The Shadow-Kenji stepped out of the slime, its feet making a wet, slapping sound against the concrete floor.
It was terrifyingly perfect. It had Kenji's messy hair, his skinny frame, even the way he hunched his shoulders. But it was made of blue glass and shifting darkness. It had no eyes, just smooth, blank skin where a face should be.
"Found you," the voice echoed again, sounding like a scratched CD skipping in their heads.
"Run!" Marco yelled.
He was the first to move. He stepped in front of Maya and Kenji, raising his stone arm like a shield.
The Shadow-Kenji tilted its head. It raised its own hand. Blue sparks, far brighter and more violent than Kenji's, crackled around its fingers.
Zzzzt.
It vanished.
There was no sound of movement. No blur. Just instant displacement.
"Behind you!" Sarah screamed.
Marco spun around, but he was too slow. The Shadow-Kenji was already there, floating in the air behind him. It slammed a glowing fist into Marco's back.
BOOM.
The impact was like a cannon shot. Marco—who weighed nearly two hundred pounds—was launched across the room. He smashed into a stack of old desks, metal screeching as they collapsed on top of him.
"Marco!" Maya cried out.
She raised her hands, trying to summon her pink tether, but she was shaking too hard.
The Shadow-Kenji landed gracefully. It turned its eyeless face toward Kenji.
Weak, the voice whispered in Kenji's mind. You are empty.
It lunged at Kenji.
Kenji reacted on instinct. He felt the fear spike in his chest, and with it, the familiar tug of the Void.
Warp.
Kenji blinked five feet to the left.
But the Shadow was already there waiting for him.
It had anticipated the teleport. It caught Kenji by the throat before he even fully materialized. Kenji gagged, his feet dangling off the wet floor. The creature's grip was like ice, burning his skin with cold.
"Let him go!" Sarah yelled.
She swung her light-sword. It was dim, flickering like a dying fluorescent tube, but she put her whole body into the swing.
The blade struck the Shadow's arm.
Hiss.
The light blade didn't cut the creature. instead, it bounced off with a shower of sparks, as if Sarah had hit solid diamond. The Shadow didn't even flinch. It backhanded Sarah without looking, sending her sliding across the wet floor.
Kenji clawed at the hand choking him. His vision was spotting. He couldn't breathe. He tried to summon a kinetic push, anything to break the grip, but he was powerless.
"Aris!" Kenji wheezed. "Do... something!"
Aris was cowering behind the furnace, clutching his tape recorder. His eyes were darting around the room, analyzing the blue crystals, the slime, the creature.
"It's sound!" Aris yelled, his voice cracking. "It's a frequency construct! It's made of solid vibration!"
"So what?" Sarah coughed, struggling to get up.
"Disrupt it!" Aris shouted. He fumbled with his tape recorder. He hit the 'Record' button, then immediately hit 'Play' while holding the microphone directly against the speaker.
It created a feedback loop.
SCREEEEEEEEEEEECH!
A piercing, high-pitched electronic shriek filled the boiler room. It was agonizingly loud, bouncing off the metal pipes and concrete walls.
The effect on the Shadow-Kenji was instant.
The creature released Kenji and clamped its hands over where its ears should be. Its solid blue form began to vibrate. Ripples appeared on its skin like water in a gale. The blue glass cracked.
"It's working!" Marco yelled, pushing the desks off himself. He had a bloody nose, but he looked furious. "Keep doing it, Aris!"
The Shadow-Kenji screeched—a digital, glitchy roar. It tried to warp toward Aris to stop the noise, but its teleport fizzled. It just flickered in place, unable to stabilize.
"Now!" Kenji gasped, massaging his bruised throat. "Hit it while it's glitching!"
Kenji, Marco, and Sarah looked at each other. They didn't need to speak. They moved as one.
Marco charged like a linebacker, his stone shoulder lowered. Sarah sprinted, forcing her fading sword to flare bright one last time. Kenji, running on pure adrenaline, warped directly above the creature.
Marco slammed into its legs.
Sarah slashed across its chest.
Kenji dropped from the ceiling, delivering a gravity-assisted kick to its head.
CRASH.
The Shadow-Kenji shattered.
It didn't bleed. It exploded into a thousand shards of blue glass that dissolved into gray smoke before they hit the floor. The feedback loop from Aris's recorder continued to screech until Aris finally clicked it off.
Silence returned to the boiler room. Just the heavy breathing of five terrified teenagers.
"Is it... is it dead?" Maya whispered, peeking out from behind a pipe.
"It wasn't alive," Aris said, trembling as he put the recorder in his pocket. "It was a copy. A bad copy. That cocoon... it was trying to 3D print a soldier using the frequency."
Kenji walked over to the pile of gray sludge that used to be Mr. Henderson. The cocoon was torn and empty.
"We can't stay here," Kenji said quietly. "If there was one, there could be more. And the police... how do we explain Mr. Henderson?"
"We don't," Sarah said, wiping slime off her jacket. "We run. Now."
They scrambled out of the boiler room, sprinting up the stairs two at a time. They didn't stop at the lockers. They didn't stop at the library. They burst out the back doors of the school and ran across the football field, hopping the fence into the woods.
They ran until their lungs burned. They ran until the school was just a small brick box in the distance.
Finally, they collapsed in a small clearing near the old creek bed—their childhood hangout spot before the satellite station.
Kenji leaned against an oak tree, sliding down until he hit the dirt. He felt sick. His neck throbbed where the clone had choked him.
"You lied," Sarah said.
She was standing over him, hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. She didn't sound angry, just tired.
"What?" Kenji looked up.
"In the library," Sarah said. "You said you were on point because you could teleport us out if things got bad. But you couldn't, could you? You were just as trapped as we were."
Kenji looked at the ground. He picked at a piece of moss. "I... I wanted you guys to feel safe. If I said I was empty, we wouldn't have gone down there. And we wouldn't have known about the cocoon."
"That thing almost killed you, Kenji," Marco said, sitting on a log. "It was faster than you. Stronger."
"It was me," Kenji whispered. "It knew my moves before I made them."
"It was a level one mob," Aris said, cleaning his glasses with his shirt. "If we use RPG logic. Mr. Henderson was just a vessel. The Signal is learning. Next time, it won't be a glitchy copy. It'll be perfect."
Maya sat next to Kenji. She reached out and touched his neck. Her hand glowed with a faint, warm yellow light.
"Does it hurt?" she asked softly.
"A little less now," Kenji said. The warmth from her hand was soothing. The bruising started to fade slightly.
"We need a base," Sarah said, looking at the group. Her fear was hardening into resolve. "The school isn't safe. Our houses aren't safe. If these things can replace people... we can't trust anyone."
"My basement," Kenji said. "My mom works double shifts at the hospital this week. She's never home before midnight. And the door has a heavy bolt."
"Kenji's basement it is," Marco agreed. "I'll bring the snacks. I think I'm gonna need a lot of protein if I'm gonna be a tank."
Kenji looked at his friends. A jock, a rebel, a nerd, and a quiet girl. And him—a glitch.
Yesterday, they were just classmates. Today, they were a squad.
"Let's go," Kenji said, standing up. "We have to figure out how to stop the Signal before it prints another one."
As they walked away from the creek, Kenji looked back at the school one last time.
High above the building, in the evening sky, the clouds were swirling in a strange, unnatural spiral. To anyone else, it looked like a storm coming.
But Kenji knew better. It wasn't rain. It was static.