Garu froze.
Jake was lying flat on the floor, motionless. A cold knot formed immediately in Garu's stomach, his breath catching before he could stop it.
Wait. Please don't be dead.
Then he heard it.
A loud, rhythmic snore echoed through the quiet room.
...
Garu stared down at him. His expression moved through several things before settling on pure disbelief. "Are you kidding me," he muttered under his breath. Not a question. A statement about the nature of the universe.
The world was coming apart outside. Adil was somewhere in the dark corridors bleeding from a chest wound carrying poison he didn't know about yet. An elite tracker was on the verge of death across Garu's shoulders. Monsters roamed every corridor of a building constructed to contain something that shouldn't be woken. And Jake — Jake who had trained since childhood, Jake who had thrown Adil through a desk that very morning with a single kick — was taking a nap.
Garu suppressed the overwhelming urge to kick him repeatedly.
He stepped forward and carefully lowered the wounded hunter onto one of the pristine medical beds instead, adjusting him with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided that feelings were a later problem.
"Give me the items," the hunter muttered, fingers twitching weakly against the sheets. "I can heal myself."
Garu was already moving toward the equipment pile.
On his way across the room he wound back and kicked Jake hard in the ribs.
"OW — what the hell?!" Jake jolted upright, one hand flying to his side, the other rubbing his eyes with the specific indignation of someone who had been perfectly comfortable until thirty seconds ago. He blinked around the unfamiliar room. "Where am I?"
For one brief genuine moment Garu considered leaving him here.
He took a sharp breath instead. I don't have time. The supplies. The hunter. Adil's entire sacrifice means nothing if I waste it standing here.
He handed the equipment across to the bleeding man and spoke over his shoulder without turning. "Jake. Listen to me very carefully."
Jake's expression shifted — the sleepiness clearing as something in Garu's voice registered. Something he'd rarely heard there.
"We aren't in our world anymore," Garu said, his voice dropping to a low precise whisper. "We've been transported somewhere else. Adil is out there right now, fighting alone."
"What—" Jake was on his feet before the word finished. He crossed to the window in three strides and pressed both hands against the glass.
Outside, the college campus was gone. Entirely, completely gone — replaced by suffocating mist that swallowed the streets whole, reducing everything beyond it to drifting shadows and the suggestion of a landscape that no longer resembled anything he knew. His gaze dropped to the medical bed. To the bleeding lacerated figure on it. To the empty holsters on the torn tactical vest.
Jake's jaw fell open slowly.
"No way," he whispered. He turned back toward Garu. "This has to be a dream."
"It isn't." Flat. Firm. No space for negotiation. "Right now you only need to remember two things."
Jake looked at him — really looked, the way people look when they understand that the person speaking to them is not currently capable of being wrong.
"First — go help Adil." Garu pointed sharply at the exit. "Second — stay silent. Not quiet. Silent. Do not make a single sound once you step into those corridors."
Jake opened his mouth. "Why—"
"Because it will get you killed." The gravity in Garu's eyes closed Jake's mouth for him. "I'll explain everything else later. Go. Now."
For the first time since waking up Jake understood that Garu wasn't delivering instructions. He was delivering facts about survival.
He gripped his fists. Gave one sharp nod. Bolted for the door.
Jake sprinted down the corridor with his chest burning and his footsteps hitting the concrete harder than they should, and he knew it, and he couldn't make himself slow down.
You can't die on me, Adil. I still have to beat you.
He clenched his jaw and pushed his legs harder.
THACK.
Adil ripped the dagger free. Blood ran from a gash across his forehead, dripping off his chin onto the concrete. He stepped forward on a leg that wasn't cooperating properly anymore, past the two Zogs lying motionless behind him.
Three down.
The wounds across his chest burned with a heat that had moved past pain into something more fundamental — his body communicating that it was running a deficit it couldn't sustain much longer. He'd been ignoring it. He kept ignoring it.
His knee hit the floor.
He hadn't decided to kneel. His leg had simply stopped asking permission.
I can't die. Not yet.
He gritted his teeth and pressed his palm against the cold concrete. Pushed. Got one foot under him. Then the other. The corridor swam at the edges but stayed mostly upright, which was all he was asking of it right now.
Then the mist ahead thickened and a fourth Zog emerged from it.
Adil looked at it.
A bitter smile found his face without asking. Blood dripped steadily from his forehead onto the floor.
Am I really going to die here? The thought arrived with a strange lightness, almost curious. After all of this?
Hahaha.
Then I'm taking you with me.
He made himself stand fully. Gripped the dagger until his knuckles went white. His eyes locked forward and something in them went very still and very clear — the specific clarity that arrived when everything else had been stripped away and only the next necessary thing remained.
Not yet.
The Zog charged.
Just a little more.
The moment its claw reached him Adil moved — not backward, forward, into the space the creature had committed to, finding the gap its own momentum created, driving the dagger deep into its eye with everything he had left and using the impact to slam it into the ground beneath him.
Did you think I didn't learn anything from the other three? His mind was still running clean even now, even here, the part of him that processed fights continuing to work while everything else began failing. The pattern. The eyes. Always the eyes. But the claws — the poison thought, the one he'd filed and not finished, pressed against the back of his skull with the insistence of something about to be proven right.
Something ruptured.
Not suddenly. Not dramatically. Just — wrong. A wrongness starting deep in his chest and expanding outward with the quiet certainty of something that had been building since the first Zog's claws found him and had finally reached whatever threshold it had been approaching.
Blood came up when he coughed.
He looked at it on the concrete floor for a moment with the detached attention of someone who had run out of the energy required for appropriate reactions.
So the claws were poisoned, he thought. Called it.
His knee hit the floor again.
"Aghh—"
The sound escaped before he could stop it. Involuntary. Small. One syllable that the corridor received like a detonation.
The air froze.
Every ghost snapped its head toward him in perfect unison — that single synchronized movement, every neck turning at exactly the same angle at exactly the same instant, hollow faces locking onto his trembling frame with the patient certainty of things that had been waiting for exactly this.
They charged.
The first passed through his chest and the cold detonated — not built, detonated — worse than before, worse because he was already damaged, already running empty, the freezing fire finding everything broken and making it more so. The static that exploded through his brain was total and blinding and the corridor folded and the darkness rushed in from every edge simultaneously and —
The ghosts still circled. Patient. Purple auras burning in the dim light. Waiting with the confidence of things that had already done the hard work and just needed the rest to follow.
Adil lay in the dust.
He breathed.
Not yet.
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OBSERVATIONS
...
Subject 999 is still here.
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From somewhere very far down. From whatever was still running underneath everything else — underneath the poison and the wounds and the static and the memory of a door that opened and a door that didn't and a room that got too large and a boy who never stopped waiting —
Not yet.
Farther down the corridor Jake skidded to a halt.
He'd heard the sound — the small involuntary sound — and then the air had changed the way Garu had described and he'd rounded the corner and stopped because the scene in front of him had physically stopped him. Ghost figures floating above a body. A body he recognized by the black hair and the college uniform and the particular way even unconscious and bleeding it managed to look like it was about to do something stupid and brave.
Don't speak. Garu's voice in his memory. Silent.
Jake's jaw locked.
His fists closed at his sides so tightly his hands ached.
He moved forward one careful step at a time toward his friend lying face-down in the dust, surrounded by things still deciding whether they were finished — covered in blood from his forehead and his chest and places Jake couldn't identify yet — and said nothing, because Garu had told him not to, and because there was nothing that existed in language for what Jake was looking at right now anyway.