...”

"I preserved it."

“I said no.”

Silence.

“I begged you to stop.”

"You were afraid."

Isabelle looked up.

“I said no.”

D’rryha did not answer.

Isabelle turned back toward the creek.

Her reflection had already returned.

“You didn't improve me...”

Her voice trembled.

“You made me into...” Her voice cracked, “... A monster.”

"Despite it all, you remain Isabelle Morgan-Sato,"

“Stop saying my name...”

"It is your name."

“DON'T SAY IT!”

She covered her ears.

It did nothing.

"You are still yourself."

Isabelle slowly lowered her hands.

Her reflection stared back.

“.... You don't know that.”

"I know what you are."

That made her still.

Isabelle looked down at the water.

“That's the problem.”

Her fingers touched her own cheek.

“You know what I am.”

Her voice broke.

“I don't.”

For once, D’rryha was silent.

Isabelle stared at her reflection.

Waiting.

Terrified that eventually—

it might move before she did.

---

Jeremy Cole and...

Interactions: None.
insert location later

---

---

Jeremy had been sitting beside the railroad tracks for almost an hour, trying to make the scanner pick up something other than static. He had built it from an old emergency radio, a police scanner he bought online for twenty dollars, and several pieces of equipment he probably should not have taken from the abandoned signal shed.

Probably.

Nobody used the line anymore anyway. Jeremy had seen trains on it twice in the last month. Neither had appeared on any schedule he could find.

The scanner hissed between his knees.

He adjusted the dial.

Static.

Turned it back.

More static.

A voice almost formed beneath it.

Jeremy leaned closer.

Nothing.

“Fuck you too.” He slapped the side of the scanner. “Piece of shit.”

Jeremy almost threw it.

He twisted around.

June Summers was sitting on the opposite rail.

He stared at her.

The tracks between them were empty; Jeremy had been facing them for the last fifteen minutes. There was no way she could have crossed without him seeing her. June sat with her knees together and her hands folded neatly in her lap. Her fingers were woven together in the wrong order.

Jeremy stared for a second before realizing why.

One of her thumbs was underneath the other hand.

“Jesus Christ, June.”

She smiled.

“You should not strike machines when they fail to give you what you want.”

Jeremy looked back at the scanner.

“Thanks?”

“It damages them.”

“No shit.”

June tilted her head.

Her body remained perfectly still.

Only her head moved.

“You do that often.”

Jeremy glanced at her.

“What?”

“Become angry when systems refuse to behave correctly.”

A pause.

Jeremy turned the dial again.

Static filled the space between them.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes.”

He waited.

June did not continue.

Jeremy looked over.

She was closer.

Still sitting on the rail.

Same posture.

Same folded hands.

But closer.

Jeremy frowned.

“Did you just move?”

“No.”

He looked at the gravel between them.

Then back at her.

June smiled again.

“You spend a great deal of time imagining what you would do differently.”

Jeremy’s fingers stopped on the dial.

“What?”

“If something happened twice...”

The scanner hissed.

June leaned forward.

Her spine remained completely straight.

“... What would you change?”

Jeremy stared at her.

“About what?”

June looked past him.

Down the tracks.

“Everything.”

“That’s a stupid question.”

“Yes.”

The answer came without offense. Jeremy looked back at the scanner as static hissed through the speaker. He turned the dial harder than necessary. He huffed.

“There’s a lot of stuff.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I know enough.”

Jeremy laughed under his breath.

“Sure, you do, ^bitch.”

June remained sitting on the rail.

The light from the dying evening stretched everything longer than it should have. Telephone poles leaned in shadows across the gravel. Trees crowded both sides of the tracks, their branches barely moving despite the wind Jeremy could feel on his face. June’s hair did not move either.

“You think about the hardware store.”

Jeremy’s hand stopped.

The scanner whispered between stations.

He kept his face down.

“What?”

“You replay it.”

Jeremy’s jaw tightened.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do.”

He looked up sharply.

June had moved again.

She was no longer sitting.

Jeremy had not seen her stand.

She stood between the rails now, hands hanging loosely at her sides.

Her feet were placed directly between the wooden ties.

Centered.

Exact.

“You imagine saying different things.”

Jeremy said nothing.

“Standing somewhere else.”

“Can you not?”

“Making Lupe stop speaking. I know you picture doing it with your genitals.”

His face grew hot.

“Shut up.”

June stopped.

For a moment.

Then:

“Would you?”

Jeremy stared at her.

“What?”

“If you could. Would you?”

Her expression did not change.

“If you could make her stop.”

The words hung there.

Jeremy looked down the tracks.

“I... don’t know...”

June tilted her head.

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You imagined slapping her across the face.”

Jeremy went still.

June took one step forward.

Gravel shifted beneath her shoe several seconds after her foot had already settled.

“Before anyone could stop you.”

His mouth went dry.

June continued.

“Then forcing her onto her knees.”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“No.”

Jeremy looked at her.

June tilted her head.

“Being angry does not mean you wanted to do those things... .”

A pause.

“... Wanting to do those things means you wanted to do those things.”

Jeremy’s jaw tightened.

“I wouldn’t have actually done it.”

“I know.”

“Then what’s your point?”

“I wonder what you would do if those consequences became optional.”

June smiled.

“Most people lie about what they want. You only lie afterward.”

Jeremy looked at her.

The smile vanished.

Gone.

She stepped closer.

“You are ashamed after.”

Something about the way she said it made him uncomfortable.

“After what?”

“Everything.”

Jeremy picked at the torn rubber around the scanner antenna.

“That’s... that's not true.”

“You rehearse apologies you will never give.”

His fingers stopped.

“You rehearse insults you will never say.”

The static sharpened.

“You imagine violence you will never perform.”

“Jesus Christ...”

“And then you feel guilty for things that didn't even happen.”

She tilted her head.

“Sad.”

Jeremy stood abruptly.

The scanner fell from his knees and hit the ground with a few ungraceful clinks.

June watched.

“You don’t know me.”

“I do know you, Jeremy Cole.”

“No, you don't.”

“I know what you repeat.”

“What does that even mean?”

June pointed at the scanner.

Jeremy followed her eyes.

The static had changed.

A voice surfaced beneath it.

“—clear the—”

Jeremy grabbed the tuning knob.

“Hold on.”

He turned it slightly.

The voice vanished.

“Fuck.”

Jeremy turned it back.

Nothing.
He leaned closer.

“Come on...”

June watched him.

Jeremy tried again.

Static.

“Fuck. I had it.”

“Yes.”

“For, like, two seconds.”

“Three.”

Jeremy looked at her.

“That’s not the point.”

“It is.”

June pointed at the scanner.

“You had what you wanted. Then you made the wrong adjustment and lost it.”

Jeremy frowned.

“Okay?”

“You know the correct choice.”

“No shit. I know that now.”

June stepped closer.

“Yes.”

Her eyes remained fixed on him.

“That is the problem.”

Jeremy stared at her.

June reached into her jacket pocket.

“What if you knew afterward beforehand?”

Jeremy blinked.

“... That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does.”

Her arm went deeper into the pocket. Too deep. The fabric should have bunched around her wrist. It didn’t.

Jeremy’s eyes narrowed.

June pulled something out.

A wristband.

At least, that was the closest word Jeremy had for it.

It was a broad cuff of dark, battered metal fitted over worn brown leather, the outer band broken into heavy overlapping segments. Faint swirling patterns curled across the metal in long engraved lines, worn shallow in some places and sharp in others. At the back sat a square clasp housing, thick and mechanical-looking, with a spiral stamped into its face. It looked old. June held it out.

But Jeremy did not take it.

“... What is that?”

“A correction.”

“Of what?”

“You.”

Jeremy stared at her.

June stared back.

Then her mouth curved upward.

Jeremy could not tell whether she had made a joke.

“Very funny, June.”

“No.”

She took his hand.

Jeremy flinched.

June turned his wrist over.

“Hey-”

She wrapped the band around him before he could pull away.

The leather lining pressed cold against his skin.

Then the metal segments shifted.

Jeremy felt them settle one after another around his wrist-

click.

click.

click.

The square clasp locked shut.

“What the hell?!”

Jeremy jerked his arm back.

He grabbed at the metal cuff, trying to wedge his fingers beneath it.

The leather lining tightened just enough to make that impossible.

Jeremy froze.

June released him.

“What did you just put on me?”

“Press the spiral.”

“What?”

“The spiral.”

Jeremy stared at the device.

“June.”

“Press it.”

“No.”

June waited.

Jeremy glared at her.

She did not move.

Did not blink.

Jeremy looked down. The cuff had no screen, no buttons that he could see. Only the engraved patterns winding around the metal and the small spiral stamped into the square clasp. He pressed it with his thumb. Something inside the cuff shifted. A tiny rotation beneath the metal. The engraved lines trembled.

Jeremy jerked his hand away.

June watched.

“What the fuck is this?”

“A choice.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“No.”

Jeremy looked at the cuff again.

The spiral sat motionless beneath his thumb.

Then he pressed it.

Click.

The railroad tracks split.

Jeremy gasped. Not physically. He knew that immediately and somehow not at all. He was still standing beside the tracks. June was still in front of him. The scanner was still resting on the gravel. But there were two versions of what happened next. In one, Jeremy stumbled backward. His heel caught the rail. He fell hard, his hand slapping down onto the gravel as a sharp piece of metal drove into his palm. Pain exploded through his hand.

“Fuck!”

He looked down.

Blood.

Then-

Click.

Jeremy was standing again. His hand was uninjured. He stopped breathing. The memory of pain remained, but the sensation was gone. He looked at the gravel behind him. The piece of metal was there, exactly where it had been. Jeremy stumbled sideways instead, away from it.

“What the fuck?”

June smiled.

“You learned.”

Jeremy looked at his hand and turned it over. Nothing.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No, I fell.”

“Yes.”

His head snapped up. June’s smile widened slightly.

“You did not keep it.”

Jeremy stared at her. The scanner crackled and he flinched as a voice came through.

“—eastbound freight approaching—”

The message dissolved into static. Jeremy barely noticed.

“What did you do to me?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

June crouched. Her knees touched the ground before the rest of her body seemed to lower. Jeremy took a step back as she picked up a small gray stone, flat on one side.

“This device, The Echo Dial, allows you to examine an immediate consequence.”

Jeremy’s eyes went to the rock.

“You act.”

She tossed it lightly. It landed near Jeremy’s shoe.

“You see what follows.”

June bent and picked it up again.

“You reject.”

She tossed it to the same place.

“Or retain.”

Jeremy watched her.

“That’s time travel.”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“Rehearsal.”

June rolled the stone between her fingers.

“Very convincing rehearsal.”

Jeremy looked down at the cuff. The spiral on the clasp looked deeper than it had before. He rubbed his thumb over it. Metal. Nothing else.

“You’re saying I can see the future?”

“No.”

“A future?”

“No.”

“Then what the fuck am I seeing?”

“A possibility.”

The wind passed through the trees. June’s clothes remained still.

“You choose.”

The stone left her hand. Jeremy barely saw the throw before it came directly at his face. He recoiled. The Echo Dial clicked once, hard, and the metal tightened around his wrist. Jeremy threw up his arm. The world thickened. The stone did not stop completely, but crawled through the air, slowly rotating. Jeremy stared.

“What—”

“Reach.”

Jeremy looked at June.

“Reach for it.”

He extended his hand. The stone drifted past his fingers.

“Too slow.”

“Shut up.”

Jeremy moved again. The cuff shifted against his skin as several tiny mechanisms turned beneath the clasp. The stone accelerated. Jeremy yelped and ducked. It shot over his shoulder and clacked against the rail. He spun around.

“You could’ve hit me!”

“Yes.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

June did not move. Jeremy’s anger stalled, only for a second. Then June pointed at the stone.

“Bring it back.”

Jeremy looked at it.

“How?”

“You already moved it.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.”

“The bracelet did.”

June stared.

“The Echo Dial is on you.”

Jeremy stared back.

“So?”

“So.”

Jeremy looked at the stone and raised his hand. Nothing happened.

“This is stupid.”

June waited. Jeremy tried again. The cuff gave a faint internal tick, then another. The metal grew warmer against his wrist. The air around the stone shimmered. It scraped against the gravel, moving an inch, then another. Jeremy’s eyes widened. He pulled his hand toward himself.

Click-click-click.

The stone shot across the ground. Jeremy jumped out of the way. June did not. The rock struck her shoe. She looked down, then at Jeremy.

“You moved.”

“Yeah.”

“You could have made it move.”

Jeremy frowned.

“I was trying.”

“You reacted instead.”

“I didn’t want it to hit me.”

June’s expression softened. The change was almost convincing.

“Exactly.”

Jeremy looked at her. June stepped past him toward the scanner.

“There are things already moving. Those are easiest.”

She nudged the scanner with her shoe.

“You can catch them.”

She bent.

“Delay them.”

June picked up the scanner.

“Redirect them.”

Then she threw it.

“Hey!”

The scanner arced toward the rocks beside the tracks. The Echo Dial contracted around Jeremy’s wrist, one metal segment pressing into the next.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Jeremy reached instinctively. The scanner slowed, not smoothly, but jerking through the air in tiny increments, each movement accompanied by a faint tick beneath the cuff. Jeremy’s teeth clenched. He pulled. The scanner curved, hit the gravel, bounced once, but did not smash. Jeremy ran over and grabbed it.

“You asshole!”

June was suddenly beside him. Jeremy recoiled.

“How do you keep doing that?”

June didn't reply.

Jeremy stared at her. June looked down at the scanner.

“Functional.”

“Barely!”

Jeremy checked the casing. A new scratch. Nothing worse. He looked at the Echo Dial. The metal plates had settled again. Still. Heavy. Ordinary. He rubbed one of the engraved curves with his thumb. For a moment, he could have sworn the groove continued farther beneath his finger than the width of the cuff allowed. He pulled his hand away.

“How much can this do?”

June began walking down the tracks. Jeremy hesitated, then followed.

“I asked you a question.”

“Yes.”

“How much can it do?”

“More when you understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Motion.”

June stepped onto one of the rails. Her shoes balanced perfectly. She walked without looking down.

“Speed.”

One step.

“Direction.”

Another.

“And, most importantly," She paused, "Intention.”

Jeremy climbed onto the gravel beside her.

“What about people?”

June stopped. Jeremy almost walked past her. She turned. Her feet remained facing forward for a moment too long before rotating after the rest of her.

“People are difficult.”

Jeremy felt a strange little disappointment.

“How difficult?”

“They resist.”

“Resist what?”

“Being told where they belong.”

Jeremy stared. June lifted one hand.

“Try.”

“Try what?”

“Move me.”

Jeremy laughed.

“I don’t know how.”

“You know enough.”

The Echo Dial clicked softly. Jeremy looked at June. He thought about pushing. Nothing happened. He focused harder. Something rotated beneath the clasp. June’s jacket twitched, then her shoulder shifted slightly backward. Jeremy’s eyes widened. June remained still. He tried again. The metal plates tightened fractionally. June staggered, one foot sliding off the rail. Jeremy laughed. An actual laugh.

“Holy shit.”

June looked at her foot, then slowly placed it back.

“Again.”

Jeremy did. The Dial began ticking, slowly at first, then faster. The field tightened. June’s hair lifted slightly Her hand slowed, moving as though underwater. Jeremy grinned. The ticking became frantic. Then pain stabbed behind his eyes. The mechanisms inside the cuff stopped all at once, the effect collapsed, and Jeremy stumbled. June was suddenly normal again.

“Fuck.”

“Living things resist.”

Jeremy rubbed his temple.

“You could’ve said it hurts.”

“I could have.”

He glared at her. June looked down the tracks. The rails began humming. Jeremy noticed it through his shoes first: a faint vibration, then stronger. The scanner crackled. A distant horn sounded somewhere beyond the trees. Jeremy looked toward the curve in the tracks.

“Train.”

“Yes.”

“We should move.”

June stayed where she was. Jeremy frowned.

“June.”

She stood between the rails, facing the distant bend. The vibration grew. Jeremy grabbed her sleeve.

“Come on.”

June looked at his hand, then at him.

“Do you think it would stop?”

“What?”

“For you.”

Jeremy let go.

“What kind of question is that?”

“The train.”

Another horn. Closer. June tilted her head.

“Would it stop because you are misunderstood?”

Jeremy stared.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Would it apologize?”

The rails trembled beneath them. Jeremy stepped off the track bed.

“June, move.”

“Would it care what you intended?”

His stomach tightened. The headlight appeared around the distant curve, small and growing. Jeremy looked at June. She remained centered between the tracks.

“Okay, seriously-”

“Motion does not care about fairness, Jeremy Cole.”

The horn screamed. Jeremy grabbed her arm. June did not move. It felt like pulling a fence post.

“June!”

“You must move it.”

“I CAN’T MOVE A FUCKING TRAIN!”

“No.”

June looked toward the approaching light.

“You can move yourself.”

Jeremy pulled harder. Nothing. The train was coming too fast. Too close.

“Are you fucking insane?!”

June turned her face toward him, perfectly calm.

“... You know what happens if you choose incorrectly.”

Jeremy froze. The Echo Dial contracted sharply, the metal segments pressing together around his wrist. The clasp turned beneath his skin.

Click.

Reality split.

In one path, Jeremy kept pulling. The train screamed closer. June remained immovable. Jeremy waited too long. He jumped. His shoe caught between the rail and one of the wooden ties. He fell; light swallowed everything.

Then-

Click.

Jeremy was standing several feet from the tracks, gasping. June stood beside him. The freight train tore past. Wind and noise slammed into him. Jeremy staggered backward, his whole body shaking. He could still remember the instant before impact, could still feel his ankle trapped, could still feel the certainty that he was going to die. June watched the train. Her hair did not move in the violent wind. Jeremy stared at her.

“You knew.”

“Yes.”

“You fucking knew!”

“Yes.”

“You could’ve killed me!”

“No.”

Jeremy’s face twisted.

“What?”

June finally looked at him.

“You chose correctly.”

The train roared between them and the forest beyond. Jeremy’s breathing came fast. His hands shook. He looked down at the Echo Dial, then back at June.

“You’re fucking crazy.”

“No.”

“You stood on the tracks!”

“Yes.”

“You made me-”

“No.”

June stepped toward him. Jeremy backed away. She stopped.

“You pulled me.”

He stared.

“You chose to remain.”

Another freight car thundered by.

“You chose to leave.”

Another.

“You know both.”

Jeremy said nothing. June’s voice softened.

“Isn’t that what you wanted, Jeremy Cole?”

The train passed. Noise drained from the world. The sudden silence felt enormous. Jeremy stared at the Dial. The engraved spirals looked different. One curve seemed tighter. Another seemed to end somewhere it had not ended before. Jeremy blinked. Everything was normal again.

“I don’t understand why you’re giving this to me.”

June stepped closer.

“You are tired.”

Jeremy laughed shakily.

“Yeah. No shit.”

“Not physically.”

He looked at her.

“You are tired of finding the correct response after people leave. Tired of understanding what you should have done when it is no longer useful.”

June’s eyes were very still.

“Tired of being told that your intentions do not matter.”

Jeremy looked away.

“Tired of losing arguments that only happen once.”

He swallowed. The hardware store returned to him. Lupe at the end of the aisle. The batteries in her hand. Her stupid smile. Zakira holding that hatchet like he was a serial killer. Mr. Alvarez looking at him. Everyone looking at him. For all the wrong reasons. Jeremy rubbed his thumb over one of the shallow engravings.

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

June looked down at his wrist.

“Whatever you decide.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want anything?”

“No.”

“Nobody just gives somebody something like this.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

June considered him. Measuring.

“You imagine many things you never do.”

Jeremy’s skin prickled. June stepped around him. Her shoulder passed close enough that it should have brushed his.

It didn’t.

“Perhaps you should find out which ones you regret.”

Jeremy turned.

June was several yards away... He had not heard her move.

“What the hell does that mean?”

She kept walking.

“June!”

She stopped.

Her head turned over her shoulder. Then the rest of her body followed.

Jeremy’s mouth closed.

June smiled.

“... You should hurt someone with it.”

Jeremy went cold.

“What?”

For a moment, June remained perfectly still-

Then something changed. Her head shifted slightly. Just enough to return to an angle a human neck was meant to hold. She blinked. Once. Twice. Her shoulders loosened. A sharp breath entered her lungs like she had forgotten she was supposed to breathe.

June looked at Jeremy.

Actually looked at him.

Confusion crossed her face.

“... Jeremy?”

He stared at her.

June looked around, her brow tightened.

“What the hell...?”

She rubbed at her temple, then her eyes dropped to Jeremy’s wrist.

The Echo Dial.

Her hand stopped.

“What is that?”

Jeremy looked down at it.

Then back at her.

“What?”

June’s confusion sharpened.

“That thing on your arm.”

Jeremy said nothing.

June looked down the tracks, then toward the road beyond the trees.

“Where are Claire and Zoey?”

Jeremy stared at her.

“What?”

“I was just-”

June stopped.

Her eyes moved slowly across the tracks again.

“I thought I was with them.”

Jeremy said nothing.

June looked at him.

This time her expression was uncertain.

Normal.

Annoyed, even.

“.... Why are you looking at me like that?”

Jeremy stared at her for several seconds.

Then sighed.

“Nothing.”

June frowned.

“Okay... ^weirdo.”

She looked at the Echo Dial once more.

Then at Jeremy.

Whatever question she had seemed to die before reaching her mouth.

June turned and walked away.

Jeremy watched until she disappeared between the trees.

Then he looked down at the Echo Dial.

Behind him, the scanner crackled.

Jeremy turned as a voice pushed through the static.

“—repeat, eastbound line is clear—”

He looked toward the tracks.

Then at the place where June had been standing.

Jeremy thought about Lupe.

Not for long.

Something beneath the square clasp turned once.

Click.

---

Interactions:
Cornell High.

---

---

The school looked wrong without cars in front of it.

Kari had seen Cornell High empty before. Summer break. Teacher workdays. Sunday afternoons when her mother forgot something in her office and dragged Kari along because she didn't feel like leaving her home alone. Those versions of the building had still felt temporary. Sleeping.

This one looked abandoned.

The parking lot was empty except for weeds beginning to push through cracks near the curb. A plastic bag had caught against the bottom of the chain-link fence and inflated whenever the wind moved through it. Several classroom windows had been covered from the inside, either with blinds or whatever teachers had found after the closure. The marquee near the road still displayed the same announcement it had the week everything stopped.

WELCOME BACK STEELHEADS!

The letters beneath it had started leaning.

Lupe stared up at the sign, rolling her eyes.

“That's depressing as fuck.”

Zakira adjusted the strap of her backpack.

“Everything is depressing to you.”

“No. Some things are sexy.”

“Name one.”

“Me.”

Zakira looked at her.

Lupe looked back.

Kari kept walking.

“I regret bringing the two of you...”

“You invited us,” Zakira said.

“Yeah, mami,” Lupe added. “At four-thirty in the fucking morning!”

“It was four thirty-eight.”

“That's worse!”

Kari carefully stepped over a crack in the pavement, one hand briefly pressing against her ribs when the movement pulled something unpleasant beneath her shirt.

Lupe noticed.

“Mami.”

“... I'm fine.” Kari immediately replied.

“You did the face.”

“What face?”

“Oh I don't know, that 'little white people pain face.'”

Kari stopped.

“I'm Black.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don't actually.”

Zakira walked between them.

“She means you grimaced.”

“I know what she meant.”

“Then why the fuck did you ask, mami?”

Kari glared at both of them and resumed walking toward the side of the building.

The entrance they were heading for was mostly hidden behind the gymnasium, past a narrow delivery lane and several dumpsters that smelled even worse now that no one was regularly emptying them. Kari had been through the door dozens of times. Her mother used it whenever she worked late and didn't feel like walking around to the main entrance. Kari reached into her jacket pocket. The key ring jingled.

Lupe stopped dead.

“Noooooooooooo...”

Kari looked back.

“What?”

“You stole the keys?”

Kari pushed her glasses up her nose with one finger, “I borrowed them, for your information.”

“From who, mami?” Lupe was barely containing her laugher. “Whoooooooooo?”

“... My mom.”

Zakira stared at Kari, who looked between them. She narrowed her eyes,

“What?”

Lupe slowly pressed both hands together.

“Dios, mios,”

“Lupe.”

“No, no, I'm sorry. I didn't realize who I was dealing with.”

Kari's eyes narrowed.

Lupe lowered her voice dramatically.

“Kari Wilson the criminal who steals from her own momma!” She said, jamming her elbow into Zakira who just rolled her eyes.

“... Shut up.”

“Breaking and entering.”

“With a key?”

“Possession of stolen property.”

“They are not stolen.”

“Betraying your own momma.”

Kari pushed the key into the lock.

“I am going to leave you outside.”

“Grand theft cafeteria.”

Zakira snorted.

Kari turned around so fast her ribs complained.

“... Really, Zakky?”

Zakira's mouth flattened.

“No.”

“You laughed.”

“I breathed.”

“You breathed funnily, like something was funny.”

Lupe was already losing it, but Kari muttered something impolite and turned the key.

The lock clicked and Kari pulled the door open. Darkness waited on the other side.

“You first, criminal.”

“Why me?”

“You have the getaway keys.”

Kari switched on her phone flashlight.

“You know what? This meeting was already a mistake.”

“Already?”

They stepped inside.

The door shut behind them with a heavy metallic sound.

Kari immediately looked back.

Zakira noticed.

Neither of them said anything.

The hallway beyond the gymnasium was exactly as Kari remembered it, which somehow made it worse. Trophy cases lined one wall. Posters advertising a homecoming dance that never happened hung crookedly beside classroom doors. Someone had left a stack of flattened cardboard boxes against a drinking fountain. The overhead lights were off, but pale evening light reached through the narrow windows in the classroom doors.

Their footsteps echoed.

Lupe looked down both ends of the hallway.

“Why does this school turn spooky when nobody's in it?”

“... That's everywhere, Lupe,” Zakira said.

Kari glanced over.

Zakira's expression tightened slightly.

For half a second, nobody spoke.

Then Lupe pointed at her.

“Exactly why I'm questioning this guest list.”

Kari sighed.

“... We're not doing this again.”

“We haven't done it once.”

“You've complained about it the whole fucking time,”

“Because you invited every crazy motherfucker and hoe you can think of.”

“I invited people who were at the warehouse. People with magic.”

Zakira adjusted her bag again.

“Who exactly did you invite?”

Kari hesitated.

Lupe stopped walking.

“Oh, no.”

“What?”

“That pause.”

“There wasn't a pause.” Kari rolled her eyes.

“There was a whole commercial break, mami.”

Kari continued down the hallway toward the cafeteria.

“I invited Tommy.”

“Fine,” Zakira said immediately.

Lupe shrugged.

“Nora.”

“Fine.”

“Ella.”

“Fine.”

“Tuyen.”

Lupe nodded.

“Vicky's homie but she's fine... when that bitch isn't around,”

“Daniel.”

Lupe blinked.

“The virgin, mami?”

Kari looked back at her.

“Daniel.”

“That's what I said.”

Zakira frowned.

“You don't know that he's a virgin. Unless...” Zakira stopped that train of thought there.

Lupe turned toward her.

“Zakira, that boy looks like he asks Jesus for forgiveness after holding hands.”

“Can we not speculate about Daniel's sex life?”

“His what?”

Kari stared at her.

Lupe smiled.

“Sorry.”

She was not.

Kari turned back around.

“Whatever Daniel is connected to fought that thing at the warehouse. He needs to be here.”

Kari continued walking.

“Lynn.”

Silence.

Kari looked over her shoulder.

Lupe frowned.

“Who the fuck is Lynn?”

Zakira looked equally confused.

“I don't know a Lynn.”

“She's new.”

“That answers nothing...”

“I know.”

“New from where?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you know anything about her?”

Kari frowned.

“She was involved enough that I thought she should be here.”

Lupe stared at her.

“That is the most suspicious thing you've ever said, and you literally stole keys from your momma.”

“Again, I borrowed them. I'm going to put them back when I'm done.”

“Where is Lynn from?”

“For the last time; I don't know.”

“Okay, so we're inviting strangers now.”

“She is not a stranger.”

“Do you know her?”

Kari paused.

Lupe threw both arms up.

“STRAN-GER.”

Zakira looked at Kari.

“How new?”

“I don't know. New enough that neither of you know her.”

“That's not a measurement.”

“And I didn't make a chart, Zakira.”

“You made a list.”

“That's different.”

“Barely.”

Kari pushed through the double doors separating the academic hallway from the cafeteria corridor.

“She's invited. Moving on.”

Lupe made a suspicious sound behind her.

“Vicky.”

“No,” Lupe said immediately.

Kari kept walking.

“She was at the warehouse.”

“Fuck no.”

“She has magic.”

“I care even less.”

Zakira glanced toward Lupe.

“What did Vicky do to you?”

“Everything, mami.” Lupe threw both hands into the air. “Watch, she’s gonna make the whole damn thing about herself. Somebody’s gonna be talking about how a monster ate their grandma, and she’ll be like-”

Lupe straightened her posture, pushed her hair back, and made her voice several octaves higher.

“‘Oh my God, you guys, I literally broke a nail at the warehouse. You have noooooooooooooo idea what I’ve been through!’”

She finished with an exaggerated shriek that echoed down the empty hallway.

Zakira stared at her.

“That impression came from the heart...”

“I’m just observant, mami.”

“More like angry.”

“I’m not angry.”

“You did a voice.”

“Because she annoys the fuck outta me.”

Kari glanced back at her.

“That still isn’t a reason not to invite her.”

Lupe pointed at her.

“See? That right there. You keep saying ‘reason’ like being irritating isn’t one.”

“It isn’t. I’m not casting a reality show, Lupe.”

“... To you.”

Kari just ignored her.

“Tyler.”

This time, both girls reacted.

Zakira groaned.

Lupe actually stopped.

“No.”

“He has magic.”

“He's Tyler.”

“And?”

“He's just a male Vicky.”

Zakira frowned.

“He is useful... that's all I can say about him.”

Lupe looked betrayed.

“Zakira, I thought you were my boo.”

“He can switch places with people.”

“He can switch places with my ass.”

Kari rubbed her forehead.

“See? This is why I didn't ask for your approval.”

“Clearly.”

“Lexi.”

Lupe stared at her.

Zakira looked away.

Kari slowed.

“What?”

Lupe's voice became very calm.

“Mami.”

“What?”

“... Why?”

“Because she was there.”

“A lot of people were there.”

“And I invited a lot of people.”

“And you couldn't find anyone better than her?”

“I guess not.”

“Voluntarily?”

“Yes, Lupe.”

“With your own fingers?”

Kari stopped walking.

“What exactly do you think is going to happen at this meeting?”

“I don't know anymore! Lynn might backstab us. Vicky is going to make me wish the monster ate my ass-" Zakira commented under her breath that neither Lupe or Kari could make out. "Tyler is going to act like a meathead. And Lexi?”

There was a pause.

“... She's going to be fuckin' Lexi.”

Zakira rubbed her temple.

Kari looked down at the keys in her hand. For several seconds, none of them moved.

Then Zakira stepped closer to the doors.

“... Who else?”

Kari shook her head.

“That's it. That's everybody who's coming.”

Zakira looked at her.

“Who's not?”

Kari's mouth twisted.

“Claire and Zoey.”

Lupe raised an eyebrow.

“They said no? I'm shocked.”

“They're looking for June.”

The humor faded from Lupe's expression.

Zakira was quiet for a moment.

“Still nothing?”

Kari shook her head.

“Even if there was a lead, they didn't tell me.”

Lupe looked down the empty hall.

“Fuck.”

Kari nodded.

“I asked them anyway. Zoey wanted to come, I think, but they're not stopping the search.”

“Good.”

Kari glanced at Zakira.

“Not good that June is missing. Good that they're looking.”

“I know what you meant.”

There was a brief silence before Kari added:

“Elsa isn't coming either.”

Lupe looked at her.

“Elsa? Ya girl?”

Even Zakira seemed surprised.

“I thought she'd be the first person here.”

“She wanted to be.”

Kari's fingers tightened slightly around the key ring.

“She has to stay with her grandmother.”

Lupe's expression softened.

“Everything okay?”

“I think so. Her grandmother just needs her right now.”

Zakira nodded.

“Then that's where she should be.”

“Yeah.”

Kari said it quickly.

A little too quickly.

Lupe studied her for a second.

“You wanted her here... didn't you, mami?”

Kari looked at her.

“... Of course I wanted her here.”

“Mhm.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Lupe.”

“I said nothing!”

Zakira looked between them.

“It clearly means something.”

“Can everybody stop analyzing me?”

Lupe folded her arms.

Then her eyes narrowed slightly.

“Wait. And that's the whole reason Claire and Zoey aren't coming?”

Kari hesitated.

Lupe's eyes narrowed further.

“Dios mios, another pause.”

Kari sighed, “... They also didn't like some of the people I invited.”

Lupe immediately pointed at Kari.

“SEE?”

“That doesn't mean you're right.”

“What's that dumbass name they call themselves? Oh, yeah..."Lupe finger quoted, “'The Terrible Trio' has spoken.”

Kari narrowed her eyes at Lupe.

^{“You don't even like Claire.”}

“I didn't say I liked her. Just that she does something right.”

Zakira looked at Kari.

“Who did they have a problem with?”

Kari looked toward the cafeteria doors again.

“Some of the same people you two did.”

Lupe nodded vigorously.

“Because we're right, mami. You should take this as a sign.”

“That remains unproven.”

“Democracy says otherwise.”

“That's not democracy.”

“Three people disagree with Kari. That's a landslide.”

“Claire and Zoey are two people.”

“I'm the third.”

“I understood the math.”

“Then respect the voters.”

Kari sighed.

“Claire and Zoey have their own priorities right now.”

Her voice softened slightly.

“June matters more to them than this meeting.”

Zakira nodded.

“She should.”

Kari looked at the cafeteria doors.

“I just hope they find her...”

There was a pause.

”... Alive.”

Nobody had anything funny to say after that.

After a moment, Zakira broke the silence.

“You said Tommy?”

“Yes.”

“Nora?”

“Yes.”

“Ella and Tuyen?”

“Yes.”

“Daniel?”

“The virgin.”

“Lupe.”

“Sorry.”

Again, she was not.

“Lynn.”

“Unfortunately,” Lupe muttered.

“You don't know her.”

“Exactly.”

Kari ignored her.

Zakira looked toward the dark cafeteria windows.

“And all of them said yes?”

Kari's mouth twisted.

“Not exactly.”

Lupe crossed her arms.

“Oh, good.”

“Some of them responded.”

“How many?”

Kari unlocked the cafeteria.

“How many, mami?”

“Enough.”

“That is not a number, mami.”

The lock clicked.

Kari pulled one door open.

The cafeteria beyond was enormous in the dark.

Long rows of folded tables had been pushed against one wall after the school closed. Chairs were stacked upside down on several of them, their legs jutting toward the ceiling. The serving counters sat empty beneath dead menu screens. Vending machines hummed near the far wall, two bright rectangles of color in an otherwise gray room.

Kari stepped inside as her shoes squeaked against the tile. She remembered lunch, people shouting across tables, someone always playing music from their phone too loudly, Vicky crossing the room with half the cheer squad around her, teachers pretending not to notice people leaving through side doors.

Normal things.

Now every sound came back to them twice.

Lupe stepped in behind her.

“Oh, this is horrible, mami.”

“You complain about everything, Lupe.”

“No, I mean this room is fucking haunted.”

“It isn't haunted.”

“You don't know that, do you, mami?”

Kari opened her mouth.

Closed it.

“Fair.”

Zakira walked toward one of the wall switches.

“Lights?”

“Only some of them.”

“Why?”

“We aren't supposed to be here. Let's not attract too much attention.”

Zakira flipped the switch.

Three fluorescent rows flickered to life.

One buzzed.

Another blinked twice before stabilizing.

The rest of the cafeteria remained dark.

Lupe looked around.

“Fantastic.”

Kari walked toward the center of the room and slowly turned. There were three exits she could immediately see. The main cafeteria doors. A side hallway near the kitchen. Emergency doors leading outside. Four if the serving area connected to the loading dock the way she remembered.

Good.

She had counted them before she noticed she was counting.

Zakira noticed her noticing.

“Enough ways out?”

Kari looked at her.

“Four.”

Lupe frowned.

“Four what?”

“Exits.”

Lupe's expression changed.

“Ooooooh....”

Kari looked away.

“We should move some tables.”

Zakira nodded.

Lupe still watched her for a second before clapping her hands once.

“All right, gang,”

Kari sighed.

“... Don't call us that,”

“Absolutely not, mami. We broke into a school with stolen keys to hold a witch meeting with a possible school shooter and a virgin with a demon-knight-thing as his Stand.”

“Daniel isn't-”

Kari stopped.

“Go ahead.”

Kari stared at her.

“Finish that sentence.”

“... I hate you.”

“That's what I thought.”

Zakira grabbed one end of a folded cafeteria table.

“... Are you helping?”

Lupe looked offended.

“I am emotionally supporting you, mami.”

“Help.”

“Fine.”

Lupe took the other end.

Kari moved toward another table.

Both girls looked at her.

“No,” Zakira said.

Kari stopped.

“What?”

“Your ribs.”

“I can move a table.”

“No.”

Lupe pointed toward the chairs.

“You can lead, mami.”

Kari narrowed her eyes.

“... I hate both of you.”

“Good,” Lupe said, lifting the table with Zakira. “Put it on the agenda.”

Kari watched them drag it toward the center of the cafeteria, then she pulled out her notebook. At least this part she could do. On the first clean page, she wrote:

WHAT WE KNOW.

Beneath it:

WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW.

Then:

WHAT WE DON'T KNOW.

Kari paused.

Her pen hovered.

Finally, she added:

WHAT WE DO NEXT.

Behind her, Lupe and Zakira argued about whether the tables should form a circle.

Kari looked up at the dark cafeteria.

At the empty serving line.

At the Warriors banner hanging crookedly above the far wall.

At the doors.

Four exits.

Enough.

^Hopefully.

She looked back down and underlined the last heading. For the first time since the mill, Kari was not going somewhere because a thread had pulled her there.

This time, she was asking everyone else to come to her.

Recollections: Where the Folds Meet

Gorge...............

Unknown | Gorge | He/It "My food!"

Description: Gorge is an enormous Pit-born creature built like a walking mass of hunger, weight, and impact. It towers over most people, its body swollen with unnatural bulk, sagging muscle, dense flesh, and layers of hardened fat thick enough to absorb punishment that would kill lesser monsters. Every movement makes the ground complain beneath it, and weak walls tremble before it even touches them. At first glance, Gorge seems almost stupid—slow, lumbering, and driven entirely by appetite. This is only partly true. The more it eats, the more animalistic it becomes. Feeding dulls whatever mind remains inside it, reducing him to hunger, violence, and the need to consume again. When full, he is at his most reckless and monstrous, tearing through obstacles and bodies with no concern for strategy. In starvation, his thoughts sharpen enough for patience, recognition, and cruel problem-solving. He watches. He waits. He chooses the easiest meal, the weakest structure, the route that traps the most prey with the least effort. This makes him especially dangerous after long periods without feeding, because the hunger does not weaken him enough to make him harmless; it gives the mind beneath the appetite room to breathe. Gorge came from the Pit, though no one knows whether he was born there, thrown there, or changed into what he is now. Some believe he was once one of countless things that survived by eating whatever the Pit discarded. Others believe the Pit made him as an answer to scarcity: a creature that could endure anything, consume anything, and keep moving no matter how much damage it took. Now that Cornell has begun to fall, Gorge wanders through cracks, tunnels, and unstable streets, drawn by warmth, fear, blood, and Lux. He is a disaster with a stomach. A moving collapse. A thing so heavy that his arrival feels less like an attack and more like a building deciding to fall in the shape of a body. Abstraction: Abominable - Ravenous Mass. Gorge’s Abstraction is centered on consumption, durability, and overwhelming physical force. His body is absurdly dense and difficult to kill. Blades sink shallowly or become trapped in meat. Bullets vanish into fat and muscle. Fire burns the surface but struggles to reach anything vital. Broken bones grind back into function through sheer mass and pressure. Even when wounded badly, he can continue moving as long as enough of him remains to drag the rest forward. His strength is monstrous. Gorge can smash through walls, crumple vehicles, tear open doors, and knock over smaller buildings or weakened structures by throwing his full weight into them. He is normally slow, but that slowness is deceptive. When properly motivated, he can launch himself forward in sudden bursts of speed, using his body like a living wrecking ball. These charges are difficult to redirect and devastating on impact, but they are crude; if he misses, the surrounding environment usually suffers instead. Gorge grows more dangerous the more he eats. Feeding restores damaged tissue, thickens his body, increases his strength, and pushes him deeper into animalistic hunger. A well-fed Gorge is harder to stop physically but easier to bait, distract, or redirect. A starving Gorge is less physically reinforced but far more calculating, capable of stalking prey, avoiding obvious traps, and waiting for victims to corner themselves. His senses are powerful and appetite-driven. He can track blood, body heat, breath, and fear, through walls or across long distances. He is especially drawn to injured targets, frightened groups, and Paranormals whose magic makes them feel “rich” to his hunger. Hiding from him requires more than silence; prey must control breathing, movement, scent, and panic. Gorge can swallow almost anything organic and some inorganic material if desperate. Flesh strengthens him fastest, but he can chew through wood, bone, drywall, metal, and concrete to clear a path. If trapped, he may eat his way free. If wounded, he may eat nearby bodies or pieces of himself to force regeneration. Despite his durability, Gorge is not invincible. He is heavy, slow to turn, vulnerable to unstable terrain, and dangerous even to himself when charging blindly. Starving him makes him physically weaker, but mentally sharper. Feeding him makes him stronger, but easier to manipulate through hunger. The safest strategy is never to fight him in a straight line. The second safest is to make sure he wants to eat something else.

Recollections: Where the Folds Meet

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Interactions: None.
The Steel Mill.

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The sound came from somewhere past the fence.

Kari stopped so hard that gravel scraped under her shoes. For one second, she thought it was the mill itself. Another groan of metal. Another pipe shifting in a building too old to keep pretending it was stable. But then it came again, thinner this time.

A voice.

Far away. Small. Strangled by distance and concrete.

Kari’s fingers tightened around the phone.

“Kari, where are you?”

She barely heard Zakira. Her attention had already gone ahead of her, pulled through the service road, through the leaning chain-link, through the open dark of the east entrance.

“I heard them.”

“No shit, we heard something too, mami,” Lupe snapped through the speaker. “Do not run toward it.”

Kari was already moving.

The fence gate was supposed to be locked. She knew that because everyone knew that. The mill had been closed for years, and adults liked to say “closed” like a padlock could make a place safe. But the gate hung loose now, chain snapped or cut or pulled apart, the metal links swinging gently in the wind. Kari pushed through, and the whole thing rattled so loud it made her teeth hurt.

“Camille!”

Her voice broke against the mill yard and came back wrong.

Camille.

Mille.

Ill.

She ran harder.

The ground changed under her feet. Gravel first, then cracked concrete, then something wet that made her almost slip. She looked down long enough to see dark water running in a line along the ground, except it was not flowing downhill. It crawled sideways toward the building, collecting in the seams between slabs like it was being pulled by a mouth.

Warning hit so hard her vision narrowed.

The mill was not just wrong. It was open.

Not a door. Not a hole. A place where the world had thinned until something on the other side had leaned its weight through. The air tasted like rust and flooded basements and old blood. The windows above her were broken black squares. The pipes along the outer wall trembled softly without steam moving through them.

“Kari, stop!”

“I can see the east entrance.”

“Stay outside!”

“The door’s open.”

“Of course the door’s open,” Lupe said, voice going pale with anger.

The entrance was a wide service door rolled halfway up, bent at one side like something had forced it from underneath. Beyond it was darkness, not complete, but layered. A few emergency lights still glowed inside, weak red bulbs throwing long strips over the floor. Water clung to the wall to her left in a vertical smear, climbing through cracks in the concrete. Camille’s picture had not been a trick of angle.

It looked worse in person. The water pulsed and Kari slowed at the threshold. Everything in her told her not to cross it.

Warning stayed uselessly quiet, because this was not danger approaching. This was danger already happening. Boundary Disturbance screamed about the mill itself, about the place being open, thin, rubbed raw between Cornell and somewhere else. But Emotional Thread was the thing that made her step inside.

Kersten and Camille were in there.

Their fear dragged at her so hard it hurt. It was not clean anymore. Not two separate threads she could follow easily. The mill distorted them, stretched them, bent them through walls and corridors until their panic smeared ahead of their bodies. Camille felt closer. Kersten felt lower. Or farther. Or fading.

Kari’s throat tightened.

”I'm at the door.”

“Mami?”

Kari stepped inside.

The mill swallowed her immediately.

Sound changed first. Outside, the wind had space to move. Inside, everything came back bent. Her breathing climbed the walls. Her shoes clicked under her and then answered from too many directions. Somewhere high overhead, a chain knocked once against metal. The red lights made the puddles look black. Old catwalks crossed above her in layers, their railings warped and rusted. The place smelled like iron, mold, hot dust, and something sour underneath.

Kari lifted the phone closer to her mouth as she muted her end for a second.

“Camille?!”

No answer.

She took another step.

Then another-

She turned mute off.

The concrete floor sloped where it should not have sloped. Not enough to see from outside, but enough to feel in her ankles. It pulled toward the right, toward a maintenance corridor marked EAST RUNOFF ACCESS. The sign hung crooked, one bolt missing, swinging slightly though there was no wind inside.

A wet click sounded from somewhere in that corridor.

Kari froze.

“Kari, leave.”

Kari could not answer.

The click came again. Slow. Heavy. Not a machine. Not water. Something thick moving against something hard.

Then a faint scrape.

A shoe dragging over concrete.

Kari’s throat closed.

The corridor narrowed around her, walls stained with rust and black water. Pipes ran along the ceiling low enough that she had to duck once. Her phone shook in her hand. The flashlight on it caught pieces of the hallway in jerks: peeling paint, wet footprints, a smear on the wall, a backpack ripped open near a drain.

Kersten’s backpack.

Kari stopped.

A sound came from farther in.

A deep breath.

Not Kari’s.

The corridor opened into a larger chamber.

Kari stepped into it, and the world dropped out from under her.

The room had been some kind of pump station once. Old equipment filled the space in dead rows: tanks, valves, hanging chains, wide pipes disappearing into the floor. Red emergency lights blinked overhead, too slow and uneven. Water crawled up the far wall in dark veins, defying gravity, pooling around broken gauges before sinking into cracks that should have led nowhere.

And in the center of the room was some type of creature.

Kari did not have a name for it.

At first, she only understood size.

It was enormous. Not tall in a clean way, not built like something meant to stand upright, but swollen into height by sheer mass. Pale flesh hung over slabs of muscle and hardened fat. Its shoulders were thick enough to block half the chamber. Its stomach sagged forward, slick with grime and dark stains, rising and falling with slow, greedy breaths. Its skin looked wrong in the red light, waxy in some places, bruised in others, yellow-green under the surface like old infection. Its mouth was too small for the size of its body until it opened.

Then it was not small at all.

Then Kari saw what it was doing.

Camille was in both of its hands.

Not held.

Pinned.

The creature had him lifted close to its chest, one massive hand clamped around his lower body while the other dug into him with slow, possessive force, dragging him closer every time he twitched. Its mouth was pressed into him, working wetly, feeding in heavy, pulls like it was its last meal. Blood ran down Gorge’s chin and disappeared into the folds of its neck. Every few seconds, its shoulders flexed, and Camille’s body jerked weakly in its grip.

Kari’s mind blanked.

Camille was alive.

That was the first thing her brain grabbed onto because anything else would have shattered her.

He was alive. Barely. His hand moved once against Gorge’s wrist, fingers opening and closing without strength. One arm hung at a bad angle. His face was turned toward the floor, eyes open but unfocused, mouth moving around words that did not reach her. He looked smaller than he should have. Not because he was small, but because Gorge made everything human look temporary.

Kersten was closer to the creature’s feet.

Or what was left in the red light looked like Kersten.

Emotional Thread screamed through Kari so violently she almost lost her balance.

Camille’s fear was still there. Raw. Choking. Alive. His thread thrashed in Gorge’s grip like a live wire. Kersten’s was weaker, fraying at the edges, collapsing into pain and numbness and then something Kari’s mind refused to name.

Kari made a sound that did not become speech.

The phone crackled near her cheek.

“Kari, what do you see?” Zakira asked.

It's head lifted.

Slowly.

It had been focused on Camille, devouring him like nothing else mattered in the world. Now its small, sunken eyes found Kari through the dark. The room seemed to bend around its attention.

Kari’s knees nearly gave.

“Camille...”

“Kari, get out.”

“It...” Kari’s voice cracked. “It has him.”

Kari had no plan. No weapon. No spell that could move something that size. Warning did nothing. Boundary Disturbance only screamed about the room itself. Emotional Thread gave her the horrifying certainty that if she froze, Camille would disappear into that mouth while she watched. Kari backed up one step.

The creature followed with its eyes.

Camille stayed in its grip.

Then Kari saw Kersten again.

The truth arrived all at once.

Gone in the way Isabelle had not been gone. Gone with an ending. Gone so clearly that Emotional Thread found the frayed edge and cut her on it.

Kari’s voice broke.

“It ate Kersten too.”

Lupe’s side of the call went silent.

For half a second, even the mill seemed to stop.

Then Gorge moved.

It was not fast at first. One huge foot dragged forward. Concrete complained under the weight. Its belly shifted. Its shoulders scraped a pipe, bending it with a shriek. Camille dangled from one hand, and the other hand reached toward Kari with slow, certain hunger.

Kari backed away.

“It’s eating them!”

“BITCH IF YOU DON’T RUN!” Lupe screamed through the phone.

That snapped something in Kari.

She screamed.

Gorge lunged.

She ran.

Her phone slipped from her hand.

It hit the concrete with a sharp crack, bounced once, then skidded under a rusted worktable. Zakira and Lupe’s voices spilled from the speaker, distant and tinny.

For all its weight, it moved suddenly, violently, like a wall deciding to fall forward. Its charge slammed through a row of old equipment instead of cleanly around it. Metal folded. A pipe burst from the ceiling, spilling dark water upward for one impossible second before it splashed sideways across the chamber. The floor shook so hard Kari stumbled, shoulder clipping the wall. She threw herself behind a pump housing as Gorge crashed into the wall where she had been.
Camille was still in its hand.

Kari pressed both palms over her mouth before she could make another sound.

Her whole body shook.

Gorge turned slowly.

Too slowly. That was the only reason she was still alive.

Its mouth opened.

A voice came out, low and ruined and thick with something that had never needed language until something tried to take from it.

“MY FOOD!”

It dragged one foot, then the other, head shifting as it listened. Its nostrils flared. It could smell her. Or feel her. Kari tried to make herself small, unreadable, quiet. But her fear was everywhere.

Kari’s eyes widened.

“No...” she mouthed.

Each step shook the floor. Its toes spread against the concrete, pale and dark-stained, too heavy to lift cleanly. It bent with a grunt, bulk folding over itself, and for the first time Kari saw how its face changed when it was close to food. Empty and sharp at once. Stupid with hunger, but not stupid enough to ignore a sound.

Gorge’s head lowered toward the floor.

Kari stayed behind the pump housing with both hands clamped over her mouth, trying to breathe through her nose without making any sound. It did not work. Every breath felt too loud. Every tremor in her chest felt like it moved the whole room. Her shoulder burned where she had hit the wall. Her sleeve was torn open. Cold water soaked through one side of her jeans. Somewhere under the rusted worktable, her phone lay silent. No Zakira. No Lupe. No one telling her what not to do.

Just Gorge.

The creature dragged one foot forward, then the other. Slow. Heavy. Patient in a way that made Kari’s stomach twist. It had stopped roaring. That was worse. The anger had gone quiet, buried under something more focused. Its nostrils opened and closed, sucking in the air. Its head shifted slightly from side to side.

It was smelling for her. It was not reading spells or threads for information. It was hunting the simple things her body could not hide.

Breath.

Heat.

Sweat.

Fear.

Kari squeezed her eyes shut and tried to make herself smaller. She pressed her back into the rusted metal, forced her breathing shallow, and tried not to shake. That only made her chest hurt worse. White Lux did not help. It wanted to notice everything: the warped pressure in the room, the wrong water on the walls, the damaged boundary around the mill, Camille’s terror, Kersten’s fading thread, Gorge’s huge body shifting somewhere too close. Her magic was making her afraid enough to give herself away.

Gorge made a low sound in its throat.

Camille was still in its hands. That was the worst part. Gorge had not forgotten him. One massive hand clamped Camille close, pinning him against its bulk, while the other held him like food it had not finished deciding how to eat. Camille’s body twitched weakly whenever Gorge shifted. Blood and water ran together beneath him, spreading slowly across the concrete. Gorge lifted Camille closer to its mouth.

Kari’s hand found the broken metal rod beside her before she realized she had moved. Her fingers closed around rust and old grease. The rod was heavy, useless, stupid. She lifted it anyway-then something clicked above her.

Kari froze.

Not Gorge.

The sound came from the ceiling.
Click.

Click-click.

A shape unfolded from the catwalk above the chamber.

At first, Kari thought it was a sheet of metal peeling away. Then it moved wrong. Too many joints. Too much thinness. A narrow body slid between the railings, long arms hooked around rusted beams, its back covered in bent metal scraps and wet gray hide. Its head hung upside down from the catwalk, face split by a vertical mouth lined with needle teeth. Thin cables or tendons dangled from its jaw, twitching like feelers.

It had been there the whole time.

Watching.

Kari stopped breathing. The thing’s head turned toward her. Then toward Gorge. Then toward Camille. It clicked again, louder. Gorge stopped. The enormous creature’s head lifted. For the first time since Kari had hidden, its attention left her. The smaller monster hit the floor lightly, too lightly for something that size, folding on all fours before rising halfway upright. It was thin where Gorge was massive, all stretched limbs and sharp angles, its ribs showing under slick skin. One arm ended in too many fingers. The other dragged a strip of rusted chain that had somehow grown through the flesh of its wrist.

It opened its mouth and shrieked.

The sound stabbed through the chamber.

Kari flinched behind the pump housing, nearly crying out. The shriek was not just loud. It was bright, piercing, full of panic and challenge and hunger. It bounced off the pipes and woke every dead machine in the room. Gorge turned fully toward it.

For one second, Kari understood what had happened.

The smaller thing had made itself louder. A moving body full of noise and panic, right in front of Gorge. It had put itself between Gorge and the rest of his meal. Gorge hated that.

The thin monster rushed first.

It was fast. Faster than anything that broken-looking should have been. It crossed half the chamber in a blur of clicking joints and wet feet, leaping over a broken pipe and throwing itself at Gorge’s side. Its teeth sank into the folds near Gorge’s shoulder. Its fingers clawed for purchase.

Gorge barely moved.

The smaller monster tore at him, ripping dark strips from skin and fat. Gorge’s body absorbed most of it. The wounds opened shallowly, then squeezed around the damage like the flesh itself was trying to swallow the injury. The thin monster shrieked again, angrier this time.

Gorge’s hand opened.

Camille hit the floor with a wet, broken sound.

Camille moved.

Barely.

Gorge did not look down at him.

The thin monster tried to leap away.

Gorge caught one of its legs and the thin monster thrashed, chain-arm scraping sparks across the concrete. It clawed at the floor, at Gorge’s wrist, at anything. Gorge lifted it off the ground with one hand. Its joints clicked wildly. Its mouth opened and closed around shrieks that broke into frantic chattering.

Gorge looked at it.

Then he bit down.

The sound was immediate and terrible.

Kari shoved her fist against her mouth so hard her teeth cut her knuckle. Tears streaked down her face. The thin monster convulsed in Gorge’s grip. Its limbs kicked against his chest. Its chain-arm whipped once, striking Gorge across the face with a crack that would have dropped anything human. He fed with both hands now, dragging the creature into his mouth, tearing into it with thick, possessive force. Pieces of metal and bone and wet gray flesh cracked between his teeth. The smaller monster shrieked until it could not. Its body folded in places bodies were not supposed to fold. Gorge pulled it apart like he was opening something wrapped too tightly.

Gorge ate faster.

That was when Kari saw the change.

His shoulders rose.

His back thickened under the skin, muscles swelling in slow, pulsing shifts. The torn places near his shoulder pressed closed. The bruised yellow-green color under his flesh deepened, then spread. His breathing changed from slow and heavy to wet and eager. He shoved more of the creature into his mouth, not chewing properly now, just crushing, tearing, forcing it down.

The chamber shook with every swallow.

Camille lay on the floor behind him.

Alive.

Somehow still alive.

Kari’s whole body leaned toward him before she could stop herself.

Gorge’s nostrils flared.

Kari froze.

Toward her breath.

Toward the tiny sound she had made when she moved.

Toward the heat of her body pressed behind rusted metal.

Kari went cold.

For one second, the smaller monster still hung from Gorge’s hands, half-eaten, twitching once. Gorge stared across the chamber, chewing slowly. Blood and black fluid ran from his mouth down his chest.

He remembered there was more.

Warning finally sparked, late and brutal.

Move.

Kari moved.

She lunged out from behind the pump housing and grabbed Camille under one arm.

He made a broken sound.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry-”

She pulled.

Camille barely moved.

He was heavier than he looked. Or she was weaker than she needed to be. His shoes dragged through the water. His hand slipped against the floor. Kari’s shoulder screamed with pain as she hauled him behind the valve assembly, trying to get him farther from the center of the room, farther from Gorge, farther from the thing that had already eaten Kersten.

Gorge took one step.

The floor complained.

Kari looked up.

He was still eating the smaller monster while moving.

That was the worst part. He did not choose between meals. He shoved the last of the thin creature into his mouth with one hand and reached for them with the other. His body had become more urgent, less careful. Feeding had made him stronger, but it had also stripped away the patience. Kari dragged Camille behind a rusted tank as Gorge’s hand slammed down where they had been.

The concrete cracked.

The shock knocked Kari off her feet. She hit the ground beside Camille, breath punching out of her lungs. For a second, she saw nothing but red light and black water.

Then a pipe burst behind Gorge.

Dark water exploded upward instead of down, spraying the ceiling and raining sideways. Gorge turned his head toward the motion, confused for half a second by the impossible flow.

Kari used it.

She grabbed Camille again, but his fingers weakly closed around her wrist. His mouth moved.

No sound came out.

Kari leaned closer despite every instinct telling her not to.

“What?”

Camille’s eyes shifted past her.

Behind.

Kari turned.

Gorge was coming around the tank.

Faster now.

Too fast.
Kari let go of Camille and threw herself backward as Gorge’s arm swept through the space where her head had been. The blow hit the tank instead. Metal caved inward with a shriek, and the whole thing tipped, tearing free from old bolts. Kari scrambled away on her hands and knees as the tank crashed between her and Camille.

“No!”

Gorge roared.

The fallen tank had cut off the direct path. Not by much. Not for long. Gorge slammed both hands against it, denting it deeper with each hit. The sound punched through Kari’s chest. One hit. Two. Three.

Camille was on the other side.

Kari pushed herself up, looking for a way around, but the chamber had changed. Or maybe panic made it feel changed. Pipes crossed where they had not been. The red lights blinked slower. The corridor she had entered through looked farther away than before. The mill was stretching again, folding distance around fear.

Gorge hit the tank again.

It moved.

Kari backed away.

“Camille!”

No answer.

Emotional Thread gave her a flicker.

Alive.

Still alive.

But barely at this point.

Gorge shoved the tank aside.

It screamed across the floor.

Kari ran.

This time she did not run deeper on purpose. She ran because every direction became the same when Gorge moved. Behind her, the monster charged, no longer slow, no longer patient. Each step landed like machinery dropping from a crane. He smashed through a row of pipes rather than turn around them. Kari reached the corridor and for half a second, she thought she was going to make it.

Then the floor dipped.

The concrete under her feet softened into the wrong angle, sloping sharply toward a drainage channel that had not been open before. Kari slid, caught herself on a pipe, and felt old metal tear into her palm. Pain flashed white.

Gorge slammed into the corridor mouth behind her and for one blessed second, his shoulders caught against the frame. Kari stared back at him. Gorge stared at her. His mouth opened, full of the remains of the smaller thing and his own endless hunger.

Then he pushed.

Concrete split.

The frame widened by force.

Kari turned and ran.

The corridor ahead was low and narrow. Her flashlight was gone with her phone, so she moved by red emergency light leaking from behind and the faint shine of water climbing the walls. Her breath came ragged. Her shoes slipped. Her torn sleeve slapped wetly against her arm. Behind her, Gorge tore through the opening with a sound like the mill being unmade piece by piece. He was too big for the corridor.

He came anyway.

His shoulders scraped both walls. Pipes burst against his body. Chunks of concrete fell around him. He did not slow. Feeding had made him reckless. Stronger. Hungrier. Dumber in the exact way that made him impossible to reason around. Kari ducked under a pipe and nearly fell.

Emotional Thread pulled back toward Camille.

It hurt.

It felt like leaving someone underwater.

^{“I’m sorry!”} she choked.

The words disappeared under Gorge’s roar.

A side door appeared on her left, rusted open just enough for a person to fit through. Kari threw herself at it. The gap scraped her ribs as she squeezed through, backpack catching for one awful second. She yanked hard, straps cutting into her shoulders, and tumbled into a narrower service passage.

Behind her, Gorge hit the doorframe.

The wall shook.

The opening was too small.

Kari crawled backward, coughing, one hand leaving bloody prints on the floor. Gorge’s arm punched through the gap, his fingers scraped inches from her shoe. Kari kicked away and hit a rack of old tools. Something fell with a clatter.

Gorge shoved harder.

The wall cracked.

Kari stumbled to her feet and ran down the service passage. It smelled worse here. Damp concrete. Burnt metal. Rot. The ceiling was low enough that she had to hunch. Every few feet, the wall pulsed with climbing water. The mill did not feel like a building anymore. It felt like a throat. Behind her, Gorge screamed.

The wall behind her cracked again.

Then again.

...

...

...

He was coming through.

Kari reached a fork in the passage and stopped for half a breath.

Left led down.

Right led toward a strip of gray light.

Emotional Thread pulled left.

Camille.

Still somewhere behind.

Still alive.

Barely.

The gray light pulled right.

Outside, maybe.

Escape, maybe.

Kari stood there shaking, blood running down her palm, Gorge breaking through the wall behind her, and for one horrible second, she understood-

Then Warning flared so hard the world skipped.

Right.

Now.

Kari went right.

The wall behind her gave way.

Gorge burst into the passage with a roar that shook rust from the ceiling.

Kari ran toward the gray light as the mill screamed around them, and behind her Gorge came faster, fed enough to be monstrous, hungry enough to keep chasing, dragging the whole building’s wrongness after him.

The gray light was not outside.

Kari realized that too late.

She reached the end of the right passage and skidded to a stop so hard her injured palm slapped against the wall. Pain shot up her arm. For one second, all she could do was stare.

The tunnel was collapsed.

Concrete, old brick, twisted rebar, and rusted pipe filled the passage from floor to ceiling. The strip of gray light came from somewhere beyond the debris, leaking through cracks too narrow for her hand, let alone her body. Dust drifted through the beam. Cold air breathed out from the other side.

Behind her, Gorge tore through the corridor.

The sound was getting closer.

Kari spun around, heart hammering. The passage behind her was too narrow, too straight, too stupid. No side doors. No ladder. No window. No miracle. Just broken walls, climbing water, and something too big to fit coming anyway.

“No, no, no, no—”

Gorge’s shape filled the far end of the passage.

He was wedged sideways for half a second, shoulders scraping both walls, head lowered, mouth wet with black fluid and gray meat. He pushed once. Concrete screamed. The walls gave him another inch.

Kari looked at the collapse behind her.

Then at Gorge.

Then back.

Her breath caught as she grit her teeth.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” She hissed.

Warning sparked again, brutal and immediate.

Kari understood.

She backed toward the collapsed wall, one step at a time, keeping her eyes on Gorge. Her body wanted to freeze. Emotional Thread still pulled back toward Camille, thin and fading behind walls and distance. Boundary Disturbance screamed from every surface around her. The mill felt less like a place now and more like a wound trying to close around them.

Gorge shoved forward again.

The corridor widened by force.

Kari swallowed hard and lifted both hands, as if that meant anything.

“Hey!”

Gorge stopped.

For one second, he only breathed.

Kari’s voice shook, but she forced it louder.

“Hey! Over here you fucking... you fucking stupid thing!”

His head tilted.

The motion was almost curious.

Then his nostrils flared.

Kari saw the exact moment he found her fear again.

His mouth opened.

No word came out this time. Just a low, starving sound that made the loose pipes tremble overhead.

Kari stepped sideways, pressing her back near the collapsed wall, close enough that dust coated her hair and shoulders. She could feel cold air leaking through the cracks behind her. Something green and damp touched the back of her neck. She flinched but did not look.

Gorge charged.

There was no build-up. No warning beyond the one already tearing through Kari’s skull. One second he was wedged in the passage. The next, he launched forward with all his weight, shoulders scraping sparks from the walls, hands dragging, mouth open. Kari threw herself sideways and hit the floor hard, rolling into the drainage channel as Gorge smashed into the collapse.

The impact erased sound.

For a second, everything became pressure.

The wall exploded inward. Pipes snapped with sharp metallic cracks. Dust and gray light burst over Kari as the whole passage shook. Something heavy struck her back. A chunk of brick bounced off her shoulder hard enough to leave a nasty bruise later. She curled into herself, arms over her head, screaming without hearing it.

Gorge crashed through the blockage. The collapsed wall gave under him like a rotten tooth knocked loose. The gray light widened into a broken gap. Air rushed through, wet and warm and full of green smell.

Not river smell.

Not mill smell.

Leaves.

Rot.

Rain.

Kari coughed, spat dust, and pushed herself up on shaking arms. Gorge was stuck halfway through the broken passage, his bulk buried in shattered concrete and twisted pipe. He thrashed once, roaring, and the remaining debris shifted around him. Kari saw the opening beside his left shoulder.

No time to think.

She crawled for it.

The gap tore at her satchel. A broken pipe scraped across her ribs. Rebar snagged her jeans and held for one awful second before she yanked herself free. Gorge’s arm swung blindly through the dust behind her, fingers smashing into the wall inches from her ankle. Kari pulled herself through-

Then she fell.

Not down far. Maybe three feet. Maybe ten. Her stomach flipped like the floor had forgotten where it was supposed to be. She hit something soft, rolled, and came up gasping with wet leaves stuck to her face. For a moment, she did not understand where she was.

The steel mill was gone.

No.

Not gone.

Changed.

Kari was in a room too large to belong underground. A massive industrial chamber stretched around her, wide enough to hold half the pump station and taller than the library. The walls were still steel and concrete, but they were split open by roots. Vines hung from catwalks in thick curtains. Ferns grew out of broken control panels. Moss covered the old machinery in soft green sheets. Trees had forced themselves up through the floor, their trunks wrapped around pipes and ladders like the mill had been dead long enough for a forest to claim the body.

Somewhere above, light filtered through a ceiling that should not have existed. Not sunlight exactly. Pale green, thick and sour, like the sky beyond the roof had been replaced by something under glass. Insects clicked in the leaves. Something small moved through the branches overhead and stopped when Kari looked up.

There was no doorway behind her.

Kari turned too fast and nearly fell.

The broken passage she had crawled through was not there.

Only a wall of vines and rusted metal, sealed tight as if it had always been that way.

“No.”

Her voice sounded wrong in the room. Too small. Too clean. The jungle swallowed the echo.

Kari stumbled to the nearest wall and shoved aside vines with both hands. They were real. Wet leaves slapped against her wrists. Roots had grown through the concrete in thick knots. She clawed at them anyway, searching for a seam, a gap, anything. No entrance. No exit. Just the room. Boundary Disturbance did not scream here.

That scared her more.

It did not feel safe. It felt distant. Disconnected. Like she had stepped into another version of the mill where Cornell’s rules had been replaced by something older and greener and even less interested in her survival. The wrongness was not tearing open. It had already settled.

This place had accepted itself.

Kari backed away from the wall, breathing too fast.

“Okay. Okay, think, Kari. Think..”

Her voice shook.

A low groan came from the wall behind the vines.

Kari froze.

Concrete cracked.

The wall bulged inward.

"... Food."

Gorge hit from the other side.

The impact shook leaves from the trees. Birds, or things shaped enough like birds to upset her, burst from the rafters in a panic. Kari stumbled backward as the vines trembled. Roots tightened around the wall like muscles trying to hold it shut.

Gorge hit again.

The vines split.

A massive hand punched through the greenery and concrete, fingers flexing in humid air.

Kari ran.

The room was huge, but open in the worst way. No corridors. No clean exits. Machinery rose in islands: rusted tanks covered in moss, conveyor frames buried under vines, old platforms swallowed by branches. Kari ducked behind a tree growing through the center of a cracked furnace and pressed herself against the bark.

Bark.

Inside the steel mill.

She almost laughed.

It came out as a sob.

Gorge forced himself through the wall.

The jungle room resisted him at first. Roots wrapped around his shoulders. Vines caught on his arms. Concrete clung to his bulk. Then he pushed, and the whole wall gave with a wet, grinding tear. He crashed into the room on hands and knees, dragging pieces of the previous passage with him.

For a second, he looked confused.

The air was different. The smells were different. Heat. Leaves. Wet soil. Living things everywhere.

His head lifted.

He breathed in.

Kari clamped both hands over her mouth.

Gorge’s nostrils flared.

The jungle had too many scents. Rot, insects, sap, wet bark, fungus, old metal, standing water. It bought her a second. Maybe two. Gorge turned his head slowly, searching, listening.

Kari sank lower behind the tree.

Her injured palm left blood on the bark.

She stared at it.

Too late.

A drop slid down the trunk.

Gorge’s head snapped toward her side of the room.

Kari stopped breathing.

He took one step.

Then another.

Each foot sank slightly into the moss-covered floor. Roots cracked under him. Vines dragged across his skin. The jungle seemed to dislike him, but not enough to stop him. Leaves trembled around his passing. Small things scattered through the undergrowth.

Kari looked around.

There had to be another way out.

There had to be.

She moved from the tree to a moss-covered tank, crouching low, keeping machinery between herself and Gorge. Her shoes sank into wet soil that had no reason to be there. The air was so humid her lungs felt coated. Sweat ran down her neck. She wiped it with her sleeve and immediately hated that she had moved. Gorge stopped and Kari froze behind the tank. His head tilted.

Listening.

Her breath was the loudest thing in the world right now. She pressed herself tighter against the tank and tried to breathe slower. In through her nose. Hold. Out through her nose. Too fast. Gorge turned.

One step.

Two.

The tank hid her from sight, but not from heat. Not from breath. Not from fear.

Kari looked over her shoulder.

The far wall was solid. No door. No window. Just rusted steel swallowed by roots and a curtain of vines so thick it looked like a forest wall. A catwalk ran above it, broken halfway across, leading nowhere.

Nowhere.

The room had no exit.

“No,” she whispered.

Gorge heard.

His hand came over the top of the tank.

Kari dropped flat as the metal caved inward above her. The impact rang through the room. She scrambled backward on her elbows, mud and leaves sticking to her clothes. Gorge’s fingers dragged down the tank’s side, peeling moss and rust with a horrible squeal.

Kari crawled under a fallen conveyor belt.

For half a second, she was hidden.

Then Gorge shoved the tank aside.

It toppled into a tree, crushing branches under its weight. The whole room shuddered. Kari crawled faster. Her bag snagged on a piece of metal. She yanked. It held.

Gorge’s feet hit the ground behind her.

She twisted, tearing at the strap.

“Come on, come on-”

The strap snapped.

Kari lurched forward, leaving part of the bag caught behind her. Not the notebook. Please, not the notebook. She did not have time to check. She scrambled out from under the conveyor and pushed herself up.

Gorge was there.

Directly in front of her.

His shadow covered her before his hand did.

Kari turned to run.

Gorge grabbed her.

His fingers closed around her middle and one arm, huge and hot and slick with blood and water. The pressure stole the air from her lungs. Kari’s feet left the ground.

For a second, there was no pain.

Just disbelief.

Then his grip tightened.

Kari choked, both hands clawing uselessly at his fingers. His skin was thick and damp and impossible to move. Her injured palm smeared blood across his knuckles. Her ribs compressed. Her shoulder screamed.

“No!”

Gorge lifted her closer.

His mouth opened.

The smell hit her first.

Rot. Meat. Metal. The smaller monster. Camille’s blood. Something old and bottomless.

Kari kicked once, weakly, her shoe striking his stomach and doing nothing.

White Lux flared in pure panic.

Not a spell.

A flood.

The jungle room snapped into unbearable clarity: every vine, every root, every pulse of moisture in the walls, every line where this version of the mill did not match the one she had entered. No exit. No door. No safe path. Only one thing mattered.

Gorge’s grip.

His breath.

His mouth.

Warning screamed.

Too late again.

Gorge pulled her toward his teeth.

Kari’s body locked.

Not because she wanted to freeze. Not because she had accepted it. Because there was nowhere left for her fear to go. Her legs kicked once, weak and useless. Her hands clawed at Gorge’s fingers until her nails bent. His grip did not loosen. His breath rolled over her face, hot and wet, thick with meat and rot and the sour stink of something that had eaten too much and still wanted more. His mouth opened wider. The inside was dark red and slick, lined with teeth that did not match each other. Some were flat and grinding. Some were long and jagged. Some looked broken and grown back wrong. Strands of black fluid stretched between them as his jaw lowered.

Kari tried to scream.

Nothing came out.

Warning screamed without words.

Too late.

[i]Too late.

[b]Too late.[/i][/b]

Then something hissed through the jungle room.

Fast.

Sharp.

Almost delicate.

An arrow struck Gorge in the mouth.

Not the cheek.

Not the jaw.

The mouth.

It punched past the lower teeth and buried itself deep into the wet dark behind them. Gorge’s head jerked back. His grip tightened hard enough that Kari saw white at the edges of her vision...

---

Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance OST - Ebony Wings

---

A second arrow followed.

Then a third.

Then a fourth.

Each one came from the far side of the room in a tight, controlled rhythm, cutting through vines and humid air with a sound like angry insects. They vanished into Gorge’s open mouth one after another. Small pouches tied beneath the arrowheads burst on impact, spilling dark seeds, powder, and damp packed soil across his tongue and throat.

For half a second, Kari did not understand.

Then green light moved inside his mouth. Deep green. Root green. The color of things pushing up through graves and sidewalks and old foundations because nobody had told them they were allowed to stop. Wood erupted between Gorge’s teeth, forcing itself into being. Thin roots snapped outward first, threading through gums, wrapping around teeth, lashing over the inside of his mouth. Then thicker growth followed, pale wood swelling from the arrow shafts in violent knots. Branches split and multiplied, stabbing across his tongue, wedging his jaw wider. Splinters drove upward into the roof of his mouth. Vines coiled around broken teeth and pulled tight.

Gorge choked.

Muffled by the sudden tangle filling his mouth.

Kari dropped half an inch in his grip as he convulsed.

Across the chamber, standing in the broken green light near a wall that had not had a door until something had made one, Zakira lowered one bow and already had another arrow drawn.

Her face was pale with terror.

Her hands were steady anyway.

“Kari!” She tried.

Kari could not answer.

Gorge twisted toward the sound.

Zakira fired again.

The arrow struck the wooden mass already choking his mouth. The seed pouch burst against the growth, and the wood thickened instantly, crawling deeper, branching through itself, becoming a plug. Gorge’s jaw strained against it. The wood cracked. Then grew over the crack. For one impossible second, Kari thought that might be enough.

Then Gorge bit down.

The wooden mass cracked.

Zakira’s face changed.

“No...”

Gorge chewed.

Not well. Not cleanly. Branches snapped between his teeth. Roots tore out of his gums with wet popping sounds. Splinters drove deeper into his mouth, but he did not stop. He crushed the living wood against his tongue, grinding it down with the same slow, horrible certainty he brought to meat. Sap and black saliva spilled over his chin. A branch punched through his cheek from the inside.

He ate that too.

Lupe stared.

“Oh, that is some bullshit.”

Gorge swallowed.

The motion traveled down his throat in a thick, visible pulse.

The wood was not stopping him, it was feeding him. His shoulders hitched wider. The burns along his hand tightened and split. The torn places in his mouth pressed around the splinters, swallowing them into meat. His jaw opened again, not all the way, not cleanly, but enough.

Enough to keep eating.

Enough to keep bringing Kari closer.

“Lupe, keep burning the hand!”

“BITCH, what does it look like I'm doing?!”

Neon-pink fire crawled over Gorge’s fingers, but his grip stayed locked around Kari’s ribs and arm. The surface blackened. Blisters rose and burst. Underneath, his flesh shifted, wet and dense, smothering the damage before it could go deep enough.

Kari choked.

“Can’t-”

Zakira drew another arrow - this one had no pouch beneath the head. Her fingers shook when she set it against the string. For one second, she could not see the whole monster. That was too much. Too big. Too alive in ways she did not understand. She forced her focus smaller.

Hand.

Green Lux ran down the arrow shaft, darker than before. Not leaf green. Not garden green. Something bitter. Wet. Venomous. It gathered around the arrowhead in a thin, trembling film.

Zakira breathed in.

Her fear narrowed.

“Rot,” she whispered.

She fired.

The arrow struck Gorge’s hand between two thick knuckles, right where Lupe’s fire had already blistered the skin.

The impact was small.

The effect was not.

Green-black Lux snapped outward from the wound like a bruise blooming too fast. Gorge’s flesh puckered around the arrowhead. Then it softened. The skin sagged, splitting in wet seams. Fat and muscle darkened around the wound, breaking down in an ugly circle that spread unevenly across his hand. Gorge made a sound that was not a roar - it was almost confusion.

His fingers twitched.

Kari sucked in half a breath.

Lupe saw the gap.

“Oh, you don’t like that, do you, fatass?”

She stepped forward and drove both hands out.

Neon-pink fire slammed into the rotting patch around the arrow. This time, the flame went deeper. The damaged flesh could not smother it cleanly. Fire licked into the split tissue, burning through softened meat and exposed channels where Gorge’s grip had begun to fail. The smell changed instantly: not just burned fat now, but spoiled meat cooking from the inside.

Gorge convulsed.

His hand spasmed open.

Kari slipped lower.

Gorge caught her again with two fingers and a thumb, crushing down reflexively.

Kari screamed.

“Again!” Zakira shouted.

“I’m trying!”

“Same spot!”

“... I fucking see it!”

Lupe focused the fire into a narrower stream.

Pink flame bored into the necrotic wound.

Gorge shook his arm violently, trying to fling the pain away, but the arrow stayed lodged in his hand. The venom effect was already fading. Zakira reached for another arrow, then stopped. Venom Arrow would not stack. Not cleanly. Not this fast. If she forced another one, it might bloom wrong, too shallow, too scattered, useless.

So she did not waste it.

She grabbed a seed arrow instead and fired into Gorge’s mouth again.

Not to stop him.

To make him choose.

The pouch burst against his tongue. Roots snapped outward, filling his mouth for a second time. Gorge snarled around them, already chewing, already breaking them apart. But his mouth was busy, his hand was burning, and Kari was slipping.

“DROP HER AL-FUCKING-READY!” Lupe screamed.

The fire brightened until the whole jungle room flashed neon pink. Zakira fired one more seed arrow into Gorge’s jaw. The wood burst open, tangled with the half-chewed growth, and wedged his mouth wide for one more heartbeat. Which was enough for Gorge to release Kari.

She hit the moss-covered floor on her side.

The impact knocked every thought out of her.

For a second, she could not move. Could not breathe. Could not understand that she was no longer in his hand.

Then Lupe was there.

She grabbed Kari under the arms and hauled backward with a panicked strength Kari would not have believed she had. Lupe was crying and furious and still burning, one hand dragging Kari, the other flinging messy bursts of pink fire toward Gorge whenever he leaned forward.

“... Move, mami! Move, move, move!”

Kari’s legs did not work right.

“But Camille-”

“I know...”

“He’s still-”

“... I KNOW!”

Behind them, Gorge spat half-chewed wood across the moss.

Then he swallowed the rest.

The burn on his hand smoked. The venom-blackened tissue sagged around the arrow wound, but already the edges were trying to close. His mouth worked around splinters and roots, grinding them down, turning the thing meant to stop him into fuel.

Zakira stepped between him and Kari anyway.

She drew another seed arrow.

Her hands were shaking now.

Her aim stayed level.

Gorge spat another clump of half-chewed wood into the moss. It landed with a wet slap, twitching once as the roots inside it tried to keep growing even after being crushed. Gorge’s mouth worked around splinters. His jaw cracked. Sap, saliva, and black fluid ran down his chin in strings. The burned hand twitched at his side, venom-blackened flesh sagging around the arrow wound.

Then the edges began to pull together.

Lupe saw it.

“Oh, fuck no.”

Zakira fired.

The seed arrow struck Gorge in the shoulder. The pouch burst against him, spilling dark soil and seeds across slick meat. Green Lux flashed. Roots snapped outward, trying to dig into him, trying to bind shoulder to neck, arm to chest, body to itself.

Gorge leaned into it, but the roots stretched.

Held.

For at least one second.

Then his shoulder rolled, and the roots tore out with wet popping sounds, dragging strips of flesh with them. Gorge barely reacted. The wounds pinched inward, pressure and mass forcing the damage closed before it could matter.

Zakira’s mouth tightened.

“That should have slowed him....”

“Hey, I don't want to hear 'should' right now, mami!”

Gorge took a step.

Lupe let go of Kari with one hand and shoved her backward.

“Mami, stay behind me.”

Kari almost laughed.

Not because it was funny. Because Lupe was five-foot-one, shaking, crying through rage, and standing between her and something that could eat cars if it got bored.

“Lupe-”

“Behind me, damn it!”

Lupe raised both hands.

The neon-pink fire around her fingers changed.

It tightened first, pulling inward from loose flame into bright, vibrating threads. Then it cracked. Sound entered it. A sharp electrical snap that made the air prickle against Kari’s skin. Pink light crawled up Lupe’s arms in jagged veins, brighter at her palms, white-hot at the center and neon at the edges.

The jungle room answered.

Leaves lifted. Fine hairs on Kari’s arms stood up. The insects in the rafters went silent all at once. Somewhere in the moss, old machinery clicked like dead switches remembering electricity.

Lupe’s eyes locked on Gorge.

She thrust both hands forward.

Neon pink Electricity hit Gorge in the chest.

The blast cracked across the room in a violent pink-white arc, splitting into branching lines as it struck him. For one beautiful second, it looked like lightning had found a body and decided to punish it. The electric brilliance wrapped over Gorge’s torso, snapped across his shoulders, jumped to the wet vines dragging against his skin, and exploded in tiny bursts where old metal fragments stuck out from the moss around him.

Gorge stopped.

Kari’s heart jumped with him.

The electricity crawled across him, snapping over fat, burned skin, saliva, blood, wet moss. Pink fire flickered underneath it, catching where the current kissed open wounds. Gorge’s muscles locked for half a breath.

Then the current died into him.

It did not travel deep. It did not seize his whole body the way it should have. It burned the surface where it touched, charring patches of skin, boiling moisture, blackening the edges of wounds. But Gorge’s body was too dense. Too thick. Too layered in fat and swollen meat and whatever impossible Pit-born mass held him together. The electricity could not find a clean path through him.

It scattered.

It sparked over him like weather over a mountain.

Gorge’s head lowered.

Smoke rose from his chest.

He moved again.

Lupe’s face fell for half a second.

“... You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

Zakira fired another arrow before Gorge could lunge.

This one struck the side of his neck. Seeds burst. Wood grew fast and ugly, hooking around his jaw, pulling his head sideways. Gorge’s neck muscles bulged. The roots strained.

“Again!”

Lupe screamed and fired again.

This time she aimed for the damaged hand.

The neon arc struck the venom wound.

That worked better.

Gorge’s burned fingers spasmed wide. Pink electricity dug into the softened tissue, snapping inside the split meat instead of sliding over it. His hand jerked open and closed, open and closed, like it belonged to something dead receiving commands from a broken wire. The arrow still lodged between his knuckles vibrated hard enough to blur.

Gorge roared.

Zakira’s head snapped toward Lupe.

“There! The rotted parts!”

“Yeah, I noticed!”

“Can you keep doing that?”

“For how long!?”

Zakira did not answer.

Gorge answered for her.

He ripped the wooden growth from his jaw with his good hand and shoved half of it into his mouth.

^{“I hate him.”}

He chewed.

Zakira fired again.

The arrow struck his knee. The pouch burst. Roots wrapped around the joint, crawling down into the moss-covered floor and up around his thigh. For a moment, Gorge’s leg locked. He stumbled, weight dropping heavily enough to shake leaves from the trees.

Lupe hit the same knee with electricity.

Pink-white arcs snapped around the fresh roots. The living wood conducted better than Gorge did. Light ran along the vines, through the wet seed-growth, into the places where the roots had bitten into his skin. Gorge’s leg buckled.

Kari sucked in a breath.

“That hurt him.”

Zakira’s eyes narrowed.

“The roots carry it.”

“So keep giving me roots!”

Zakira drew fast.

Too fast.

The next arrow wobbled when it left the string.

It struck Gorge’s stomach instead of his other knee. The pouch burst. Roots spread across his belly in a frantic green web. Lupe sent electricity through it anyway.

For one second, Gorge’s whole front lit up.

Pink brilliance raced through the root-web, burning it black, snapping against the slick folds of him. The smell was immediate and awful: scorched moss, burned meat, boiled sap. Gorge staggered backward a step.

Then he leaned forward.

The burned roots snapped, sank into the folds, and disappeared as he crushed them against himself.

Zakira’s breath hitched.

“No...”

Gorge took another step.

The floor sank under him.

Lupe fired a third burst.

Then a fourth.

Each one hit harder than the last, bright enough to turn the green room pink-white, loud enough to crack against Kari’s teeth. The arcs jumped to hanging chains, dead panels, old conveyor frames. A rusted control box on the wall burst in a shower of sparks. Vines caught fire in short, neon-edged flashes before the wet jungle smothered them.

Gorge kept coming.

The electricity burned him.

It did not stop him.

Black patches spread across his chest, shoulders, and burned hand. His flesh blistered. His mouth leaked sap and smoke. The venom wound on his hand opened again, sagging wider with each electrical strike. But underneath every injury was more mass. More wet density. More body waiting to absorb whatever they did.

Lupe’s arms shook.

“Why won’t you go down?!”

She threw both hands forward and poured everything into one violent burst.

The bolt hit Gorge in the face.

Pink-white light exploded across his eyes, mouth, and jaw. Electricity crawled between his teeth. Fire chased it, flaring through half-chewed wood and saliva. His head snapped back. The roar that came out of him broke into a choking, electrical bellow. For one heartbeat, Gorge stopped completely.

Zakira seized the opening.

She fired three seed arrows in a row.

One to the mouth.

One to the knee.

One to the burned hand.

The shots were not perfect, but they landed.

Green Lux burst in three places. Wood filled his jaw again. Roots lashed around his knee. Hard growth snapped over his damaged fingers, trying to force them open, trying to brace them apart before they could close around anyone else. Lupe dropped one foot back and drove electricity into all three growths. The room became pink and green violence. Roots lit up like wires. Gorge’s knee buckled. His burned hand jerked uselessly. His mouth choked around wood that sparked and smoked between his teeth.

Kari, half-collapsed against a mossy support beam, stared through watering eyes.

For one impossible second, she thought maybe this was it. Maybe not kill him, but enough to give them a window to escape.

Gorge fell to one knee.

The impact shook the chamber.

Lupe gave a broken laugh.

“Yeah! Stay down ya' bitch!”

Gorge’s hand slammed into the floor, his fingers dug into the moss and soil. Then he pulled himself forward. Zakira’s smile, barely there, died before it fully formed. Gorge chewed through the sparking wood in his mouth. His knee dragged against the roots until the growth tore apart, strips of flesh and vine coming loose together. His burned hand twitched against the wooden brace, then crushed through it by force, deadened fingers closing anyway. The electricity had scorched him. Zakira’s roots had slowed him. Venom had rotted part of his hand. His face was burned. His jaw was split at one corner. One eye had gone cloudy from the electrical flash.

And still, he stood.

Bigger than before.

Hungrier.

The half-eaten wood moved down his throat in a thick swallow.

White Lux made it cruelly clear.

Damage did not mean defeat.

Gorge’s body accepted injury like weather. It endured it, folded around it, ate what it could, dragged the rest forward. They could hurt him. They could delay him. They could make him angry.

They could not kill him here.

Zakira knew it.

Kari saw the exact moment her face changed.

“... We can’t kill him.”

Lupe’s fire flickered around her hands.

“Don’t say that, mami.”

“We just can’t.”

“Then we hit him harder!”

“... With what?”

The question cut through the room sharper than any arrow.

Lupe looked at Gorge.

Then at her own shaking hands.

Then at Kari, barely standing.

The anger on her face cracked, and fear showed through.

Gorge took one step.

Slow.

Heavy.

The jungle floor dipped under him.

Zakira drew another arrow, but now Kari could see the truth in it. Zakira was not aiming to kill anymore. She was aiming to interrupt. To redirect. To buy movement.

Seconds.

That was all they had ever been buying.

“Don’t fight him straight,” Kari whispered.

Lupe looked back.

“What?”

Kari swallowed, throat raw.

“He’s too heavy. Too slow to turn. He breaks things when he charges.”

Gorge’s nostrils flared.

His cloudy eye fixed on them.

Kari forced herself to look around the room, through the pain, through the pink afterimages, through the green light pressing against everything.

No exit.

No door.

No safe path.

But there were walls.

Roots.

Catwalks.

Old machinery.

The place where Gorge had forced himself through.

The wound in the room.

“We don’t kill him.”

Gorge lowered his head.

Preparing to charge.

Pink electricity dug into the softened tissue, snapping inside the split meat instead of sliding over it. Gorge screamed. Not in pain exactly. In offense. His entire arm jerked sideways, the seed-grown wood around his neck snapping apart as he twisted. Zakira ducked when one splintered branch flew past her face. Gorge slammed his damaged hand against the ground once, trying to crush the feeling out of it. The jungle room shook.

Kari stared. Not at Gorge. At the floor. At the wall behind him. At the wall he had already broken through. Her thoughts were moving strangely now. They could not kill him. That much was obvious. Zakira's arrows hurt him. Lupe's fire hurt him. The electricity hurt him more when they gave it somewhere soft to go. And none of that mattered enough. Every wound closed. Everything he ate made him worse. Every second they stayed here was another chance for one of them to end up in his hands.

Kari's eyes moved across the room. Broken machinery. Collapsed conveyor. Trees growing through furnaces. The first hole in the wall, still dripping vines and cracked concrete around the edges. Gorge had made that. Not the room. Not the rift. Him. Kari's breath caught.

“Wait.”

Lupe looked back at her like she had lost her mind.

“What?”

Kari pointed across the room.

“The wall.”

Zakira did not look away from Gorge.

“What about it?”

“He got in here through one.”

Gorge pushed himself upright. His burned hand hung low at his side. Already, the blackened tissue was tightening.

Lupe's eyes widened.

“Oh.”

Kari looked toward the far side of the jungle room. The wall there was different. She had noticed it before. Steel beneath vines. Concrete in places. Roots spreading across it in thick braided knots. But now that she was actually looking, really looking, White Lux caught along its shape. Not a vision. A relationship. The wall belonged here. And somewhere behind it, something else did too. A corridor, maybe. Another room. Something built. Something closer to the mill she remembered. Kari could not see through it. She did not know where it led. But it led somewhere.

“We can't beat him.”

Lupe snapped around.

“Thanks, mami, who would have thought?!”

“No, listen to me!”

Kari's own voice surprised her. Lupe stopped. So did Zakira. For half a second. Gorge did not. He started toward them. Kari pointed at the far wall.

“We make him open it.”

Zakira finally looked, then back at Kari.

“How?”

The answer came immediately. Kari hated it.

“We piss him off.”

Lupe stared at her. Then Gorge. Then Kari again.

“... Oh, that's easy.”

“Lupe.”

“What? He already pissed me off first.”

Gorge charged.

“MOVE!”

The three scattered. Gorge hit the rusted frame where they had been standing. Metal folded inward with a scream. The impact threw moss and wet soil into the air. Kari ran left. Her ribs hurt. Her shoulder hurt. Her head hurt. Her whole body felt like something someone had dropped down a staircase. She kept running. Behind her, Gorge tore himself free from the machinery and roared.

“FOOD!”

His voice shook leaves loose from the branches overhead. Kari reached the far wall and slapped one bloody palm against it. She pointed toward a section half-hidden behind a curtain of vines. Zakira ran toward her.

“You sure?”

“No.”

Zakira's face tightened. Kari grabbed her wrist.

“But it's thinner.”

“That is not the same thing!”

“I know!”

Lupe screamed from across the room.

“CAN YOU TWO BITCHES CONFESS YOUR LOVE FOR ONE ANOTHER SOME OTHER TIME?!”

Gorge was after her. Lupe ran backward, both hands raised, throwing bursts of neon-pink fire into his face. The flames splashed across his forehead and cheeks. Gorge barely slowed.

“Yeah, come get me! I'm the most tasty snack here, fatass!”

“LUPE!”

“What?! You said piss him off!”

“I DIDN'T SAY GET EATEN!”

Gorge swung. Lupe ducked so hard she fell onto one knee. His hand passed over her head and demolished the trunk of a young tree behind her. Wood exploded. Lupe scrambled up.

“Okay! Okay! He's mad!”

Kari looked between Gorge and the wall. Distance. Direction. The path between them. Her mind wanted more information. She forced herself to stop. She did not need more. That was the mistake. Always one more detail. One more confirmation. One more piece before she committed. There was no time.

“'Kira!”

Zakira looked at her. Kari pointed toward Gorge's injured hand.

“Can you make him turn?”

Zakira's eyes moved. Hand. Wall. Gorge. A plan formed between them without needing the whole sentence.

“I can make him react.”

Zakira pulled an arrow. Lupe finally reached them, breathing hard enough to choke.

“... Please tell me we're leaving, mami.”

“We're going to stand in front of the wall.”

Lupe blinked.

“... Girl, what.”

“Then we're going to move.”

“Girl.”

“He's going to hit it.... Ideally.”

“Mami.”

Kari grabbed both of Lupe's shoulders.

“I know!”

Her voice cracked. All three of them went still. Kari's hands were shaking. Her eyes burned.

“I know, okay? I know this is stupid. I know.”

Gorge ripped the broken tree from the floor behind them. Roots came free with wet snaps. Kari looked at the wall, then at her friends.

“But I don't have any better ideas!”

That was the truth. No dramatic revelation. No secret answer. Just the best thing she had. Zakira nodded first.

“Okay.”

Lupe looked at her.

“Seriously?”

“Do you have something else?”

Lupe's mouth opened. Closed. Gorge threw the tree.

“GET DOWN!”

They dropped. The trunk crashed against the wall above them. Concrete cracked. Kari stared at the fracture spreading through the surface. A smile almost happened.

“Oh my God...”

Lupe looked up.

“What?”

“He already started.”

Gorge came toward them. Not running yet. Walking. One huge step after another. The room moved around his weight. Kari backed against the wall. Zakira stood to her right. Lupe to her left.

“... This is a terrible idea.”

“You're one to talk,” Zakira rolled her eyes.

“Hey, that was one time.”

“If it wasn't for me, that monster would be eating your yams.”

Lupe coughed, tried to force sarcasm when she replied, “Oh no. Not my yam-”

“... Can you two focus? This isn't the time.”

“I'm focusing.”

Gorge stopped thirty feet away. His nostrils opened. Closed. Blood. Sweat. Burned flesh. Three terrified girls pressed against the same wall. His mouth opened.

“... FOOD.”

Kari's stomach dropped. Warning hovered at the edge of her mind. Not yet. Gorge leaned forward. Kari's heart hammered.

“Wait.”

Lupe looked at her.

“Bitch?”

“Wait.”

Gorge took one step. Then another. Zakira raised her bow. Kari grabbed it and pushed the tip down.

“Not yet.”

“Kaaaaaaaaaaaari—”

“He has to commit.”

Gorge moved faster. The distance narrowed. Twenty feet. The floor shook. Fifteen. Lupe's electricity started crackling around her fingers.

“Mami—”

“Will you just fucking wait?!” Zakira snapped.

Ten. Gorge's mouth opened. His body lowered. Kari felt reality stutter. There. Warning ripped through her.

“...NOW!”

Zakira fired. The arrow struck Gorge directly in the burned hand. Green Lux bloomed through the damaged flesh. Gorge jerked. Lupe screamed and drove both hands forward. Pink electricity struck the arrow. The current buried itself into the rotting wound. Gorge's whole arm spasmed. His body twisted. But he did not stop. He charged harder. Exactly what Kari had been hoping for. Exactly what every terrified part of her body now deeply regretted.

“MOVE!”

Zakira went right. Lupe went left. Kari tried to move. Her leg gave. For half a second, she stayed exactly where she was. Gorge filled the room in front of her. Too big. Too close. Again. Not again. Lupe caught the back of Kari's shirt. The fabric tightened against her throat. Then Kari was yanked sideways so violently she hit the ground and rolled. Gorge missed them by inches.

He hit the wall.

The sound was enormous. Concrete detonated outward. Steel screamed. Roots tore apart. The entire section of wall folded around Gorge's body and then disappeared with him into the space beyond. A cloud of dust swallowed the room. For a second, nobody moved. Then came another crash from the other side. Then another. Gorge had not stopped at the wall. He had gone through whatever was behind it too.

Kari coughed.

“... Did it work?”

Lupe stared through the dust.

“Mami, if it didn't, I'm going to shove my foot so far up your-”

Zakira was already moving.

“Get up.”

Kari pushed herself onto one knee. Her legs shook. Zakira grabbed one arm. Lupe grabbed the other. Together they hauled her upright.

The hole in the wall was ugly. Not a doorway. Not even close. A human-sized gap existed mostly because Gorge had taken the rest of the wall with him. Broken rebar curled inward. Roots hung torn and dripping. Beyond it was a dark industrial corridor, unmistakably part of the mill. Real concrete. Real pipes. Real rust. Kari had never been so happy to see ugly fucking concrete in her life.

“Let's go.”

They went. Lupe climbed through first, kicking loose concrete out of the way. Kari followed. Zakira came last, bow held tight against her chest. The second Kari crossed the broken wall, Boundary Disturbance slammed back into her skull. She nearly fell. The mill. Cornell. Wrongness. Everything returned at once.

“Oh, fuck—”

Zakira caught her.

“What?”

“Nothing. Nothing, we're back.”

“Back where?”

“I don't know. Hopefully home!”

Lupe threw her hands up.

“Great!”

A crash sounded somewhere ahead. All three froze. Gorge. Not behind them. Ahead. Somewhere beyond the pipes and intersecting corridors, he was moving. Then came another impact. Metal folded. A machine screamed across the floor. Gorge roared.

“FOOD!”

Lupe whispered.

“Oh, I am sick of looking at this ugly mother-”

Kari grabbed her hand.

“Run.”

They ran. The corridor split almost immediately. Left. Right. Straight ahead into darkness. Kari stopped.

“No, no, no—”

Zakira grabbed her shoulder.

“Which way?”

“I don't know.”

A roar echoed through the pipes. Closer. Lupe looked over her shoulder.

“Bitch, you're the magical information girl-bitch!”

“Shut up! I'm trying!”

Left felt wrong. Straight felt nothing. Right—her thoughts skipped. For half a second she saw Lupe moving before Lupe moved.

“Right!”

They turned. Their shoes hammered against the concrete. Behind them, Gorge hit something. The whole corridor shook. A pipe burst overhead. Steam exploded into the intersection they had just left.

Lupe looked back once.

“I think we lost him.”

“Bitch, shut up before he hears us!”

Another crash. Then another. Gorge was tearing through the mill instead of following its corridors. Kari realized that was both good and extremely bad.

“No, I mean he doesn't know where we went!” Kari said quietly.

Zakira understood first.

“The room must have confused his scent. Shuuuuuuuut up!”

Gorge groaned somewhere behind the walls.

“FOOOOOOD...”

“I AM NOT THE LOUDEST THING IN THIS BUILDING RIGHT NOW!”

Lupe threw a middle finger up behind her.

“SEE?!”

They reached another intersection. Kari grabbed the wall. Her head was spinning. Everything inside the mill felt wrong. Too many directions. Too many disturbances. Camille's thread—

Kari stopped.

She almost reached for it. Almost. Zakira grabbed her.

“Kari. We have to go.”

Camille. Somewhere behind them. Maybe alive. Maybe not. Kari's throat closed.

“... I know.”

Zakira did not let go. A sudden silence followed. Then, somewhere deep inside the mill, Gorge stopped thrashing. Kari's blood went cold.

Lupe whispered.

“... Aw shit.”

A low sound rolled through the corridors. Breathing. Listening. Kari covered her mouth. All three stood completely still. The mill creaked around them. Water dripped somewhere. One drop. Two. Three. Gorge's breathing stopped.

“Go.”

They moved. Not running yet. Fast. Quiet. Shoes placed carefully against broken concrete. Lupe's fire disappeared completely. Zakira held her arrows against the bow so they would not rattle. Kari led now. Not because she knew the way. Because every few seconds, she waited for the tiny wrong feeling and chose another direction. Left. Down a stairwell. Across a service platform. Through a door hanging off one hinge. The mill unfolded around them in broken pieces.

And behind them—

BOOM.

Gorge had started again.

Lupe jumped.

“Jesus fucking Christ!”

Another crash. Then a roar. Then metal ripping apart. He was moving in the wrong direction. Something might have caught his attention. Kari knew it was either going to get away... or not. Long as he was going away from them that was all that mattered. Eventually, they reached the pump chamber. Kari recognized it immediately. The red emergency lights. The vertical water. The blood. Her stomach folded inward. Kersten. Camille. She stopped. Lupe ran into her back.

“Mami, why did we stop?”

Kari stared toward the center of the room. The place where Gorge had been feeding. Empty. Blood everywhere. No Gorge. No Camille. Her chest tightened until it hurt. Zakira stepped in front of her.

“Don't.”

Kari looked at her.

“We don't know.”

“No.”

“I can check.”

“Kari.”

“I can—”

A crash echoed from somewhere below them. Closer than before. Zakira grabbed her hand.

“We came here for you.”

Kari's face twisted.

“I came here for them.”

“I know.”

“I can't just—”

Lupe grabbed Kari's other hand. Her voice was quieter now.

“Mami.”

Kari looked at her. Lupe was still crying. She had probably never stopped.

“We gotta go.”

Kari looked back once. At the blood. At the impossible water crawling upward. At the phone still somewhere under the rusted worktable. At everything she was leaving. Then she let them pull her.

They ran through the narrow maintenance corridor, past Kersten's torn backpack, up the sloping concrete that had felt wrong on the way in. The steel mill shook behind them. Gorge hit another wall. Then another. He was not following their path. He was making his own. That was worse somehow.

The east entrance appeared ahead. Dark blue night beyond it. Real sky. Kari almost cried at the sight of it. Lupe did.

“Oh my God.”

“Don't stop.”

Nobody stopped.

They burst through the service door and into the mill yard. Cold air hit Kari's face. The difference was violent. No jungle heat. No mold-thick corridor. No blood smell except what they had brought out with them. Just night. Grass. Rust. The river somewhere beyond the property.

They ran across cracked concrete, past dead machinery, past a loading platform collapsing under weeds. Behind them, the mill groaned. Not naturally. Something hit the inside wall hard enough to send dust from the broken windows.

Lupe screamed, flipping off the monster.

“HE'S STILL FUCKING LOOKING!”

“KEEP GOING!”

They reached the fence. The gate hung open. Kari's foot caught on the broken chain. She went down hard. Zakira stopped immediately. Lupe doubled back.

“No, no, no, get up, mami!”

Kari tried. Her legs finally refused.

“I can't-”

“Yes, you can.”

“I actually can't!”

“You absolutely fucking can!”

Lupe grabbed under one arm. Zakira took the other. They lifted her between them. Kari screamed when her injured shoulder pulled.

“Sorry.”

“Don't apologize, just go!”

They half-ran, half-dragged her through the gate. The service road stretched ahead. Too long. Kari stared at it.

“No.”

Lupe looked at her.

“What?”

“The road.”

“What about it?”

“It's doing that thing again.”

“What thing?!”

“THE LONG THING!”

Lupe looked at the road. Then at Kari.

“Mami, I don't know what that means!”

“It means don't look at it!”

“Oh, perfect!”

They ran anyway.

Behind them-

BOOM.

Every bird in the nearby trees exploded into the sky. The mill's upper windows rattled. Something huge moved behind them in the dark. Not outside. Still inside. Gorge roared again. Distant. Furious. Hungry.

“FOOD! FOOD! FOOD! MORE! MORE! MORE! EAT! EAT! EAT!”

The words rolled through the dead mill and out across the yard. Kari's legs found strength they did not have. She ran. All three of them did. Nobody spoke. Nobody looked back. The service road bent toward Main. The mill disappeared behind warehouses and trees, but the sounds followed. Crash. Metal screaming. Silence. Then another crash somewhere else. Gorge tearing apart rooms. Checking corridors. Breaking through walls. Looking for three smells that had already escaped him.

Kari could still hear him when they reached the first streetlight. Lupe bent forward with both hands on her knees. Zakira grabbed the back of her shirt.

“No.”

Lupe wheezed.

“Giiiiiirl—”

“Keep moving.”

“I am about to fucking throw up.”

“Throw up while walking.”

“Fuck you.”

“Walk.”

Kari laughed. She did not mean to. The sound escaped her in one broken, exhausted burst. Lupe stared at her. Kari laughed again, then covered her mouth, then started crying. Her whole face just folded.

Lupe immediately straightened.

“Oh, mami...”

Kari shook her head.

“No.”

She wiped her face too hard.

“No, no, we have to keep moving.”

Zakira watched her carefully. Kari turned toward the road. Her hands were shaking. Her clothes were soaked. Her shoulder screamed. Her ribs hurt every time she breathed. Kersten was dead. Camille was still in there. Maybe. Kari didn't have the strength to check his thread right now. Isabelle was somewhere she could not reach. The town was breaking. The mill had opened into a jungle that should not exist. And somewhere behind them, Gorge was still tearing rooms apart because he could not understand where his food had gone.

Kari started walking. Lupe came beside her. Then Zakira. Behind them, far inside the steel mill, something enormous slammed into another wall. The sound reached them several seconds later. None of them turned around. Kari listened anyway. She could not help it.

They could faintly hear him scream about food. Kari's fingers closed around the friendship bracelet on her wrist. She kept walking.

“Next time, don't go into the fucking mill! Dumbass ho.”

Kari laughed through her tears. Zakira shook her head.

“What in the hell were you thinking?!”

“You have to understand,” Kari laughed. ”I can't lose anyone else.”

The laugh cracked halfway through.

Lupe stopped walking.

“Don't say that shit like it's funny.”

Kari's smile disappeared.

“I'm not.”

“You almost died.”

“I know.”

Kari looked between them, exhausted.

“I could feel Kersten and Camille in there. They were terrified. What was I supposed to do?”

“Wait for us. Call for backup. Literally anything, bitch!”

“And if waiting got them killed?”

“And if going in got you killed?”

Kari went quiet.

Lupe wiped angrily at her face.

“You think you're the only one who can't lose people?”

That hit harder than anything else.

Kari looked down.

“No.”

“Then stop acting like everyone else can take it.”

For a few seconds, the only sound was Gorge crashing through something far behind them.

Kari nodded.

“I'm sorry.”

Lupe sighed and stepped closer.

“Yeah. You should be, dumbass.” Lupe rolled her eyes.

Then she pulled Kari into a careful hug.

Kari winced immediately.

“Ow-

Lupe loosened her grip.

“Shit. Sorry.”

“It's okay.”

“No, it ain't. You look like Jeremy's mom after she got that train ran on her.”

Kari laughed weakly.

“That's... so mean. I mean he deserves it, but it's still awful.”

“Shut up.”

They started walking again.

After a few steps, Kari slowed.

Her fingers tightened around the bracelet.

Zakira noticed.

“Don't.”

Kari looked toward the mill.

“... I just need to know.”

“Kari.”

Lupe moved closer beside her.

“Mami... Just leave it alone. I know you got that stupid know-it-all magic, but not every question needs an answer.”

Kari tried.

She really did.

But uncertainty had already gotten inside her.

She reached.

Emotional Thread stretched back toward the steel mill, faint and exhausted. Past the roads. Past the broken gate. Past concrete, blood, impossible water, and rooms that should not exist.

Kari searched for Camille.

Nothing.

She tried again.

Not the tangled interruption she felt when she searched for Isabelle.

An ending.

The thread was there only in the way a cut string was still a string.

Kari stopped walking.

Lupe and Zakira stopped with her.

Neither asked.

They saw her face.

Kari's hand closed tightly around the bracelet.

She sighed.

Far behind them, Gorge screamed again.

This time, none of them said anything.

They kept walking.

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Recollections: Where the Folds Meet

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Interactions:
Cornell Park > Naomi Chen's Store.

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Kari picked Cornell Park because she already knew what it felt like when it was normal.

That mattered now. Normal had become a baseline, not a comfort. She needed somewhere familiar enough that she could tell when the shape of it changed. Cornell Park sat near the edge of town, close enough to the woods that the walking paths always felt a little too willing to disappear into them. In the afternoon, it was full of people pretending nothing had happened. Kids screamed near the swings. Parents talked on benches. Someone jogged past with earbuds in. A dog barked at nothing near the tree line. The town had gone back to moving as if it had never seen bodies hit concrete.

Kari sat on a bench with her notebook open on her lap and her friendship bracelet wound tight around her fingers. She had stopped writing the names of her first spells like they were mysteries. Warning, Boundary Disturbance, and Emotional Thread were not easy, but they were hers now. She knew the difference between Warning and anxiety. She could tell when Boundary Disturbance was Cornell reacting instead of her own nerves. Emotional Thread no longer drowned her every time she touched it. Not always, anyway. That was why she was here for something else.

At the top of the page, she had written:

Rift Reading?
Fracture Sense?
Bad names. Fix later.

Under that:

Goal: get information from damaged spaces. Not just “wrong.” What kind of wrong?

Kari stared at the last sentence for a while, then underlined information twice. White Lux was supposed to be information magic. That sounded clean until she remembered information did not arrive in neat sentences. It came as pressure, timing errors, direction, dread, noise, emotional residue, and half-formed meaning that could be real or could be her brain trying to make sense of trauma. Her spells worked because she had learned how to sort the signal from the mess. This new thing had no sorting system yet.

“Okay,” she muttered. “Baseline first.”

She closed her eyes and let Warning settle at the edge of her awareness. It did not flare. No half-second lurch. No cause-and-effect skipping. No immediate danger. Good. The barking dog was just a barking dog. The kid shrieking at the slide was playing, not dying. Her own heartbeat was fast but not prophetic. Kari wrote: Warning clear. No immediate threat.

Then she shifted into Boundary Disturbance. That one felt different. Less like checking the air and more like pressing her palm against Cornell’s pulse. The park stayed loud around her, but beneath it, something strained. Not breaking. Not yet. Just pulled too tight in one direction. Her attention slid toward the old drainage tunnel at the far end of the slope, half-hidden by weeds and chipped concrete. The same place she had noticed twice before. The same place everyone else kept ignoring.

Kari wrote: Boundary confirms disturbance near tunnel. Stable? Persistent? Not active?

She tested Emotional Thread next, carefully. She did not reach for everyone. That was the old mistake. Instead, she found one familiar thread first. Elsa. Warm, distant, distracted, alive. Kari let herself hold it for only three seconds before releasing. Then she tested the people nearby without grabbing onto them. Surface impressions only. A parent’s impatience. A child’s excitement. A jogger’s exhaustion. Nothing like collective panic. Nothing like a crowd sensing danger. Nobody else felt the tunnel.

That made it worse.

“Of course not,” Kari whispered.

A boy ran past with a melting ice cream cone, laughing while red syrup dripped down his wrist. For one second, it looked like blood. Kari blinked, and it was just cherry dip. His mother called after him to slow down. The dog near the trees started growling.

Kari looked up. The drainage tunnel sat dark at the bottom of the slope. The air around it did not shimmer. No monster crawled out. No rift split open. No red sky appeared on the other side. It was just a tunnel. That was what made it hard. The wrong things never had the decency to look wrong long enough to be studied.

Kari turned to a fresh page.

New spell attempt 1: read disturbance, not detect it.

She inhaled slowly and focused past Boundary Disturbance. Not “where is the wrongness?” She knew where. The question was different. What did the wrongness know? When did it happen? Did something pass through? Was it opening, closing, waiting? Was there an other side, or was Cornell just folding in on itself?

The moment she pushed, the park noise thinned.

Kari kept her eyes open. That was one of her new rules. Closing her eyes made everything feel more dramatic and less reliable. With her eyes open, she could compare the impression to reality. The tunnel remained still, but her perception caught on its edges. The concrete mouth seemed deeper than it should be. The inside was not black anymore, exactly. It had depth behind the depth, like a hallway drawn over another hallway. Kari wrote without looking down: depth distortion. pressure. maybe old opening?

The pressure sharpened. For half a second, she smelled wet stone, rust, and something hot under it. Her hand tightened around the pen. Then the impression collapsed.

A basketball bounced somewhere behind her.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Then it bounced from inside the tunnel.

Kari went still.

Warning did not flare. That was almost worse.

The basketball bounced again.

No one else reacted.

Kari forced herself to keep breathing. The kids behind her were still excited. The parents were still bored. The dog was afraid, but dogs got afraid of garbage bags and squirrels. None of that proved anything.

“Okay. So either that was real, or I’m being fucked with...”

Her own voice came back from the tunnel.

Okay.

Kari’s fingers went cold.

She wrote: voice mimic. unreliable. do not answer.

Then, under that:

Do NOT answer.

The pen dragged harder than intended.

The park path beyond the tunnel stretched in the corner of her eye. Kari refused to look directly at it at first, because she already knew what Cornell did when it caught her watching. The path was wrong by maybe twenty feet. No, thirty. No, not distance. Relationship. The path was taking longer to reach the same place. A road could not procrastinate, but that was the closest phrase her brain had. This was exactly the kind of thing she wanted the new spell to explain.

Recent? Maybe.
Used? Maybe.
Direction? Down, but not physically down.
Pressure? Inward. Or outward. Both?
Residue? Fear, but not human.
Color? Red, but not light.
Sound? Breathing. Dragging. Her voice.

Kari stopped before the impressions could pile higher. Her nose had started bleeding. Not badly. Just one warm line slipping over her lip. She wiped it with the back of her hand and stared at the red smear.

“... That's a sign I need to take it easy... well, easier...” she said under her breath.

The swings creaked behind her, she turned this time.

The swings were full of children.

They were moving normally. One kid kicked his legs. Another shouted for her dad to push higher. A third twisted in circles until the chain wound tight. Nothing sat there that should not have been there.

Kari looked down at her notebook. Under her notes, in handwriting close to hers but not exact, a new line had appeared.

... You are asking the wrong side.

Kari stared at it, but she did not panic. Not fully. No one nearby had noticed her page writing itself. That meant either the phenomenon was selective, internal, or not fully physical. That was a useful thought.

Kari wrote beneath it: Wrong side of what?
The red ink bled through the paper before she finished the question. Not normal bleeding. The letters sank downward, like the page had depth inside it. For a second, Kari could see the words falling through layers of white paper into a dark place below.

Then the page snapped back.

Her written question was gone.

So was the line that had appeared.

Kari’s mouth went dry.

The new spell had not given her information. It had given her a conversation she could not verify, with a thing she could not identify, about a place she did not understand. Borderline useless. Worse than useless, maybe. It was the kind of useless that made her want to keep trying.

That was dangerous.

She shut the notebook.

The moment she did, the park returned at full volume. Kids yelling. Dog barking. Parents talking. Cars passing. A lawnmower starting somewhere down the block. The world resumed its performance without missing a cue. Kari sat there for another ten seconds, notebook closed beneath both hands.

“Nope.”

Her voice was flat.

“Not doing this today....”

The tunnel said nothing. She packed slowly because moving too fast felt like admitting something had chased her off. Notebook in bag. Pen in front pocket. Bracelet back around her wrist. She checked her phone. 4:42 PM. Then 4:42 PM again. Then 4:43. Good enough.

As she stood, the path to the gate looked longer than it should have.

Kari stopped and stared at it.

“I can see you doing that.”

Nothing changed for a second.

Then the path shortened back to normal.

Kari did not write it down.

She left the park without looking toward the tunnel again. Behind her, the dog stopped growling. The swings kept creaking. A woman laughed too loudly near the benches, and everyone else kept being normal because normal was apparently the town’s favorite lie.

Once Kari reached the sidewalk, she realized her hands were still shaking. Her head hurt, her nose felt raw, and her notebook seemed heavier than it should have been. The new spell had no name, no method, no safety limit, and no reliable output. It had told her almost nothing except that the damage near the tunnel could answer back.

Or pretend to.

She wiped at her nose again, checked that no blood remained, and looked down Main Street. The library could wait. She needed water, tissues, and something with sugar before she tried to turn psychic nonsense into notes.

Naomi Chen’s store was only a few blocks away.

Kari adjusted her bag on her shoulder and started walking, keeping to the side of the street where the storefront windows reflected her clearly. After the park, she wanted proof that only one of her was following along. The store looked normal from the outside, which immediately made Kari distrust it.

The front windows were clean enough to reflect the street behind her. Shelves of snacks, cheap phone chargers, household supplies, bottled drinks, and overstocked seasonal decorations crowded the inside. A bell chimed when Kari pushed the door open, too loud in the quiet. The air smelled like plastic packaging, floor cleaner, and old cardboard. Somewhere near the back, a refrigerator hummed with a low mechanical rattle that kept almost becoming a growl whenever Kari stopped paying attention.

Naomi stood behind the counter, sorting receipts with the kind of focus that made everything around her look inefficient by comparison. She did not greet Kari. She only glanced up once, saw her, and went back to her papers.

Naomi felt wrong.

Not Boundary wrong. Not Cornell wrong. Not rift wrong. Just absent. Kari had gotten used to people carrying emotional noise whether they meant to or not. Irritation, boredom, worry, hunger, grief, impatience. Even strangers had some kind of loose thread around them if Kari brushed close enough. Naomi had nothing. No emotional direction. No readable pressure. No pull. It was like trying to listen through a wall and realizing the wall was not blocking sound. It was eating it.

Kari stared too long.

Naomi looked up again.

“... Can I help you, young lady?”

Kari jolted and immediately hated herself for it. “No. Sorry. I’m just looking.”

“Then look with your eyes. Not your entire body.”

Kari blinked. “... What?”

“You’re standing in the aisle like you’re waiting for the building to tell you something.”

Heat crawled up Kari’s neck as her eyes shifted. “I’m not doing anything.”

“... That's usually what people say before they do something.”

Kari pressed her lips together and turned sharply toward the drinks, pretending she had meant to go there the entire time. She grabbed a water bottle from the cooler. The refrigerator rattled again behind the glass, and for half a second, the bottles inside looked too far back, like the shelf extended deeper than the store allowed. Kari shut the cooler door fast.

Naomi noticed.

Of course she noticed.

Kari moved to the tissues next. She picked up a small pack, then put it back, then grabbed it again because her nose still felt raw from the park. Her hands were shaking a little. She tried to hide that by reaching into her bag for her wallet, but her fingers brushed the edge of her notebook instead. The notebook shifted, half-sliding upward.

“... Take your hand out of the bag.”

Kari froze.

The store went quiet in a way it had not been quiet a second ago. The refrigerator still hummed. The street still moved outside. But the space between them locked.

Kari slowly pulled her hand free. Empty.

Naomi’s expression did not change. “Open it.”

“... Excuse me?”

“Your bag. Open it.”

Kari stared at her. “I didn’t steal anything.”

“I did not ask what you did. I told you to open the bag.”

Kari’s grip tightened around the water bottle until the plastic crackled. “You can’t just accuse me because I’m nervous. Everyone's nervous these days.”

“You walked in, stared at me, stood in my aisle muttering, touched five things, put your hand in your bag, and jumped every time the cooler made noise. Believe me young lady, if I called you nervous, I'd be generous.”

“... Maybe I’m nervous because you’re talking to me like I’m already guilty.”

Naomi’s eyes narrowed. “You probably are guilty.”

That hit harder than Kari expected. Not because it was true, but because it was so blunt. So certain. After the park, after the tunnel, after her own voice coming back wrong, this was almost worse because it was ordinary. No monster. No magic. Just an adult deciding what Kari was before Kari could explain herself.

“I just came in for water and tissues.”

“Then pay for water and tissues.”

“I was-.”

“After opening your bag.”

Kari looked toward the windows. A woman passed outside without looking in. A car rolled by. The whole town kept moving past the glass like this was not humiliating, like Kari was not standing in the middle of a convenience store being treated like a thief because she could not stop flinching at things no one else noticed.

She opened the bag.

Notebook. Pens. Wallet. Phone. Gum wrapper. Keys. Nothing else.

Naomi leaned forward slightly, scanning without touching. Her gaze paused on the notebook.

“What is that?”

“A notebook.”

“I know what a notebook is, child.”

“Then why did you ask?”

Naomi’s mouth flattened.

Kari immediately regretted saying it, but not enough to apologize.

“Open it.”

“No.”

The word came out before she had time to soften it.

Naomi’s eyes sharpened. “No?”

“No. You wanted to see if I stole from you. I didn’t. My notes are not your business.”

“They became my business the second you walked into my store.”

“Owning a store doesn't mean you can boss people around, Ms. Chen.” Kari narrowed her eyes.

The second she said it, Kari felt something ugly twist in the air between them. Not magic. Not exactly. Just the sudden awareness that she had chosen the worst possible response

Naomi went very still.

Kari swallowed, but she kept her ground. Her heart was beating too fast now, Warning still silent because this was not that kind of danger. This was social danger. Adult danger. Reputation danger. The kind that did not trip her spells but still made her feel cornered.

Naomi stepped out from behind the counter.

Kari stiffened.

“I have had teenagers steal from this store before you even learned to talk, young lady,” Naomi said. “They smile. They lie. They cry when caught. They say it was a mistake. They say they were just nervous. Do not stand in my store and tell me what I am allowed to do.”

Kari’s face burned. “And do not stand there and act like you're more important than you actually are because you own a stupid store!” Kari spat back. Kari immediately regretted saying it, but not enough to apologize.

That stopped Naomi for half a second.

Kari heard her own breathing. Too loud. Too uneven. She forced the water and tissues onto the counter with more control than she felt.

“I’m buying these. Then I’m leaving. That's it.”

Naomi stared at her for a long moment.

Then she returned behind the counter and rang up the items with quick, clipped motions. The total flashed green on the register. Kari paid with cash because she did not want to wait for the card reader. Naomi gave her the change without touching her hand.

For one second, Kari almost said something else. Something about Cornell. About how everyone was pretending. About how maybe Naomi of all people should know what it looked like when a place was rotting under clean floors and organized shelves.

Instead, she took the bag.

Naomi spoke before she reached the door.

“Next time, leave the bag at the counter, young lady.”

Kari turned back.

Her throat felt tight. Her hands still shook. The blankness around Naomi remained absolute, unreadable, infuriating.

“There won't be a next time, because I’ll just go somewhere else.”

Before Naomi could get out another word, Kari was out of the store. The loud ring of the bell ringing was the last Kari heard of Naomi's store.

Outside, Kari walked half a block before stopping beside an empty storefront. She pressed the heel of her hand against her eye and breathed through the sting in her throat. She would not cry because Naomi Chen was rude. She would not cry because a store owner thought she was stealing. She would not cry because for one horrifying second, being unreadable had felt more frightening than the tunnel speaking back.

She pulled the notebook out just enough to check the cover.

Still there.

Still hers.

No new writing.

Good.

Kari shoved it back into her bag and looked toward the library at the end of the street. Her headache had not gone away. The water helped a little. The sugar could wait. The embarrassment would have to wait too.

She needed context.

If the park could answer back, if Naomi could vanish from her senses while standing right in front of her, if Cornell could stretch roads and then pretend it had done nothing, then Kari needed more than practice.

She needed records.

She started walking toward the library, keeping her reflection in the storefront windows beside her the whole way.

---

Interactions: None.
The Library.

---

---

It was thirty minutes past six in the afternoon when Tommy gave up on the second book on the subject I of witchcraft and the occult. He sat it off to the side, on top of the first one. The first one had held his attention for longer, a book about a variety of demons that were said to be conjured up on certain days of the year. But that wasn’t of much use to him. The second was about what the term “witchcraft” actually meant, and skimming bits of various chapters yielded nothing practical either. It was a small wonder that these books were found in the back corner where few went, and not up front where most people actually read around relatively comfortable tables. He sighed and leaned back, pulling out a notepad and a pen from his jacket.


Ancestors- Talk to them?

Tyler- Teleports around. Has to trade places with something.
Vicky- Smacks things with a magic bat. ??
Me- Make things that thin, order them around.

Try to do Tyler’s thing. Throw a card. Didn’t work
Witchcraft? Nope.

He sighed. Tommy didn’t have much to go off of. Could he fill another card with something that understood this stuff better? Did it even work like that?

There were monsters running around in the damn streets, what did anything even work like?

He turned around in his chair and stood up, going for a third try with a third book.

---

Kari nearly misses him at first. The occult section was tucked away in the back of the library, a place most students avoided. In recent days, Kari saw why those shelves no longer felt right. Not haunted or magical, but heavier with possibility. Her eyes lingered on the abandoned books beside him. Demons, witchcraft, occult history. Her chest tightened. She knew someone else was watching, too. Tommy looked exhausted in that specific way like someone who’s stopped sleeping well but still pretends to have things under control. Kari immediately recognized it because she was feeling the same. For a moment, she thought about leaving. Then her eyes caught the notepad: ‘Ancestors — Talk to them?’ ‘Tyler — Teleports around.’ ‘Vicky — Bat.’ Kari froze. The world shifted with that awful little lurch again—the kind she’d noticed since the warehouse. Not a vision, just recognition. Too many threads connecting.

“... You were there too.” It wasn’t really a question. Her voice was quieter than she intended.

Tommy stopped, book in hand. He turned around and looked at her. He didn’t really talk to Kari, but he didn’t really talk to most people. She was usually pretty quiet from what he understood, not quite in the social periphery he knew.

She was there. Everyone was.

”Yeah. Last time I accept an invitation to a party,” He snarked, deadpan. ”Almost died, and now-“ He dropped his half-assed notes onto the table.

”Now Cornell’s on fire.”

”It might be a lil more than on fire at this point.”
Kari sighed-then stopped herself. Hesitantly glancing at the door, before the question quietly left her lips, ”May I have this seat?”

”Yeah, sure.” He took a different one, sitting back down with a book titled Fairies and Folklore: 800 Years of Myth. ”I’m not convinced anyone else has been back here since the Cold War, everything’s so old. Since when did people read stuff like this until now?”

”It's Cornell, half the city is illiterate” Kari deviously snorted, before she glanced at the book then up at Tommy, ”Question, have you seen anything in these books about something called ‘The Owl’, or something called ‘Observation?”

As she asked, a smile crept on her face but she fought it down. ”... Or White Lux.”

”Nope. Not unless there’s a dictionary back here. You find anything about a lion? Or people who make monsters?” He asked. ”Because I’ve got basically nothing.”

Kari paused for a moment where the silence was louder than any word. “Why do you ask that?”

”When I got magicked, or Kindled, whatever it’s called, I saw people who could make monsters. I can do it too, but they just left me to figure most of it out. Magic is real, they said, then they left in a hurry.”

He shoved the book aside and withdrew his deck of cards. They felt different in his hand ever since. Tommy opened the top and flicked the flat end with his finger, causing a card to jump up.

Then his woven coyote creature he called the Watcher appeared, curled up at his feet half-asleep.

”Abracadabra.”

Kari stared at the creature a second too long. Not the card trick but the creature itself. The way it breathes against the floor… Her stomach dropped.

”... Okay,” Kari couldn't help but laugh. ”So we are doing THIS now.”

She laughed again… Thin and nervous. Her gaze flicked between Tommy, the creature, and his deck of cards.

“My ancestors basically told me I’m supposed to watch people. Protect them. Figure things out before they happen.”
A pause.

“Which feels like a really unfair thing to dump on someone before disappearing, by the way.”

She glances back down at the creature.

”That’s more than I got. They just told me to be proud and that I’d know what to do. And I damn well don’t, so I’m just grasping. For whatever looks magic. And this?” He gestured at the books. ”Not much better so far.”

Kari let out another quiet laugh, though this one sounded more tired than amused. Her fingers drummed nervously against the table before stopping altogether.

“Yeah, mine acted like they were dropping off a group project before class started.”
A pause.

” But, I don't think we are going to find the answers in normal occult stuff.

”I don’t know where else to look.” He leaned back in his chair. ”Doubt anyone else does, either. I’d like to, maybe get to figuring out what got done to Cornell while I’m at it. But… Unless there’s a demon named Stolas going around planting magic trees, then yeah, these books aren’t working for me.”

Kari stayed quiet for a second, eyes lowering toward the books scattered across the table.

“... What if we’re looking in the wrong Cornell?”

The words left her before she fully thought them through.

She immediately rubbed at her forehead.

“Okay, that sounds insane but hear me out.”

A nervous laugh escaped her.

“But ever since the warehouse, things keep feeling…” She searched for the right word. “Off. Like parts of the city don’t fully match anymore.”

Her gaze flicked briefly toward the shelves around them.

“And the monster wasn’t 'normal'. None of this is normal. So maybe the answers aren’t either.”

A pause.

“Maybe there are places overlapping ours. Other versions of Cornell. I don’t know.”
She slumped back slightly in her chair.

“I just know these books feel…” Kari gestured vaguely at the occult section.

“Too small for whatever’s happening.”

Tommy blinked.

”...I’m not sure I know what “normal” means. Not anymore, whatever happened, it happened for a reason. So- So maybe you’re right. I don’t know how you could be, or what that means, or how the fuck there’s more than one Cornell.”

They didn’t know this stuff existed, and now they were literal wizards. What else did they not know? Or how much digging they had to do?

”I think there’s an explanation somewhere. I’ll take any answer right now, your guess is as good as mine.” He chose to run with it. ”If there was another Cornell, or two, or three, and we’re in the wrong one, which one’s the right one?”

Kari stared at him for a second.

Then she laughed.

Not a normal laugh either. short at first, then spiraling into something thin, exhausted, and genuinely neurotic. She covered part of her face with one hand like that might somehow stop it.

“Oh my God.”

Another laugh escaped her.

“See, this is exactly the kind of bullshit that would’ve gotten someone institutionalized like two weeks ago.”

She shook her head quickly, trying to regain composure, but the smile stayed strained.

“How do we even know this is our Cornell?”

A beat.

“Like seriously how would we know? What if we’ve already crossed into something else and just didn’t notice?”

”Fffffuck if I know?” He threw his hands up. ”Tyler’s acting like a sociopath all of a sudden, Vicky’s got a magic bat, I can make that thing. Dead people are talking to us, oh, and now people are pretending that party didn’t happen. After people got killed.”

He crossed his arms and stared up at the ceiling. ”I got nothing for any of those, don’t get me started on that. I mean, it’s not like we can ask those dead people to give us more answers, can we? Gotta do something, though. Maybe- Huh. Maybe…”

An idea came to him.

”Hang on. What can you do? What magic did you actually get?”

”My ancestors told me that I have ‘White Lux’,” Kari shrugged.

”Information magic. I was told I had to find an owl- No THE Owl. To learn the family spell.”

She sighed.

”I’ve figured out pieces of it, but not the big one.”

Well, that was ominous.

”Information. Okay. We need a lot of that. I’ve got three of these monsters. One’s a bird with razors for wings and the other carries things. I can make more, I think…” Without thinking, he thumped the bottom end of his cards against the table. The whole stack rose up, and he pulled them out. They glittered under the lights as if they were coated in foil.

”Each one’s got a piece of me, kind of. I bled for one of them. I think I can make more, and stick each one in these cards. So, maybe you’ve got options? What if you learned how to follow where one of them went, that way, we didn’t have to risk our necks? Or… Maybe you make something too? Like- I dunno, a crystal ball, just out of thin air. Then I take that and make another monster out of it and it beams information to one of us.”

His fingers began to move, and the top card was suddenly spinning between them like a coin.

Kari watched the card spin between his fingers, her expression slowly shifting from overwhelmed to intensely focused.

“Okay, wait. If each one has a piece of you in it, then they’re connected, right? Because my magic isn’t about making things. It’s about perception. Following connections.

The words came out faster now, thoughts tripping over each other.

“So maybe I don’t need a crystal ball. Maybe I just need…” She gestured vaguely at the spinning card. “An anchor.”

A pause.

“If your creatures can move around independently, then maybe I could eventually learn to see through one.”

”Now you’re onto something. That one there, he watches things. I made him to keep an eye out for things and- It feels like hell, but I feel it when he sounds the alarm. So I could make another one, maybe something that’s smaller or faster.”

Watcher yawned on the ground, and sniffed at Kari.

”Maybe we make it with both your magic and mine so it’s easier on you. Then send it out to look around.”

”Sounds like a plan,” Kari laughed. ”Shall we begin?”

---

It was remarkable how little attention the two received. In that back corner of the library, against the wall where books had last been touched before a generation ago, one could forget they had ever even walked in. Tommy had arranged the books off to the side in an organized stack and summoned Porter for a brief moment to store his jacket away.

His small menagerie of beasts lay dormant within the deck. He chose to use the Jack of Diamonds for this experiment he was undertaking with Kari. With the table clear and the card face-up between them, he took to pushing Gold Lux into it. That took some time, mostly because he was beginning to notice that it was harder to build a creature without a reference; Raptor’s was his own blood, Watcher’s was wood and glass, and Porter was based on a backpack.

There was a lattice structure made of smoke hovering above the card, not unlike a hologram. An orb of some kind, with four diamond-shaped eyes in each direction.

”This is harder when there’s nothing solid to go off of,” He finally spoke.
”I don’t really know how to touch or chip away at magic, but this’ll do. How’s yours looking?”

Kari didn’t answer immediately.

She was staring at the construct above the card with painful concentration, elbows on the table and fingers pressed tightly against her temples. Every few seconds her eyes unfocused slightly, like she was trying to look through it instead of at it.

“Bad.”

A short, frustrated laugh escaped her.

“I think I’m trying too hard.”

The lights above them flickered faintly.

Kari’s gaze snapped back toward the floating orb.

“Your magic feels…” She hesitated. “Loud. Not literally loud, just...”

Her hand gestured vaguely in the air.

“Structured. Like there’s layers inside it.”

”I...” His face scrunched for a moment. ”Maybe. There’s the magic, and there’s the part of me that it gets. And there’s what I’m turning it into. I don’t understand much of it myself.”

He left the unfinished thing there and sat a hand palm-up on the table. Thin trails of gold smoke rose off his fingers. The raw stuff. ”Maybe try this?”

Kari stared at the smoke curling from his hand with immediate suspicion.

“This feels like a terrible idea.”

Despite saying that, she leaned forward anyway.

Carefully, Kari held her own hand just above his palm. Not touching. The moment the gold smoke brushed against her fingers, her breath caught sharply.

For a split second, Kari could feel the shape of it. Tommy’s magic wasn’t random at all. It branched outward in layered threads, all leading back toward him like nerves attached to a central body. The unfinished construct above the card flickered in her vision alongside it, suddenly clearer than before.
Then the sensation hit too hard.

Kari jerked back immediately, nearly knocking her chair over.

“Jesus Christ on a cro-”

Her hand flew to her forehead.

“Okay, okay, I saw something.”

A nervous laugh escaped her as she stared back at the smoke.

“I think your monsters are all still connected to you.”

A pause.

“Like they’re extensions instead of separate things.”

”…Think so?” He sounded worried, and he really didn’t know what the fuck they were doing here. ”Is that something we can take advantage of?”

“I think so yeah,” Kari lowered her hand from her forehead. “If they are connected to you then they leave trails. Not physical ones. More like...”

Kari made a vague motion between them.

“... Information. Presence. I don't know yet.”

”Like you just know they’ve been somewhere?” He just knew certain things about the monsters he made. How they were holding up, what amount of strain they could take. It had to be that “Tommyness” in them, because in some small way, they had pieces of what made him Tommy.

”So… So if they’re connected to me still, maybe now you just stick magic in this thing? Or stick it in the smoke coming off me, and I’ll do it. I think. Honestly, if you don’t know, I sure as hell don’t.”

Kari stared at the unfinished construct.

Then at Tommy.

Then back at the floating smoke-orb thing.

“Okay.”

She lifted one hand slowly, as if approaching a wild animal. The white Lux around her fingers shimmered faintly of a nervous little glow that looked about as confident as she felt
.
“I’m going to do this veeeeeeeeeeeery carefully.”

The construct rotated in place, four diamond-shaped eyes blinking in different directions.
Kari narrowed her four eyes

“Do not look at me like that.”

She tried to press the White Lux gently into the center of the construct.

Nothing happened.

She tried again, focusing harder.

Still nothing.

The orb wobbled once, almost offended.

Kari’s face tightened.

“Rude.”

She leaned closer, searching for anything that looked like an anchor point, a seam, an opening, some kind of magical intake valve—anything. Her White Lux slid along the outside of the Gold structure, refusing to sink in.

Then she saw it.

A tiny gap near the bottom of the lattice.
Kari froze.

“... No, absolutely not.”

The construct turned slightly.

The gap remained exactly where it was.

Kari stared at it with growing horror.

“That is not an anchor point. That is a butt.”

Her White Lux pulsed faintly, like it disagreed.

“No. Don’t encourage this.”

Another second passed.

The construct hovered.

The library stayed quiet.

Kari slowly inhaled through her nose.

“... I hate magic.”

Then, with the grim determination of someone committing an unforgivable crime, Kari jabbed two fingers forward and shoved a thin stream of White Lux directly into the bottom of the construct.

The orb spasmed.

“Oh my God.” The construct shot six inches upward, spun violently in place, and made a tiny, horrible squeaking noise that absolutely should not have come from something made of smoke and cards. Kari yanked her hand back like she’d touched a hot stove.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! I didn’t know where else to put it!”

The White Lux threaded through the construct all at once, lighting the inner lattice like veins under glass. Its four eyes snapped open in perfect unison.
Kari leaned back in her chair, mortified.

“Okay. So. Good news? I think it worked.”

She looked at the newly glowing construct, then immediately covered her face with both hands.

“... I’m never explaining this to anyone.”

”Yeah…”

Tommy clapped his hands around the creature, and finished its construction. The lines began to fill in, as if a painting were being completed. The empty lines became solid walls, the diamonds turned pearlescent red.

The end result was a glowing orb that could see in all directions, linked to both of them.

”Me either.”

It floated back down, and stared at them both with its strange eyes. Tommy felt the odd connection begin to settle in, he felt aware of what exactly it was looking at.

He tilted his head. ”I’ll call you Balor.”

”’Balor’” Kari parroted, as a catty grin formed on her face. She tried to fight it off. ”You’re going to give our child a name like that.”

There was a beat.

Before Kari erupted into laughter.

Tommy stared back at her. He didn’t see what was funny about it.

”In one of these books,” He waved at the stack. ”There’s these things called Fomorian. Big ogre things, and Balor is their king. He’s said to have a magic eye.”

Of which their “child” had four. The glowing orb floated in place, spinning slowly. Its red diamond eyes blinked at them.

Kari threw her hands up. ”It was just a joke. You don't need to nerd out on me.” She laughed.

”I got it,” He made a snrk sound. ”Okay, so, it’s alive… Now what?”

Kari wiped at the corner of her eye, recovering from laughing.

“Now?”

She looked at Balor, then at the table, then very deliberately avoided looking at the tiny gap she had violated to make this happen.

“Now we pretend that was a very professional magical procedure.”

Balor blinked all four eyes.

Kari’s smile twitched.

“... Don’t judge me.”

She leaned forward slowly, trying to focus on the thread of White Lux woven through the construct. It was faint, but there. Not like Tommy’s connection. Where his felt structural, like bones holding the thing together; hers felt thinner, more like a window someone forgot to close.

“Okay... I think I can feel it.”

Her voice quieted as her expression shifted into concentration.

“Balor, go to the end of the aisle.”

The orb floated in place.

Kari narrowed her eyes.

“Please?”

It drifted forward.

The second it moved, Kari flinched.

For one awful second, she saw the library twice: once from her own seat, and once from Balor’s strange, hovering angle. Shelves stretched differently. Light bent wrong. Tommy’s cards glittered from above. Her own face looked startled and deeply embarrassed.

Kari grabbed the edge of the table.

“Oh. Okay. That is weird.”

She blinked hard, forcing herself back into her own eyes.

“Good news? I can see through him.”

A pause.

“Bad news? I hate seeing through him. But… it worked.”

Balor blinked again from the end of the aisle.

Kari swallowed, a nervous smile creeping back in.

Tommy watched the orb flutter about. ”Maybe shut your eyes when he’s out. Or maybe you can get used to that. Come back here-” He stuck a hand out, causing Balor to disappear. He re-summoned the construct above its card, so it wouldn’t make Kari vomit from moving.

”Okay, great. It’s stable. We basically made a drone hooked up to a phone, cool. I guess… Now I just send him flying? Maybe I can see through him too, or something close to it, and just shunt him back into his card when we don’t need him. Usually, I toss one or two of these out and just bring them back that way, instead of making them find me.”

Kari nodded quickly, though the motion made her stomach twist a little.

“Yeah. Shutting my eyes is probably smart. I don’t think my brain likes two camera angles at once.”

She rubbed at the bridge of her nose, then looked back at Balor’s card with a strange mixture of pride and horror.

“But if you can send him somewhere and bring him back instantly, that’s actually huge.”

Her voice lowered as the thought settled.

“We could check places before walking into them. Alleys, empty houses, the warehouse again…”

The last one came out quieter than the rest.

Kari swallowed and forced herself to keep going.

“Or places where Cornell feels wrong. If there’s a rift, or something close to one, maybe Balor can get near it without us getting killed.”

Kari swallowed again. Shifting in her feet.

“Baby steps.

”Yeah. Yeah, we’ll do that. I’ll throw him out and have him look in places. If you need me to pull him back, just say so. Or message me, I’ll write my number down before we go.”

Tommy pulled his phone out and checked the time. It was getting late.

”…Damn. So, I should get going before someone asks what I was up to. How about I send him off and bring him back to me in a bit? See what happens.”

Kari’s eyes went toward the windows, where the evening outside had already started turning darker than she liked. The library felt safe in that fake way public places did, but the thought of Balor floating through Cornell without either of them nearby made her stomach twist.

“Okay. But don’t send him too far.”

She paused, realizing how ridiculous that sounded when talking about a magical eye-drone they had made less than ten minutes ago.

“Actually, I don’t know what ‘too far’ means yet. So… maybe just somewhere close. Somewhere boring first.”

Kari looked down at the Jack of Diamonds, her expression caught between worry and reluctant excitement. The White Lux thread inside Balor still felt faintly present, like a tiny open window in the back of her head. She didn’t like it. She also didn’t want to lose it.

“If it starts feeling wrong, I’ll text you. If I say pull him back, just do it. No questions, no experimenting, no ‘maybe one more second.’”

Her voice came out firmer than she expected. It surprised her a little, but she didn’t take it back.

She gathered her notebook and pens, then hesitated before writing one more thing at the bottom of the page.

Balor — shared sight works. Nauseating. Useful. Dangerous?

Kari stared at the word dangerous for a second, then underlined it once.

“This is probably the first smart thing we’ve done since the warehouse.”

A small, tired smile tugged at her mouth.

“Which is concerning, because it involved magical butt stuff.”

She closed the notebook and slipped it into her bag, but her hand stayed on it for a moment.

“Be careful, okay?”

The words were soft, but not casual. Not really. Kari glanced once more toward Balor’s card, feeling that thin thread tug at the edge of her awareness.

“Cornell’s already weird enough without us accidentally making it worse.”

”Yeah, I’ll…” He picked up Balor’s card and stowed it, surprised it even worked. ”I’ll do that. I’m going. I’ll keep my phone on.”

Balor followed him out, his eyes taking in everything around him. The way there were less cars than one would expect, even at this hour. The complete lack of people. The wronging tilt of Cornell being so different now. His eyes saw everything the two could see and more.

He drove home quickly.

---

Interactions:
The Streets of Cornell to the one place she said she wouldn't go.

---

---

The library doors shut behind Kari with a soft mechanical click, and for one second, she stood under the outside lights without moving.

Evening had settled over Cornell too quickly.

That had become one of the town’s smaller cruelties. The sky did not go dark all at once, but it always felt like she had missed a step. One minute there was late afternoon hanging over the rooftops. The next, the streetlights were on, the windows were black, and the spaces between buildings looked deeper than they should have. Kari adjusted the strap of her bag against her shoulder and checked the sidewalk behind her.

Only one shadow followed.

Good.

She hated that she had to check.

Tommy had already gone, Balor tucked away with him in that Jack of Diamonds card like any of this counted as normal. Kari could still feel the thread faintly, not enough to see through it, not enough to know where it was, but enough that there was a tiny open window somewhere in the back of her head. It made her skull feel drafty. She pulled out her phone before she could talk herself out of it.

Elsa answered on the fourth ring.

“.... Heeeeeeeeeey, what's shakin bacon? You still alive?”

Kari closed her eyes for half a second, facepalming.

“That is such a bad greeting.”

“Yeah, well, you answered, so it worked.” Elsa’s voice was low, casual in the way it got when she was trying too hard to sound casual. “Where are you?”

“Leaving the library.”

There was a beat.

“... By yourself?”

Kari looked down the street. A car passed too slowly, headlights dragging over the pavement. For a second, the road shone wet even though it had not rained.

“... Technically.”

“Kari.”

“I’m alone, yes. I’m walking on Main. I’m not near the woods. I’m not near the warehouse. I'm not near the Steel Mill. I’m not doing anything stupid.”

“... Sounds like you're near one of the three.”

“Honestly? I would feel the same way,” Kari sighed. ”You wouldn't believe this day so far.”

Elsa was quiet for a beat. Then softer, “What happened?”

Kari started walking because standing still made the street feel like it was waiting for her to make a decision. She kept to the side with the storefront windows, watching her reflection move beside her. Coat, bag, tense shoulders, tired face. Still her.

“I practiced earlier.”

Elsa whispered, “... Magic practiced?”

“No, Elsa, clarinet.” Kari rolled her eyes. ”Of course with magic!”

“There she is.”

Kari gave a tiny laugh, but it came out thin. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Be sarcastic. It lets me know you're still you and not possessed by a ghost or something.”

Kari swallowed and passed a closed barbershop. The striped pole outside turned lazily, though the place was dark. Red, white, blue. Red, white, blue. For a second, the red stripe looked too thick.

She looked away.

“I went to the park. Cornell Park. I wanted somewhere familiar because I’m starting to realize that’s the only way I can tell what’s changed.”

“That is such a terrifying sentence.”

[color=#eac6ae]“I know.”[/color]

“What did you find?”

Kari thought of the drainage tunnel. The basketball bouncing from inside the dark. Her own voice coming back wrong. The notebook swallowing her question.

“There’s something near the old runoff tunnel.”

“Something like a monster?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know.” Kari rubbed at her forehead with two fingers. “That’s the problem. I can tell when something is wrong now. I can tell when danger is close, when something comes through, when people are emotionally...”

She hesitated.

“Emotionally what?”

“Loud.”

Elsa did not answer immediately.

Kari kept walking.

“But that’s not the same as understanding. Warning tells me something is about to slip. Boundary Disturbance tells me Cornell itself is reacting. Emotional Thread tells me where people are, sort of, and what they’re carrying. But none of that tells me what is going on.”

“So you tried to make a new one.”

Kari smiled despite herself. “I hate that you knew that.”

“You do this thing where you get scared, then immediately try to make a whole ass system for the thing scaring you.”

“That is not true.”

“Kari.”

There wass a beat.

“... It's kind of true.”

“Uh-huh.”

Kari stopped at the corner, waiting for the crosswalk light even though no cars were coming. Across the street, the road stretched past the traffic signal for a second too long. She watched it until it snapped back into place.

“I tried to read the disturbance itself instead of just detecting it.”

“That sounds useful.”

“It was not.”

“How not useful?”

“It gave me fragments. Red. Pressure. Down but not physically down. Fear, but not human fear. My voice coming from places my voice should not be.”

Elsa went quiet.

Kari crossed the street.

“Then my notebook wrote back.”

“What?”

“It wrote, ‘You are asking the wrong side.’”

“Kari.”

“... I know.”

“No, I need you to understand that I am saying your name in the ‘why are you still walking around alone’ way.”

“I stopped after that.”

“You stopped after the haunted notebook started talking to you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sooooooooooooo proud of you,” There was a silence that stretched on too long. "I'm being sarcastic by the way."

“That’s fair.”

Kari passed the alley beside the Riverside hardware store. She did not look down it. She could feel it there, though. Just slightly wrong at the edges, like Cornell had been folded and unfolded too many times.

Elsa’s voice softened again. “Are you okay?”

Kari almost lied.

She was very good at almost lying now. The sentence rose automatically: I’m fine. I’m just tired. It’s okay. I handled it.

But the bracelet on her wrist felt tight.

“No.”

“Okay.”

“But I’m less confused now.”

“That sounds like a version of okay.”

“It’s not okay. It’s just... I think I’m starting to understand how my magic works.”

“Tell me.”

Kari exhaled slowly.

“It doesn’t give me answers. It gives me relationships.”

Elsa said nothing, giving her room.

Kari kept going, faster now because the thought had shape. “Danger isn’t just danger. It’s a relationship between what is about to happen and what should happen. Boundaries aren’t just lines. They’re agreements. This belongs here. That doesn’t. People aren’t just emotions. They’re connections. Threads. Distance. Pulling away. Coming closer.”

The words sounded strange out loud, but not wrong.

“White Lux is too much because everything is connected to everything else, and I have to figure out which connection matters before something kills us.”

Elsa breathed out. “Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re becoming a psychic detective.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“... Magic guidance counselor?”

“Worse.”

“Trauma librarian?”

Kari laughed once, then covered her mouth because it almost turned into something else. “That one is kind of close.”

“Okay. So what did the actual library say?”

“Normal occult books are useless.”

“Shocking.”

“Tommy was there.”

“The weird guy?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you two do?”

Kari winced before answering.

“We made a magical drone.”

Silence.

Then Elsa said, very carefully, “You made a what?”

“A. Magical. Drone.”

“With the future school shooter?”

“It was actually a pretty good idea.”

“Those words are how people die in movies.”

“It can scout places before we go in.”

“That is also how people die in movies.”

“Elsa.”

“I’m listening.”

Kari turned onto the next block. The library was behind her now, but she could still feel the shape of it in her head: the old shelves, the table, the stack of useless books, Balor’s four red diamond eyes blinking open.

“Tommy’s constructs are still connected to him. I can feel the connections. So we made one with some of my White Lux inside it, and now I can sort of see through it if it moves around.”

“'Sort of.'”

“Nauseatingly.”

“That does not make me feel better, girl.”

“It shouldn’t.”

“At least you know that.” Elsa laughed.

Kari glanced at her reflection in a dark store window. For half a second, her reflection’s mouth was still while she spoke.

She stopped walking.

Elsa caught it immediately. “What?”

Kari stared.

The reflection stared back.

Then it blinked with her.

“Nothing.”

“Kari.”

“Window was weird.”

“... You should know not to look in windows after dark”

“I know.”

There was a silence.

“I hate this town.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Kari started walking again.

For a little while, neither of them spoke. Elsa stayed on the phone anyway. That helped more than Kari wanted to admit. The simple sound of someone breathing on the other end made Cornell feel less able to swallow the street whole.

Then Elsa said, “... Do you think Isabelle is dead?”

Kari’s steps slowed.

The question hit clean through everything else. The park. Naomi. Tommy. Balor. The window. All of it fell away, and she was back at the warehouse, seeing Isabelle lifted wrong, seeing that thread yanked out of place.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you feel her?”

Kari closed her eyes for one second too long.

She had tried. Quietly. Privately. More than once. Every time, the answer was either nothing or something too tangled to trust. Isabelle had not felt like a normal absence. She had felt interrupted.

“Not clearly.”

“That’s not a no.”

“No.”

Elsa’s voice dropped. “Kari.”

“I don’t want to say it means anything.”

“But?”

Kari swallowed.

“But when someone is gone, I think there’s supposed to be an end to the thread.”

“And Isabelle?”

Kari looked toward the hills beyond Main Street, where the last light sat dirty and low behind the old buildings.

“Isabelle feels like someone cut the thread and tied it somewhere I can’t reach.”

Elsa did not answer, and Kari wished she had not said it.

Then her phone buzzed against her cheek.

She pulled it away and looked at the screen.

Kersten.

The text was plain enough that it took a second to become frightening.

hey weird question do u know anything about the runoff channels under the east side of the steel mill?

Kari stopped walking.

Elsa’s voice came through smaller now, tinny against the night air. “Kari?”

Kari stared at the message until the letters stopped looking like letters.

“No.”

“What happened?”

Another text came in.

camille thinks there’s a way under. not going in far. just looking.

Kari’s mouth went dry.

“No no no no no....”

“Kari, what happened?”

Kari typed too fast.

Do NOT go near them. Leave. Now. I’m serious.

She sent it.

Then another.

Where are you exactly?

Then another.

Kersten answer me

Elsa’s voice sharpened. “Talk to me.”

“Kersten just texted me about the runoff channels under the east side of the steel mill.”

“The steel mill? Why?!”

“Because apparently everyone in this town is competing to see who can make the worst posssible fucking decision.”

“Kari.”

“They’re there with Camille.”

“Call them.”

“I am.”

Kari hit Kersten’s contact.

It rang.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Voicemail.

She called again.

Voicemail.

Her stomach pulled tight, but according to Emotional Thread, they were fine. That did not ease the girl.

Her phone buzzed again.

Not Kersten.

Camille.

A picture.

Kari opened it.

For half a second, she did not understand what she was seeing. Concrete wall. Rust streaks. A narrow maintenance passage. A line of dark water running along the side.

Except the water was not on the floor.

It clung to the wall in a vertical sheet, crawling upward through cracks in the concrete like it had decided gravity was optional.

Kari’s ears rang.

Elsa said, “Kari?”

Kari did not answer.

The picture shifted in her hand.

Not actually. The image did not move. But her White Lux caught on it anyway, and suddenly the steel mill was there in the back of her skull. Not visually. Structurally. Boundary Disturbance slammed into focus so hard she nearly dropped the phone.

The mill was screaming with wrongness.

With the feeling of a place being rubbed thin from the inside.

Kari grabbed the side of the empty storefront beside her and bent forward, breathing through her teeth.

Elsa’s voice spiked. “Kari!”

“I think something came through.”

“What?”

Kari tried to answer, but the words tangled. The mill was not close enough for her to feel like this. It should not reach this far. Boundary Disturbance had limits. Everything had limits.

Cornell kept proving that wrong.

“The mill.”

“The steel mill?”

“Something just came through.”

“Kari, what came through?”

A beat.

“... I don't know.”

She called Kersten again.

No answer.

She called Camille.

He picked up on the second ring.

For one second, there was only breathing.

Too close to the phone.

Too quiet.

“Camille?”

Static shifted.

Then a whisper.

“Kari?”

Relief hit so hard she almost missed the fear under his voice.

“Camille, where are you?”

Metal screamed somewhere behind him.

Not struck. Dragged.

The sound ripped through the call, long and awful, like something huge had leaned its weight against a wall that was not supposed to move. She checked Emotional Thread and could only sense fear.

Camille gasped.

Kari pressed the phone hard against her ear. “Camille? Camille, listen to me. Get out. Get the fuck out right now.. Where’s Kersten?”

His breathing hitched.

“Kari-”

Something slammed into metal.

The call cut off.

Kari stood frozen on the sidewalk with the dead phone against her ear. The pull of Emotional-Thread was overwhelming.

Elsa was still on the other line, her voice distant and panicked. “Kari? Kari, answer me. What happened?”

Kari lowered the phone.

For a second, she could feel too much.

Kersten. Maybe. Camille. Maybe. Fear moving wrong. Not behind them. Ahead of them. Like something in the mill knew the shape of their panic before it happened. Like the building had already made room for where they were about to stand.

Kari’s hand shook as she switched back to Elsa.

“I’ll call you back.”

“Kari-”

She ended the call before Elsa could sound any more afraid.

For a second, the sidewalk went quiet around her. A traffic light clicked above an empty intersection. A loose sign knocked softly against brick. Somewhere behind her, a car rolled past too slowly, then turned onto a side street and disappeared. Without Elsa’s voice in her ear, the town felt wider. Like every street had opened its mouth at once.

Kari looked east.

She could not see the steel mill from where she stood, but that did not matter. Everyone in Cornell knew where it was. Even when buildings blocked it, even when the river fog hid it, even when you tried not to think about it, the mill lived at the edge of town like a stain that had soaked too deep to scrub out.

Boundary Disturbance kept pulling at the back of her skull, but Emotional Thread was worse.

It screamed without sound.

Kersten’s fear came in bright, jagged bursts, panicked and disorganized. Camille’s was lower, trapped under shock, like he was trying very hard not to fall apart and failing anyway. Kari could not hear their thoughts, but she could feel the direction of them. East. Down. Inside.

Every step toward the mill made the threads sharper.

Kari tried to breathe through it and failed.

“This is stupid,” she whispered.

She kept going anyway.

Kersten still had not answered. Camille’s number would not reconnect. Kari tried both again as she moved, cutting through Main, then behind the hardware store, then down the narrower streets that led toward the industrial side of town. Each call either rang until voicemail or died before the first tone finished. She texted while walking fast enough that her thumb hit the wrong letters twice.

[i]Answer me. Leave if you can.[/i]

Then, after staring at the screen for a second too long:

Please.

No response.

Boundary Disturbance kept pulling at the back of her skull. The pressure grew worse with every step. Heavier. Like the mill was not a building anymore, but a bad direction. Kari crossed an intersection without waiting for the signal. Halfway through, the painted crosswalk lines stretched under her shoes, dragging east like someone had pulled the road thin. She looked down. The white stripes ran too long for a second, then snapped back so suddenly she stumbled.

“Nope. Keep walking.”

Her voice sounded steadier than she felt.

Her stomach pulled tight, and Emotional Thread answered so violently she almost dropped the phone.

Kersten.

Camille.

Not words. Not images. Just direction and feeling.

Fear.

Close enough to reach for, far enough to be useless. Their terror pulled east, hard and frantic, like two hooks set under Kari’s ribs. It did not tell her where they were exactly. It did not tell her what had them. It only told her they were scared, they were together or close enough to blur, and their fear was moving wrong.

The service road ahead was mostly dark. Gravel replaced pavement in broken patches. The fence along the mill property leaned inward, rusted chain-link trembling in the wind. Beyond it, the old steel mill rose in pieces: pipes, skeletal catwalks, broken windows, black brick, dead machinery. Most of it was still hidden by distance and bad light, but the shape was there. Too big. Too quiet. Waiting at the end of the road.

Kari’s stomach turned cold.

She was closer than she ever meant to be. That was a lie. She had meant to be this close. She had just not wanted to admit it until the mill was already in front of her.

Her phone rang.

Kari nearly dropped it.

For one awful second, she thought it was Kersten. Or Camille. Or no caller ID. Her hand shook as she looked at the screen.

Zakira.

Kari stared at the name while the ringtone cut through the empty service road. The mill loomed ahead, dark against the last weak strip of sky. Somewhere near the fence, metal clinked softly. Chain-link. A gate. Something loose moving when there was not enough wind to move it.

The phone rang again.

Kari answered.

“Zakira?”

Recollections: The Compendium

BadMotorFinger
| Gateway to the Room a Thousand Years Wide | "Here comes your wound, your memory, your age, your sound…" ORIGINS & CREATIONS: | Unknown, believed to be born from Soundgarden itself. | TYPE: | Dimensional Key | LOCATION: | Last seen in the possession of Einar Shepard, traversing the hidden corridors of Cornell. | NOTABLE OWNERS: | Einar Shepard, the current user. | ABSTRACTION-GRANTING: | No. | .............................................................................	BadMotorFinger is an artifact of quiet menace and strange rhythm. Initially, it appears simple—just a metal talisman—but it hums beneath consciousness, vibrating at the core of the world. Holding it makes time feel slightly distorted; bones seem to remember a rhythm the mind cannot articulate. BadMotorFinger grants access to the Room A Thousand Years wide- which is, at first, a simple, blank room: four walls, a floor, a ceiling, nothing more. Step inside, and the world outside pauses. Reappear wherever you can imagine, anywhere you can picture—but with every use, the room grows. Walls stretch, ceilings rise, floors extend—time and effort do not pass outside, but inside the room, the space swells. Repetition turns simplicity into vastness; eventually, what was once a moment to traverse may take years to cross. Over time, escape turns labyrinthine; what once took moments could someday require years to traverse-though the outside world remains unchanged.The artifact resonates with sound and memory beyond words: like a battlefield compressed into a single note, like guitars distorting reality, like a choir sung by countless unseen voices. It serves as a gateway, a trap, a whispering presence, and a reminder of the cost of stepping outside the song of the world.

Recollections: Where the Folds Meet

---

???

Interactions: None.
Cornell?

---

---

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 together.

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 opened.

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 “right.” 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.

Small changes.

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 tighten.

Better to let the people help.

Better to let them place themselves where they belonged.

---

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.

But known.

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 refusal.

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 would fall. Not quickly. Not cleanly. But the direction had been chosen by damage.

This was not tragedy.

Tragedy required attachment.

This was structure failing into 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.

---

The Creature

Interactions:
Home.

---

---

Crazy - Doujah Raze

---

---

Somewhere unknown but familiar.

Close, but far.

A place you have never been.

But always lived.

Cornell, but not 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 Pit below.

The distance between them is walking.

The distance between them is breathing.

The distance between them is gone.

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.

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 screamed 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 meaning 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 certainty.

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 surviving. 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 can fix it. 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 thing 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 mercy; a will, warped by the Pit, still reaching for the shape of a rescue; a guilt so deep it had become anatomy.

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 always 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: go.

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: the Intruder. 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 murder for prevention.

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

---

Interactions: None.
The Sanchez Residence > Streets of Cornell.

---

---

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, they made it sound simple. Lupe clenched her fist until her nails bit into her palm and whispered, "Burn."

Nothing happened.

She tried again. She lifted her hand this time, palm out, like that would make a difference. “Burn.” 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. “No, no, no, fuck that. Again.” 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 alive 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;

“I SAID BURN, YOU BITCH!”

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.

“I’m not done,” 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, “You’re gonna die for what you've done, fucker.”

Her voice cracked.

Then steadied.

“I don’t care how long it takes.”

---

By the third week, Lupe had stopped pretending she was only practicing.

She had words for it when people asked. Training. Control. Self-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 staged. 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. Don’t try to be brave. Don’t be stupid. Every warning sounded like Diego’s voice, and that made her want to disobey it more.

She found the beast on Miller Street, 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.

“Okay,” 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 smiled.

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.

“You lost, papi?” she called in English, voice shaking just enough to betray her. “Or you just ugly for free?” 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.

“Yeah,” she spat. “You feel that, papi!?”

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. Beasts will notice you. You begin with nothing. You will be tested. 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... Nothing happened.

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.

“No,” she gasped. “Come on-”

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.

“I’m not done,” 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. Here. 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.

“Move!” Zakira shouted.

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

“Fuck, mami, I had it!” 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.

“No, you didn’t.”

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.

Shame.

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

That made Lupe angrier than the pain.

“GET OUT OF THE WAY!” Lupe yelled.

Zakira did not look at her. “Stay out of the way.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!”

“Then stop acting like you want to get killed!” 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 wrong.

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.

“Mami!”

Zakira grabbed her bow with her injured hand, face tightening at the pain. “I see it.”

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.

“Again!” she shouted.

“I’m trying, mami!”

“Try faster!”

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. Smart. 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.

“You were hunting it, weren't you?” Zakira asked.

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

“So?”

Zakira stared at her.

Disappointed.

“You almost died... mami.”

Lupe laughed once, sharp and empty.

“Yeah? So? Everybody does. Everyone. And I mean everyone.”

“That's not healthy.”

“Well, does it look like I care at this point?!”

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

Lupe’s expression changed.

“I know.”

“Then why?”

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

“... Just because.” 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.

“Because they’re walking around,” 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. “Because they get live. They get to just... be out here. Breathing. Hunting. Doing whatever the hell they want while Diego and Alejandro are—”

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.

“Lupe,” she said carefully. “You're going to kill yourself at this rate picking scraps with every monster you see.”

Lupe’s eyes snapped back to her.

“Watch me.”

“No.”

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. "I’m not watching you die to make a point.”

“It’s not a point.”

“Then... what is it?”

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.

“It all what I have left,” she said finally.

Zakira’s expression tightened. That answer hurt her. Lupe could tell. Good. 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.

“Mami, don’t,” she muttered.

“I’m not asking.”

“I don’t need saving. Especially not from you.”

Zakira adjusted Lupe’s arm over her shoulders and started walking her away from the street anyway. “Clearly.”

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.

“I hurt it,” she whispered.

Zakira kept walking.

“Yes.”

Lupe swallowed.

“Not enough.”

“No, but you survived... This time.”

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.

"Let's get you to Kersten's house. They can patch you up."

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.

---

Interactions: None.
The Sanchez Residence > Streets of Cornell.

---

---

Zakira knew something was wrong before anyone 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 before 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 command instead of advice.

She was by the wall. She was always 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.

Buckled.
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.

Move.

She needed to move.

She knew that.

Her body did not care.

Her body had become one solid piece of waiting.

Don’t guess.

The thought came from nowhere.

Don’t guess.

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, no, no.

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.

Flat.

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.

Known.

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.

Dandelion.

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.

Dandelion Blood.

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.

"I-" 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 wrong.

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.

Hers.

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.

---

Mend (to fix, to repair) - E L S I A N E

---

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 skin. 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 worse.

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 yet. 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 everyone 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. Do not go out alone. Do not say anything 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. Empty. There was a difference. Quiet was natural. Quiet was sleep, distance, and wind settling in trees. This was an absence arranged to mimic peace. 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, let them. 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. Trap. 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 housecat. 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 GOD SEES ALL, though someone had rearranged the removable letters beneath it into SEE GODS ALL, 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 that 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 politeness. 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 RIVERSIDE HARDWARE 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. LOCAL OFFICIALS URGE CALM AFTER RECENT DISRUPTIONS. 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. Cut what spreads wrong. 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. Better 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 hold 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 the hatchet with the orange handle. Not the largest. Not the sharpest-looking. The one that looked most like a tool and least 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, Jeremy Cole 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 planning something? I mean, sorry. That sounded bad. I just meant... that’s a lot.”

“No.” Zakira said. Too fast. Her fingers tightened around the handle. Jeremy noticed. Of course 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.

“Relax.” 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.

“... I’m buying something.” She squeaked.

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

For you. 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 is alone. She was visible because he had decided to look.

“No,” Zakira said. “I’m fine.”

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.

^“Move.” Zakira said, but the word came out too small.

Jeremy blinked.

“What?”

“I need to pay.”

“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.

“... They already do.”

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-”

“Don’t.” 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.”

“You were going to.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Move.”

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.

“Jeremy.”

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.

“Take your hand off her shit if you want to end the day with your hand still attached... papi.”

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

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

“That’s crazy, because I didn’t ask. I told you to let go of her shit. Now.”

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.

“Get out of here.”

Jeremy’s ears went red.

“I was just talking to her.”

“And she told you no like forty times now”

Lupe tilted her head.

"I'm not going to say it again, Jeremy. If you don't let go of her...”

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 sooooooo dramatic now,” he muttered.

Lupe smiled without warmth.

“Go be misunderstood somewhere else. Preferably in front of a train. Dickhead.”

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.

“You good?” Lupe asked.

Zakira hated that question because the answer was never really yes anymore.

“I’m fine,” she said automatically.

Lupe’s eyebrow lifted.

“That’s not what I asked.”

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

“I don’t know,” she said, and that felt more dangerous than lying.

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

“Yeah. Same.”

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.

“You buying that?” she asked, nodding toward the hatchet.

Zakira looked at it.

“I think so.”

“You know how to use it?”

“No.”

“Well, sounds like you're about to learn the hard way, mami,”

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. CORNELL RESIDENTS ENCOURAGED TO CONTINUE DAILY ROUTINES. 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.

“Disruptions,” Lupe said quietly.

Zakira looked at her.

“What?”

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

“That’s what they’re calling it. Disruptions. Like somebody knocked over traffic cones.”

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. Approved.] 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.

“Bad like potholes, or bad like Cornell bad?”

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 nothing. Mr. Alvarez looked at them then, finally. His face said leave. His mouth said, “Have a good night.” Lupe stared at him for a second longer, then took her flashlight off the counter.

“Yeah. You too.”

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.

“He mess with you before, mami?” 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.

“No,” she said. Then, because the truth had become slippery, “Not like that.”

Lupe made a quiet sound through her nose.

“He’s the kind of guy who thinks being pathetic means nobody’s allowed to call him dangerous.”

Zakira looked down at the wrapped hatchet.

“He’s scared too.”

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

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.

“You shouldn’t be out alone.”

Zakira almost laughed.

“You are.”

“Yeah, and I’m stupid.”

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. “... Not that way, mami.”

“Why?” Zakira asked, though her feet had already agreed.

“Because I don’t like it.”

“That’s not a reason, Lupe.”

“It is tonight.” 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. “We cut behind the laundromat, then take Bell’s lot. It adds liiiiiiiiiiiike five minutes.”

“You know that’s safer?”

“No.” Lupe started walking anyway. “Buuuuuuut I know the ways I’m sure as fuck not taking.”

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.

“You keep looking at the ground, mami,” Lupe said. “Everything good?”

Zakira’s stomach tightened. “Sorry.”

“Wasn’t a complaint, mami.”

“Oh.”

“Was it doing that before?”

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. “I don’t know.” 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, “Maybe.” 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.

“That place open all night, mami?” Lupe asked.

“I think so.”

“Anybody in there?”

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. “No.”

“Cool.”

“It’s not.”

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

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.

“It’s pulling.”

Lupe stopped. “Your necklace?”

Zakira nodded, fingers going to the glass pendant before she could stop them. “Down. But also... that way.” 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. “Of course it is.”

“We can go another way.”

“Is another way better?”

Zakira did not answer.

“Yeah.” Lupe exhaled through her teeth. “That’s what I thought, mami.”

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.

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

Zakira almost tripped. “It’s not me.”

Lupe looked at her.

“... Not on purpose. I think,” Zakira corrected, smaller.

“Mhm, mami, mhm.” 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. “Because last time I saw plants acting weird around you, they were choking out a monster and saving my ass, mami.”

Zakira’s grip tightened around the paper-wrapped hatchet. “That was different, and you know that.”

“Different how?”

“I made that happen... mami,.” Zakira looked down at the grass. It stayed bent toward the deeper street, patient and wrong. “Or I tried to. This is just happening.”

Lupe’s joking expression faded a little. “Okay.” She shrugged.

Zakira glanced at her.

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

Zakira swallowed. The air tasted metallic. “At the warehouse, before I knew anything, I saw a weed bend before the monster moved.” She touched the locket through her hoodie. “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.”

Lupe walked slower. “Tell you what, mami?”

“I don’t know.”

“You keep saying that, mami.”

“Because I don’t.” It came out sharper than Zakira meant. She flinched at herself. “Sorry.”

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

Zakira breathed in. “It felt like family.”

That made Lupe glance over.

Zakira kept her eyes on the ground. “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.” Her fingers tightened around the hatchet. “'The world tells you where it hurts.' 'Guard the line. Cut what spreads wrong.'”

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

“... That’s not what it felt like when you saved me, mami,” Lupe said finally.

Zakira looked at her.

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

“I was scared.”

“Yeah. No shit.”

“And I wasn’t even aiming that good. I aimed better when...” I'm shooting targets that stand still.

“You hit the monster more than I did.”

“You were hurt. I couldn't let it kill-”

“I was stupid.”

Zakira did not answer.

Lupe’s mouth tightened. “Don’t do that quiet thing, mami.”

“What quiet thing?”

“Ooooooooh, I don't know. That one where you don't say you disagree because you’re just too polite.”

Zakira looked down.

Lupe laughed once, humorless and low. “Yeah. Thought so, mami... Thought so.”

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.

“You were hunting it.” she flatly said.

Lupe’s face closed immediately.

“I was dealing with it, mami.”

“And look how that went.” Zakira said harsher than she meant. “That thing almost killed you.”

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.

“And if I stayed home, then what, mami? It oh-so politely waits outside until we’re ready?”

Zakira went quiet.

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

“Fuck that, mami. That’s what everyone's 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, everything's gonna fuckin' be okay.”

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

“It won’t. You know it. I know it. And everyone knows it but are too fuckin' pussy to admit it.”

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.

“If something is coming, mami, I’d rather meet it in the street than wait for it to pick a window.”

Zakira’s grip tightened around the bag. “That doesn’t mean you can fight it by yourself.”

“Didn’t say I did a great job.” Lupe shrugged.

“You almost died.”

“A lot of people almost died. Your fucking point?”

“Lupe.”

“... Don’t start with me, Mami.”

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.

“Don’t say my name like you’re about to make me explain myself. Like you're my madre.”

Zakira swallowed. “I’m not trying to be.”

“Good. One's already enough of a pain in my puss.”

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, “You showed up. It helped. Great. Wow. Thank you.”

Zakira glanced at her.

Lupe kept staring forward.

“Just to remind you, I never 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.”

Zakira sighed, defeated.

“Okay.”

“And don’t do the quiet thing where you pretend okay means you’re not judging me.”

“I’m not.”

“You should be, though, mami.”

That landed strangely.

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

“I was stupid. You said it without saying it. I’m saying it with my chest. Happy?”

“No.”

Lupe blinked.

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

“I’m not happy you almost died.”

For a second, Lupe had no answer.

Then she scoffed, soft and defensive.

“Yeah, well. Same.” She shrugged.

“Did it at least help?” Zakira asked.

Lupe’s jaw flexed.

“No.”

Zakira nodded once.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you understand.”

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

“... I think I do.”

Lupe looked at her then, sharp and wounded.

Zakira continued before she could lose the nerve. “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.” Her voice thinned. “She screamed. I didn’t mean to. I stopped thinking, and it let go, but I still hurt her.”

Lupe’s anger dimmed into something heavier.

“I left after that.”

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

“Did she get out?” Lupe asked.

Zakira stared at the sidewalk. “... I don’t know.”

“Then how'd you know you killed her?”

“I know I hurt her.”

“Yeah.” Lupe’s voice lowered. “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.”

Zakira’s eyes stung. “That sounds like something people say when they want to excuse themselves.”

Lupe looked away.

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe it is.”

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

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

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Lupe nodded without looking at her. “Yeah.” Then, after another step, “Me too.”

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. “You good, mami?”

“I thought I saw something.”

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

“It was probably nothing.”

“Well, nothing has been real fuckin' busy lately, mami.”

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.

“Do you think it’s all because of the warehouse?” Zakira asked.

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

That answer chilled Zakira more than she expected. “You think it was happening before?”

“Don’t you?”

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. “... Maybe.”

“There’s that word again.” Lupe said in a sing-song.

“It’s a useful word.”

“Well, find a new fuckin' one before I burn that bitch out of the dictionary.”

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

Lupe noticed. Her mouth tightened.

“No. I don’t mean you, mami.” Her voice was still sharp, but less careless now. “I mean everybody else. The town. Adults. News people. Cops. Teachers... Me.”

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

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

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.

“Monster,” 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. “Yeah.”

Zakira swallowed. “Or magic.”

The dandelion by the curb trembled.

Lupe breathed out. “Yeah.”

“People disappeared.”

“Yeah.”

“The roads are wrong.”

“Yeah.”

“Cornell is...” 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. “Fucked, mami. Possibly beyond fixing.”

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.

“What do we do?” 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. “First? We don’t go where the scary hardware man told us not to go.”

“Good.”

“Second? We find people who aren’t useless.”

“Who?”

Lupe looked at her. “You tell me. You’re the one with the plant compass and the creepy family flower slideshow.”

Zakira almost smiled. It hurt and helped at the same time. “Kari.”

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

“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.”

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.

“Anyone else, mami?” Lupe asked.

“Tommy, maybe.”

Lupe gave her a look. “Weirdo Tommy?”

“He can make monsters.”

“Of course he can.”

“And Tyler can teleport.”

“Tyler can what?”

Zakira blinked. “Teleport.”

“You said that tooooooo casually.”

“Sorry.”

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

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

“There she is.”

“Don’t.”

“Fine, mami.” Lupe’s own smile faded. “Kari first, though.”

“She might not answer.”

“Then we just gotta call her twice.”

“She might think we’re crazy.”

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

“Zakira. Mami.”

“What?”

“... Crazy left like three weeks ago.”

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.

“Do you think Kari will help?” Zakira asked.

“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.”

“When she doesn't?”

“Then Jeremy gets to pretend being the only boy in the room counts as having a personality.”

Zakira almost smiled despite herself.

“That’s also a low bar.”

“See? You’re learning.”

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.

“That normal?”

“No.”

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.

“We should call Kari now,” Zakira said.

Lupe’s expression sharpened. “Now-now?”

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.

“... Before I talk myself out of it.”

Lupe crossed. “Then do it, mami. We don't got forever.”

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 midnight. 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 worse 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.

“Zakira?”

Zakira’s heart jumped hard enough to hurt.

“Kari?”

“Yeah, in the flesh,” A pause. ”I mean it's through the phone-but that's neither here nor there.”

A beat.

“Why are you calling so late?”

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. “... Are you home?”

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

“... Why?”

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.

^"Speaker."

Zakira hesitated.

Lupe widened her eyes and pointed at the phone harder.

_{"Speaker, mami."}

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.

“... Did you just put me on speaker?” Kari asked.

“Yeah,” Lupe said, leaning closer. “Hi, mami!”

Another pause, but his one was longer.

“... Lupe?”

“In the flesh. Also through the phone. Crazy how technology works, mami.”

There was another pause. This one brief.

“I really can’t do this right now.”

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

“Kari...” Zakira said. “...Where are you?”

“I’m outside.”

“Yeah, mami, we got that part...” Lupe rolled her eyes, and Zakira had a feeling Kari could feel it.

“I’m fine.”

“Nobody asked if you were fine. They asked where the fuck you were.”

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.

“Look, I need to go.”

“No.”

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.

“You don’t get to say you need to go when you sound like that.”

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

“Like what?” Kari said incredulously.

“Like you’re speed-walking into some bullshit. The bullshit we don't need right now.”

“I am not speed-walking.”

A beat.

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

“... Ooooooooooooooooo-kay.”

“I’m not—” Kari stopped herself, exhaled sharply, and kept moving. “Why did you call me?”

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.

“Something is wrong near Miller’s Creek.”

Kari went quiet.

The footsteps did not stop.

That was worse.

“Aw fuck, here we go,” Lupe said under her breath.

“Mr. Alvarez warned us not to go there.”

“Mr. Alvarez from Riverside?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He said don’t walk down Miller’s Creek because 'the road’s bad'.”

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

“Oh, I hate that. I FUCKING hate that a lot.”

“Kari?”

“I’m not going to Miller’s Creek.”

Lupe’s eyes narrowed.

“That was a very specific answer, mami....”

“Then where are you going?”

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.

“Kari.”

“I said I’m not going to Miller’s Creek.”

“Mami.” Lupe’s voice flattened. “If you say ‘technically’ right now, I’m going to lose my fucking mind.”

Kari breathed out through her nose.

“The steel mill.”

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.

Steel mill.

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.

“... Why?” Zakira asked.

Kari did not answer fast enough.

“Kari,” Lupe said. “Why the fuck are you going to the steel mill!?”

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

“Camille and Kersten went there.”

Zakira’s grip slipped on the phone.

Lupe caught her wrist before she dropped it.

“What?”

“They went to the steel mill.” Kari’s voice stayed low, but the control was thinning at the edges. “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.”

“A picture of what?”

Kari’s breathing grew louder.

”Oh nothing,” Kari sarcastically said, “Water on the wrong side of a wall.”

Zakira did not understand at first.

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

“Like it was climbing,” Kari said. “Not spilling. Not leaking. Climbing.”

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 always 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.

“Did you call them?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Kersten didn’t pick up. But Camille did.”

Kari’s footsteps slowed just enough to mean she was remembering.

“He whispered my name. Then something hit metal near him, and the call cut off.”

The cold pressed into Zakira’s hoodie.

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

“Kari, call the police.”

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

The street listened.

Zakira did too.

“The building is what?”

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

“I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Try.”

“I don’t have time.”

“Make time, mami.”

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

“Something is wrong with the boundary around the mill.”

Zakira’s locket pulled harder.

“Not the fence. Not the property line. The place itself. It feels...”

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.

“Thin.” Kari said. “Like the air has been rubbed down until there’s almost nothing left between here and somewhere else.”

Lupe whispered, “Jesús.”

“I felt it from my house.”

Zakira’s breath caught.

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

“Feel them how?”

A pause.

“Wrong.”

“Mami.”

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

Zakira went still.

Lupe looked at her.

Kari kept going, voice tight now, almost breathless. “Like something there already knows where they’re going to stand before they stand there.”

The dandelion by the curb bent lower.

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

“I’m not going in.”

“You are absolutely going in. I can hear it in your smartass voice.”

“I’m going to stop them before they go inside.”

“Are they inside already?”

Kari did not answer.

Zakira’s stomach dropped.

“Kari.”

“I don’t know.”

There it was.

The word.

Maybe’s cousin. I don’t know. Honest and useless and terrifying.

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

“Where are you right now?”

“By the service road.”

“Which service road?”

“East side.”

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

“By the drainage ditch?”

“Near it.”

“That’s Miller’s Creek, dumbass.”

“It feeds into Miller’s Creek... for your information.”

“Oh my god, I hate smart people.”

“Kari, wait for us.”

“No.”

The answer came instantly.

“I'll be in and out. I promise.”

“Please.”

“Zakira, they’re already there.”

“Then wait outside.”

“If they’re inside, waiting outside means I’m listening to them get hurt.”

Zakira flinched.

Lupe’s jaw tightened.

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.”

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

“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!” 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.

“That’s why I’m trying to get off the phone.” Kari filled the silence.

Lupe gave a short, humorless laugh.

“That is the worst possible way to make me trust you, mami.”

“I’m not asking you to trust me.”

“Good, because I don’t.”

“Kari,” Zakira said. Her voice sounded thin. Too thin. She hated that. “Tell us how to get there.”

“No.”

“Giiiiiiiiiiiirl.....”

“No. If you come here, that is more people in the same place going wrong.”

“We’re coming anyway.”

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.

“Zakira—”

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.

“Kari, where are you?”

Kari did not answer.

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

“Kari!”

“I heard them.”

“No shit, we heard something too, mami. Do not run toward it.”

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.

“Camille!”

No answer.

Then another voice, farther away.

Kersten.

Maybe.

A shout cut short.

Kari’s breath turned ragged.

“Kari, stop!”

“I can see the east entrance.”

“Stay outside!”

“The door’s open.”

Lupe’s face went pale with fury.

“Of course the door’s open.”

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.

“Lupe.”

Lupe followed her gaze.

For once, she said nothing.

Through the phone, Kari whispered, “I’m at the door.”

The words came out small.

That scared Zakira more than if she had screamed.

“Mami?”

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.

“Kari, leave.”

Kari took another step.

The clicking stopped.

For half a second, there was nothing.

Then Kari inhaled.

Not a gasp.

“No...” she whispered.

Lupe’s hand tightened around the flashlight.

“What?”

Kari did not answer.

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

“Oh my god....”

“Kari, what do you see?”

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.

“Camille...”

Zakira’s stomach dropped.

“Kari, get out.”

“It... it has him.”

The street went silent around Zakira.

“It ate Kersten too.”

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.

“It’s eating them!”

“BITCH YOU DON'T RUN!” 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.

Hungry.

Then a voice filled the speaker.

Not Kari’s.

Not Camille’s.

Not Kersten’s.

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

“MY FOOD!”

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.

“Zakira!”

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.

“Where the fuck are you going!?”

“My house.”

“This is not the time for a bedtime routine!”

“.... My bow.”

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.

Thump.

Look.

Thump.

Closer.

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.

“Move.”

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 known 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.

“How fast can you do this!?”

Zakira opened the case.

Her hands stopped shaking.

Not completely.

Enough.

“Fast enough.”

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.

Hungry.

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.

Pointing.

“Okay, mami.” Her voice was low now. Stripped down. “We go fast, we don’t go stupid!”

A rare sentence for you. Zakira kept the comment to herself as she looked toward the dark shape of town beyond the houses.

“We get Kari.”

Lupe’s jaw tightened.

“And Camille and Kersten, if they’re still alive, that is...”

Zakira nodded once.

Neither of them said what if they weren’t.

They ran toward the steel mill.

Recollections: Where the Folds Meet

The.Intruder

Unknown | Intruder | It/Its "If they wake, they fall."

Description: The Intruder is the thing that came through first. At the warehouse, most people never truly saw it. They saw bodies lifted, twisted, displaced, and slammed by something too heavy for empty air. They heard footsteps bend the concrete beneath them. They felt the room shift under an invisible weight. To the Blind, it was absence with consequences, a force that took people before the mind could understand what had happened. To those whose perception opened, the truth was worse. The Intruder is tall, wrong, and unstable, its shape refusing to settle into one arrangement. Limbs flicker between presence and absence. Its mass seems to drag space along with it, compressing distance, interrupting motion, and forcing bodies into impacts they were never meant to survive. It does not move like an animal. It moves like a damaged event trying to finish itself. Despite its brutality, the Intruder is not entirely mindless. Its cognition is severely damaged, broken down into pressure, heat, impact, fear, and resistance, but something remains beneath the violence. It remembers that the warehouse matters. It remembers that the children there are doomed. It believes their Kindling Events are not awakenings, but the first signs of the Pit claiming them. The Intruder kills because some ruined part of it believes death is the only way to stop the change before it completes. In its broken logic, if the children awaken, they fall. If they fall, Cornell sinks further with them. Better to end them early. Better to stop the Kindling before it can root itself in their bodies. It is a monster, but something inside it still thinks it is trying to save them. Abstraction: Abominable - Reactive Mutation. The Intruder’s Abstraction is a violent form of reactive regeneration. Its body does not simply heal from damage; it studies the damage, survives it, and mutates in response. Every wound becomes information. Every successful attack teaches it how to endure the next one. When harmed, the Intruder’s anatomy reorganizes rapidly. Flesh hardens, softens, liquefies, calcifies, folds, or separates depending on what struck it. Fire may cause its outer layers to blacken into insulating tissue. Blades may force bone cages and dense muscle to grow around entry points. Impact may cause its body to distribute force through shifting internal structures. Lux-based attacks can injure it, but repeated use allows the Intruder to form temporary counters suited to that specific method of harm. The more damage it takes, the more dangerous it becomes. Pain does not weaken it in a normal sense. Injury pushes its body into escalation, creating new defenses, new movement patterns, new striking surfaces, and new ways to exploit whatever hurt it. If a weapon remains embedded long enough, the Intruder may grow around it and temporarily incorporate it into its body, using it as a limb, lever, anchor, or weapon. Even without adaptation, the Intruder is naturally powerful. It possesses immense physical strength, enough to crush bodies, tear through weak structures, and overpower most targets directly. Its speed varies unpredictably, shifting from slow, deliberate stalking to sudden explosive bursts of motion. Its body is heavy enough to crack floors beneath it, yet flexible enough to bend, compress, and force itself through spaces that should not fit it. Its senses are superb, though not entirely human. The Intruder tracks living beings through motion, heat, breath, panic, Lux, vibration, and resistance. It does not need clear sight to find prey. Fear and awakening power draw its attention especially quickly, making magical or emotionally unstable targets easier for it to locate. Its greatest strength is also what makes it horrifying: it improves by surviving. A fight that lasts too long becomes a lesson. Repeated tactics become liabilities. The more its enemies hurt it without finishing it, the more specialized it becomes against them. However, its adaptations are not always permanent. Many counters are temporary, formed in response to immediate threats and discarded once they are no longer useful. Its mind is also damaged, narrow, and incomplete. It can be confused by contradiction, overwhelmed by too many unfamiliar stimuli, or forced to retreat from powers it recognizes as beyond its ability to currently adapt. The Intruder is not invincible.