The white lasted about three seconds.

Then it was gone and Tobi was still on the fire escape, one hand on the drainpipe, the city still burning at the edges of his vision, and there was a screen in front of his face that wasn’t there.

Not a screen. Not exactly. More like the idea of a screen, hovering in his vision the way afterimages do when you stare at a light too long. He could see through it. He could see around it. But it was there, sharp and cold and completely real.

[ADAPTIVE DEVOUR EVOLUTION SYSTEM]

[HOST: TOBI VALE]

[AGE: 18]

[RANK: UNRANKED]

[EVOLUTION POINTS: 0]

[STATUS: CALIBRATING]

[FIRST DIRECTIVE: SURVIVE.]

He blinked.

It stayed.

He rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrist.

Still there.

"Okay," he said out loud, to no one, to the burning city and the broken sky. "Okay. Sure. Why not."

He didn’t have time for this. He filed it somewhere in the back of his mind in a folder labeled deal with it later and grabbed the drainpipe with both hands.

It groaned under his weight immediately.

He moved fast, hand over hand, feet pressing flat against the brick, not letting himself look down. The pipe shuddered. A bolt near the second floor pulled halfway out of the wall and he felt the whole thing sway and he just moved faster, dropping the last two meters, hitting the ground harder than he meant to.

His knees absorbed it. His palms hit the pavement catching himself and he felt the scrape immediately, warm and wet.

He straightened up.

The bar was dark. The door was still hanging open and glass from the windows was spread across the pavement and there was a shape near the doorframe that he looked at for exactly one second before he looked away and kept moving.

He pulled up Google Maps.

No signal.

He pulled up the offline map he’d downloaded six months ago when his data kept cutting out. His mother’s clinic was four kilometers northeast. He knew the road. He’d walked it before.

He started walking.

The street was chaos but it was the specific chaos of a city where people haven’t accepted what’s happening yet. People running in both directions. A woman standing in the middle of the road just screaming, not at anything, just screaming. Two men trying to board up a shop front, working with the intense focus of people who needed to do something with their hands. A child sitting on a step alone.

Tobi stopped at the child.

Boy. Maybe eight. Wearing a school shirt at midnight, which meant he’d been awake when it happened, which meant he’d seen the sky break open, and his face had the blank look of a person whose brain had protected him by turning most of itself off.

"Hey." Tobi crouched in front of him. "Where are your parents?"

The boy blinked. Focused slowly. "Daddy went to check."

"Check what?"

"The noise." He pointed down the side street to their left. "He said stay."

Tobi looked down the side street.

Dark. Quiet. A streetlight flickering at the far end.

Something was moving at the edge of that light.

It wasn’t the same creature from before. This one was smaller, about the size of a large cat, and it moved in a stuttering way, like a video with frames missing. Every time he tried to focus on it directly his eyes wanted to slide off.

He looked back at the boy. "What’s your name?"

"Emmanuel."

"Emmanuel, I need you to get up right now and walk back toward that main road, you understand? Don’t run. Just walk. Don’t look back."

"But Daddy said stay—"

"Emmanuel." He kept his voice even. "Get up and walk."

Something in his tone worked. The boy got up. He walked. Tobi watched him reach the main road, watched a woman grab him, watched them move away together.

Then he looked back at the side street.

The thing was closer.

He could see it better now. Roughly spherical, about knee height, covered in something that was either fur or feelers, he genuinely could not tell which. Four limbs that bent in too many places. No visible eyes but it was oriented toward him with the certainty of something that could see him perfectly.

It had something in one of its limbs.

A hand. A human hand, wrist up, fingers curled.

Tobi’s stomach turned completely over.

He needed to move. He knew that. His legs just weren’t getting the message immediately.

The thing clicked at him. That same sound from before, that rhythmic clicking, patient and wrong.

Then it lunged.

It was fast. He threw himself sideways and felt it pass close enough that the air moved against his cheek and he hit the pavement shoulder-first and scrambled upright immediately because his body had apparently made a decision his brain hadn’t caught up to yet.

He ran.

Not away from the clinic. He ran down the main road, toward the northeast, because going toward his mother and going away from this thing were the same direction and that was just luck but he took it.

He could hear it behind him.

He didn’t look back. Dami had told him once, Dami who played football and had read too many survival books, that you never look back when you’re running from something because it throws your balance and costs you half a step. He’d laughed at the time.

He wasn’t laughing.

His lungs started burning at the two hundred meter mark. He was not, historically, a runner. He was a person who walked fast and occasionally sprinted for buses. The clicking sound was getting further away which either meant he was outrunning it or it had found something else.

He turned a corner and pressed himself against a wall.

Breathing hard. Too hard. He counted to five and tried to slow it down.

The clicking faded.

Gone.

He stood there against the wall with his hands on his knees, sweat already soaking through his shirt, palms still bleeding from the pavement, and he became aware that the screen was back in the corner of his vision.

[THREAT EVADED]

[SURVIVAL RESPONSE DETECTED]

[MINOR ADAPTIVE PROCESS INITIATED]

[STAMINA CALIBRATION IN PROGRESS]

"Stamina calibration," he muttered between breaths. "Great. I’ll be sure to send a review."

He pushed off the wall.

The smoke was thicker now, coming from somewhere to the west, and the sky above was still torn open, that impossible wound just sitting there across the stars like it had always been there, like the world had always been broken and they were only just noticing. The shapes behind it had stopped moving. Or they’d moved somewhere he couldn’t see. He didn’t know which option was worse.

He was one kilometer from the clinic.

The streets were emptier here. Either people had found somewhere to hide or something had moved through this area already. He kept close to the buildings, kept his footsteps quiet, checked every side street before he crossed it.

The system prompted him twice. He ignored it.

He could not afford to think about glowing screens in his head right now. He could not afford to think about what he’d seen in that side street. He could not afford to feel anything about it yet because if he started feeling things about it he would have to also feel things about his mother’s last message and that door was staying shut.

He reached the clinic.

The lights were off. The front door was closed. He stood across the street and studied the building, looking for movement on the ground floor, and he found it.

Not his mother. Something else. A shape in the alcove beside the entrance, low to the ground, back toward him, doing something he couldn’t see with something he couldn’t identify.

He needed to get inside.

He needed to get to the side entrance. There was one. He’d walked her in through it once, three years ago, when she’d forgotten her key card and he’d climbed through a window because the latch was broken and they’d laughed about it afterward at two in the morning eating cold rice.

He remembered exactly which window.

He started moving along the wall toward it, keeping slow, keeping quiet, not looking at the shape in the alcove, and he was almost to the corner of the building when his foot came down on a piece of broken glass.

The sound was small.

It was enough.

The shape in the alcove stopped moving.

Tobi pressed himself flat against the wall and did not breathe.

Silence.

Then the clicking started. And it was not the sound of one creature.

It was the sound of several.