The air tasted off. Like old pennies and refrigerated plastic. Every time he blinked, there was a half-second delay in the world catching up.
He stared at a smear of pale sweat on the floor near his shoe. It hadn't dripped. It was just... there. Like it had peeled off his body without motion. Like memory misplaced.
Kenton looked up from his tool kit, eyes flicking to Lance's expression—not judgmental. Studying.
"You're holding your breath again."
Lance didn't answer.
"You've done it four times in the past minute. Long gaps between inhale and exhale. It's a stress response, but also indicative of systemic rejection—your body doesn't know what part of it is foreign anymore."
Dani glanced over, unimpressed. "That's one way to tell a guy he's spiraling."
"He is," Kenton said without hesitation. "And the bleed's accelerating."
Lance swallowed. "Bleed?"
"You're leaking," Kenton said, as if stating a fact about a weather pattern. "In small ways. From the inside out. But the weird part is, it's not just you anymore."
Kenton rose, wiping his palms on his jacket. "When I scanned you before the subway, your vitals were still mostly human. Mostly. Now? You're throwing off signals that curve outside the laws of entropy."
Dani cocked her head. "That's science for 'he's screwed,' right?"
"No," Kenton muttered. "That's science for he's changing the shape of the data itself. He's not a threat yet. But his presence is redefining context. That's worse."
Dario let out a low whine. His eyes never left Lance.
Lance didn't move. He couldn't. His fingers were tingling again—fine, white dust falling from his knuckles. It landed without sound, dispersing like powder on water, vanishing into the floor.
He exhaled. The room shifted. Or maybe just his perception of it. The edges of Dani's coat bent at the corners. The graffiti on the far wall now said something in a language he didn't recognize.
He blinked again, longer this time.
And in that blink, he was alone.
No Dani. No Kenton. No dog.
Just silence. Endless, humming silence. And then, quietly, softly, a voice:
"You weren't supposed to live long enough to see this."
Lance's eyes flew open. Dani was crouched in front of him, staring hard.
"Hey. Earth to milk-boy."
He flinched, gasped, clutched Dario like a parachute yanked mid-plummet. His breath came fast and shallow.
"I think it's in my eyes," he rasped. "I—I think I'm seeing things backwards. Or inside-out. Or both."
Kenton was already beside them, running a scanner along Lance's arms. "The symbiote isn't invasive in the traditional sense. It's not replacing you—it's misinterpreting you. Like it's trying to rebuild a concept it only half-understands."
"What the hell does that mean?" Dani asked.
"It's not a monster you fight with bullets or bombs," Kenton said quietly. "It's a fracture. A corruption in the code of reality, for short."
That stopped Dani for a breath.
Lance sat against the wall now, knees pulled to his chest. Dario's head rested on his lap, calm and steady as ever. The one constant. The one anchor.
Lance didn't cry. But if he had, the tears might've looked like milk.
Kenton turned toward Dani. "We can't keep him unprotected. If this goes on, we'll lose his definition. Not just his sanity. His... boundaries."
"And you're sure there's no playbook?" she asked.
"I've seen fragments. Scattered files. Erased people. They don't just go missing—they get reclassified. Removed retroactively. Like they were never real."
Dani stood, eyes narrowed. "So how the hell do we stop that?"
Kenton didn't answer right away. His fingers twitched. His jaw clenched.
Then, almost softly, like admitting a wound:
"I don't know. I just know we need to get him somewhere older than this thing."
"Older?" Lance whispered.
Kenton nodded. "Somewhere reality doesn't bend easily. Somewhere the rules were etched deeper. Places with weight."
Dani exhaled, sliding a bullet-sized device into her palm and rolling it over her knuckles. "Fine. You pick the place. I'll get us there."
Kenton turned to her with haunted eyes.
"You're not gonna like where it is."
She grinned, not kindly. "I don't like anywhere."
Lance leaned his head against the wall. Dario curled tighter against him.
The thing in his head wasn't whispering anymore.
It was listening deeply.
The train shouldn't have been running.
Its schedule wasn't posted anywhere. The station they'd found it in was half-swallowed by roots and rust. The vending machines dispensed dead moths instead of snacks. The platform map didn't list a destination—just a single blinking pixel labeled: DO NOT REMEMBER.
"Great," Dani muttered, hopping aboard with her briefcase slung over her shoulder like a weapon. "Nothing screams stability like a train that gaslights you on arrival."
Kenton followed more cautiously, his scanner whining in uncertain pitches. "It's not listed in any of the sealed transport logs. But it's moving through stabilized faultlines. That's... promising."
"You say that like it's a good thing," Lance murmured, trailing behind them, Dario pressed to his side like a talisman. His voice was hollow, almost swallowed by the dim hum of the subway. Every word felt weighed down, like it had to fight its way out of him.
"It is," Kenton said. "In a way. The last time I tracked a faultline vehicle, it passed through six towns that no longer exist but left everyone on board mostly intact."
Lance blinked, staring at the scratched floor beneath his shoes. "Mostly?" His voice cracked. Even the word sounded foreign, brittle.
"One guy got replaced with his high school bully. But everyone agreed it was an improvement."
Dani barked a short, sharp laugh, trying to pierce the gloom. "Poor bastard. Imagine getting overwritten by Todd from fourth period."
Lance forced a dry, humorless smile, but it didn't reach his eyes. His hands rested limply on Dario's fur, nails pressing shallow grooves into the soft coat. He didn't notice the subway posters flapping faintly in the stale air. HE DOES NOT DRINK FROM THE MILK. His chest tightened at the sight, and he pressed his forehead against his arm.
He sat down slowly, letting the seat swallow him, slumping so far his knees nearly touched the scratched floor. The world didn't feel real. Not the train, not the upholstery, not even Dario's warm body leaning against him. The Misfolded Saint's voice still reverberated in his mind, a cold echo lodged behind his eyes: You're too dependent on your dog to live... pathetic.
He hadn't just been frightened. He had been torn open. Every memory, every insecurity, every half-forgotten failure had been flung at him, raw and glaring. And now... now he had nothing left to filter reality through. No piano. No sketches. No protective fantasy to turn the world into something safer.
He pressed his face into Dario's fur, breathing shallow and uneven. The dog whined softly, nudging at him. Lance didn't respond. He couldn't. Every heartbeat felt like it might shatter him entirely.
Kenton noticed, pausing a few feet away. His voice was gentle yet a bit awkward. "Lance... you need to—"
"I can't," Lance whispered, voice trembling. "I... I don't know who I am without it. Without... everything. I've been lying to myself for so long... pretending it's normal."
Dani shifted beside him, quiet now, but the faint hum of the sigils in her briefcase seemed to pulse in sympathy. Lance didn't ask for comfort. He didn't want it. He couldn't handle it.
The train rocked slightly, a muted screech of brakes echoing down the tunnel. To anyone else, it was just a subway ride. But to Lance, it was a liminal space, a limbo between the fractured world he'd just endured and the uncertain one ahead. The Misfolded Saint had left marks deeper than bruises or scars—marks no sigil, no briefcase, no dog could shield him from.
He closed his eyes, the world narrowing to Dario's warmth and the thrum of his own ragged heartbeat. Every thought of home, every filtered memory of normalcy, now felt like a lie. The fear of confronting his past, of truly seeing himself as he was, weighed heavier than any monster chasing him could.
And in that quiet, suffocating dark, he realized something: surviving the Misfolded Saint didn't feel like victory. It felt like collapse.
Kenton pulled out a collapsible screen from his coat and began typing one-handed. "This route should get us to Hollow Reach in two hours. If the train doesn't fold."
"Hollow Reach?" Dani asked, plopping into the seat opposite him. "Why do all these places sound like rejected horror podcasts?"
"Because they are," Kenton said. "Most people don't remember them. Not anymore. But Reach has roots. It might have enough reality density to slow down the infection."
Lance leaned back and closed his eyes. But the train kept flickering. One second the interior was dull green and humming. The next, the windows showed not landscape, but a flickering image of his old apartment hallway—except the walls were too long. And there was no ceiling.
Then it would snap back to normal. More or less.
Inside him, something was building.
Not organs or bones—though those twitched sometimes.
The symbiote worked like a sculptor with broken blueprints. It poked through his memories—half-remembered birthdays, the sound of a microwave he once owned, the cold click of a disconnected landline. It stole fragments without asking. Pieced together an echo of him, but wrong.
A memory of his mother making pancakes now smelled like concrete dust.
His father's laugh now looped mid-chuckle, starting again before it could end.
It was building him, again. But off-script.
Lance opened his eyes. Dario licked his hand.
"You okay?" Dani asked without looking up. She was reloading a slingshot with small, spinning sigils that buzzed faintly like bees.
"I don't know what it's doing," Lance said, voice low. "It's like... it keeps poking around in my head. Like it's looking for something."
Kenton looked up sharply. "What kind of something?"
"I don't know," Lance said. "Memories, maybe. Feelings. But they come back wrong. Familiar, but off. Like it's... trying to rebuild me, and getting the shape wrong."
Kenton's brow furrowed. "That's not how it usually happens."
"How does it usually happen?" Lance asked.
Kenton hesitated, then said quietly, "They don't usually bother with details. They take over. Consume. Move on."
Lance looked away. His hands had started to tremble again.
The train screeched around a curve that might not have existed.
They passed a field of mannequins standing ankle-deep in a lake. None of them wore clothes, but all of them held car keys.
A moment later, the windows were just black.
Lance rubbed his arms. They weren't cold. But they didn't feel attached, either.
Dani reached into her coat and pulled out something that looked like a protein bar wrapped in surgical gauze. She unwrapped it and handed it to him.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Food," she said.
He raised an eyebrow. "Real food?"
"Define real."
He ate it anyway. His stomach didn't complain. Yet.
Kenton sat across from him, eyes never leaving his scanner.
"Your memory's looping," Kenton said.
Lance blinked. "What?"
Kenton held up the scanner. "You've asked the same question six times since we got on. About the cow."
"I did?"
"You didn't finish it every time. Just said, 'What was that—' and stopped."
Lance looked at Dario. The dog stared calmly out the window at the mannequins.
"Sometimes it feels like... it's trying to remember me, but not how I remember me. Like it's guessing." Mercer said finally, voice low.
He paused, staring down at Dario's calm, steady eyes.
"Or maybe it's just... filling in blanks I didn't even know were there."
The train light flickered, and the seat next to him was briefly filled with someone else.
A figure, blurred like a corrupted file. Holding a birthday cake. Singing with a mouth full of teeth.
Then gone.
He didn't say anything.
The train screeched again—this time slowing.
Outside the window was a crumbling platform with faded signage. Someone had written LEAVE SLOWLY in smeared paint across the doors.
"This is it," Kenton said, rising and gripping the edge of his seat with shaking fingers.
Dani holstered her slingshot and reached for the parasite jar. "Back to ground. Let's see if this place holds."
Lance stood last. His legs felt wrong. Heavy and delayed, like they weren't quite his.
The air in Hollow Reach was... wrong.
It wasn't the temperature—mild, maybe a little damp. It wasn't the smell—though there was a faint sweetness, like overripe fruit left too long on porcelain.
It was the silence.
Not total, not dead—but too carefully curated. As if the wind waited for them to finish speaking before it moved. As if every creak of a warped shutter had meaning. As if the town was listening.
Lance stepped off the train behind Dani and Kenton, Dario pressed close to his heel. The station platform was cracked and tilting slightly sideways, like it had softened over time. Above them, a rusted sign dangled from only one chain:
WELCOME TO HOLLOW REACH
Time Lost, Time Kept
Below that, a smaller sign written in chalk:
Speak softly. He's learning to listen.
Lance stared at that one a little longer than he should have.
The streets of the town felt underused. Buildings leaned too close together, their windows either shuttered or open too wide. A streetlamp blinked in Morse code. A newspaper stand swiveled slowly on its own, like it was trying to show them something they didn't want to see.
The people—when they finally passed some—moved oddly. Not menacing. Just off. A woman in a pale green coat pushed an empty stroller while humming a lullaby with no words. A man stood facing a brick wall, head tilted back, mouthing a conversation no one else could hear.
Kenton whispered to Dani, "The town's still stabilized, but it's been grazed."
"Grazed?"
"Brushed by unreality. Something skimmed it and left fingerprints. That kind of damage... it doesn't scream. It settles."
Lance didn't speak. He couldn't stop watching the shadows. Not the ones that moved—but the ones that didn't.
They stopped at a convenience store that seemed functional. The neon "OPEN" sign buzzed just slightly out of sync with itself. A cardboard cutout of a cartoon mascot stood in the doorway—some off-brand cat holding a bag of ice. It had human hands.
Inside, the cashier wore sunglasses. The ceiling fans didn't move. The radio behind the counter played jazz, but only the drum track.
Lance stood by the refrigerator, staring at a single carton of milk. It wasn't the same brand. This one had a hand-scrawled sticker on it:
PROPERTY OF THE REACH. DO NOT WAKE.
He turned away. Fast.
Outside again, Kenton had his scanner out. "The farther in we go, the more stable it gets. That shouldn't be possible. It means something's rooted here."
Dani raised an eyebrow. "Rooted like...?"
"Like it built something underneath this town and hasn't finished."
They walked on.
A kid rode a tricycle in perfect, silent circles. The wheels never squeaked. His shadow had three heads.
By the time they reached the town square, the sun had stalled mid-fall in the sky. The clouds barely moved. Lance found himself slowing, heart thudding against his ribs for reasons he couldn't name.
He wasn't panicking.
He was remembering things wrong.
Dani said something. He didn't quite catch it. Her voice came through like a phone call from a tunnel.
"...You good?" she asked, though the tilt of her head and the slight furrow in her brow betrayed that she already knew the answer.
Lance didn't respond. His hands rested limply on his dog's fur, fingers pressing shallow grooves as if the pressure could ground him. His eyes stared past her, vacant and hollow, pupils like tunnels with no light at the end.
Dani noticed the tremor in his shoulders, the slow slump of his spine as if gravity itself had doubled against him. She didn't speak, didn't reach out—just watched, silent, a witness to a man who felt the world had bled away from him in a single encounter.
And in that silence, the answer was clear without words. Not "no." Not "maybe." But hell no, screamed in the blankness of his gaze, a wordless testament to a mind left naked, to the truths he had no defense for, and the fragile tether of life he clutched just to keep himself from disappearing entirely.
They stopped in front of a boarded-up building labeled TOWN HALL / OBSERVATORY in faded brass. A large set of binoculars had been bolted to the roof. They were aimed directly at the ground.
Kenton checked his scanner again and frowned.
"We should stay here tonight," he said. "The central field density is strongest in this block. If the symbiote's trying to construct a self from you, it might be slowed—confused—by this place."
"Like hiding a tree in a forest?" Dani asked.
"More like hiding a song in static."
They entered the building.
Inside, dust clung like memory. Desks long abandoned, clocks frozen on different times. A hand-drawn map of the town had been scribbled over in red ink—dozens of circled buildings, each labeled with things like "Still hears the hum" or "Unfolded but returned".
A line at the bottom read:
WE COUNT THEM SO THEY DO NOT COUNT US.
Lance sank into a chair by a window. He didn't say anything. His breath fogged the glass even though the air wasn't cold.
Dario sat beside him, ears twitching.
Kenton wandered the halls, mumbling to himself.
Dani stood nearby, arms folded, eyes scanning the corners.
Outside, the quiet deepened. The buildings across the street hadn't moved.
But somehow, they were closer now.
And above them all, Hollow Reach watched.
The air in Hollow Reach didn't cool at dusk—it thickened. The town square, so empty when they'd passed through earlier, now pulsed with low murmurs and soft footfalls. No announcement. No bell. Just people emerging from buildings like they were answering a signal only they could hear.
Lance pressed his forehead to the dusty window of the observatory, watching. Dario sat at his feet, ears perked, unmoving. Dani stood behind him, arms crossed, eyes narrowed. Kenton was seated at a nearby desk, scribbling something incomprehensible in a torn journal full of bent paperclips and symbols that refused to stay still when you stared too long.
Dani moved beside him, peering down. "Cows," she said, flat.
"What?"
"Some of them. Cow masks. See?"
She was right. About a dozen figures, scattered among the slow-moving crowd, wore paper-mâché cow heads—oversized, painted bone-white, with eye holes cut unevenly. Some had crude horns. One dripped something black from its nostrils.
Kenton looked up sharply. "We need to stay inside."
"Tell me why," Dani said.
"Because they only do this when the boundary ripples. It's not just tradition. It's a... containment method."
Lance stepped back from the glass, throat dry. "What are they containing?"
Kenton didn't respond.
Outside, the crowd began to move in concentric circles around the square fountain. Some hummed. Others chanted in a language that felt like it should be understood—but resisted meaning, syllables slipping through mental fingers.
One of the cow-masked figures stepped forward.
It wasn't their gait or posture that made Lance freeze—it was the smile.
Human mouth. No eye holes. Lips pulled too wide across a face that hadn't moved otherwise. A smile like it had been practiced on someone else's skin.
The figure looked up.
Right at him.
Lance stumbled back, nearly knocking over Dario. "It saw me."
"No," Kenton said too quickly. "It remembered you."
The ritual intensified—arms lifted, heads tilted, murmurs rising into harmony with something below the audible spectrum. The cow-masked figure, still smiling, lifted a hand and crooked one finger.
Come down.
"Absolutely not," Dani muttered.
The front door rattled once. Then again. Not a knock. A testing.
Then a voice—wrongly distorted, like a throat mimicking speech without lungs to back it.
"Laaaaaaance."
Dani's gun was already in her hand. She didn't aim it. Just held it like an anchor.
The voice returned. "The boy who wore the wrong fear. Come see what you're becoming."
Kenton stood slowly. "We need to go. Not far. Just two streets north. There's someone I know—we can learn more from him. But we don't stay here tonight."
Dani frowned. "You said this place was stabilized."
"It was," Kenton whispered, "until they remembered him."
They left through the back.
Hollow Reach's alleyways were strangely smooth—worn flat like they'd been walked forever but never used. The windows watched. Doors breathed, slightly ajar.
As they reached the edge of the northern block, Dario stopped and growled. Low. Tense. Then stepped behind Lance.
The person sitting in the alley had once been a man.
Maybe.
He wore no shirt, just a rust-colored shawl that shimmered when he moved. His face was half-turned away, obscured by something—not cloth, not shadow, but a film, like melted transparency. His hands were wrong—too long, fingers curled inward like they were thinking for themselves.
And where his neck met his jaw, something pulsed beneath the skin. Not like a vein.
Like a tether.
The man turned.
His eyes were too clear. Too aware.
"Hello, Kenton," he said.
Kenton flinched. Just a flicker—but it was there. "You're still here."
"You're late," the man replied, and smiled—just the mouth, not the rest of the face.
He looked at Lance. Then at Dario. Then back to Lance.
"You're louder than they expected," he said. "You're not a wound anymore. You're an invitation."
Lance took a step back.
"I don't know you," he said.
"No. But I remember what you forgot."
Kenton hissed, "Don't listen to him. He's merged. Too much. He folded inward—let the contamination pick the parts it liked."
Dani raised an eyebrow. "And what, it liked the creep factor?"
The man chuckled, dry and delicate.
"You joke now," he said to her. "But in time, your memories will ask you who you really protected."
Lance stared, heart racing.
He could see it now—beneath the man's translucent throat, something twitching. Like a mass of wires trying to organize into a spine. Or a thought trying to wear a shape.
The man leaned forward.
And whispered.
"Would you like to know what it's building inside you?"
Lance didn't answer.
But Dario barked. Once. Loud. Piercing.
The man winced.
And then the shadows pulled back like curtains.
The town square roared with inhuman chants. Cow-masked figures moved again.
Something had seen them.
Kenton grabbed Lance. "We move. Now."
"Where?" Dani asked, already cocking the grenade launcher.
"Somewhere it doesn't remember," Kenton snapped.
"And that guy?" she nodded toward the merged man.
He hadn't moved. Just smiled. And said, to Lance:
"Soon, you won't need to knock. You'll be the door."