The Gate had grown teeth.
It loomed in the center of the city like a wound in the world, suspended above shattered towers and cratered streets. A perfect oval of blackness edged in shifting light—neither fire nor lightning, but something older. Hungrier.
And it was growing.
Faster now.
Every hour, it pulsed—an invisible wave that rolled across the landscape like heat off scorched stone. No one felt it. But Kieran did. Not with his skin. With his bones. Like an old fracture remembering the hammer.
He stood on the edge of an overpass, staring at the horizon.
Below, the city was in chaos.
Roaming aberrants. Factions carving territory into blood-soaked grids. Survivors vanishing into tunnels and coming back wrong. It had only been three days.
Three.
But the world was already folding in on itself.
He turned away from the Gate and walked back toward the safehouse.
Mira was there, sitting cross-legged on a stained mattress, sorting scavenged Cards like poker chips. She looked up as he entered. "Anything?"
"Noise." He tossed a pack of ration bars onto the table. "The Crows are two blocks east. They've got firepower. Scanners. And they're looking for someone."
Her brow furrowed. "Us?"
"No." He sat beside her. "They're not smart enough to know what we are."
"…What are we?"
Kieran didn't answer.
Because he wasn't sure yet.
He had theories. Fragments of memory from the life before—visions he couldn't always trust. In one of them, he'd seen a tower of glass rising from the ocean, humming with impossible light. In another, he'd watched himself burn from the inside out, Cards spiraling like ash from his veins.
All of it might have been metaphor.
Or prophecy.
But this much he knew:
He'd died.
And he'd come back.
Not just back in time.
Back wrong.
There were moments now—quiet ones—when the world slowed. The air thickened. Sounds warped.
And then… he would hear it.
A whisper in a language he'd never known, but somehow understood.
Not words.
Not commands.
Just presence.
Watching.
Waiting.
Testing.
He blinked. Mira was staring at him. "You okay?"
Kieran nodded slowly. "Yeah."
Lie. But she didn't press.
Instead, she held up a Card. "This one's weird."
He took it.
The surface was cool to the touch, slick like wet stone. Tier I. Unidentified. A blank sigil shimmered across its center, like an eye half-closed.
He'd seen one like this before.
Only once.
Back when the real horror started.
"…Don't bind it," he said. "Not yet."
Mira nodded.
They spent the next hour in silence, cataloging gear. Cleaning weapons. Listening.
The city didn't sleep anymore.
And neither could they.
That night, they moved again.
Not because they were out of supplies. But because Kieran felt the rhythm changing. A wrongness in the air, like the moment before thunder.
They made their way through backstreets and half-collapsed tunnels, avoiding the major factions. The Red Hands had taken over the metro stations, turning them into dens. The Dogs of War were setting up towers on rooftops, building kill zones. And the Crows—well, the Crows just liked to watch things burn.
But Kieran wasn't looking for a fight.
He was looking for a place.
He didn't know where it was.
He just knew it called to him.
They stopped near dawn, inside the husk of a luxury condo building. Glass cracked under their boots. Furniture rotted in place. The walls were covered in mold and something worse—symbols burned into the plaster with tools that weren't made for human hands.
Kieran traced one with his fingers.
It pulsed faintly.
Alive.
"What is this place?" Mira whispered.
He didn't answer.
Because now, he remembered.
This was where he first bled silver.
Where he opened a gate within a Gate.
And where he'd learned the name of the thing that lived inside him.
It wasn't a Card.
It wasn't a skill.
It wasn't even a curse.
It was a key.
A key to something buried so deep inside the world no one even knew it had a lock.
Not yet.
But they would.
And when they came to open it?
They'd find him waiting.