Myra's voice was the first to break the silence, calm but firm, her tone like a hand pressed to an open wound.
"Listen... we're spiraling. No one here wants this to end with blood. Sector Delta—my division—they overwrite anomalies. If it's a matter of the sphere's hunger, maybe we can substitute. Feed it an overwritten husk. Something harmless, contained."
Her gaze was steady, controlled, even though sweat clung to her temple. She spoke like someone standing in a negotiation room rather than a shadowed cult hall.
The cult leader's head tilted, a sickly grin forming, the candlelight bending around his face as though it recoiled. His voice slithered across the stone, half-chant, half-riddle. "Sector's bones cannot sate what was born of marrow. A mask will not fool the feast. For the sphere does not hunger for what is contained. It hungers for what bleeds, what breathes... what remains."
His words coiled back toward Dani, striking not with accusation but revelation.
"And you—steel-wrapped shade. Eight hours you toiled, eight hours you screamed at a dying wall, all to guard a flicker you call human. And why? Not duty. Not code. But the knot in your chest, the ache you dare not name. A vessel kept alive, not because he stands, but because he makes you remember what standing felt like."
Dani's face tightened, anguish burning hot behind her eyes. She trembled—not from fear, but from rage so sharp it carved into her bones.
"Shut the hell up." Her voice cracked like broken glass. "I didn't spend eight hours tearing my body apart just to hear a shitty riddle about feelings and walk away empty-handed. We're putting the sphere back!"
Her hand went for the Refractor blade at her hip, the strain in her arm making her armor creak.
The cultists stirred, hoods swaying in unison, their whispering voices twisting into one another until the air hummed with static prayer.
The leader didn't flinch. His hand rose, palm outward, a calm mockery of blessing.
"You cannot unmake hunger with anger. The sphere is not yours to bind. It knows its meal. It seeks not the shell, but the seed within. The symbiote. The marrow-boy."
The whispers doubled, then tripled, a drone of voices shaping into one phrase that cracked against the stone walls:
"He must be devoured."
Kenton staggered again, fury and terror warring in his expression. Myra glanced sharply at Dani, then back at the leader, her calm cracking but her voice still even.
"Then you're damning an innocent man."
The leader smiled. His teeth gleamed in the flicker.
"Innocence is only hunger unspent."
Dani's hand shook against the blade. Her anguish pressed against her rage, ready to break.
---
Lance woke up at 7:00 a.m. sharp, his alarm buzzing faintly on the nightstand, dragging him out of a black, dreamless void. His room was dim, morning light smeared across the blinds. He groaned and pushed himself upright, rubbing his eyes with a heaviness that clung deeper than fatigue.
Beside his bed, Dario stirred. The dog yawned wide, tail thumping against the floorboards, his warmth filling the room with a grounding presence.
"Hey, bud." Lance's voice cracked, but the smile that followed was real. He reached down and scratched behind Dario's ear, the dog leaning into him with quiet trust.
The symbiote's presence gnawed faintly at the edges of his skin, that ever-pressing itch of wanting to overwrite him into Rico again—but the weight of Dario against his leg steadied him. Anchored him.
He dressed mechanically: collared shirt, slacks, badge clipped to his chest. Bag over his shoulder. Dario's leash clipped with a soft click.
By 7:40, he was in his car, coffee balanced precariously in the cup holder. Morning traffic crawled like molasses. Some guy cut him off merging without signaling, and Lance slapped the steering wheel with a muttered, "Yeah, sure, just own the whole lane, jackass." If traffic was even half as bad as yesterday--
It was.
Another driver leaned on their horn behind him even though the light had just turned green.
By the time he pulled into the office lot, it was 8:15. Late. Again.
Inside the office, everything smelled of burned coffee and printer toner. His sneakers squeaked against the carpet as he crossed the rows of cubicles, every head lifting just slightly at the sight of him.
The dog didn't help.
Dario padded faithfully at his side, tail wagging in the sea of judgment. People leaned back in their chairs to whisper. One guy muttered, "Is that even allowed?" loud enough for Lance to hear.
Lance slid into his cubicle and sank into the chair, Dario curling up beneath the desk like he belonged there. Lance let out a shaky sigh and tried to pretend—just for a second—that this was fine. That he was fine.
It didn't last.
"Mercer."
Lance froze. His boss's voice, sharp as a paper cut. He looked up to see Mr. Dalca, arms folded, gaze narrowed at him like he'd dragged a corpse into the office instead of a golden retriever.
"You're late. Again." Dalca's tone was clipped, efficient. The kind of anger that had been waiting for this excuse. "And now you're bringing a dog?"
"He's quiet," Lance said quickly. Too quickly. "He just... stays under the desk."
"That's not the point." Dalca pinched the bridge of his nose. "We're not running a daycare. Mercer, I swear, if this happens again—"
"I'll figure something out," Lance cut in, because he didn't trust himself not to say something worse. The itch in his skin flared again, and for one terrifying second he thought his reflection in Dalca's glasses had the wrong face.
Dalca blinked, noticing his.. form is different, more than yesterday. He turned away without another word.
The office noise resumed around him. Phones ringing. Keys clacking. The faint whir of an overworked AC unit. Lance leaned back, dragging a hand down his face.
Just another day at the office.
Lance dragged his chair forward and woke his terminal. The monitors lit up with a cascade of error logs, red lines stacking like falling dominoes. His inbox chimed in sync, one after another—ticket after ticket.
He scrolled the first: URGENT: Finance can't access payroll sheets. System timeout.
The second: URGENT: Server 3 is dropping packets.
The third: URGENT: Printers on Floor 2 all offline. Again.
He exhaled through his teeth. "Okay. Okay, one at a time."
Fingers flying across the keyboard, Lance tunneled into Finance's permissions tree. A bad update script had reset access rights. He pulled up the command line, rewrote the user group mapping, hit enter. The error vanished. He typed a quick note: Fixed. Reapplied permissions manually. Shouldn't recur.
One down.
Dario whined under the desk, then slipped out before Lance could stop him. A blur of golden fur bolted across the office carpet.
"Dario—hey!" Lance half-rose from his chair, but the dog was already weaving between cubicles. Heads popped up like prairie dogs. Someone laughed. Someone else hissed, "Unprofessional."
Lance grit his teeth, sat back down, and dove into Server 3's packet loss. A looping process was eating memory. He killed it, purged cache, then rerouted traffic through the backup. CPU load dropped instantly. He allowed himself a tiny nod. Competent. Always competent.
Another ping. Printer queue jammed—Floor 2 screaming.
"Of course," Lance muttered. He remote-connected to the print server, spotted a rogue 300-page job of solid black rectangles. He nuked it from the queue and flushed the spooling service. A sigh of relief rolled in from down the hall like he'd just solved world hunger.
Dario came bounding back, tail wagging, dragging a chewed-up stress ball in his mouth. Droplets of dog drool dotted the carpet.
Before Lance could wrestle the ball away, a voice cut through the chaos.
"Rough morning?"
He glanced up. Tina from HR, mug of coffee in hand, leaned against his cubicle wall with that polite smile people wore when they weren't sure if they wanted small talk or just wanted to look sympathetic.
"You could say that," Lance said flatly, eyes still on his screen as a new flood of tickets dinged into his inbox.
Tina tilted her head. "That's a lot of red text. Doesn't it all... get overwhelming?"
"Yes," Lance said, without missing a keystroke. His fingers tapped in a fix for a corrupted registry path on a marketing laptop. Done. Closed. Next ticket.
Tina chuckled softly. "You sound like you actually know what you're doing."
"I do," Lance muttered, louder than he meant. He caught himself, swallowed the edge in his voice, and added, "It's just... a lot. Today."
Dario popped up beside him, front paws on his chair, tail sweeping across the cubicle wall. Tina crouched down and scratched him behind the ears.
"At least you've got help," she teased. "Maybe you should put him on payroll."
Lance forced a smile, though the itch under his skin gnawed harder. He typed faster, burying himself in syntax, in commands, in logic. Anything to keep the world from fraying at the edges.
But the tickets kept piling. Each fix spawned another problem. Each solution bought him seconds before the next crisis. And in the periphery, coworkers kept whispering, watching him with sideways glances—too long, too sharp, like they didn't see Lance at all, like they were waiting for him to slip into someone else's skin.
Dario barked once, breaking the spell.
"Yeah," Lance whispered, staring at the endless queue of problems. "I know, bud. One thing at a time."
The queue did not stop.
Payroll again. Sales couldn't access their shared drive. A VP's laptop wouldn't connect to Wi-Fi—priority one, critical, of course, because the world would fall apart if the VP couldn't open PowerPoint.
Lance kept moving, fingers twitching over the keyboard in a blur. Diagnostics, resets, patches, permissions, registry fixes. His skill was the only thing between the office and chaos—but the chaos was infinite. Each time he crushed one bug, two more slithered out. His inbox had become an ouroboros of problems eating themselves alive.
And the whisper in his head—the itch under his skin—kept pressing harder. The symbiote wasn't talking, not in words, but he could feel its agitation at the repetition. Like it hated the monotony. Like it wanted him to break the cycle.
No. We're not doing this.
Dario pawed at his leg, grounding him, but the office noises were starting to warp. Phones rang too long, too shrill. Keyboards clacked in sync, like an army marching. The printer down the hall spat papers in a steady rhythm, a metronome for his unraveling.
And then the screen flickered. Just once. A single frame.
An error log appeared that wasn't routed to his queue. Not even in the system. Just a blank field of text.
USER NOT FOUND.
He froze. Stared. Blinked. It was gone.
The inbox chimed again. Thirty-seven new tickets. All legitimate. All screaming.
"Mercer!" A voice from over the cubicle wall—accounting. "My system crashed again!"
"Mercer!" Another, louder. "VPN's not authenticating!"
Lance squeezed his temples. His skin itched. His blood felt wrong, humming with static.
One thing at a time.
He powered through, fixing VPN tokens, restoring corrupted profiles, reimaging a workstation remotely while half-listening to Tina's idle chatter about HR forms. He could multitask. He was good at this. Competent. Always competent.
But when he looked down, his hands weren't his. For half a second, they were darker, broader, veins like black threads running under the skin.
He yanked them off the keyboard. Blinked. They were normal again.
Dario barked sharply—one loud, grounding sound. But when Lance looked at his monitor, a new message had appeared in the middle of the error log. No sender. No ticket ID. Just text.
HELLO, RICO.
Lance's throat went dry. He slammed the keyboard. Nothing closed it. Nothing deleted it.
Coworkers around him kept whispering, watching, eyes sharp and wrong. Tina was still smiling at Dario like nothing was happening. The office was perfectly normal. Perfectly mundane. And it was crushing him alive.