Kael did not remember deciding to run.
One moment, the thing that had once lent him a lighter was turning its broken head toward him.
The next, the world had lost all shape except one.
Away.
Away.
Away.
His shoes slipped over wet stone. His shoulder clipped someone's chest. A scream burst beside his ear and vanished behind him, swallowed by a larger scream, then another, until sound stopped being sound and became pressure.
The campus was no longer a school.
It was movement.
Bodies colliding.
Hands reaching.
Mouths opening.
Blood spreading faster than rain could thin it.
Someone shoved him from the side. Kael stumbled, caught himself against a bench, and kept going before his mind could understand whose fingers had brushed his sleeve.
His lungs burned.
Air entered him in torn pieces.
Iron.
Smoke.
Wet concrete.
Something sweet and rotten underneath, already blooming from opened bodies.
[Planetary Synchronization: 28%]
The notification appeared without urgency.
Cold.
Flat.
Patient.
As if the world screaming around it were only background noise.
Kael slammed into the corner of a low wall and nearly folded over it. Pain flashed through his ribs. He pushed himself upright with both hands, leaving a red smear on the stone that he did not know was his or someone else's.
Run.
His body obeyed.
Then another scream cut through the noise.
Not louder.
Not cleaner.
Closer.
A voice he knew only because the morning had given it to him one last time.
"Rough morning?"
Kael turned before he could stop himself.
And saw Clara.
She was on the ground near the steps, one shoulder twisted beneath her, her bag still hanging from the strap caught around her arm. A creature crouched over her, too thin and too long, its back splitting open with each breath as if another spine were trying to climb out of it.
Its claws had raked across her cheek.
Skin hung loose.
White bone showed beneath.
Its mouth was buried in her throat.
Kael stopped moving.
The world did not.
People ran around him. Shoes struck stone. Someone fell. Someone crawled. Something shrieked from the cafeteria doors with a voice that kept breaking into different pitches, like three throats fighting over one scream.
But for Kael, everything narrowed.
Clara's hand scraped the ground.
Empty fingers.
Twitching.
As if they were still trying to click a pen that was no longer there.
His stomach dropped so hard it felt like falling from inside himself.
"Clara…"
The creature tore its mouth away. Wet strands stretched between its teeth and the ruin of her neck.
Clara's eyes were open.
Too wide.
Too white.
But alive.
For one impossible second, she looked almost aware of him.
Almost.
Her lips moved.
No sound came.
Maybe she had tried to say his name. Maybe she had tried to ask for help. Maybe the body only remembered language after the person had already begun to leave.
Kael took one step.
His foot would not take the second.
The creature above her convulsed, then jerked away as if whatever it had wanted from Clara was already done. It hissed through black teeth and retreated into the chaos, dragging one arm that bent in three places.
Clara remained.
Breathing.
Still breathing.
Move.
Kael did not.
Her chest rose once.
Hard.
Wrong.
The veins beneath her skin darkened.
At first, they looked like bruises.
Then like ink.
Then like roots.
They crawled from the wound in her throat, spreading under her jaw, down her arms, across the white of one eye. Her fingers clawed at the pavement with sudden strength, nails snapping, blood streaking beneath them.
Her legs spasmed.
One knee bent sideways.
CRACK.
Kael flinched as if the sound had struck him.
Clara's mouth opened.
No scream came out.
Only a wet, pleading breath.
Her empty fingers twitched again.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
A gesture without its sound.
A habit without the girl who owned it.
Nothing left to put the world in order.
Then her neck snapped.
Not from a blow.
From inside.
Her head twisted toward him with a smoothness no living joint should have allowed.
The kindness vanished from her face.
Not slowly.
Simply gone.
Like a light switched off in a room no one would enter again.
Her jaw stretched.
Wider.
Wider.
The corners of her mouth split. Blood poured down her chin in two dark ropes. Her teeth pushed outward, multiplying wrong, the human shape of her smile collapsing under something black and eager.
Kael could not breathe.
No.
Her arms moved.
Not as arms.
As instruments remembering a purpose that had nothing to do with her.
Fingers lengthened. Knuckles burst. Bone slid through skin in pale hooks, darkening at the tips as if dipped in ink.
The tear in her cheek widened until one side of her face hung loose, wet and useless.
The smell hit him.
Iron.
Rot.
Cold ash.
Clara rose.
Not completely.
Not cleanly.
Her body unfolded in pieces, each joint arriving at a decision the others had not agreed to. One foot dragged behind her. One shoulder sagged open. Her head remained tilted too far to the side.
Then the thing wearing her body laughed.
A thin, airless sound.
Skinless.
Kael heard it and understood, with a horror deeper than sight, that he would remember that laugh longer than her voice.
The thing that had been Clara turned away from him and leapt onto a student trying to pull another girl to her feet.
There was a brief struggle.
A strangled cry.
A spray of blood across the steps.
Then the body beneath her began to twitch too.
The horror did not stay with Clara.
It spread.
Kael staggered backward.
His legs were weak.
Too weak.
Around him, the pattern revealed itself.
Bites.
Wounds.
Spasms.
Silence.
Then movement again.
Not death.
Worse.
A body given another purpose.
One by one, bodies rose where bodies should have ended.
Too fast.
Too many.
Like the campus itself was learning a new grammar and every broken spine was a letter in its alphabet.
It's spreading.
The thought struck so hard he almost fell.
It's infecting them.
His throat closed.
Students who had been screaming for help seconds earlier were now turning on the people who tried to save them. A girl with half her scalp peeled back crawled across the pavement with both arms, then launched herself at a pair of ankles. A professor pressed both hands against a wound in his stomach, whispering something that sounded like a prayer, until his fingers sank too deep and something beneath them moved.
Kael backed away. A shoulder hit him. He spun. The world lurched.
Someone's blood was on his lips. He wiped it with the back of his hand and nearly vomited when the taste followed.
[Planetary Synchronization: 42%]
The number rose.
The campus answered.
A pulse moved through the air.
A pressure. A hum. A tightening behind the eyes.
Kael felt it pass through him and into the bodies around him.
Some screamed louder.
Some stopped screaming.
Some smiled.
Ahead, near the wall of the administration building, a boy about Kael's age stumbled backward with both hands raised.
"Stop," the boy begged. "Please—please stop."
The thing approaching him had once been another student. Its face was mostly intact, which made it worse. A familiar nose. A familiar jaw. A student ID still swinging from a lanyard against its chest, absurdly clean beneath the blood.
But the eyes were empty.
The teeth were clenched.
And its breath came wet and animal, heavy with hunger.
The boy's back hit the wall. His hands searched wildly along the ground.
Plastic.
Paper.
Mud.
Nothing.
Then concrete.
A broken piece, sharp on one edge, slick with rain.
He grabbed it with both hands.
The thing raised an arm.
The boy screamed.
Not bravely.
Not beautifully.
Like an animal discovering there was no language left between itself and death.
He swung.
CRACK.
The concrete struck the attacker's temple. Its head snapped sideways. Bone split. Blood sprayed hot across the wall.
The thing staggered but did not fall.
The boy screamed again and struck lower.
Harder.
Closer.
CRACK.
This time the skull collapsed inward with a sound Kael felt in his teeth.
The body dropped.
Arms twitching.
Mouth opening.
Closing.
Opening.
Then still.
The boy remained pressed against the wall, both hands locked around the bloodied concrete. He stared at what he had done.
His chest heaved.
His mouth trembled.
He looked ready to collapse.
Then something changed.
Kael saw it.
Or felt it before seeing.
A faint shimmer pulled itself out of the corpse, not light exactly, not mist, but something between breath and heat. It gathered around the boy's hands, slid into his wrists, vanished beneath the skin.
The boy's spine straightened. His shoulders widened by a fraction. His breathing slowed.
The shaking did not stop all at once.
It was taken from him.
His eyes sharpened.
No understanding yet.
Only the first terrible taste of cause and effect.
The boy looked at his hands.
Then at the corpse.
Then at his hands again.
A laugh escaped him.
Small.
Broken.
Almost ashamed.
Then another.
Less ashamed.
Kael felt bile climb his throat.
He forced it down.
The boy flexed his fingers.
And something answered.
Around them, the chaos thickened.
A man brought a fire extinguisher down on a crawling creature's back and gasped when his arms swelled against the sleeves of his coat. A girl drove a shard of glass into a mutated face and staggered backward, eyes wide, as the cut across her own cheek began closing too fast.
The campus was not only dying.
It was teaching.
Kael stepped back.
No.
A wet chorus rose from the courtyard.
Screams.
Cracks.
Laughter.
Sobbed prayers.
Bodies rising.
Bodies falling.
Bodies learning, before anyone had agreed to be taught, what the new world paid for.
No, no, no.
The thought struck again, colder this time.
They get stronger by killing.
[Planetary Synchronization: 54%]
His legs moved before he could decide where to go.
Then failed.
A body slammed into him from the side.
Kael fell.
His hands plunged into warmth.
Soft.
Giving.
Wet.
For one second, his brain refused the shape of it. His fingers tightened by reflex, and something slid between them.
Then the smell reached him.
Not blood alone.
Opened stomach.
Half-digested food.
Shit.
The intimate stink of a body made public.
Kael looked down.
His hands were buried in the torn abdomen of a man whose eyes were still open.
The man's mouth moved once.
No sound.
Just air bubbling through blood.
Kael screamed.
Not a word.
Not even a name.
Only a raw strip of sound torn out of him as he scrambled backward, palms slipping, knees dragging through gore. His heel crushed something soft. He felt it burst under his shoe and screamed harder.
Get up.
He could not.
Get up.
Something laughed nearby.
High.
Childlike.
Insane.
The sound crawled through the courtyard and made every hair on Kael's body rise.
A wall shook.
Once.
Again.
Dust fell from the administration building's cracked façade.
Something enormous struck from inside.
BANG.
The windows trembled.
BANG.
A scream behind the wall cut off halfway through.
BANG.
Kael forced himself upright.
His hands were red to the wrists.
He did not wipe them.
There was nowhere clean to put the blood.
He ran.
Blind.
Limping.
Gagging.
Running on the scraps of a body that had stopped asking his permission to continue.
Anywhere.
Away from Clara's laugh.
Away from the boy at the wall.
Away from the thing hammering through concrete.
Away from the law being born in blood.
He passed a row of lockers torn open like rib cages.
A door hung half off its hinges ahead.
Storage.
He saw the word without reading it.
A dark mouth in the side of the hall.
He threw himself inside.
The room smelled of dust, bleach, old paper and metal.
Shelves.
Cleaning supplies.
Broken chairs.
Coiled cables.
A mop bucket with black water trembling inside it.
Kael slammed the door shut. His hands slipped on the handle.
He grabbed a chair, dragged it, jammed it beneath the knob.
Barely a second later—
BANG.
The door buckled inward.
Kael fell back.
Claws scraped the wood.
Long.
Slow.
Almost curious.
He clamped both hands over his mouth. Blood smeared across his lips.
The thing outside breathed against the door.
Wet.
Hungry.
Then another scream pulled it away.
Footsteps dragged past. A body hit the wall outside. A sob became a gurgle.
Then silence.
Only the brief absence of being next.
Kael slid down the cold wall until he was sitting on the floor. His knees rose against his chest.
His hands shook in front of him.
Red.
Under his nails.
In the lines of his palms.
Drying at the edges.
He stared at them as if they belonged to someone else.
Wake up.
His breathing hitched.
Wake up.
The room did not answer.
Outside, the campus screamed in pieces.
Inside, Kael listened to his heart battering against his ribs.
[Planetary Synchronization: 61%]
The notification glowed in the dark.
Soft.
Cold.
Unhurried.
Kael curled tighter.
Small.
Alone.
Soaked in other people's blood.
For the first time since the morning began, he stopped running.
And in the silence that followed, something worse than fear found room to breathe.
The world outside was ending.
Inside him, something had begun to learn its shape.