Chapter 10: To be
The silence in the ruined corridor wasn’t empty. It was a held breath. Ren’s boots crunched on frost-dusted tile, the sound absurdly loud. The klaxon had died somewhere in the labyrinth of stone, leaving only the whisper of his own breathing and the distant, echoing drip of ruptured pipes. The chill from the classroom clung to him, a second skin.
He kept the durasteel leg gripped tight, its weight a crude comfort. Every shadow pooling from a sheared wall sconce seemed to shimmer at the edge of vision. Every groan of settling infrastructure felt intentional. The math of his survival in the classroom felt flimsy out here, in the wider breach. A lucky guess against a destabilized phenomenon. This was different. The air was watchful.
He reached a junction where a grand arched window, its stained glass depicting the founding of Tokyo-1, should have looked out over the academy spires. The glass was there, but the image had reformed itself into a twisted helix of color, senseless and sickening. He moved past it, his own shape a dark blur in the warped pane.
He stopped.
His reflection didn’t.
It paused a half-second after he did, its movement jarringly out of sync. Then it turned its head, slowly, to look directly at him from within the prison of the glass.
Ren froze, his blood turning to slurry in his veins.
His reflection’s mouth opened. No sound came through the window. But its face contorted, a perfect mimicry of a scream, eyes wide with a terror Ren did not feel. It slammed its palms against the inside of the glass, once, twice, a silent, frantic battering.
A whisper brushed the shell of his ear, dry as insect wings. …turn…
It wasn’t a voice. It was the memory of a voice, rubbed raw. It carried the taste of ozone and static.
His reflection pointed a trembling finger past him, up towards the vaulted ceiling of the corridor behind where he stood. Then its image fractured, pixelated, and dissolved into the chaotic colors of the window.
Ren turned.
Slowly.
Above him, where the corridor met the central rotunda, the space was wrong. The air thickened into a swirling, vertical pool of darkness, like ink dropped into water. Dangling from it, suspended by threads of nothingness, was a figure. Humanoid, but stretched, its proportions a careless sketch. Long, twig-like arms ended in hands with too many joints. It had no face, just a smooth, obsidian plane that drank the scant light.
It didn’t move. It just hung there, a punctuation mark of wrongness in the sentence of the hall.
Then one of its arms unspooled.
It didn’t lunge. It extruded, lengthening with a faint, plastic sound, the hand swimming through the air towards him with a terrible, lazy grace.
Ren’s body broke its paralysis before his mind could. He threw himself backwards, his shoulder hitting the wall as the distended hand closed on the space where his head had been. The fingers snapped shut with a sound like cracking ice.
He ran.
Not with strategy, but with the raw, scrambling panic of a prey animal. His feet slipped on the frost. The durasteel leg clattered against a fallen column. He didn’t look back. He could hear it, a soft, skittering drag along the stone ceiling, keeping pace.
A side passage loomed—a servant’s accessway, narrow and unadorned. He ducked into it, plunging into near-darkness broken only by the emergency strips glowing a weak, failing yellow. The air was clogged with the smell of damp stone and burned wiring.
The skittering stopped at the entrance. A soft, probing tap-tap-tap on the stone archway.
He backed down the narrow corridor, his breath sawing in his throat. The accessway ended in a T-junction. Left or right. Both swallowed by gloom.
Tap-tap-tap.
Closer.
He went right, the space tightening until the walls brushed his shoulders. A pipe leaked a steady, cold drip onto his neck. He emerged into a small, circular maintenance vault, crowded with dead breaker boxes and a massive, silent filtration unit. No other exit.
The skittering filled the passage behind him.
He turned, lifting the metal leg, backing until his spine hit the cold metal of the filtration unit. The creature filled the narrow entrance, its form a blot of deeper night. It had to contort itself to fit, its limbs folding at impossible angles as it flowed into the chamber. It straightened up, its faceless head nearly brushing the low ceiling. That smooth, blank plane regarded him.
The hand extended again, slower now, confident. It moved through the air between them, a black tendril.
Ren’s fear crystalized into a single, white-hot point. This thing, this mess of the world’s breaking, had hunted him. It had stolen his face to do it. The anger that had saved him in the classroom returned, not as a flare, but as a cold, focused burn. It etched away the panic, leaving only a sharp, brutal clarity.
He didn’t wait for the hand to reach him.
With a raw shout that tore his throat, he launched forward, not away, but inside the creature’s reach. He swung the durasteel leg not at the extending hand, but in a vicious, rising arc towards the joint of its closest limb.
The impact was wrong. It felt like striking hardened tar. A shock of numbing cold shot up his arms. But the creature recoiled, a stuttering jerk, its smooth balance disrupted.
It made a sound. A low-frequency thrum that vibrated in Ren’s fillings, that seemed to sour the air in his lungs. The blank face rippled, like the surface of a pond.
It lashed out. The back-handed swing caught Ren across the ribs. There was no pain, just a massive, bruising impact that flung him sideways. He crashed into a breaker box, metal crumpling, and slid to the floor. The steel leg clattered from his grip, skittering into the darkness.
The creature loomed over him, blotting out the faint light. Both hands came down now, fingers lengthening into precise, needle-like points aimed at his chest and throat.
Ren scrambled back, his boots slipping. His hand found purchase on a loose cable, then on a recessed handle on the side of the filtration unit—a manual override lever, frozen shut with age and rust.
The needles descended.
He braced his feet against the unit, wrapped both hands around the rusted lever, and pulled with every ounce of desperate strength left in his body. But it was too late as the creature kept closing in.