Soph's trail wasn't hard to follow.
She walked in a straight line, cutting through the crowd. Shoulders tense, head slightly down, fingers clenched around her phone. No weaving. No wasted steps.
His motes tracked her like a cursor on a screen.
Hao stayed a few paces back, close enough not to lose her, far enough to pretend he wasn't following a stranger out of a party because his insides didn't like her.
This is stupid, he told himself.
Normal explanations lined up like excuses.
Maybe she has some weird heart condition. A bad surgery. Chronic anemia.
Still, every time she shifted, every time her weight moved from one foot to the other, his motes twitched. Her body wasn't wrong in the way the basement thing had been wrong. It was still human-shaped.
Just… off.
Like someone had swapped out a piece of her for something heavier and slower and expected nobody to notice.
They passed through the living room toward the back of the apartment, where the music thinned into a muffled beat. Fewer people, more discarded cups, a couple making out against the hallway wall as if they were trying to merge through it.
Soph didn't look at any of them.
Her thumb kept tapping at her phone screen. Unlock. Scroll. Type. Delete. Lock. Repeat.
The more he watched her move, the more his brain tried to default to something reasonable.
Maybe the motes are overreacting.
Maybe the blessing's still figuring out humans.
Maybe every weird sensation isn't a monster flag.
"You are not overreacting," the Anchor spoke.
He didn't bother answering.
They reached the back of the apartment. A narrow hallway stretched out, ending in a plain door with a scuffed metal bar instead of a knob. "EXIT" glared in red above it.
Soph pushed it open with her shoulder and slipped through without hesitating.
The door started to swing shut behind her.
Hao slid forward and caught it with his fingers at the last second, feeling the cold metal bite into his skin. He eased it open carefully, stepping through before it could slam.
By the time he reached the bottom of the short concrete stairs, the air had shifted from warm and sweaty to knife-cold. The party's bass dimmed to a distant, dumb echo above him, like someone had buried a speaker in the ceiling.
The door clicked shut behind him with a sound that felt too loud.
The alley behind the building was the kind every city grew like mold.
Narrow. Damp. Lined with brick walls that sweated moisture and old grime. A flickering streetlamp at the far end tried its best to pretend it made a difference. Shadows crowded the corners anyway.
Dumpsters hunched along the walls like sleeping beasts. Trash bags slumped between them, slick and dark. The smell of old oil, rotting food, and colder air tangled in his lungs.
Soph stood near the middle, glowing faintly under the weak light.
Her breath misted the air in soft, uneven clouds. She wrapped one arm around herself, phone in the other hand, screen lighting up her face in cold blue as she checked it every few seconds. Scroll. Type. Delete. Lock.
She didn't notice him.
Hao stopped just outside the door's reach and let it close fully behind him. The faint thud cut the alley off from the party entirely.
He stayed in the shadows, the dark swallowing most of his outline. The blessing helped, his motes thinning around him, swallowing small sounds: the shift of his shoes, the drag of his breath, the faint brush of fabric.
This is how people end up on news segments, he thought. "Quiet boy was secretly a creep, neighbors shocked, they thought he was nice."
He should turn around.
He should go back upstairs, blend into the background, pretend he hadn't felt anything strange. Call it stress. Call it trial aftershocks. Call it his brain trying to paste horror rules over a normal girl.
She could just have a medical condition, he told himself. Something rare. Something that set the motes off. I don't know what "wrong heartbeat" even means in real life.
His motes drifted outward on instinct anyway, thinning into a nearly invisible haze that spread through the alley.
Information slid back into his mind.
Heartbeat: slow. Too slow.
Blood flow: thick, dragging.
Body density: wrong.
Not dead.
Just… out of spec.
Human-shaped.
Human-colored.
Not behaving like the data set in his blessing considered "standard."
He swallowed.
"Closer," the Anchor suggested. Its presence coiled tighter around his thoughts.
You might as well tell me to walk straight into a prison cell, Hao thought. Night alley, drunk girl, mysterious boy lurking in the dark. That never ends well.
"You're welcome," the Anchor said.
He could almost hear the non-existent smile.
Soph's shoulders tensed. She checked her phone again, thumb hovering over the screen before dropping away.
Maybe she's waiting for someone, he thought. An actual danger. Not me.
That was the part he kept circling back to.
If she was just sick, his motes wouldn't recoil like that. If she was just sad, his blessing wouldn't catalog her body like a threat.
He took one step forward.
His foot landed silently. The motes suppressed the sound of his shoe brushing against the concrete. His breath stayed low and controlled.
He stopped halfway between the door and the center of the alley.
Close enough to close the gap if he needed to.
Far enough that, to anyone glancing back, he was just another patch of darkness.
Footsteps scraped at the far end of the alley.
Not Soph's.
A shape detached itself from the darkness, peeling away from the deeper shadow under the busted streetlamp. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Wrapped in a long coat that had seen too many winters. The hem brushed his boots, damp from the alley floor.
He walked with the kind of steady, unhurried pace that came from someone who knew exactly how much distance he could cross and how quickly.
His face was the kind that would vanish in a crowd if not for the eyes: sharp, tired, mean. Not rageful. Not wild. Just worn down and permanently angled toward trouble.
Hao's motes tagged his approach instantly. Weight: high. Stance: balanced. Hands: visible, but loose.
"Old guy?" Soph called softly.
Her voice trembled just a little around the edges. Not completely drunk. Not completely sober.
"That you?"
Her words hung in the air between them, white breath curling into the cold.
Hao stayed in the dark.
Waiting for everything to go worse.