Two hours bled past.

Finn did not sleep so much as float, that exhausted half-state where the body refuses to switch fully off in case something needs killing.

The Safe Zone’s regeneration ticked his HP up the way an old radiator ticks toward warm. Nyx, beside him, was a presence and a temperature and very little else. Her breathing was so quiet he had to actually look to confirm she was still doing it.

Around them the camp went on with its small, unconvincing pretence of normalcy. Someone had got a kettle working off a car battery.

The girl with the rabbit had fallen asleep in her mother’s lap, the rabbit clutched against her cheek. The Marshals had run their supply rotation without him, and three of them had come back.

Finn had counted them out, and counted them back in, and noted the absence.

Nobody else seemed to.

By the time the sun had dropped behind the dome’s far edge, his stomach had progressed from grumbling to genuinely angry, and the inside of his mouth tasted like copper.

He pushed himself upright.

’And he rises.’ Nyx’s voice came from somewhere deep inside her hood. ’Am I to understand it is time, Bearer?’

’That’s right. We’re going shopping.’

’Splendid. I shall endeavour to be amused.’

He took the kitchen knife off his thigh and slid it through his belt. Nyx, beside him, picked up the length of rebar. The Marshals near the obelisk paid them no attention as they crossed the car park.

Marcus was deep in another speech, hands moving. Dale was nowhere obvious, which was its own kind of information.

The Safe Zone boundary ran along the line of trolleys.

Finn stopped at it.

It was the first time he’d stepped out since coming in. He hesitated a beat, glanced at Nyx beside him, the dome’s blue light bathing them both, then stepped through.

The temperature changed at once.

Outside the ward, the world had teeth again.

The Tesco had not aged well in the four hours since Integration.

The automatic doors were still stuck half-open, and in the gap between them something pale was growing.

It took him a step or two to understand what he was looking at.

A root.

A single, thick, ash-coloured root, splitting the rubber seal at the bottom of the door and arching upward in a slow lazy curve before plunging back into the floor of the entryway.

Its bark was the colour of cold ash. Faint silver-grey lines ran along it, like veins under skin, pulsing very slowly in a rhythm that did not match anything human.

Finn knew that wood.

’Ashwood,’ he murmured.

’I beg your pardon?’

’Ashwood. From the beta. We saw plenty on the way here.’

He stepped over the root carefully. It did not react. Through the half-open doors, the inside of the supermarket smelled of damp earth and refrigerant and something faintly, unpleasantly sweet — like fruit left out a day too long.

The lights were out. The fluorescents had blown, but the Integration had supplied its own: small clusters of pale silver fungi clung to the shelves at staggered heights, glowing faintly, casting the aisles in a cold underwater light.

It was beautiful in the way a deep cave is beautiful, which is to say: it was not beautiful, and you should not be in it.

Beside him, Nyx breathed out slowly. The teasing edge had left her voice entirely.

’This,’ she said, ’I recognise.’

’You do?’

’Not this place. This... texture. The way the air sits.’ Her crimson eyes were wide under the hood.

He wasn’t sure what to make of that.

The first three aisles were a wreck. Tinned goods on the floor. A till lying on its side, the receipt tape still spooling out across the tiles. Someone had attempted to clear this stretch. there were boot prints in the dust, multiple sets, recent, going both in and out, and that was almost certainly the Marshals’ work.

The signs of the run-back grew clearer the deeper they went.

A torn glove on the floor, the fabric stiff with dried blood. A short sword lying point-first against a crisp display, its blade nicked in three places. A long, dragged smear of red leading away from the produce section and disappearing around the corner.

Finn followed it.

It led them, of course, toward the freezer aisle.

The ashwood had taken the freezers.

Three of them on the right side had split open — not violently, not blown apart, but parted at the seams, as though something soft and old had pushed up through the metal from underneath.

Roots the thickness of his thigh curled out of the broken cabinets and wound up the wall, sprouting smaller tendrils at the joints. The frost on the vents had not melted; it had simply gone over to the new wood, glittering palely along the bark.

Frozen peas, half-thawed, lay in tidy little drifts at the foot of the roots.

Finn stared at it for a second longer than was wise.

Then he made himself look down at the smear again.

It ended at the wall about ten feet in.

He crouched beside it, slowly. Did not touch it. Did not need to.

The pattern of the spatter on the lino told him most of what he needed to know — short, hard arterial bursts, four of them, each one slightly further from the last. Whoever had been bleeding had been moving. Trying to. Not for long.

He followed the smear with his eyes to the wall at the end of the aisle.

There was a mark on the wall about head height.

Two punctures.

Set narrow apart, three fingers, no wider, and angled toward each other, so that the wounds, in flesh, would have met somewhere behind the victim’s spine.

Around the punctures the plaster was crazed with a fine spray of cracks, as though something had not so much stabbed the wall as gripped it.

Finn went very still.

’Bearer.’

’...Yeah.’

’You have gone the colour of milk. What is it?’

He didn’t answer at once. He was looking at the way the cracks radiated. The way the punctures sat just so. The way the blood smear stopped a foot before the wall, as though whatever had been bleeding had been lifted off its feet and held there.

He had read about this exact pattern.

Three months ago, on the Fracture Online beta forums, in a thread one of the alpha testers had posted at three in the morning and edited four times before it got pinned. The thread had been called PSA: do NOT engage solo in low-light. The wound diagram had been the first image.

He pulled Nyx half a step back behind him, very slowly, without breaking the line of his gaze.

’Bearer. What is it.’ 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

’Verge stalker.’

’...What is a verge stalker.’

’It’s an ambush predator. It hunts on the edges of vision. You don’t see it until it strikes. You don’t hear it until it strikes. The only thing you ever get is the wound pattern.’

’...And how does one know one is in the room with one, Bearer?’

He swallowed.

’You don’t.’

The fungi on the shelves dimmed for a moment, in unison, as though something had passed in front of them.

Then they brightened again.

And somewhere, very softly, in the dark between the freezers, a single pea rolled across the lino and tapped against the toe of his shoe.