Kaelen didn't stop walking until the city gave way to the industrial district.
Here, the silence was different. In the residential zones, the silence felt like grief—empty homes, abandoned lives, the echo of people who had simply stepped out for a moment and never returned. In the industrial zone, the silence felt like patience.
Machines didn't mourn. They just waited.
The sky above had turned a bruised purple, the color of a healing contusion. It offered no light, only a vague, suffocating sense of direction. The sun was a memory, replaced by a diffuse gray glow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Kaelen found shelter in a shipping depot. The main gates were twisted, not by force, but as if the metal had simply decided to flow like liquid for a few seconds before hardening again into abstract shapes. He slipped through a gap in the steel, careful not to snag his pack.
Inside, rows of shipping containers were stacked like giant, rusting bricks. Some were fused together, their metal skins melted into one another. Others hovered inches off the ground, locked in a glitch of physics that no longer applied.
He found a dry corner between two containers—one red, one blue—and sat down.
His legs ached. Not the sharp pain of injury, but the dull, grinding fatigue of a body that hadn't truly rested in weeks. Every muscle felt tight, like a wire pulled to its breaking point.
He opened his bag.
Inventory was a ritual. It was a way to impose order on a chaotic world.
One bottle of water, half full. A packet of dried meat, hard as leather. A flashlight with fading batteries. A small knife, the blade chipped.
He drank a single mouthful of water, swishing it around his mouth to trick his brain into thinking it was more, before swallowing.
Conservation, his mind whispered. Structure. Discipline.
He closed the bottle.
"You should drink more," a voice said.
Kaelen didn't jump. He didn't scramble for his knife. He simply froze, his hand still resting on the cap of the bottle.
He knew that voice.
It wasn't the voice of a raider or a scavenger. It was calm. Reasonable. The kind of voice that made sense in a boardroom, or a classroom, or a gentle dream.
He looked up.
Sitting on the crate opposite him—less than ten feet away—was a man in a gray suit.
He looked ordinary. His tie was loosened, the top button of his shirt undone. His jacket was draped over his knees. He looked like a commuter waiting for a train that was running late, tired but patient.
Except for his edges.
Where the man's shoulders met the darkness, they blurred. His outline wasn't sharp. It vibrated, like a low-resolution image trying to render itself on a bad screen.
"Who are you?" Kaelen asked. His voice was steady, though his pulse hammered against his ribs.
The man smiled. It was a polite smile, but it didn't reach his eyes. His eyes were just flat color. No pupils. No iris. Just gray.
"Does it matter?" the man asked. "Names are heavy, Kaelen. Carrying them makes you tired."
Kaelen tightened his grip on the water bottle. "You know my name."
"The world knows your name," the man said softly. "It knows everything about you. It knows you're tired. It knows you're counting steps because you think math will save you from the math-less."
The man leaned forward. The blur around his shoulders expanded, bleeding into the air like watercolor on wet paper.
"Why do you keep walking, Kaelen?"
"Because I'm alive," Kaelen said.
"Are you?"
The question wasn't mocking. It was curious. Genuine.
"Look at you," the man said, gesturing vaguely with a hand that trailed mist. "You eat scraps. You sleep on concrete. You speak to no one. You contribute nothing. You are a line of code that executes no function. You just… loop."
Kaelen stared at him.
This wasn't a survivor. This wasn't a hallucination brought on by dehydration.
This was a Hollow.
He had heard rumors of them in the early days, whispered by people who disappeared shortly after. Echoes of humanity. People who had been partially deleted but hadn't fully vanished. They weren't ghosts. They were glitches. Errors in the system that tried to correct other errors.
"I observe," Kaelen said. "I remember."
"Observation is passive," the Hollow countered gently. "It consumes resources. It takes up space. You are inefficient, Kaelen. You are holding on to a version of the world that has been deprecated."
The man in the suit stood up.
His feet didn't touch the ground. He hovered an inch above the dust, bobbing slightly like a cork in water.
"Rest," the Hollow whispered. The word sounded like a bed. Like a warm blanket on a winter night. "Just close your eyes. Stop counting. Stop moving. Let the silence take the weight."
Kaelen felt the urge wash over him.
It was physical. A wave of heavy, sweet exhaustion.
Why was he walking? What was the point? The archives were lies. The gods were gone. The sky was broken. Every step was just a delay of the inevitable.
Sitting here forever sounded… correct. Efficient. Peaceful.
The Hollow stepped closer. The gray blur began to bleed into the air around Kaelen, dimming the world further.
"Let go," the Hollow said. "It doesn't hurt. It's just… simplifying."
Kaelen's eyes drooped. His hand relaxed on the water bottle. The plastic crinkled.
Simplify, his mind agreed. Yes. That makes sense. Why fight the edit?
Then he saw it.
On the crate next to where the Hollow had been sitting, there was dust. Thick, gray industrial dust that had settled over decades.
But the Hollow had left no mark.
There was no imprint of trousers on the dust. No disturbance in the air.
The Hollow had no weight.
The Hollow wasn't real.
And if the Hollow wasn't real—then it had no authority to tell him what to do.
Something sparked in Kaelen's chest. A cold, hard knot of anger. It wasn't the panic of a victim; it was the indignation of a man who realized he was being lied to.
"No," Kaelen said.
The Hollow paused. The gray eyes flickered. "No?"
"You don't get to decide," Kaelen said.
He forced his eyes open. He forced his legs to engage. The muscles screamed in protest, burning with lactic acid, but he ignored the signal.
He stood up.
The exhaustion dragged at his bones like gravity, heavy and suffocating, but he pushed back against it.
"I am not a line of code," Kaelen said. His voice was getting louder, filling the empty container. "I am not an error."
He took a step toward the Hollow.
"Sit down," the Hollow commanded. The voice wasn't gentle anymore. It was a distortion, a blast of static that hurt Kaelen's teeth. "Cease."
"No," Kaelen said again.
He stepped right up to the figure. Up close, the man's face was a mess of pixels and gray mist, a bad rendering of a human being.
"I am real," Kaelen snarled. "And you are in my way."
He didn't swing a fist. He didn't have a weapon that could cut mist.
He simply pushed his will against the space the Hollow occupied. He asserted his existence over the emptiness. He anchored himself in the reality of his pain, his thirst, his anger.
I am here. You are not.
Denial.
The air cracked.
It sounded like a gunshot—sharp, violent, and deafening in the silence.
The Hollow's eyes went wide. The gray blur shattered like tempered glass struck by a hammer.
"Wait—" the Hollow tried to say. The voice glitched, looping on the syllable. "Wait-ait-ait..."
But the logic held. Kaelen was real. The Hollow was not. Reality corrected the error.
The Hollow imploded.
It didn't vanish silently. It screamed—a digital, tearing sound of corrupted data being purged—and then collapsed inward. The suit, the face, the mist—it all folded into a single point of gray light, and then burst apart.
A pile of fine, gray dust rained down onto the floor.
Silence rushed back into the room.
Kaelen stood there, chest heaving, heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
He was alone.
But something had changed.
The air around him felt… stable. The dust at his feet wasn't floating. The container next to him wasn't vibrating. The purple bruise of the sky seemed to pull back slightly.
For a radius of three feet around him, the world felt solid.
He looked at his hands. They were shaking, but they felt heavy. Real. More real than they had five minutes ago.
A text appeared in his vision, hovering in the air like the timeline on the terminal had. But this time, it wasn't the red of an error.
It was a cold, lucid blue.
[ ANOMALY CONFIRMED ]
[ AUTHORITY FRAGMENT AWAKENED ]
[ TYPE: DENIAL ] > The ability to reject the encroachment of the Void within a limited space.
[ RANGE: 1 METER ]
[ CURRENT STATUS: OBSERVER (LEVEL 1) ]
Kaelen stared at the words.
He reached out and touched the floating text. His finger passed through it, but he felt a faint static tingle, like touching a CRT screen.
He looked down at the pile of dust that used to be the man in the suit.
He hadn't just survived.
He had edited back.
He picked up his bag. The exhaustion was still there, but the crushing heaviness—the urge to give up—was gone.
He wasn't just a survivor anymore. He wasn't just a witness.
He was an anomaly. A glitch that could bite back.
Kaelen looked at the path ahead, winding deeper into the industrial maze. He didn't know where it led. He didn't know what else was waiting in the silence.
But for the first time since the sky turned gray, Kaelen didn't just count his steps.
He planned them.