Chapter 6: Nothing
The silence wasn’t empty anymore.
It breathed.
Ren stood frozen on the ceiling-floor, his own heartbeat a frantic drum against his ribs. The cold seeped through his uniform, a damp, clinging chill. He made himself move, each step a careful experiment in this wrong geometry. Shards of a shattered chalkboard hovered nearby, equations half-written now just absurd glyphs in the void.
A whisper brushed the back of his neck. Not a sound, exactly. A pressure, a suggestion of voice where there was none.
He spun, boots scuffing frost.
Nothing. Just the slow drift of debris and the yawning, spiraling gut of the broken staircase.
Get a grip. Assess. Kaito’s training was a flickering, dying light in his head. Find a wall. A terminal. Anything.
He began picking his way along the beam, aiming for a floating cluster of lockers that might have once been the far wall. His shadow, cast by no visible light, stretched long and thin ahead of him, bending unnaturally over the jagged terrain. It didn’t match his movements. It lagged, pooling in places as if too heavy to lift.
Another whisper. This one had texture, a grating, staticky quality like a corrupted audio file. It came from his left.
He jerked his head. A bank of lockers tilted slowly, door ajar. Darkness inside.
“Hello?” The word was stupid, pathetic. It vanished.
He took another step. The grinding hum of the stones deepened. A new sound woven into it: a soft, wet clicking. Like a tongue on the roof of a mouth. Or many tongues.
He picked up his pace. The beam narrowed. A gap yawned ahead where the permacrete had sheared away, opening into a vertical shaft that fell—or rose—into featureless grey. He’d have to jump to the next cluster of flooring, a chunk about three meters away, drifting in a lazy circle.
He backed up, readying himself. The clicking grew louder, more rhythmic.
Don’t look. Just go.
He ran and launched. For a sickening second, there was only the void beneath him. Then his knees hit the floating slab, the impact jarring his teeth. He scrambled for purchase, fingers scraping ice.
He risked a look back.
Across the gap, standing perfectly still on the beam he’d just left, was the figure.
It was tall, too tall, a smudge of absolute black that didn’t reflect the sickly green-grey light so much as swallow it. Its shape was roughly humanoid, but the limbs were elongated, the joints seeming to bend in too many directions. It had no face. Just a smooth, blank oval where a head should be. It was turned toward him.
It had been there. How long had it been there, watching him?
Every instinct screamed. This wasn’t a training hologram. This was the glitched, aggressive reality his uncle fought. This was the thing that made orphans.
Ren moved. Not with cleaner discipline, but with the raw, scrambling terror of a kid running from Kansen District bullies in a dark alley. He slipped, slid on the frost, pushed himself up. He didn’t know where he was going. Just away.
He leaped to another fragment of hallway, this one with a water fountain still bolted down, a stream of water curling upward in a frozen, glassy tendril. The clicking was right behind him now, a dry, eager sound.
He chanced another glance.
The creature was on his slab. It didn’t run. It flowed. One moment it was at the edge, the next it had covered half the distance with a liquid, unnatural shift. Its long arms reached, fingers tapering into points.
Ren’s breath tore in his throat. He stumbled around the fountain, slipped on the upward-curling ice, and went down hard. The impact knocked the air from his lungs. He rolled onto his back, skidding toward the slab’s edge.
The creature loomed over him, blotting out the weird grey sky. It smelled of ozone and rotting meat. Its blank face tilted, studying him. One of those pointed hands shot out, faster than a snake.
Cold, iron-hard fingers closed around his throat.
It hauled him up. His boots kicked empty air. The pressure was immense, absolute. Spots bloomed in his vision. The clicking was right in front of him, emanating from that smooth, featureless black. He clawed at the arm, but it was like gripping polished stone. His thoughts fragmented. The birthday. His father’s absence. The stupid, crushing need to prove himself. To be a cleaner. This wasn’t how it was supposed to—
BOOM.
The sound was catastrophic in the dense silence. A simultaneous flash of orange-white light from his left.
The creature’s head vanished in a spray of black, granular particles that smoked and hissed as they dispersed. The grip on Ren’s throat spasmed, then released.
He dropped, crumpling to the frost, gasping, choking, hands clutching his neck.
The headless body wavered, took one stumbling step, and then dissolved into the same smoking black sand, collapsing inward until nothing remained.
Ren sucked in ragged, burning breaths. Through watering eyes, he looked toward the blast.
Haru stood on a floating section of the staircase railing, twenty feet away, looking like he’d just been dragged through a warp gate. His uniform was torn at the shoulder. His hair was wild. And he was holding a sleek, matte-black tactical shotgun, smoke still curling from its barrel. His knuckles were white where he gripped it. He was panting, his chest heaving, his eyes wide with a feral, stunned shock.
He lowered the weapon a fraction. His gaze locked on Ren.
“Hey,” Haru said, his voice hoarse, trembling with adrenaline. “You, uh… you okay, clean-head?”
Ren could only stare, his throat on fire, his mind blank. He nodded, a tiny, shaky motion.
Haru’s shocked expression cracked into a weak, insane grin. “Cool. Good. Don’t… don’t ask about the gun. Found it.” He swung the shotgun’s strap over his shoulder, the motion awkward, and carefully picked his way across floating debris toward Ren. “This place is seriously messed up. The stairs just… keep going. And I saw something… bigger. Down in the dark.”
He reached Ren, crouched, and offered a hand. His own was shaking. “We can’t stay here.”
Ren took the hand. Haru pulled him up. They stood together on the small, drifting island of floor, the void stretching around them, the echoes of the shotgun blast still ringing in the unnatural quiet.
Haru hefted the weapon again, checking the load with a clumsy, unfamiliar motion. “We need to find a way out. Before something else hears us.”
The grinding hum of the stones seemed to agree, pulsing louder all around them, a hungry, waiting sound.