The air was too still.
Not the kind of stillness that comes before a storm, but the kind that comes when the world has already ended and just hasn't told you yet.
Layla stood barefoot on a floor she couldn't see. It wasn't dark, exactly—there was light, but it was cold, pale, and came from nowhere she could name.
Three mirrors floated before her in perfect alignment, each one taller than she was, rimmed in a dull, tarnished silver that breathed in and out like lungs.
Her own face stared back at her from each glass.
Except… not her.
The first Layla was covered in ink—black tattoos curling up her neck and across her face like vines choking a wall. The lines moved, twisting and rearranging into patterns that almost looked like writing before shifting again. Her eyes were ringed in deep black, the whites shot through with inky cracks.
The second Layla's skin was paper-pale, her irises a milky gray. Her hair floated as if she were underwater, each strand waving slowly, rhythmically. Her expression was hollow—no anger, no joy, just a fixed, patient hunger.
The third Layla was streaked in blood—thin rivulets tracing her jaw and dripping from her fingertips. She smiled, not wide, but deep, the kind of smile that knew something she didn't.
They all tilted their heads at the same time, watching her with the weight of something ancient. Layla's throat tightened.
The mirrors breathed once.
Then all three spoke together, voices overlapping perfectly, rattling in her bones:
"SIGNAL CONFIRMED."
Her ears rang. The air trembled.
They moved in unison, each pressing a hand to the inside of their mirror. The glass rippled outward like water struck by a stone, and their hands passed through—cold, unreal, reaching for her.
Layla stumbled back. "No—"
The inked Layla's fingers brushed her arm. The pale-eyed Layla's nails scraped her wrist. The blood-streaked Layla's hand clamped around her own.
The cold shot through her like ice driven into her veins.
She screamed.
The mirrors shattered at once—soundless, the fragments dissolving into black mist before they could hit the floor. The mist coiled around her ankles, her waist, up to her throat—
Layla jerked upright in bed, gasping so hard her chest ached.
Her room was dark, lit only by the sodium-orange glow from the streetlamp outside. Her sheets were damp, twisted. The taste of metal clung to her tongue.
She looked across the room.
The cracked mirror on the wall—the one from last night—was still there. The fissure ran across her reflection like a scar.
And for half a breath, she could swear the reflection was still moving.
-----------------------------------
Morning hit like it always did in this part of London—gray, wet, and unbothered by human schedules. The air carried that sharp mix of damp concrete and fried oil from the corner chippy that never seemed to close.
Layla tugged her hood low, pulling her hands into the sleeves of her sweatshirt as she stepped out of the block of flats. She hadn't slept again after the nightmare. The echo of those mirrored voices still hummed in her skull.
She just needed to get to the clinic. Get through another session. Pretend things were fine.
She spotted them before they spotted her—three girls huddled on the low wall outside the shuttered convenience store. They were all teeth and neon nails, their voices pitched high with the thrill of fresh gossip.
"…and then they said he just snapped," one was saying, her eyes wide. "Like, picked up the car with his bare hands. Tossed it."
"Yeah, and the police—" the second girl mimed a gun with two fingers, making a pop sound with her mouth. "Done. Just like that."
"They said his tattoos were moving. Moving." The third girl shuddered in mock horror. "Creepy as hell."
Layla was nearly past them when the first one looked up and froze mid-laugh. "Oh. Look who it is."
The other two followed her gaze, smiles sharpening like knives.
"Well, well," the second girl purred, sliding off the wall. "If it isn't Bad Luck Layla."
Layla kept walking, eyes forward.
"You hear about the crash?" the first one called after her. "Her parents, splattered all over the M4, and she walks away without a scratch. Isn't that right, Layla?"
"Guess even Death didn't want her." The third girl's laugh was high and ugly.
The heat rose in Layla's face. Her grip tightened inside her sleeves.
She didn't look back. Didn't give them the satisfaction.
"Hey—" A sharp hand clamped on her shoulder, spinning her around. "We're talking to you."
The second girl stepped closer, close enough for Layla to smell her sickly-sweet perfume. "You're a curse, you know that? Everywhere you go, bad things happen. Maybe you should've stayed in the car that night. Saved everyone the trouble."
Layla's vision narrowed, the world reduced to their smirks, their painted nails, the cold air stinging her cheeks.
She could feel it—the tremor in her chest, the pressure in her skull—like the moment before glass breaks.
"I don't have time for you," she muttered, stepping to the side.
A hand shoved her back.
"Don't walk away from me."
Her breathing hitched. The heat inside her spiked, sharp and unbearable.
The streetlamps above them flickered. Once. Twice.
Then both exploded.
The sound was like a gunshot in the narrow street. Shards rained down, tiny sparks hissing as they hit the wet pavement.
The girls screamed, ducking and covering their heads.
Layla didn't wait. She bolted down the road, hood low, heart hammering, the air still shimmering faintly from the burst.
Behind her, the girls' voices rose again—panicked now, tangled with curses.
She didn't hear the quiet scrape of a boot from the alley across the street.
A figure stood there, still as stone. Hood pulled low, face in shadow. Watching.
They didn't move as Layla disappeared around the corner, only tilted their head slightly, as if noting the way the lamps had gone out in perfect sync.
The figure reached into their coat, pulling out a small device. It blinked once—soft, green—and recorded something in a language that didn't belong on Earth.
Then they turned and melted back into the shadows, leaving only the hiss of the broken lamps and the damp morning air behind.
-----------------------------------
The New Vienna Clinic sat like a relic from a more hopeful time, its brick façade mottled with damp and years of neglect. Inside, the lighting was too warm to be comforting, the air too clean to be real.
Layla pushed through the double doors, shaking stray raindrops from her hood. Her reflection flashed in the glass as it closed behind her—cracked and distorted from the smear left by some previous visitor.
Dr. Hanna Wexler looked up from her desk, offering that same polite smile she'd worn since day one. A smile that never quite reached her eyes.
"Layla," she said, gesturing toward the couch. "You're here."
"Don't sound so surprised," Layla muttered, dropping into the seat.
Hanna folded herself into the armchair opposite, notepad balanced on one knee. "Last week, you left abruptly. We didn't finish our conversation."
Layla shrugged. "Nothing left to say."
Hanna glanced at her notes. "You were telling me about… a feeling. Like something was waking up inside you."
Layla's jaw tensed. "Maybe I was tired. People say weird things when they're tired."
The pen hovered above paper. "You've had that dream again?"
Her eyes flickered involuntarily to the cracked mirror on the far wall—Hanna's decorative antique, not the one in her room, but too similar for comfort.
Layla looked away. "Not exactly."
Hanna leaned forward slightly. "Not exactly?"
She could feel the hum again, low in her bones. She thought about the lamps bursting this morning, the girls' laughter cutting off in shock. Her mark—whatever it was—pulsing faintly under her skin.
"Do you ever feel like you're being… watched?" Layla asked instead.
"By someone in particular?" Hanna asked.
"Not someone. More like… something."
Hanna's eyes narrowed in curiosity, but she didn't interrupt.
Layla picked at a loose thread in her sleeve. "It's like… I'm carrying something inside me that isn't mine. And it's just… waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
She almost said to wake up. Almost. Instead, she shook her head. "Forget it."
Hanna jotted something down. "We'll come back to that. I'm more concerned about your isolation. You haven't been in contact with friends outside of Deke?"
Layla's mouth twitched in something between a smirk and a flinch. "Deke's enough."
The clock on the wall ticked over to the hour. Hanna set her pen down. "Our time's up. But I'd like you to consider writing down what happens between our sessions. Dreams. Thoughts. Anything strange. Sometimes putting it on paper helps make sense of it."
Layla gave a noncommittal hum, already halfway to the door.
-----------------------------------
Deke was waiting outside like he'd been there all along, leaning against the brick wall, hands stuffed into the pockets of his denim jacket. A paper bag dangled from one hand.
"Missed you by five minutes," he said as she approached. "Guess my timing's not perfect after all."
"Tragic," she deadpanned, pulling her hood up again.
They fell into step without discussion, weaving through the narrow streets. The rain had stopped, but the wet pavement reflected the city's neon signage in fractured shards.
Deke handed her the bag. "Fries. Before you ask, yes, they're still hot. Miracles do happen."
She took one without thanks, chewing in silence.
His tattoo itched again. Not the kind of itch you could scratch away, but a slow burn, like it wanted to be seen. The faint glow beneath his collar pulsed in time with his heartbeat—and, he noticed, in time with her steps.
He adjusted his jacket to hide it, careful not to let the movement draw attention.
They passed a café where the holo-screen above the door was showing muted news footage: another "incident" in Toronto, this one involving a woman levitating over a crowd before collapsing. The scrolling ticker at the bottom rattled off words like "containment" and "emergency protocols."
Deke kept his eyes forward. "You see any of this on your way here?"
"Hard to miss," she said around another fry.
They didn't talk much after that. Not because they had nothing to say—more because there was too much, and neither wanted to break the fragile quiet they'd found in each other's company.
He thought back to the night the mark first appeared. He'd been asleep, dreaming of stars bleeding into ink, the sky itself cracking open. He'd woken with a searing pain at his neck, skin blistered where the symbol now lived. It hadn't stopped burning until three nights later—coincidentally, the night Layla showed up at his flat after disappearing for a week.
It had never stopped reacting to her since.
He didn't believe in coincidence anymore.
Outside her building, they lingered for a moment. The city was loud here—sirens somewhere to the east, a distant metallic thump like scaffolding falling.
"Get inside," he said finally.
"You too, hero."
Her smirk was faint, tired, but real. She pushed through the door, vanishing into the shadowed stairwell.
Deke stood there a moment longer, eyes scanning the street. The burn at his neck flared once, then dimmed.
He told himself it was nothing.
-----------------------------------
(Unknown POV)
It entered the city like smoke.
Not the curling, lazy drift of a chimney plume—but the dense, purposeful creep of something alive. A shimmer in the air that bent the light wrong, refracting faces into distorted, inhuman shapes for anyone unlucky enough to look directly at it.
Through its senses, the world was a lattice of heat signatures, electromagnetic pulses, and rhythmic thuds that marked each living thing. But only some mattered.
The ones with the mark.
They pulsed differently—beacons in the static.
The alien drifted through a narrow Tokyo street, the crowd oblivious until it solidified enough to be noticed. Gasps rippled outward. Heads turned. A woman dropped her shopping bag, apples bouncing and rolling toward a gutter.
It ignored her. She was unmarked.
Three men stood at the end of the block, their forearms glowing faintly through shirtsleeves. The alien didn't need to see the shapes—its internal map had already identified them by the pattern of their pulse: fast-fast-slow-fast. A cadence impossible for an unmarked human.
They noticed it too late.
It moved faster than muscle could register. One moment the men were standing, the next their bodies were twisting mid-air, frozen in positions that screamed without sound. Tattoos across their skin flared so bright they burned through fabric—then blackened to ash.
The crowd scattered, some screaming, some filming.
It stepped over the fallen without looking back, its focus already shifting to the next target.
Above, on the mirrored surface of a skyscraper, its own reflection looked wrong. Not tall and humanoid like it appeared now, but stretched, faceless, its skin alive with runes that crawled and rearranged themselves constantly.
In the distance, another strike unfolded—a flash of lightning where the sky was clear, a figure falling from ten stories with no impact. The alien felt them die as clearly as it felt the vibration of the ground beneath its feet.
This was not an isolated mission.
From orbit, the command pulses had gone out in perfect synchronization. Across the planet, others like it were moving through cities: Lagos, New York, São Paulo, Mumbai. Each hunting the marked. Each culling with precision.
The humans didn't understand the pattern yet.
Their media called it terror attacks, containment failures, mass psychosis events. But the alien's internal feed was already logging thousands of confirmed terminations, each marked with a symbol that translated—imperfectly—into human language as purified.
It paused at an intersection, its head tilting slightly. The hum of the global signal—NASA's countdown—was stronger here, bleeding through from somewhere close. It scanned the faces rushing past.
Children crying. A man shoving his wife toward the subway entrance. A police officer fumbling with his weapon.
Then—a flicker.
A woman with a mark along her jawline, hidden under makeup, walking fast but not running. The alien's sensors pinged a match. Her pulse pattern sang the same fast-fast-slow-fast cadence.
It stepped toward her.
She turned her head, just enough to see it. Her pupils blew wide. She bolted.
The chase was brief. She was fast, but it didn't need speed—it needed inevitability. She slipped into an alley; it was already there, the geometry of its movement folding space in ways her mind couldn't follow.
Her last sound was not a scream, but a gasp—the kind made when the air is stolen from your lungs before you can think to fight.
The mark on her skin flared, cracked, and faded to black.
The alien stood over her for a moment, its senses washing outward, recalibrating. The kill had sent a ripple through something—some network it was only dimly aware of.
Somewhere beyond the city, beyond even the planet's atmosphere, the black vessel pulsed in acknowledgment. The runes along its hull shifted, one set dimming while another lit up like a heartbeat.
Mission parameters updated.
The alien tilted its head skyward. For a fraction of a second, its form slipped—not to invisibility, but to its true state: a vertical storm of shifting glyphs, the suggestion of limbs barely coalescing before blurring apart again.
Then it moved on.
-----------------------------------
On Earth, the chaos didn't spread in a line.
It erupted. Everywhere. All at once.
Social Media – Live Feeds
@LagosWitness: It's walking through the fire like it's nothing—skin's glowing, tattoos—oh God it's looking at— [Feed ends]
A tourist's phone in Times Square shakes wildly, capturing a man levitating thirty feet in the air.
The crowd cheers.
The man explodes into glittering sparks mid-applause.
People scream.
Someone laughs hysterically.
Mumbai flood footage: the water barely knee-deep.
Dozens of bodies float face-down.
Every one of them is marked.
Every tattoo still smokes like a snuffed candle.
Hashtags Burn Across Feeds
#InkbornDeath
#TattooPurge
#SignalConfirmed
London – 11:07 p.m. GMT – Newsroom Feed
A presenter clutches her earpiece, speaking over the rising murmur from behind the cameras.
"—and authorities have confirmed the attacks are coordinated. Victims appear to share one common feature: unusual tattoo-like markings. Viewers are advised to—"
The feed cuts.
Static hisses for a single heartbeat.
▓▓▓ PURIFICATION PROCEEDING ▓▓▓
The picture returns.
The anchor's face is bloodless, but she keeps reading as if nothing happened.
Her hands tremble under the desk.
But the world saw it.
-----------------------------------
Deke – East London – 11:12 p.m.
His phone vibrates on the desk.
The message is short, just: You seeing this? — Layla.
He starts typing back.
Stops.
The news plays in the background—clips spliced from around the world, each worse than the last. He catches glimpses without sound:
A girl in Nairobi floating upside down, eyes rolled white, blood dripping toward the ceiling.
A police barricade in São Paulo ripped apart by something invisible.
People vanishing mid-run in Istanbul, leaving only smoking footprints behind.
He glances back at the phone.
The typing bubble never appears.
He calls her.
Straight to voicemail.
His parents' voices filter in from the hallway. His mother's on the phone with an aunt—something about staying inside, about "armed patrols" in the streets. His father steps into the doorway.
"You're not going out tonight."
"I just need to—"
"No." His father's tone leaves no space to argue. "You've seen the news."
Deke swallows the retort and grabs his jacket anyway. "I'm not—"
"You're not," his father says again, sharper.
The jacket hangs from his hands for a moment. His neck burns under the collar. The mark is reacting hard now—like it knows something's wrong.
He looks at the phone again.
Calls her.
Voicemail.
Again.
Voicemail.
He paces to the window, scanning the street. In the distance, two drones hover above the intersection, their searchlights sweeping in sync with the NASA signal's pulse. A third one drifts lower, spotlighting someone before moving on.
Somewhere far away, a siren warbles. Not police. Not ambulance. Lower. Older.
His phone vibrates again—this time it's not Layla. It's a notification.
Trending: #SignalConfirmed – London.
The thumbnail image makes his stomach clench.
It's the corner by Layla's block.
The broken streetlamps.
And a hooded figure standing exactly where he'd been waiting for her earlier.
The caption: Who is she?
Deke's pulse thuds in his ears. He's already halfway to the door when his father calls after him.
He doesn't answer.
-----------------------------------
END OF CHAPTER 2