The crosswalk signal turned red just as Rou reached the corner, forcing him to wait with a growing crowd of office workers and students.
His phone buzzed against his ear, his boss's voice cutting through the traffic noise.
"Are you even listening to me? This is the third time this month you've submitted the reports in the wrong format. The third time!"
Rou touched his hair, pushing a strand back behind his ear as a bus roared past. "I'll fix them when I get home tonight."
"That's what you said last time, and then accounting complained to me. To me! Do you understand how that makes me look?"
"Yes."
"Yes? That's all you have to say?" His boss's breathing grew heavier through the phone. "Sometimes I wonder if you even want this job."
The light changed, and the crowd surged forward. Rou moved with them, stepping around a woman who'd stopped to check her phone in the middle of the crosswalk.
"I need the job," he said, which was true enough, since rent was due in three days and the payment from this month's work would hit his account sometime today, if the company's payment system didn't mess up again like it had two months ago.
"Then act like it! I don't have time for this. Fix those reports, and I mean actually fix them this time, or you are fired."
The line went dead.
Rou put his phone in his pocket and kept walking toward the bus stop, weaving between slower pedestrians and street vendors setting up their morning displays. The city moved around him in its usual pattern, everyone focused on their phones or their conversations or just getting wherever they needed to be.
At the bus stop, twenty or so people had already gathered under the shelter, most of them staring at their phones or talking to someone through wireless earbuds. Rou found a spot near the back edge and leaned against the glass partition.
He decided to scroll on Youtube while he waited.
A woman next to him was arguing with someone on her phone about a wedding venue, her voice rising with each exchange. Two teenagers near the front kept shoving each other and laughing about something on one of their screens. An older man in a wrinkled suit checked his watch every few seconds, muttering under his breath about being late.
'Should have just walked,' Rou thought, but it was twelve blocks to his apartment and his feet still hurt from yesterday's shift at the warehouse, the second job his boss didn't know about and would probably rage about if he found out.
The woman's wedding argument grew louder. "I don't care what your mother thinks about lilies! It's my wedding!"
One of the teenagers stumbled backward from another shove, bumping into the anxious businessman, who cursed and shoved back, which made both teenagers laugh harder.
Rou touched his hair again, a habit he'd developed in middle school and never quite shaken, twisting a section between his fingers while he watched the street for the bus.
That's when the air changed.
It wasn't dramatic at first, just a feeling like the pressure dropping before a storm, making his ears pop slightly. The woman stopped mid-sentence about flower arrangements. The teenagers' laughter died. Even the traffic seemed to quiet for a moment, though cars kept rushing past.
"What the—" someone started to say, but the words got swallowed by a sound that wasn't quite a sound, more like the absence of sound that somehow hurt to hear.
The air in front of the bus stop shimmered, like heat waves rising from hot asphalt, except it was March and barely above freezing. The shimmer spread, growing wider and taller, through it Rou could see something that made his brain refuse to process what his eyes were showing it.
Not the street on the other side. Not buildings or cars or people walking by. Something else, somewhere else.
"Everyone get back!" the businessman shouted, but his words came out wrong, stretched and distorted like someone had grabbed the sound itself and pulled it like taffy.
The shimmer exploded outward.
Rou felt his feet leave the ground, his stomach lurching as gravity seemed to forget which way was supposed to be down. The woman next to him screamed, but the scream dopplered away as she tumbled in a different direction. His phone flew from his pocket, spinning away into the twisted space.
He tried to grab onto something, anything, but there was nothing solid anymore, just the sensation of falling in every direction at once while lights that shouldn't exist burned behind his eyelids. His jacket whipped around him in wind that came from nowhere and everywhere.
'This isn't happening,' he thought, even as his body tumbled through space that bent wrong, that folded in on itself and stretched out simultaneously. 'I'm supposed to fix those reports tonight. The payment should hit my account by three. Rent is due—'
The thought scattered as something grabbed him, not hands but force itself, and pulled.
The world tore.
Then darkness.
Then impact.
Rou hit ground that wasn't pavement, the breath knocked from his lungs in a painful grunt. Dirt and grass filled his mouth. His ribs screamed where he'd landed on them. Around him, other impacts, other groans and cries of pain or confusion.
He pushed himself up on shaking arms, spitting out earth and trying to make his eyes focus. The bus stop was gone. The city was gone. Instead, trees stretched up toward a sky that was the wrong shade of blue, too clear and bright without the usual haze of pollution.
The air smelled wrong too, like animals, wood smoke and things rotting in the distance.
"Where are we?" someone whimpered, and Rou turned to see the wedding woman sitting in the dirt, her phone still clutched in her hand though the screen was dark and cracked.
Others were picking themselves up or still lying where they'd fallen. The businessman. The teenagers. A few people Rou hadn't noticed at the bus stop but who must have been there. Maybe ten or twelve in total, scattered across a small clearing surrounded by massive trees that looked older than any trees should look.
"Is everyone okay?" someone asked, and nervous laughter followed because nothing about this was okay, nothing about this made sense.
Rou touched his hair, realized his hand was shaking, and lowered it. His ribs still hurt from the landing, and when he breathed deep, something in his chest clicked wrong. But at least he was alive, all of them.
However, things started to get weird as they heard something.
A scream, but not like any scream that should exist. It started low and rose to something that made primitive parts of Rou's brain light up with warnings passed down from ancestors who knew what it meant when something screamed like that in the dark.
The scream cut off.
Then came the sound of something wet tearing.
Then another scream, this one human and worse because of it. This one full of words that weren't quite words anymore, just the sound of someone begging without language for something to stop, please stop, please—
The scream ended mid-plea, replaced by sounds that made the wedding woman vomit and one of the teenagers start crying.
Through the trees, barely visible in the strange too-bright light of this place, something moved. Something large. Something that made branches snap as it fed.
Another human scream pierced the air.