The sky above the city was wrong.
Leo didn't know how he knew—he just felt it.
The air pressed down like wet silk, thick, suffocating. The stars flickered—not with distance, but with hesitation. Like they weren't supposed to be there. Like they were struggling to remember how to shine.
Every breath felt borrowed.
Every shadow held something hungry.
The Hollowing had begun.
Jessica walked beside him, golden numbers flickering in her eyes. She had stopped trying to control them. Now they whispered to her, shifting between dimensions, slipping through logic like water through clenched fingers.
"This place isn't real anymore," she murmured. "Or it's trying not to be."
Mike checked his weapon—only to find that it had changed.
The metal wasn't metal anymore. It pulsed beneath his grip, shifting between solid and liquid, reshaping itself based on rules that weren't theirs.
"Yeah," he muttered. "Not creepy at all."
Chen was silent, fingers twitching over her console. She didn't look up, didn't breathe too hard. Like she was afraid of being noticed.
The streets stretched ahead—too long.
Buildings that should have been familiar weren't.
Neon signs flickered between languages that had never been spoken. Storefronts bled into different versions of themselves, shifting between open, closed, ruined, and forgotten.
At the edges of Leo's vision, things moved.
Not people.
Not anything with a name.
Something hollow.
Mike pointed. "We're being followed."
Leo had already sensed it.
Not footsteps. Not movement.
Just... absence.
Reflections in the windows where no one stood.
Shapes shifting in puddles that weren't rippling.
A presence that existed only in the places they weren't looking.
Jessica exhaled sharply. "It's hollowing out the city. It's not just watching—it's removing things."
Chen's fingers flew across her console. "No radio signals. No time variance. The city is still here. But something is rewriting it. Deleting parts."
Leo turned his head—just a fraction.
And the street behind them was gone.
Not abandoned.
Not in ruins.
Just… erased.
Like it had never been built.
Like it had never existed at all.
His pulse spiked. "Move. Now."
The Spaces Between
They ran.
Not because of what they saw—
But because of what they didn't.
The air was thick, drenched with something unseen.
Every step carried the weight of unwritten consequences.
Something was peeling back reality, hollowing it one moment at a time.
Jessica gasped. "It's feeding."
Leo didn't ask what.
Because he already knew.
Memory.
Identity.
Existence itself.
They turned a corner—
And saw it.
A shape standing in the hollowed-out street.
Not a person.
Not a shadow.
Something else.
Its body was an outline—a void in the shape of a human. A figure carved from the space between things, from the parts of the world that had been forgotten.
It had no features. No details.
Just an absence.
And then—
It turned.
Even without eyes, Leo felt its gaze sink into him.
His head throbbed—wrong memories flashing behind his eyelids.
A school hallway.
A girl looking at him from across the room.
No name. No voice.
Just a feeling.
A sense that she was important.
A sense that he had already lost her once.
He staggered, breath hitching.
The thing in the street tilted its head.
Like it was curious.
Like it had seen something inside him.
Then—
It stepped forward.
Chen fired first.
A burst of energy—bright, sharp, real.
The shot should have burned through anything.
But the thing didn't dodge.
It simply wasn't there anymore.
Not teleportation. Not speed.
Just absence.
Jessica screamed—her equations flickering violently.
Mike shouted. "Leo—MOVE!"
Leo couldn't.
The thing was already reaching for him.
Its fingers were longer than they should have been.
The air around them peeled away—
Like paper dissolving into nothing.
Then—
A hand grabbed Leo's wrist.
Cold. Firm. Real.
And suddenly—
He wasn't there anymore.
Leo staggered forward—
And the world tilted.
The city was gone.
The air smelled like dust and something ancient.
A single fluorescent light flickered overhead.
A small, empty room.
Walls covered in handwritten notes.
Leo turned, heart pounding.
And she was there.
The girl.
The same one from his memories.
The same one from the mirror.
She stood by the door, bare feet silent on the cracked tile.
Watching him.
Waiting.
Leo's throat was dry. "...Who are you?"
Her eyes flickered—something unreadable in their depths.
Then she spoke.
A whisper.
A warning.
"You shouldn't have seen it."
Leo stared at the message.
"You brought her with you."
The jagged letters bled into the glass, shifting and warping, the words almost alive, twisting into something watching back.
His reflection still wasn't there.
Jessica's breath hitched. "That's not possible."
Mike swallowed hard. "I—" He stopped himself, as if afraid that speaking would make things worse.
Chen didn't blink. "We need to move. Now."
But Leo couldn't.
Because something was still here.
A presence.
Not a sound, not a shadow—
A feeling.
Like the moment before thunder, when the air tightens around you.
Like the weight of an unseen hand hovering over your throat.
He turned, pulse hammering.
And for the briefest second—
The girl stood in the doorway.
Silent. Watching.
Leo's breath caught.
But before he could blink—
She was gone.
And the mirror whispered:
"It saw me."