…It was not full of organs.
It was full of cloth.
Shirts, undershirts, socks, scraps of sari silk, fraying denim—garments packed into the yawning cavity as though his torso were a closet forced inside-out. Sleeves wormed through the wet cage of ribs, knotted around splintered sternum. A bra strap looped tight where his heart should have been, cinching a pulsing knot of stained cotton and torn polyester that rose and fell, trying to breathe.
The bundle twitched, and a baby's onesie pushed briefly to the surface, its cartoon panda face slick with condensation, then was dragged back under by unseen hands.
The sound it made was worse than any scream: the damp slither of fabric sliding over fabric, like a laundry machine full of meat.
Rajan didn't realize he'd clenched his fists until the pressure made bones in his forearms creak. The Karmic Echo stirred inside him, that familiar pressure behind the ribs, as if something in his own chest wanted to bloom the same way—open like a flower and spill out all the things he'd stuffed in there and refused to look at.
He forced a breath through his teeth, tasting metal. "Lian," he said, not turning his head, "do not touch anything."
Behind him, her footfalls stopped short at the threshold. "You think I was about to run in and hug the corpse closet?"
Her voice was brittle, the sarcasm stretched thin. Illusory Threads shimmered faintly around her like heat haze, reacting instinctively to her rising fear, doing what they always did: try to rewrite reality.
Rajan extended his awareness instead of his hands. The room was wrong down to its atoms. The angles chewed at his depth perception, every line bent toward a point somewhere past the visible space. The air tasted aged, like he'd stepped into a wardrobe full of clothes that had absorbed years of skin, breath, and tears. A karmic saturation, dense and cloying.
The man's head lolled. His eyes were open, clouded but not entirely vacant. Threads of dried blood had stuck his lips together. When he rasped, they cracked.
"You…came," he wheezed. "She…called…good…"
His voice sounded like cloth tearing. As he spoke, the mass in his chest shifted, garments writhing. A child's dress surfaced, pink, embroidered with tiny flowers. It was soaked dark, the color of old wine.
Lian swallowed audibly. Rajan heard it over the wet rustle.
The carpet under the man's knees wasn't carpet anymore. Not entirely. It bulged and pulsed, fibers unspooling into cords that climbed his shins, disappearing up into his calves as if his own clothing had fused with the floor. His trousers had grown seams as thick as veins, and from those seams, new threads branched, anchoring into the wall, the ceiling, other hanging furniture.
"Rajan," Lian murmured. "His wife. The voice. Where is she?"
The Echo shivered, tasting the question. Fear, devotion, neglect, guilt. A whole marriage of small cruelties and desperate clinging packed like sediment.
Rajan narrowed his eyes. "Everywhere," he said.
He stepped inside. Gravity shoved sideways, then corrected, like the room had hiccuped. The sloped ceiling seemed to inhale; the hanging table swung as though underwater. A lampshade rotated 90 degrees without moving, its geometry glitching, edges smearing and snapping back.
The man flinched at Rajan's approach, not in fear but in relief so violent it shook his rigged body on its clothing restraints. One of the cords tore free with a fibrous snap, flapping wetly before re-rooting itself in the wall.
"She was so tired," the man croaked. "Always washing, always folding. Said the house would swallow us one day if we didn't respect it. You have to keep up with the…with the…"
He trailed off, eyelids fluttering.
"Routines?" Lian supplied, stepping in after Rajan, Threads flaring. Illusions slid like transparent curtains across the walls—images of what the apartment should look like: normal, cramped, ugly in a human way. A faded sofa, a cheap fan, a TV on a crooked stand. For a moment, the reality and the illusion overlapped perfectly.
Then the room reacted.
The fake sofa buckled, its illusory fabric blistering. Within seconds, the vision blackened as if scorched from the inside. The walls around it bulged with pressure. Lian hissed, stumbling back, a hand flying to her temple.
"Don't force it," Rajan clipped out. "This space is more saturated than your Threads."
She blinked rapidly, eyes dilating. "It didn't just reject the illusion," she said. "It…fed on it."
In the walls, something giggled. A low, muffled sound like children laughing under piles of blankets. The wallpaper—no, there hadn't been wallpaper before—bloomed across the tilting surfaces, a floral pattern composed entirely of tiny, repeated silhouettes of hanging bodies.
Rajan's Karmic Echo thrummed, resonating with the house's hunger. This wasn't a simple infestation. This was a domestic space that had fermented in resentment until it became an entity.
The Realm of Echoes bleeding through the mundane.
"You asked for help," Rajan reminded the pinned man, kneeling just outside the reach of those writhing shirt-sleeves. "Your wife's voice reached my line. Where is she now?"
The man's eyes rolled toward him, and for a moment, Rajan saw past the milky film: a blowtorch of grief.
"She begged it to choose her," he whispered. "Not our son. Not our little Chintan. She said she was the one who kept the house alive, she had fed it with her hands, her back, her…she said if something had to go missing into the walls, it should be—"
His breath hitched. Inside his chest, the clothes convulsed as if in sympathy. Little socks surfaced and vanished, leaving smears of color like bruises.
"She traded herself," Rajan said.
"No one forced her," the man spat, sudden venom cutting through his weakness. "Always so dramatic, always…'Look at everything I do, look at how you come home and toss your shirt anywhere, look at the way you use me, use the house, use—' She thought binding herself would teach me. Teach the boy. You understand? She did it to punish."
Lian's jaw tightened. Rajan felt the spike of recognition from her—a familiar narrative of sacrifice sharpened into weapon.
He ignored the way it tangled with his own memories of his mother's voice, threadbare from chanting protective sutras before the ritual that annihilated their enclave.
"You resented her for it," Rajan said, voice flat.
The man's laugh was a ragged cough. "Resented? I prayed she would fail. That the house wouldn't listen. That she would stay. Romance, right?" His lips peeled back in a rictus grin. "She didn't fail."
The ceiling sagged, then lowered, as if listening. The bulb overhead bloomed into a sphere of tangled hangers, twisted metal hooked with bits of hair, tags, and fingernails. From the walls, wrinkles formed—handprints pressing outward from beneath the surface, dragging down.
Lian's Threads lifted like spider legs around her, ready to cut and re-stitch perception. But her hands trembled.
"Chintan?" she ventured. "Where is your son?"
The man's head jerked toward her. In that instant, Lian knew he would tell her anything if she came closer. The house knew it too.
Rajan grabbed her wrist before she stepped forward. His fingers dug into her skin; heat from the Echo seeped across into her pulse. She met his eyes, furious for half a second—then saw what was underneath: fear, cold and naked.
"He's part of the knot," Rajan said. "Can't you feel it?"
She closed her eyes, risked dropping her illusions entirely. The room rushed in without the buffer. The sound of fabric grinding; whispering in languages that were never spoken, only worn. There, under the man's heart-knot, a smaller presence, muffled, not gone.
"Oh," she breathed. "He's…sewn in."
The man sobbed, a sound so childlike it twisted her stomach. "He wouldn't stop crying," he said. "She was gone. The house was angry. It needed—something. It needed to be maintained. I put him…somewhere safe. Where it couldn't take him too, you see? I put him where it had already eaten."
Lian recoiled as though slapped. "You buried your son in your own chest."
"I loved him," the man insisted. "He's with us. With the house. We're all together. Isn't that what she wanted?"
The Echo inside Rajan reared like a struck animal. The room brightened and dimmed in pulses synced with his heart. The man's horror, his rationalizations, his desperate attempt to recast atrocity as love—it mirrored the way Rajan's mentors had justified binding spirits to children to "preserve the lineage."
If you say it's sacrifice for duty long enough, it stops sounding like murder.
The walls swelled, the geometry flexing in response to his agitation. Wallpaper bodies elongated, stretching into full-sized shadows. Arms peeled away from the pattern, reaching.
"Careful," Lian warned, recognizing the shift in him as much as in the house. "You're leaking."
His aura was. Faint, black-gold threads of karmic energy seeped from his pores, drawn by the room's thirst. Ghostly fingers reached greedily through him, tasting that volatile Echo.
On instinct, she spun her Illusory Threads around him, weaving a visual lie over his spiritual form: a figure of dull stone, blank and inert. It wouldn't hold long, but it might stop the house from noticing just how delicious he was.
The entity that had coalesced around their domestic tragedy was clever, but it was still young. Still more hunger than strategy.
Unlike the force Kira and Vikram were dealing with across the city, where the sky had begun to bruise.
*
Rain sheeted over the Tokyo rooftop, turning neon reflections into smeared wounds on the black glass. Kira knelt on the slick concrete, chalk and blood mixing under her fingers as she finished the last of the overlapping mandala-torii sigils.
Vikram stood at the roof's edge, shoulders hunched against the wind, eyes locked on the building directly opposite: a high-rise with windows like dozens of watching eyes. One by one, those windows were fogging from the inside. Faces pressed to the glass—too many, too flat—smearing down as if melting.
"The surge is climbing," he said, voice tight. Pain radiated up his cursed leg, every drop of rain a needle where the rakshasa-yaoguai's mark burned beneath the skin. "If we don't anchor the Veil in this ward, whatever is trying to push through will have an echo-pool in the whole district."
Kira licked rain from her upper lip. It tasted metallic; not from her own blood this time, but from the charged atmosphere. Spirits pressing against the barrier, crowding like commuters at rush hour, ready to flood in when the doors opened.
"You could help with the sigils," she said lightly, trying to ignore the way the storm clouds seemed to shiver with something that wasn't wind. "You can bend better than you're pretending to."
He looked over his shoulder, eyes shadowed. "If I bend down more than this, my spine might decide to do its best impression of that staircase we saw in Kolkata. The one that folded the wrong way."
She almost smiled. Almost. The memory of that staircase—the bodies welded into each step, mouths opening as feet came down—clinched the humor dead.
"We need them to hit this anchor instead of the Hayashi-Wei boy," Kira said, returning to the circle. "If the Great Unbinding picks him as its primary conduit here…Tokyo goes first. And my family will say it's poetic justice."
"Your family isn't here," Vikram said.
"That's the tragedy," she replied. "They won't get to see me save the world without their holy approval."
The last line of the sigil flared as she completed it. Lesser spirits answered her call—a flock of translucent, birdlike forms rising from the chalk, each with human teeth for beaks. Her summons were ugly things, imperfect, always a little wrong. She trusted them more for it.
"Spread," she ordered. "Intercept anything trying to ride the storm in. Sing loud."
They darted up, vanishing into the rain, their distant, discordant shrieks blending with thunder.
Vikram's gaze slid back to the opposite building. In one window, a shape leaned against the glass—a woman, maybe, hair hanging. Then she began to flatten. Bones compressing, organs redistributing, her whole body ironing itself smoothly against the pane until she was nothing but a pale stain, spreading into the fog.
He suppressed a shudder. "Kira," he said quietly. "This feels…coordinated."
She heard the strained note in his voice. Their rivalry had once fed off moments like this, each trying to outdo the other's courage in the face of horror. Now, the idea of proving him wrong, of leaving him exposed, made her throat ache.
"The prophecies talk about 'threads tugged across cities,'" she said. "Fates braided whether they like it or not. That's why we're here and Hayashi is there. Someone—or something—is playing weaver."
"Or butcher," Vikram muttered.
The wind shifted. A smell rolled over the rooftop: laundry powder, mildew, and something sourly intimate—the same stink that was choking Rajan's lungs in the room that couldn't be a room.
Kira frowned. "Do you smell—"
"Ward link," Vikram cut in, eyes flashing. "We've got cross-contamination. Whatever is in that apartment…is touching the same layer of Veil we just pinned."
Kira's heart skipped. Rajan. Lian. The messy, reluctant alliance that had begun between their little teams pulsed like a live wire through her chest.
"If that domestic echo grows into a full breach node," she said, "it could turn this whole district into…into—"
"A house," Vikram said. "And we'd all live in it. Forever."
A flicker of panic danced through her. For all her bravado, for all her thirst for revenge, she did not want to die in a metaphor.
"Then we shore up here," she decided, voice sharpening. "Give them a fighting chance to cut the knot there. They sever the emotional core; we stitch the Veil tight where it's thinnest. Two couples, one existential crisis."
Vikram snorted softly. "Romantic."
"Don't get ideas," she snapped, but her cheeks warmed despite the cold.
Below, in the building, lights began to flicker in a pattern. Off-on, off-on, like blinking eyes. Somewhere, something laughed—a deep, rattling sound that made the puddles on the roof vibrate.
Vikram flexed his hands, joints cracking. "Let's keep the world from becoming one big haunted closet," he said.
"Agreed," Kira murmured, and drew more blood.
*
Rajan leaned closer to the man whose chest had become a wardrobe for the dead and the living. The house groaned around them, resentful of the delay, of this talk. It wanted resolution. Closure. A final folding.
"You called us," Rajan said. "I won't ask you why. There's no answer that will satisfy either of us. But if you want your son to have even a chance at release, you're going to have to let go."
The man's fingers curled, threads tightening, cutting his own wrists. "Let go of what?" he asked, bewildered. "There's nothing left to hold."
Lian crouched beside Rajan, close enough that their shoulders brushed. Her illusions had thinned, but the Threads still moved around her, searching for leverage in the damaged geometry.
"Your story," she said softly. "You're gripping it so hard you've strangled everything else."
He turned his head, focusing on her. "You think I wanted any of this?"
"No," she said. "That's the problem."
Silence stretched. The house listened, offended, confused.
Rajan placed his hand just above the man's exposed, cloth-packed chest. The Karmic Echo surged to meet the knot of accumulated emotion there—years of unspoken resentment woven with acts of care, weaponized sacrifice, desperate love. It was a microcosm of the Great Unbinding itself: everything people refused to acknowledge, forced into a confined space until it broke reality.
If he pulled too hard, he'd rip the Veil locally, give the nascent entity a doorway. If he didn't pull at all, the knot would solidify, become a permanent anchor for future unbindings.
His ribs ached with the pressure, as if his own body wanted to mirror the blossom of bone before him.
"Rajan," Lian whispered, feeling the tremor in him. "If this unravels you from the inside, I will not be able to weave you back."
He almost smiled. "Then don't let me unravel."
He sank his awareness into the mass of fabric. Each piece carried an echo: arguments, apologies, silent dinners, the heavy warmth of a sleeping child carried from couch to bed, slammed doors, shared blankets. The house had eaten all of it. He could taste the fingerprints of the larger force behind the Great Unbinding, tugging these small tragedies into its design.
He found the smallest thread: a tiny sock, knitted badly, one side longer than the other. It was soaked in fear but also in something gentler: hope so fragile it made his throat hurt.
He closed his fingers around it—spiritually, not physically—and pulled.
The house screamed. The sound ripped through every angle, every plane, the walls buckling, furniture twisting like wrung-out limbs. The man arched, mouth stretched so wide his jaw joints popped, but what came out was not his voice.
It was a woman's.
"YOU DON'T GET TO TAKE HIM," she howled, echoing from inside the walls, from inside the mass of clothes, from the wallpaper's printed bodies. "YOU NEVER CARED, YOU NEVER LISTENED, YOU NEVER—NEVER—"
Lian's Threads snapped up, weaving barrier after barrier against the assaulting sound. Each word came with images: dishes left in sinks, messages unanswered, exhaustion dismissed, the slow erosion of self. The horror was not that the house had become hungry.
It was that it had been fed, daily, in teaspoons of neglect.
Rajan's grip tightened on the tiny sock-thread. "You bound yourself to punish," he said quietly, addressing the unseen wife. "You turned your home into a mouth to prove a point. This is your karma."
"And his," she shrieked. "And his. He gets to live free after I—after we—"
"No one walks free," Rajan said, voice low, controlled. "That's the thing about Echoes. But the child does not belong in this ledger."
He yanked.
The knot convulsed. Threads snapped, fabric tore, the house bloodying itself in its desperation to hold on. Lian felt the Veil above them ripple, the tremor running up toward the ward Kira and Vikram had erected.
The man's chest split wider with a wet sound. Something small and formless tumbled forward—not a fully formed ghost, not yet, just a clot of potential, shaped like a boy's silhouette made out of worn-out shirts and tears.
It clung to the edges of the cavity, terrified.
Lian reached for it with a Thread of pure, unadorned illusion—not to lie, not to manipulate, but to offer an image: a door, slightly open, light beyond. A way out that was not another trap.
"Chintan," she murmured, her voice shaking. "You're allowed to leave."
The wife's voice shrieked, feral. The man sobbed, unable to form words, bound in his own choices. The house, sensing its anchor loosening, began to thrash.
Above, on the drenched rooftop, Kira's sigil exploded into cold fire as the Veil buckled. Vikram slammed his cursed palm down onto the mandala, pushing his qi into the cracks, breathing through the pain.
"Hold," he grunted. "Whatever they're doing down there—hold for them."
Kira's lesser spirits screamed overhead, diving into spectral fissures, plugging them with their own unraveling forms. Their teeth scattered like hail.
Back in the impossible room, Rajan felt the Echo flex inside him, eager to devour the freed karma, to grow fat on it. He gritted his teeth, sweat pouring down his spine.
He would not become the monster that tidied up after other monsters.
Instead of pulling the boy into himself, he angled the thread toward Lian, toward her door of light. She gasped as the weight hit her, as the childish terror and love flooded her senses. It was too much, too close to her own memories of being small, invisible, expendable in Beijing's back alleys.
"Take it," he said. "Show him out."
Her hands shook, but she held the image steady. The boy-shaped clot hesitated.
From the walls, the woman's voice broke, finally, into sobs. "Don't leave me alone here," she whispered. The first honest thing.
Chintan's echo shivered.
Lian met Rajan's eyes over the boy's crumpled outline. They both knew the truth: no exorcism, no ritual could fix what had been done. They could only redistribute the suffering.
"You're not alone," Lian said softly to the unseen wife. "You have your house."
And as she said it, she let her illusions slide, just a little. For the wife, she painted an endless corridor of freshly laundered clothes, perfectly folded, never wrinkling, never stained. A heaven of domestic perfection that was, in reality, just the prison she had built for herself.
It was cruel. It was merciful. It was karma.
Chintan's echo stepped through her door. The knot in the man's chest loosened with a wet sigh. The house shuddered, suddenly smaller, suddenly sadder.
Rajan sagged back, chest heaving, ribs intact but burning. The Echo inside him quieted, sated by restraint rather than indulgence.
On the rooftop, the storm's color shifted from bruise-purple back toward ordinary black. Kira let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding as the mandala dimmed, intact. Vikram, sweat-soaked and shaking, straightened with a groan.
"Whatever they did," he said, "it worked. For now."
Kira flexed stiff fingers. "For now is all anyone gets," she replied. "That's what makes it terrifying."
She glanced out over the city, lights flickering, shadows longer than they should be. Somewhere down there, Rajan and Lian were pulling threads neither of them fully understood. Somewhere beyond the horizon, the Great Unbinding watched, patient.
In the too-deep room, the man slumped, his restraints loosening as the floor-cords withdrew, sulking. The wallpaper bodies faded back into pattern. The smell eased from unbearable to merely sickening.
"Is he free?" the man whispered.
"No," Rajan said. "But he's not here."
The man nodded, as if that was enough. His eyes fluttered closed. He didn't die. Death would have been too clean. He just…settled, becoming another piece of worn fabric in the house's history.
Lian helped Rajan to his feet. Their fingers lingered a heartbeat longer than necessary. Outside the warped doorway, the normal corridor waited, fluorescent light humming, pretending nothing had happened.
"The Veil is thinner than we thought," she said.
"It's not thinning," Rajan responded, staring back into the room that was already forgetting its contortions. "It's remembering."
They stepped out together, leaving the house to its swallowed prayers. The door closed behind them with a soft, satisfied click.