I stopped breathing.

The fog shifted. Just slightly. The way thick fog moves when something large and silent passes through it without disturbing it the way a person would.

Azure told me to stay, I thought, standing completely still in the dark outside Vale 2 with a dead boy slumped against the wall and every light on campus extinguished. She knew. And all the students knew. Lights off, doors closed, no noise. Not coincidence. Survival protocol.

They all know what moves at night here.

[Entity returning. Do not move.]

I waited. I had run my whole life. Twenty years on the plain, running from things that were faster and stronger and more numerous. I had run from level three infected and level five coordinated packs and from Mute’s teleportation in a Hogsby corridor at two in the morning.

I was level seventeen now. I was done running first.

A figure appeared in the fog. Female. Moving without the stumbling urgency of infected, without the aggression of something that had lost its reasoning. Controlled. Deliberate. The specific movement of something that was in no hurry because it knew it didn’t need to be.

Human, I thought, watching her take shape. Or something that used to be.

[Entity has locked onto you.]

She stopped. Testing me the way predators test things, looking for the fear response, reading the specific quality of stillness to determine whether it was frozen terror or something else.

She found something else.

Her right hand extended, and the dead boy slid across the ground toward her without being touched. She let him drop. Then she started walking toward me.

"Who are you?" I asked.

She didn’t answer. The fog thickened around us, and then she was beside me, close enough that I could hear her breathing — wrong in the specific way that breathing is wrong when the person doing it doesn’t actually need to.

She sniffed. Slowly. Along my neck. I didn’t close my eyes. There was no version of my death that happened with my eyes closed.

She pressed her nails into my neck. Light. Feeling the pulse of the vein underneath.

I could hear the specific wrongness of her breathing. She sniffed slowly along my neck, then my jaw, then my chest, reading me the way something reads a scent trail. She pulled back slightly.

"You fucked my brother’s slave," she said. Her voice was layered, something underneath the words that didn’t come from a human throat. Not anger exactly. More like the flat observation of someone noting a violation of property.

She pressed her nails again into my neck. Light. Feeling the pulse. Then she smiled.

It was the smile that confirmed everything the system hadn’t been able to classify. Not human. The specific smile of something that had learned to produce the expression without having the feeling behind it.

"I can smell her on you," she said. "Every corner of her." The smile held. "My brother won’t be pleased."

My hands moved before my brain finished authorizing it. Both palms flat against her chest.

I discharged. She flew back and hit the ground. The fog that had been surrounding her dissolved as she landed.

[Run to your hostel. Now.]

I looked at her on the ground. Then at my hostel building, the only lights visible on the entire campus. I ran toward her instead.

I need to see the face, I thought. I need to know what this is.

She was already rising when I reached her. Fast. The speed of something that had taken a significant hit and was treating it as an inconvenience.

Brown hair. Beautiful face. Pale skin, the specific pale of something that hadn’t seen sunlight in a very long time. All black clothing. And when her mouth opened I saw them.

Sharp canines. Not Azure’s gentle points. These were functional. Designed.

Brother’s slave, she had said. You slept with my brother’s slave.

I launched myself at her. She didn’t dodge. She caught me mid-air with one hand, turned, and drove me into the ground with the ease of someone for whom physics was a suggestion.

"Send my greetings to the fallen souls," she said, and brought her head down toward my neck.

Her mouth hovered close. The wrong, cool breath washed over my exposed throat in slow waves. One sharp tooth broke skin, a hot pinprick of pain followed immediately by the cold press of her lips and the heavy, suffocating weight of her body holding me down.

My hands found her throat. She was strong in a way that had nothing to do with ability levels or charge percentages, the fundamental strength of something built differently from anything the system had prepared me for. I held her back by millimeters.

I planted my feet on her hips and rolled. She scrambled up. I didn’t give her time. I discharged again, palms flat against her ribs

She flew back. I ran. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

The ground failed me. I don’t know what she did to it but my feet couldn’t find purchase and I went down hard, scrambling back up, running again.

Air pressure behind me. She was fast in the way of things that don’t tire.

She hit me from behind and I was on the ground again, face down in the grass outside my hostel, the first faint light reaching us. She didn’t slow for it. She sat on me, both knees pinning my hands, her grip turning my head exactly where she wanted it.

I moved my head every direction I could. Not giving her the angle. Not making it easy. Not while I had anything left that could refuse.

My heart hammered against the inside of my ribs while the freezing ground stole warmth from my back and the wrong creature above me tried to claim my throat.

Her nails went into my neck. Her mouth opened.

[Warning: Unknown entity. Classification beyond current system parameters.]

[Host survival not guaranteed.]

Host survival not guaranteed, I thought, still trying to move my head. That’s a new notification.

I don’t like that notification at all.

"Don’t move," she whispered. "You’ll make it worse."

Her teeth sank deeper.