Days bled together.
There was no sunrise anymore—just the sky shifting from black to gray, from gray to something that only pretended to be day.
Leo moved through it like a shadow, his footsteps muffled by ash. His stomach ached with the kind of hunger that made sound feel louder, sharper. He could hear his own heartbeat when he stopped walking.
He hadn't eaten in two days. Maybe three.
Time didn't keep shape here. The streets were endless repetitions of the same: collapsed buildings, crushed cars, roads split open like veins. The smell of burned plastic hung in the air, faint but constant, clinging to the back of his throat.
He'd stopped calling out for people. Silence had answered too many times.
Now his voice was only for himself, quiet mutterings that broke the loneliness just enough to prove he was still real.
"Food," he whispered as he picked through the wreckage of what might have been a convenience store. "Anything."
The door had melted into its frame. He slipped through a hole where the window once was, glass crunching under his boots. The interior was a cave of shadows—no lights, only the dim glow seeping through cracks in the roof.
Shelves lay on their sides, their contents fossilized in dust. He kicked aside a pile of metal and found a can. The label was gone, but when he shook it, something sloshed inside.
He hesitated only a second before prying it open with a broken key. The smell that hit him was metallic and sour, but edible enough. He ate with his fingers, not tasting anything, just swallowing until the ache dulled.
Afterward, he sat against the wall and let his head rest back. The silence felt heavier here, almost aware.
It wasn't complete silence though. Somewhere deeper in the store, something scraped faintly.
He froze.
The sound came again—soft, quick, like claws against tile.
He held his breath, eyes narrowing toward the darkness between aisles.
Nothing moved.
It's just rats, he told himself. Rats survive anything.
Still, his pulse quickened.
He stood carefully, picking up a broken metal rod for defense. The air smelled damp now, faintly rotten. He took one step forward, then another.
Something scuttled out of sight—too fast to see clearly.
He stopped moving.
"Hello?" he said, hating the way his voice trembled.
Silence.
Then a soft sound—like breathing—but uneven, ragged.
He backed away, slowly, until his heel hit a fallen shelf. The noise stopped.
He waited another long minute, then forced himself toward the entrance. The silence remained absolute.
Outside, the air hit him colder than before. The wind had shifted, carrying the faint smell of rain—or maybe chemicals.
He wiped sweat from his forehead and looked up. The sky wasn't just gray anymore. It shimmered faintly, almost oily, as if layers of light were twisting within it.
He squinted. The clouds pulsed once—barely visible—but definitely moving against the wind.
He blinked and it was gone.
His stomach turned. He started walking again, faster this time, keeping to open streets. Every few steps, he glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to see something watching him from the shadows.
He needed shelter. Somewhere higher, maybe, where he could see the streets.
He found a half-collapsed office building and climbed the broken stairwell to the third floor. Each step creaked under his weight, dust falling from the ceiling like gray snow.
When he reached the landing, he stopped to catch his breath. His hand brushed the wall. It was warm.
He pulled back instantly.
The concrete pulsed beneath his palm, faint but rhythmic.
He stared at it, uncomprehending. Then the vibration stopped, leaving only stillness.
"Maybe it's just me," he whispered. His voice sounded small in the empty space.
He sat down near a window, what was left of one, and looked out over the city. The wind moved ash across the rooftops in slow waves, like an ocean of dust.
In the distance, smoke still rose from some unseen fire.
He thought about climbing down and checking it out, but his body ached with exhaustion. He tore a strip from his sleeve, wrapped it around his burned wrist, and leaned his head against the wall.
Sleep came in fragments—short bursts of black between noises. Each time he woke, the shadows had moved.
At one point, he thought he saw a shape below on the street—small, hunched, moving in erratic steps through the dust.
It wasn't human.
He blinked, rubbed his eyes. The thing was gone.
He told himself it had been another hallucination—like the voices, like the flashes of light that came and went at the edge of his vision.
But when he looked at the wall beside him again, the warmth had returned. This time it stayed.
A pulse, faint but steady.
The city was breathing.
By the time morning came, Leo hadn't slept at all.
The gray sky above the city never changed color; it only brightened slightly, enough to make the dust shimmer. He climbed down from the office floor, stiff and hollow-eyed, and walked toward what had once been a market district.
He needed water. His tongue felt like paper.
The streets were quieter than before—no shifting debris, no echoing metal. Just the slow whisper of ash falling. When he stepped on it, it clung to his boots like wet sand.
He found a convenience store half buried under a collapsed overpass. The roof sagged, threatening to give, but a row of intact coolers near the back caught his eye.
"Please," he muttered, voice cracking. "Just one bottle."
He crawled over rubble, using a metal rod to push aside fragments. The floor creaked with every step. When he reached the cooler, he pulled the door open. Inside were bottles covered in frost—or what had once been frost, frozen mid-drip, now hardened into translucent webs.
He reached for one.
Something inside the cooler moved.
A ripple under the bottles, a soft scrape, followed by a wet dragging sound.
Leo froze.
The thing inside shifted again—slowly, deliberately.
He stepped back, heart hammering. The air turned sharp with a metallic odor, somewhere between ozone and rot.
Then a shape unfolded from the shadows inside: a rat, or what had once been one. Its skin was thin as film, half transparent, the skeleton visible beneath. Patches of fur clung in irregular clumps. Its eyes were gone, replaced by two points of dim white light.
Leo stumbled back into a fallen shelf. The creature crawled out of the cooler, dragging a hind leg that bent the wrong way. It made no sound, only the faint scrape of bone on tile.
He swung the metal rod instinctively. The tip connected with a crack. The creature burst apart—not like flesh, but like glass. Fragments scattered across the floor, glowing faintly before dimming into stillness.
For a second, Leo couldn't breathe.
He lowered the rod slowly, his arms shaking.
Then he saw it: one of the shards pulsed once with light—the same pale glow that sometimes flickered under his skin.
He stepped back, the breath catching in his throat.
A new sound came from behind him.
Soft footsteps.
He turned fast.
At the far end of the aisle, two shapes stood in the half-light. Human in outline. Wrong in detail.
Their skin was gray-blue, stretched tight. Patches of hair clung to burned scalps. One had a jaw twisted sideways, teeth bared in a frozen grin. Their eyes—white, lidless—reflected the faint light from the rat's remains.
They didn't breathe. They didn't sway. They just watched him.
Leo's throat locked. His grip on the rod tightened.
The taller one tilted its head, as if listening. Then it stepped forward—one, two, three careful steps.
The other followed, slower, dragging a limp arm behind it.
Leo backed away, fast, his heart pounding so hard he thought it might shatter his ribs.
"Stay back," he rasped.
They didn't.
When they moved again, their joints made faint, brittle clicks. The sound wasn't random—it was rhythmic, mechanical, almost synchronized with the pulse he could feel inside his own chest.
He realized it too late: the closer they came, the more the Bracelet began to vibrate.
A weak, electric pulse ran through his wrist, matching their motion.
The air thickened. The faint white light along their veins brightened—and so did his.
"No," he whispered, stepping back until his heel hit debris. "You're not real."
They moved faster now, the taller one lunging. Leo swung the rod again, wild, and caught it across the temple. The skull cracked inward, light spilling out in a short, violent burst.
The other creature shrieked—an awful, distorted sound, not human, not animal. It lunged too.
Leo hit it once, twice, metal clanging off bone, until it stopped moving. The bodies didn't bleed. The light inside them just dimmed, fading to gray dust.
Then silence.
The smell of ozone returned—stronger now, sharp enough to sting. The air around him shimmered faintly, alive with static.
He dropped the rod, his breath ragged. His hands were trembling. When he looked down, faint filaments of light crawled beneath his skin, tracing his veins like threads of fire.
The same color as theirs.
The same light.
He stumbled out of the store, eyes burning, lungs full of the metallic air.
Outside, the sky had changed again. Clouds twisted in unnatural spirals, faint streaks of pale radiance moving within them like something alive.
He sank to his knees on the cracked asphalt, covering his face.
"They were alive," he said under his breath. "They were—people."
He didn't know if he was speaking about them or himself.
The wind answered with silence, carrying dust over the still forms behind him until they disappeared completely.
He didn't stop running until his lungs burned.
When his legs gave out, he crawled under the fractured shadow of an overpass — concrete split and leaning, held together by rebar veins. The air there was damp and colder. He sat with his back against the wall, metal rod still clutched tight.
Every sound from the ruined city reached him faint and distorted — the moan of settling steel, the whisper of dust shifting. But nothing followed him.
For the first time since the blast, he almost wished something would.
He wiped his face with trembling hands. The streaks they left on his cheeks glowed faintly before fading — thin veins of light that refused to vanish completely.
He stared at them, horrified. It wasn't dirt. It was him.
His hands shook harder. The image of the creatures wouldn't leave him — their pale veins, their eyes lit from within. The way they'd responded to him, like moths to their own source of fire.
He pressed his wrist against his knee and whispered, "What did you do to me?"
The Bracelet gave no answer. It just sat there — cold metal, quiet, dead.
He wanted to tear it off, but the skin had already sealed around it, burned smooth into place. It pulsed once, faintly, as if mocking him.
He shut his eyes and saw the city again, bright and alive, then gone in a single heartbeat. The blast. The white light swallowing everything — and him, at the center.
The memory twisted until it became the image of those creatures again: twisted echoes of life crawling out of his mistake.
His breath hitched.
Maybe they weren't accidents. Maybe they were survivors. Or worse — continuations.
He leaned forward until his forehead touched his knees. The thought circled, endless and sharp:
You didn't just kill them. You changed them.
By the time dawn seeped through the cracks, he hadn't moved. The light was weak, gray, and cold.
He lifted his head and looked at his hands again. Beneath the skin, faint light still glowed. Not bright enough to blind—just enough to remind him it was still there.
Alive.
Inside him.