The Torrent-born moved like water learning to walk.
One moment it was ten meters away, climbing from the drainage grate with limbs that bent wrong. The next it was *closer*—not running, not lunging, just *existing* in a space that had been empty a heartbeat ago.
Sable's legs wouldn't move.
Medical training screamed at him: *flight response, adrenaline spike, motor cortex override*—but the words were just noise because his body had already done the math and arrived at a simple conclusion.
He was going to die here.
Second launched from his pocket, wings beating frantically, trying to pull him toward the alley. The bird's talons raked across his neck—small cuts, sharp enough to sting—and the pain was enough to break the paralysis.
Sable ran.
Not gracefully. Not with any kind of plan. Just pure animal panic, boots splashing through black water, shoulder slamming into someone who was standing with their arms spread wide, waiting for grace that would never come.
Behind him, the wet sound of movement. Joints articulating. Something breathing that shouldn't have lungs.
He ducked into the alley—the same one from earlier, the dead-end where the girl and the three men had disappeared—and his brain caught up to his legs halfway through.
*Dead end.*
*Stupid.*
*You're going to die in a dead end because you panicked like an amateur.*
The alley terminated in a concrete wall twenty meters ahead. No doors. No hatches. No convenient maintenance shafts to crawl through because this wasn't his tunnel, this was *someone else's* dead end and they'd probably died here too.
Sable spun around.
The Torrent-born stood at the alley's mouth, backlit by the red emergency strobes, and for the first time Sable got a clear look at it.
It had been human once. Maybe. The proportions were *almost* right—two arms, two legs, one head—but everything was stretched, elongated, like someone had grabbed a person by the skull and feet and pulled until the connective tissue gave up. Its skin was the color of drowned flesh, translucent enough that Sable could see the shadows of organs shifting underneath. No eyes. Just smooth skin where eyes should be, and that vertical mouth, lipless, lined with teeth that were too small and too perfect.
Children's teeth.
Baby teeth.
Sable's hands shook. He pulled the scalpel from his pocket—four inches of surgical steel that felt like a toothpick against something that had already unmade a man by *breathing* at him.
Second circled overhead, chirping frantically. The sound was too loud, too sharp, *attracting attention*—
"Get out of here," Sable hissed.
The bird ignored him. Dove at the Torrent-born's head, talons extended, aiming for where eyes should have been.
The creature's head tilted. Tracking. Its mouth opened slightly.
"*Second, no—*"
The bird pulled up at the last second, wings beating hard, climbing toward the fire escape that zigzagged up the alley wall.
The Torrent-born's attention followed.
Away from Sable.
Toward the bird.
*No.*
Sable moved without thinking. Charged forward, scalpel raised, aiming for—what? The throat? The chest? Some vital organ that probably didn't exist anymore because this thing had already left biology behind?
The blade connected.
Drove toward the soft tissue under the jaw.
Skittered off like he was trying to cut *stone*.
The creature's head swiveled. Slowly. Curiously.
Looked down at him.
Sable saw his reflection in the smooth skin where its eyes should have been—warped, distorted, a dark-haired kid with a face too thin and a scar that split his forehead from hairline to left eyebrow. His hair had come loose from the tie, falling in messy curtains around his face, and for just a second he saw what the monster saw:
A nineteen-year-old medical dropout with mismatched eyes—one brown, one winter-blue—holding a scalpel like it was a sword. Playing hero. Pretending he was someone who saved things instead of just documenting how they died.
The Torrent-born's hand moved.
Too fast. Impossibly fast.
Claws—five of them, hooked and sharp—wrapped around his throat and *lifted*.
His feet left the ground.
The scalpel clattered to the wet pavement.
Pressure. Crushing. The world narrowed to the sensation of his windpipe collapsing, his vision sparking at the edges, his hands scrabbling uselessly at the creature's wrist—
*Why isn't there a Grace?*
The thought came from nowhere, bitter and desperate.
*Nineteen times . Nineteen times standing in the black water, waiting for the burn under his skin, the notification that would change everything. Five times walking away empty. Rainblind. Cursed. Useless.*
*Everyone else got something. Even the people who died screaming got thirty seconds of power before the Torrent-born tore them apart.*
*Why not him?*
*What was so fundamentally broken about Sable Lucthilde that even the Rain looked at him and said 'no thanks'?*
The claws tightened.
His lungs burned.
Second shrieked—high, desperate—and dove again.
The Torrent-born's other hand snapped up, caught the bird mid-flight, and *squeezed*.
Something small and fragile cracked.
Second went limp.
The world stopped.
Not the Rain. Not the screaming. Not the creature holding him by the throat.
Just Sable.
Everything else kept moving, but *he* stopped—suspended in the moment between seeing and understanding, between knowing and *feeling*.
The Torrent-born's fist opened.
A small grey shape tumbled toward the pavement. Hit. Didn't move.
Sable's right eye—the blue one—tracked the fall with clinical precision: *velocity, impact force, probable internal hemorrhaging*—
His left eye—the brown one—just *saw*.
Second.
Small.
Broken.
Not moving.
And something in Sable's chest, something that had been holding itself together through six years of the Dredge and nineteen years of trying to be enough for people who kept deciding he wasn't, finally gave up.
The regret hit like drowning.
Not for dying. Dying was easy. Dying was the Dredge's favorite punchline.
The regret was for *this*—for three weeks of a bird that kept coming back, kept choosing him, kept fighting to stay alive in a place where everything was designed to kill it. Three weeks of something small and stubborn deciding that Sable Voss Lucthilde was worth returning to.
And Sable had let it die.
Not because he couldn't save it.
Because he'd *run*.
Because when it mattered, when the choice was between fighting something he couldn't kill or protecting something small enough to fit in his pocket, he'd chosen the same thing he always chose.
Survival.
His own.
Alone.
The way it always ended.
*I'm sorry.*
The words burned behind his eyes, carved themselves into his skull with the weight of every other apology he'd never said, never meant, never gotten the chance to take back.
*I'm sorry I wasn't good enough.*
*I'm sorry I couldn't be what you needed.*
*I'm sorry I keep failing everything that tries to love me.*
The Torrent-born's mouth opened wider.
Sable stared into the pink wetness at the back of its throat and thought about his adoptive father—the bottle, the screaming, the way the man's hand had felt when it connected with his forehead hard enough to split skin and leave a scar that would never quite fade.
*"Six years of tuition and you drop out? You ungrateful piece of—"*
He thought about the older boy's face when she'd told him some people don't get second chances.
He thought about the girl from Block 17, dying in fourteen hours because he'd documented her tumor instead of *trying* something, *risking* something, being anything other than the coward who watched from a safe distance and wrote it all down like observation was the same as caring.
He thought about Second—stupid name, stupid hope, stupid bird—coming back every morning like it had already decided Sable was worth the effort.
And Sable had let it die.
*I'm sorry.*
Cold script burned itself across his vision, white-hot and absolute:
**[Whenever regret touches you, fifteen seconds are stolen back.]**
The world *snapped*.
Reality inverted—black became white, white became black, colors bleeding into shades that didn't have names. Sound reversed, sucking backward into silence like the universe was inhaling. His stomach lurched, twisted, *dropped*—
His feet hit the ground.
Sable stood at the alley's entrance, back pressed to wet brick, unharmed. The Torrent-born was ten meters away, just pulling itself from the drainage grate. The man who'd laughed was still alive, fire just beginning to bloom around his fists.
Fifteen seconds earlier.
Sable remembered *both*.
The claws around his throat—the pressure, the cracking, the way his vision had narrowed to a pinpoint.
And also this moment. Standing here. Alive.
His hand moved to his pocket.
Empty.
His heart stopped.
*No.*
*No no no—*
Something rustled against his chest. Inside his coat. A small shape, shifting, annoyed at being compressed.
Sable's hands shook as he reached in.
Second looked up at him, feathers ruffled, black eyes indignant. The bird chirped once—*what the hell, I was napping*—and tried to bite his finger.
Alive.
Whole.
*Alive.*
Sable pulled the bird out, held him at eye level, and stared. His vision blurred. His throat closed. His hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Second tilted his head. Concerned. Confused.
Then the bird chirped softly—the sound he made when Sable was having a bad night, when the nightmares got too loud—and pressed his small head against Sable's thumb.
*I'm here. It's okay. I'm here.*
Sable made a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob, and pressed his forehead against Second's. "You died," he whispered. "You *died* and I couldn't—I didn't—"
The bird chirped again. Impatient. *I'm fine, you're fine, what are you talking about?*
Sable looked at the Torrent-born.
Then at the notification still burning behind his eyes.
**[Whenever regret touches you, fifteen seconds are stolen back.]**
Fifteen seconds.
*Fifteen.*
Not a minute. Not an hour. Not enough time to run, to plan, to do anything except die slightly differently.
The Rain—the thing that had torn the sky open, that had flooded the world with black water and monsters and the promise of power—had looked at Sable's entire existence and decided his Grace was worth *fifteen seconds*.
Triggered by *regret*.
The most useless emotion. The one that only mattered *after* you'd already fucked up.
Sable started laughing.
It came out wrong—too high, too sharp, tasting like rust and insanity. Second squawked in alarm.
"Fifteen seconds," Sable said to the bird. To the Rain. To whatever cosmic sadist had decided this was fair. "You couldn't give me something useful? Fire? Super strength? The ability to *not die*?"
The Torrent-born turned toward him.
"No," Sable continued, voice rising. "You give me *regret*. The world's most fucking obvious participation trophy. 'Thanks for caring! Here's a do-over so you can watch yourself fail in *slightly different ways*!'"
The creature moved.
Sable was already diving left—remembered exactly how it lunged, the split-second pause before it exploded forward—and the claws whistled past his head, close enough that he felt the displacement of air.
He hit the ground hard, rolled, came up with the scalpel in his hand, and *threw*.
The blade tumbled end-over-end, sparked off the creature's chest, clattered uselessly to the pavement.
The Torrent-born's head tilted.
Sable ran.
Not deeper into the alley this time. *Out*. Toward the street, toward the crowd, toward anywhere that wasn't a dead end.
The creature pursued.
Not running. Just *moving*—space folding around it, distance becoming irrelevant—
A hand grabbed Sable's collar. Yanked him sideways. He stumbled, caught himself against a vendor's stall, spun around—
The docker. The one with fire around his fists. Grinning like a maniac.
"I'm *blessed*!" he screamed. "I'm fucking—"
"Don't," Sable grabbed his wrist, felt the heat radiating from the man's skin. "Don't fight it, just *run*—"
"I've got *fire*!" The docker shoved him off. "I'm a *god* now!"
He charged.
The Torrent-born's mouth opened.
The air bent.
The docker came apart in a red mist.
Sable tasted copper. Felt something warm splatter across his face, his neck, soaking into his hair. His left eye—the brown one—flinched. His right—the blue one—stayed open.
*Aerosolized blood. Instantaneous tissue separation. No Grace in the world stops that.*
The Torrent-born turned back toward him.
Sable's hand found Second in his pocket. The bird was shaking again.
"I know," Sable whispered. "Me too."
The creature *moved*—
Reality inverted.
Fifteen seconds earlier, Sable was standing at the alley entrance. The docker was still alive. Second was still in his pocket, confused why they kept doing this.
Sable spat blood that wasn't there anymore and started walking.
Not running. Walking. Steady. Deliberate.
The Torrent-born climbed from the grate.
Sable watched it. Studied it. Let his medical training map the creature's anatomy—joint placement, range of motion, the slight hesitation before it moved that might have been calculation or might have been muscle memory from when it was still human.
The docker charged past him, screaming about blessings.
"Don't," Sable said quietly.
The man ignored him.
The Torrent-born opened its mouth.
Sable closed his eyes before the red mist happened.
Reality inverted.
Again.
And again.
And *again*.
By the seventh loop, Sable had stopped flinching at the sound of the docker dying. By the twelfth, he'd figured out the Torrent-born's attack pattern—three seconds to target, half-second to inhale, two seconds to *pull*. By the fifteenth, he'd mapped every exit route from the alley and realized none of them mattered because the creature was faster than physics and he was just a medical dropout with a bird and a curse.
By the twentieth loop, his hands had stopped shaking.
By the twenty-fifth, he'd stopped caring. Used the docker as a distraction for the torrent born so he can hide.
He stood at the alley entrance, Second tucked safely in his coat, and watched the Torrent-born climb from the grate with the detached interest of someone who'd already died enough times to know fear was just a waste of adrenaline.
The notification still burned behind his eyes.
**[Whenever regret touches you, fifteen seconds are stolen back.]**
Sable looked at his hands—covered in blood that kept resetting, kept vanishing, kept reappearing every time he made the wrong choice.
Looked at the creature hunting him.
Looked at Second, alive and warm against his chest.
"You know what? Sable said softly. Fuck it. Let's see how many times I can die before I stop regretting it."
Second chirped. It sounded worried.
"Yeah," Sable said. "Me too."
He tucked the bird deeper into his coat, turned his collar against the Rain, and walked into the street.
Somewhere ahead, the city was tearing itself apart.
Somewhere behind, he'd already died thirty times.
Somewhere in between, Sable Voss Lucthilde was learning that second chances and last chances looked exactly the same when you kept making the wrong choice.
The Torrent-born followed.
The Rain kept falling.
And fifteen seconds at a time, Sable learned to stop counting.