Vin's POV (Twitch Stream)
The neon glow of Vin's bedroom bathed the walls in shifting colors—pinks bleeding into blues, a flicker of static from the LED strips that probably weren't supposed to flicker at all. His mic crackled, then caught his laugh mid-breathless wheeze.
"Alright, alright, alright—welcome back to the apocalypse, chat. Hope you've stocked up on toilet paper, canned beans, and, uh—whatever the hell you need when #SignalConfirmed starts trending harder than cat videos."
Chat scrolled faster than he could process. Lines of emotes—crying faces, fire, skulls—mixed with comments firing off like machine-gun bursts.
user329: bro the world is literally ending lmao
InkTruthSeeker: they're hunting the MARKED, wake up sheeple
jellybean69: show us ur fridge rn. prove u stocked up.
xxxFearGodxxx: #InkbornDeath IS REAL
Vin grinned, leaning back in his chair, his hoodie sliding down one shoulder. "You guys sound like my mom after a Netflix true crime binge. Chill. It's a hoax. It's always a hoax. Remember killer clowns? Tide pods? Exactly. Same energy."
The chat spammed KILLER CLOWNS 2016 LET'S GO until the words blurred into nonsense.
Vin sipped his soda, burped into the mic, then pointed dramatically at the camera. "Here's the thing though…" He lowered his voice. "What if—hypothetically—your boy here… had a mark?"
That silenced chat for half a second. Then: explosion.
TR0LLBOY: NO CAP. SHOW IT.
angelofdoom: shut the fuck up ur not funny
MOMMYMILKERS88: 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀
staineditself: prove it rn
godiswatching: YOU WILL BE PURIFIED
Vin chuckled nervously, fingers drumming the desk. "You guys are so easy to bait, holy shit. But nah, seriously. It showed up like… three nights ago? Just woke up, boom. Free tattoo from the universe. Who needs a midlife crisis when you can skip to the cursed body art?"
The dares flooded in. SHOW IT. SHOW IT. SHOW IT.
Vin shook his head. "Alright, alright, don't cream yourselves. But when I get abducted mid-stream, I want you all to remember me as the legend who farmed followers while dying on cam, okay?"
He tugged up his sleeve.
The room's LED glow paled next to the faint, pulsing light crawling across his forearm. A symbol, sharp-edged and curling like it wanted to keep writing itself, shifted faintly under his skin. With each beat of his heart, it pulsed.
For a moment, chat froze. Then exploded.
NOOOOOOOOOOO
CLIP CLIP CLIP CLIP CLIP
HOLY SHIT ITS REAL
IM CALLING 911
bro ure dead already
tattoobrotattoobrotattoobro
Vin tried to laugh, but it came out thin. "Relax. It just…it glows. Big deal. Maybe I'm radioactive now. Maybe I'll join the Avengers. Call me… Inkman."
But his joke died as the screen stuttered. Not the stream—his camera. His own face fractured into jagged shards, split across the feed like broken glass.
For a heartbeat, the fragments weren't him at all.
For a heartbeat, the fragments weren't him at all.
→ Soldiers torching something in a desert, their shadows bending unnaturally.
→ London streets choking on smoke, black shapes flickering between the flames.
→ A sky splitting open, red light bleeding through a crack in reality.
→ A wall of symbols—tattoo-like runes—crawling across the feed in jagged motion, too fast to read.
The images vanished as quickly as they came.
Chat detonated.
WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT
NOT EDITED. I SAW IT TOO.
glitch?? no way
bruh twitch servers can't do that
i clipped it. not fake. swear.
Vin sat frozen, hand still clutching his sleeve. His skin crawled like the tattoo pulsed harder, even though the camera showed nothing but his pale arm. He looked offscreen, jaw tight, like he'd heard something behind him.
Chat spammed desperate lines.
BRO SAY SOMETHING
VIN??
yo this is not funny anymore
He forced a smile that didn't reach his eyes, muttered something too low for the mic to catch, then slammed his keyboard.
The feed cut to black.
The last thing the viewers saw was the stream title updating automatically, Twitch's algorithm trying to categorize what it had just seen:
[STREAM ENDED – CLIPS TRENDING]
-----
Layla
Black screen.
Cut to rain.
East London at night, all wet glass and jagged neon. Sirens stitched the sky together in crooked lines while drones combed the blocks with white cones of light that pulsed—forty-one beats apart—like the world had grown a mechanical heart.
"Left," Deke hissed.
They ran.
Layla's breath came cold and metallic, the air tasting like battery acid and fried oil. Every shadow felt inhabited. Windows watched. Puddles watched. Even the billboard that kept glitching through three different ads seemed to watch—BUY / OBEY / ▓▓▓ SIGNAL—before correcting itself with a blink.
"Eyes up," Deke said without looking back. "Just need to get out of the city. That's all."
"Sure," she said, though the word didn't hold.
They crossed under a skeletal rail bridge, the iron ribs dripping, the river beneath it choked with black. A drone swept low over the street ahead, searchlight raking along brick and shutter and the blown-out carcasses of two streetlamps—the ones she'd shattered that morning. The light slowed as if considering, then moved on. Layla's skin prickled in its wake.
They cut down a narrow side road where the puddles were slick with oil rainbows. The shutters of an old café had been half-rolled and left to rust. The sign above the door read PALERMO in flaking gold.
"Here." Deke shouldered the door. It gave with a soft, sticky groan.
Inside smelled like old sugar and damp wood. Chairs were stacked upside down on tables, their legs in the air like the café had surrendered. A chalkboard menu leaned against the wall, chalk smeared by a long-ago hand: FLAT WHITE, ALMOND CROISSANT, and, faintly beneath it, WE ARE STILL OPEN. The O had cracked through the middle.
They slid the door shut and waited, backs to the wood. The city hummed outside. Forty-one seconds later, the neon OPEN sign in the window flickered once like a shuddering eyelid.
"Count it," Deke murmured.
Layla counted without wanting to. One-one-thousand—two—three—her pulse tripping over the number she didn't say. Something thrummed in her ribs in time with the world. By thirty-eight she was shaking. By forty-one the ceiling light blinked, the espresso machine let out a sick little hiccup, and the hum in her bones steadied like it had been fed.
Deke moved first. He ghosted behind the counter and crouched, keeping low. "They're sweeping in grids," he said, the old habit of explanation creeping into his voice because explanation was a kind of blanket. "We wait for the next pass, then we go out the back."
Layla's reflection flashed in the mirror behind the bar—three ovals of glass set into a frame of tarnished brass. Two of the mirrors were intact. The third had a hairline crack from corner to corner, a white scar through her face. For half a breath, the reflection's mouth moved a beat late. She looked away, jaw tight.
Deke ransacked politely. He found a box of tea biscuits gone soft, two protein bars whose wrappers crinkled like old leaves, and a half-full crate of bottled water sweating in the dark. He cracked one and pushed it into her hand.
"Drink," he said, not unkind.
She took a mouthful, swilled, swallowed. The metal taste receded half an inch.
He slid one of the protein bars onto the counter and unwrapped the other for himself, making a show of rolling his eyes. "Gourmet. I'll leave them a five-star review."
Layla's mouth twitched, then failed to become a smile. She pinched off a corner of the bar and let it dissolve.
Outside, a siren curved away. Static buzzed at the base of her skull. The hum came back around, patient and precise.
"Why here?" she asked. "Why now? Why me?"
"Bad timing. Bad luck," Deke said, the last word softening as it left him.
She laughed once, brittle. "Bad Luck Layla. Heard that one today." Her eyes drifted to the door, as if the words might seep under it and find her. "Everywhere I go—" She stopped, tried again. "You ever feel like you're poison and no one told you? Like you're this… walking fault line and people crack if they stand too close?"
Deke leaned his elbows on the counter, the wood groaning. For a second he looked like he might go for a joke, a quip, something easy. He didn't. "You're not a curse."
"Streetlamps disagree."
"That wasn't you," he said. "Or if it was, it was because someone else has been messing with the whole board. You don't blame the piece."
She stared at the mirror, at the white line through her face. "Tell that to the girls with glass in their hair."
Silence settled with the dust.
He tore another bite from the bar, chewed, swallowed. His hand drifted up to his collar and pressed, a small motion he didn't seem to realize he was making. The faintest glow brushed his skin under denim, like a watch face bleeding through. Layla's gaze snagged on it.
"You okay?" she asked.
Deke's hand stilled. He snapped his gaze away and found the window instead. "Yeah. Just—scratch." He rolled his shoulder as if that proved it.
She didn't press. The hum was building again; she could tell by the way the hair on her arms lifted.
"After the next pass," he said, "we make for the canal. If we can get to the towpath, we can follow it out past the checkpoints. They're watching roads, stations. Less so water."
"Drone saw me this morning," she said. "When the lights blew."
"Then we don't give it a face to match," he said. "Hood up. Keep your head down. No hero moves, okay?"
"Wasn't planning any."
He threw her a look, a knot of worry disguised as annoyance. "I'm serious."
"I know," she said, and meant it.
They fell quiet again. The café's dark had a shape; you could almost hear where the tables would be in daylight, where a kid would have sat with a hot chocolate, where someone in love would have stared into steam and thought of futures that now no longer existed. Layla felt the ache of those ghosts without understanding why. The mirror behind the counter watched them in triplicate, one version of Deke blurred, one Layla split.
Her voice was small when it came. "Maybe I should've stayed in the car."
Deke flinched like she'd hit him. The words landed between them with the thud of an untold history.
"Don't," he said.
"You weren't there."
"I am now," he said, too fast. His throat worked. He looked at her then, really looked, and something inside his face unlocked like a door on a chain. "Layla, I—"
He saw it then—the way her shoulders had folded in on themselves to take up less space, the way her hands were tucked inside her sleeves like she was trying to hold all her sharp edges in. He swallowed whatever had been coming. The door clicked shut again.
"We're getting out," he said instead, steady. "Both of us."
The glow under his collar flared as she stepped closer to take another sip of water. He winced, barely. She felt it—not the heat itself, but the ripple it sent through the hum in her bones, like two frequencies briefly aligning before slipping past one another.
"What is it?" she asked, voice too calm for how not-calm she felt.
"Nothing." He lied because the truth was a thing with teeth and neither of them had hands free for wrestling. "Nerves."
The world hit forty-one. The neon OPEN sign shimmered, failed, and died. The café exhaled. Somewhere outside, something metal banged hard enough to rattle the cups on their hooks.
Deke straightened. "That's our window."
He moved along the counter, scanning for a back door. Found it in the shadow beside the pastry case: an EXIT sign with half its letters dead, the arrow pointing into darkness. He eased it open an inch. Cold air licked his face. The alley beyond was a rib cage of brick and pipe, water mourning down the drain.
Layla didn't move.
"What?" he asked, keeping his voice low.
She nodded toward the mirror. The middle pane—uncracked—held their reflections like a held breath. For one trembling instant, Layla's reflection lifted its chin a fraction of a second after hers. Not long. Just wrong. A smear of delay. The hair along Deke's forearms rose.
"Not now," he said. "Don't give it anything."
She dragged her hood up. The fabric whispered. "I don't know how to not give it anything."
He reached, stopped himself, then settled for an awkward pat to her sleeve, a touch that said here without promising more than the moment could afford. "Then give it me," he said. "I'm right here."
There are sentences that change the weather. That one did, a little.
They slipped into the alley. The air back here tasted like pennies and rot. Above them, a drone slid across the slice of sky, light ticking over rooftops in patient metronome. Deke checked the timing, lips moving with numbers he didn't say aloud.
"On the dark," he whispered.
They ran the length of the alley, shoes soft on wet grit, and cut right through a gap that shouldn't have existed between two buildings but did, the city splitting for them like a stagehand was kind for once. Their breath lived in their chests like creatures trying to escape.
At the end of the passage, the canal crouched, black and wide, an animal waiting. Beyond it, the towpath bent east toward ink and the promise of less metal in the sky.
They ducked under a steel footbridge and crouched among nettles, Deke scanning, counting, counting, Layla listening to the pulse of the signal in the water, in the pylons, in her teeth. The burn at Deke's neck surged when her knee brushed his. He pulled away half an inch, careful, as if distance might stop whatever was happening from happening.
"Out of the city," he breathed, like a spell. "We just need to get out."
The drone's cone of light swept across the canal and moved on. In the still it left behind, their reflections rippled on the water—two shadows broken by rain.
"Okay," he said. "Now."
They ran.
----
They moved east along the towpath, the canal black beside them, broken bottles glittering like drowned stars. The night had the quiet of something holding its breath too long. Layla tugged her hood lower, every muscle braced for the next siren, the next drone sweep, the next wrong reflection.
The city hadn't slept. It had convulsed.
On a corner near the old tannery, the air still smelled of ozone and smoke. A body lay collapsed against a brick wall, skin charred black like it had been flash-burned from the inside. Tattoos spiderwebbed across the flesh, glowing faintly even in death, lines still shifting as though they hadn't gotten the message their owner was gone. A soldier in body armor stood nearby, rifle loose at his side, muttering into a comm unit. He didn't look at the corpse. He looked past it, eyes scanning rooftops, corners, shadows.
Layla's steps slowed. The sight rooted her. Deke's hand brushed hers, not quite holding, just urging. "Don't look," he whispered.
Her voice scraped out anyway. "They're burning from the inside."
"Keep moving."
They turned down a street where the asphalt was chewed by tank treads. Military convoy—five armored transports, engines low, scanning beams sweeping. A loudspeaker barked: "RETURN TO YOUR HOMES. COOPERATE WITH PATROL. IDENTIFY THE MARKED." The words echoed down the rows of tenements like scripture. Windows slammed shut.
On a wall between shuttered shops, graffiti bloomed red against soot. INK BELONGS TO US.
The letters bled like fresh wounds.
Layla slowed again, fingers twitching in her sleeves. "Who's us?"
Deke kept his eyes down. "Not here."
They pressed deeper into the city's guts, alley to alley, steps echoing on wet stone. People noticed them. Even in the half-dark, Layla felt it—the way conversations hushed, heads tilted, eyes lingered a second too long. A woman whispered something to her child and pulled him closer. A man sweeping glass muttered into his collar.
It wasn't just fear of strangers. It was recognition.
"They're looking at me," Layla whispered, throat tight.
"They're looking at both of us," Deke muttered, but she didn't believe him.
The weight of eyes followed. They weren't safe anywhere.
----
They cut through a back alley between a laundrette and a boarded-up pub. The smell of mildew and piss pressed close. Deke was ahead, scanning. Layla pulled her hood lower, each step dragging.
Something clattered.
A shadow dropped from the fire escape. Another slid from behind a dumpster. A third stepped out of the dark ahead.
Figures closed in, hoods up, scarves hiding mouths. The one in front had a red band around their arm and a spray can dangling from one hand, the nozzle stained the same crimson as the graffiti on the wall.
Deke froze.
Layla's stomach dropped. "Deke—"
The lead figure tilted their head, eyes catching faint light. Then—sharp intake of breath. "You're marked."
The scarf tugged down just enough for a smirk. "You're one of us."
Two others flanked. One yanked Deke's collar down before he could stop them. The glow flared. His mark burned against his neck like a brand.
Layla's heart seized. The world shrank to that flicker of light, that secret she hadn't seen until now.
The rebels muttered. "Confirmed. He's real."
The leader nodded. "We've been hunting soldiers all week, trying to pull ours out before they're taken. You—" They jabbed a finger at Deke. "You belong with us. You've got the ink."
Deke's jaw tightened. He looked at Layla, then back at them. His mouth opened, closed, opened again.
"Wait," Layla said, voice sharper than she meant. "He's not—he doesn't even know you."
The leader ignored her. "Come with us, brother. We'll keep you alive."
Deke's voice cracked when it came. "If I come—she comes too."
Laughter rippled. "She's unmarked. Dead weight."
"She's not." His tone carried something that almost broke.
Layla's throat ached. "Deke, what are you doing?"
He didn't look at her. His hands rose slow, palms out—a gesture halfway between surrender and offering. "It's the only way. They can keep you safe."
Safe. The word stung worse than a slap.
She shook her head, stepped back. "No. No, you can't—"
"Layla." His voice was low, pleading, but not to her. To himself. To the part of him that had already decided.
Her chest hollowed. It felt like glass breaking.
-----
Hands grabbed her arms. Rough fabric over her mouth, her hood yanked down hard. The alley tilted as she thrashed.
"Let go!" Her voice strangled, muffled.
The rebels pinned her, wrists bound with cord that smelled like gasoline. The hood came back up, dark swallowing her.
Through the narrow gap, the last thing she saw was Deke.
His face—torn wide open by guilt, lit by the faint burn of the mark that had betrayed them both. His lips moved like he wanted to say her name, like he wanted to undo what he had just done, but the sound never reached her.
They dragged her back into the alley's dark. The pavement scraped her knees. The voices blended—"Move her." "Fast." "Don't let anyone see."
The air inside the hood was hot and damp. Each breath tasted like cloth and panic.
Her thoughts clawed her raw. He was supposed to be my brother.
The cord bit into her wrists.
He gave me away.
Her chest burned with something bigger than fear.
Outside, boots splashed through puddles, orders whispered sharp as knives. Somewhere in the city, sirens rose. A drone's beam swept the rooftops, missing them by inches.
The rebels moved like water through cracks, practiced and silent. Layla stumbled where they pulled her, the world blind beyond cloth. Her pulse hammered in her ears, syncing with the city's strange rhythm. Forty-one beats. Again. And again.
But louder than all of it was the weight in her chest, the betrayal raw and new, searing hotter than any mark could.
The hood pressed tighter, and then there was only black.
----
END OF CHAPTER 3