Three clicks. Maybe four. Hard to tell when sound was bouncing off walls.

Tobi counted to ten inside his head and nothing came around the corner to kill him, so he allowed himself to breathe again. Slowly. Through his nose. His back was flat against the brick and the brick was warm from the day’s heat and some part of his brain that was apparently still functioning normally noticed that detail and filed it away for no reason.

He turned his head just enough to see the alcove.

Two of them. Same species as the one with the hand, small and spherical and wrong, clicking at each other in a pattern that almost sounded like conversation. They weren’t looking in his direction anymore. Whatever he’d done by stepping on that glass, they’d decided it wasn’t interesting.

The broken window was four meters past them.

He looked at the window.

He looked at the creatures.

He looked around for options.

There was a rusted metal bin against the wall on the other side of the street. He looked at it for a long moment. Then he picked up a chunk of broken concrete from the ground near his foot, tested its weight, and threw it.

It hit the bin with a sound like a small car crash.

Both creatures spun toward it instantly and moved, that stuttering too-fast movement, crossing the street in the time it took Tobi to take two steps. He didn’t watch where they went. He moved to the window, got his fingers under the frame, felt the latch give exactly like he remembered it giving, and he was through before his brain had fully committed to the decision.

He pulled the window shut behind him.

Dark inside. The generator had cut out or been shut off, and the only light was coming through the windows from the burning parts of the city, orange and unsteady. He was in a storage corridor. Shelving units on both sides, medical supplies, plastic containers stacked to the ceiling.

He stood still and listened.

The building was quiet. Not empty quiet. Hiding quiet.

"Mom?" He kept it just above a whisper.

Nothing.

He moved down the corridor. At the end of it, through a fire door held open by a rubber wedge, was the main hallway of the ground floor. He could see the reception desk from here. Behind it, three people were crouched low against the wall. He recognized one of them.

His mother saw him at the same moment.

She crossed the floor in about four steps and grabbed him and he grabbed her back and for a few seconds that was all there was. Her hands on the back of his head. The smell of her, hand sanitizer and the specific soap she always used. He felt about twelve years old and didn’t care at all.

"You absolute idiot," she said into his shoulder. "I told you to stay inside."

"Your last message was I love you. What was I supposed to do?"

She pulled back and looked at him. Her eyes were red but her face was steady, which was just who she was, who she had always been. She looked him over the way she always did, checking for damage, cataloguing him.

"You’re bleeding."

"Pavement. It’s nothing."

"Let me—"

"Mom." He caught her hands. "What’s happening. What do you know."

She looked at him for a moment. Then she looked at the two people behind her, a young male nurse named Chike that Tobi recognized, and an older woman in a patient’s gown who was staring at the window with the expression of someone who had decided to be somewhere else in their mind.

"One of the doctors got through to someone in Abuja before the network crashed," his mother said. "She said it’s everywhere. Not just Lagos. Every city. Every country." She paused. "The same sky. The same voice."

"The same monsters?"

"Different ones, she said. Different shapes. Same gates."

Chike cleared his throat. He was maybe twenty-five, lean, holding a fire extinguisher with both hands like it was a weapon. "There are three of those things outside the front. Been there for about twenty minutes. They haven’t tried to come in yet but."

"But," Tobi said.

"But one of them touched the glass earlier. Like it was checking. Testing."

Tobi looked at the front door. The glass panels beside it showed the alcove outside. He couldn’t see the creatures from here but he could see the way the shadows sat wrong at the edge of the light.

The system pulsed in his peripheral vision.

[THREAT PROXIMITY: ELEVATED]

[RECOMMENDATION: EVACUATE OR FORTIFY]

[HOST BIOLOGICAL STATUS: ADRENAL RESPONSE DETECTED]

[OBSERVATION: HOST IS FASTER THAN BASELINE. CONTINUE MONITORING.]

Faster than baseline.

He filed that away.

"We need to move," he said. "Not stay here. The longer we stay in one place the worse the options get."

"Move where?" Chike said.

"Somewhere with more people. More walls. There was a community hall on Adeyemi Street, about six hundred meters—"

"That’s six hundred meters with those things outside."

"I know."

Chike stared at him. "You know."

"I don’t have a better idea. Do you have a better idea?"

Silence.

His mother put her hand on the older woman’s shoulder. "Mrs. Adeyinka. Can you walk?"

The woman blinked back from wherever she’d been. "Yes. Yes, I can walk."

"Alright." His mother stood up. She had that face on, the one from every difficult night shift and every bad phone call and every moment she’d ever had to be the one holding things together. Tobi had spent his whole life watching that face and had never once told her how much it steadied him. "Tobi leads. Chike, you take the back."

Chike looked at the fire extinguisher in his hands. "Right. Yeah. Okay."

They went to the side corridor.

Tobi went through the window first, dropped to the ground, checked the immediate area. Clear. He helped Mrs. Adeyinka through, then his mother, then Chike came through last still carrying the extinguisher.

They moved along the outside wall of the clinic, staying tight to the building. Tobi kept checking the corners. His mother kept her hand on Mrs. Adeyinka’s arm. Chike’s breathing was loud and fast behind them and Tobi almost said something about it and then didn’t because he wasn’t exactly quiet either.

They reached the end of the building.

Tobi looked around the corner.

The road was empty for about forty meters. Past that, smoke, and the flickering shapes of something that might have been people running or might not have been people at all. The right turn that led to Adeyemi Street was thirty meters down on the left.

"Fast," he said quietly. "Don’t stop."

He went.

They all went.

He heard the clicking when they were halfway across. Not from behind. From above.

He looked up without stopping, and for a terrible half second he saw one of the creatures on the wall of the building across the road, four meters up, head oriented directly at them, completely motionless.

He kept moving.

"Don’t look at it," he said. "Just keep moving."

They made the turn.

The creature did not follow. He didn’t know why. He didn’t ask questions about it.

Adeyemi Street was thirty meters ahead and he could already see lights, actual lights, someone had gotten a generator going, and there were voices, multiple voices, and a gate and people behind it.

They made it.

The gate opened for them. Someone grabbed Mrs. Adeyinka’s other arm and helped her through. Chike stumbled inside and put his back against the wall and slid down it slowly with the extinguisher across his knees and his eyes closed.

Tobi’s mother touched his face with both hands.

"You’re okay," she said. Like she was telling him, not asking.

"I’m okay," he said.

He looked past her at the community hall. Maybe forty people inside from what he could see. Scared. Confused. Arguing in three different corners simultaneously. A man in the center trying to organize something and being ignored. Children sitting in a group near the back wall.

Normal people. Ordinary people. His city.

The sky outside was still open.

He looked at the system screen he was slowly accepting was permanent.

[SURVIVAL MILESTONE REACHED]

[HOST HAS DEMONSTRATED: THREAT ASSESSMENT. TACTICAL DECISION MAKING. PROTECTIVE BEHAVIOR.]

[EVOLUTION POINTS EARNED: 3]

[FIRST EVOLUTION THRESHOLD: 100 POINTS]

[DEVOUR FUNCTION: LOCKED. UNLOCK CONDITION: FIRST KILL.]

He stared at that last line for a long moment.

First kill.

Outside, somewhere in the direction they’d come from, the clicking started up again. Louder this time. More of them.

And underneath it, a new sound. Something deeper, something that vibrated in the chest rather than the ears, low and rhythmic and patient.

Something bigger had arrived.