Rain has teeth.
It chews the city into a smear of lights and wet concrete, gnaws at the edges of the world until everything looks bitten and frayed. I run anyway, hood up, shoes slapping through puddles, breath catching in my throat like a pulled stitch.
Midnight. Freight yard. Chain-link fences rattle in the wind. Sodium lamps buzz—hiss—then steady. I cut between two silent boxcars and find the place I'm supposed to meet him: a loading platform with a crooked yellow line and a vending machine that's been dead since the apocalypse no one announced.
My phone vibrates.
Unknown number: You're late.
I text back with cold fingers: Traffic.
There's no traffic. Just an ache in my ribs from sprinting and the feeling that if I stop, something ends. I don't know what. I only know I can't let it end tonight.
A coin clinks somewhere in the dark.
Not rain. Not metal falling by accident. A lazy, practiced flick, catch, flick, catch. The sound settles in the hollow behind my ear like it belongs there.
"Kaelen."
The voice comes from my left. Calm. Close.
I turn and see him standing under a broken light, rain sketching silver bars across his hood. I can't make out his face. The lamp above him keeps trying to decide whether to exist—stutter, buzz, hum—so his features come and go like bad reception.
"You brought it?" he asks.
"I brought the truth," I say, because bravado feels safer than fear. "You going to stand there and pretend you didn't set me up?"
He laughs softly. Flick. Catch. That coin again. "You're wired, aren't you?"
"This isn't a movie," I say. "I couldn't afford the microphones."
He tilts his head. For a second, the light holds and I catch a reflection flash across his lenses. Glass? Goggles? I can't tell. The lamp coughs and dies. All I have is the rain and his breath, slow and even.
"We don't need to fight," he says. "We just need you to stop."
He steps forward and the night tilts.
It's not vertigo. The world actually shudders, like a sheet being snapped. To my right, the horizon pulls thin, the rail lines stretching too straight, too long, until the distance narrows to a pin. My shadow fractures across the wet concrete into a dozen hairline cracks.
"Stop what?" I ask, but my mouth is already dry. Deep down, I know.
He wants me to stop looking. Stop connecting the files, the money, the disappearances no one else noticed.
The coin flicks and vanishes. His hand is empty.
No—it isn't.
He draws something from under his coat and the air goes cold enough to bite. Blade, my brain supplies, but it doesn't look like any knife I've seen. It isn't steel. It's a length of darkness with hairline fractures spidering along it, each crack glowing a dull red like embers pressed under glass. Light bends around it, a thin mirage rippling the rain.
My throat closes. "That's—"
"Don't move," he says. "Please."
I move.
Not brave. Just human. My legs choose for me and I bolt for the gap between the boxcars. The first step splashes. The second slips. The third finds traction and life comes back into my arms—pump, pump, pump. Behind me, a sound like bad television fills the yard: static, dense and hungry, as if someone turned a dial inside the night and tuned it to grief.
"Kaelen." His voice is closer than it should be. "I told you. If you stop—"
I cut around the corner. The yard opens like a mouth. Floodlights throw hard shadows that look wrong—too sharp, too clean. My shadow doesn't keep up. It snags behind me and jerks like it's caught on something I can't see. The air smells like ozone and hot dust.
I hit a locked gate at a dead sprint. The chain bites my palms. I throw myself up, over, jeans shredding at the thigh. My shoe catches. The chain howls. I tumble, land badly—knee screams, shoulder buckles—and roll until the asphalt bruises me into stillness.
"Standing still is fading," a voice whispers, but it's not his. It's inside my skull, the part of me that thinks in other people's words. It sounds like a girl I don't know and a child I never met and the hiss of the rain becoming language.
Footsteps. Unhurried.
I push up, stumble, run. The yard narrows into a service alley where a vending machine looms like a coffin with buttons. My breath leaves me in white rags. The rain softens. The world goes too quiet.
I glance back.
He isn't in a hurry, and that terrifies me more than any chase ever could. When he moves, the distance between us shrinks like a trick of lenses. The blade hums. The glow in its fractures flickers, brighter when it tilts toward me—as if it recognizes heat.
"What do you want?" I ask, voice tearing on the way out. "Money? The files? You can have it all. Take it."
"Want?" he repeats softly, like he's trying out a word he hasn't used in years. "I don't want. I remember."
"Remember what?" I choke out.
"How to open doors," he says.
The coin hits the ground between us and spins. It wobbles, dented, off-balance, catching stray reflections of the red cracks along the blade. Then it falls, but it doesn't clink. It vanishes into its own reflection. The sound that follows is soft, patient. A crack, like glass giving way.
I bolt right. He doesn't stop me. The alley buys me fifteen yards of hope, and then the world decides I've had enough hope for one night. My foot hits slick paint and I go down hard on my side. Stars burst across my vision in the wrong colors—red, then white, then none.
He stops two steps from my face. The blade points down. Rain crawls across its surface and disappears into the cracks like it's being drunk.
"Take it easy," he says, and there's something like regret in his voice that makes my stomach twist. "It's worse if you fight."
"Then I'll fight," I rasp. Because of course I say that.
The blade lowers until it hovers over my chest, and the heat coming off it isn't heat—it's vibration, like standing too close to a speaker and feeling the bass in your bones. It hums, and the hum feels like a hundred televisions left on in empty rooms.
"Why me?" I manage. Not who are you, not what is that. Just the smallest question my mouth can carry.
"Because you don't stop," he says.
The words land like an answer and a sentence. I don't know what I was supposed to stop. I only know that I didn't.
He exhales. The blade drops the last inch.
Cold. Then every nerve in my body becomes a wire stripped bare. The hum becomes a scream I can't hear with my ears—only with whatever part of me isn't flesh. Light pours out of the blade's cracks and into me, and for a heartbeat I see something impossible:
A wall of white stretching forever.
A door carved into it like a wound.
Shadows with no owners drifting like smoke.
A memory that isn't mine presses against my skull:
Do not look back. Do not stop. Do not say your own name out loud.
Rain beads on my lashes. My hands won't move.
"You'll be fine," he lies. He isn't cruel about it. He isn't kind either. He speaks like a clerk confirming an appointment. "It's only different from what you expected."
"Who are—" I start.
The world snaps.
Not the world. Me.
Something inside my chest pulls tight, then tears. It doesn't hurt like pain. It hurts like erasure. Heat, cold, heat, cold, gone. The rain stops touching my skin. The smell of ozone recedes