The cold reached him first.
Metal pressed against his wrists and ankles, tight enough to bruise, and something circled his throat without quite choking him. It sat there like a reminder that he was breathing with someone else's permission. Makun pulled against it and the chains bit deeper, so cold they burned.
The dark around him was total. It had no shapes and no edges, and it seemed to swallow even the sound of his breathing.
Then the footsteps came. They didn't echo the way footsteps should; they seemed to come from inside his skull, slow and patient, and his heart began to hammer hard enough to hurt.
A green light bloomed above him and pulsed like something sick. In its glow a glass tube descended around him and sealed with a long hiss of pressured air. The space shrank, and his chest tightened with it.
Beyond the glass, shapes were gathering. Their proportions were wrong and their limbs too many, and their faces slid out of focus whenever he tried to look at one directly. One of them tapped the glass in a slow, even rhythm, the way someone keeps count, and the others pressed close to the tube. For a moment he thought they had come to watch him.
Then he felt the pull in his chest, as if something vital were being drawn out through his skin, and he understood that they had come to feed.
"No," he said. It came out as a croak. The second time, he screamed it.
He threw himself against the chains until his wrists were slick and warm. One of the shapes lifted a hand toward the glass, a hand with far too many fingers, and Makun kept screaming and kept fighting while the cold sank into his bones and the pulling grew stronger and the dark leaned in to finish him.
He woke with a gasp.
The sheets had wound around him like rope. For three long seconds his body refused to move, and he could still feel the chains at his wrists and throat, cold and certain, until he tore his arms free, kicked the sheets off and shoved himself back against the headboard.
Just sheets. Just the sagging mattress, in an apartment that somehow looked worse than it had last night.
Fuck.
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and waited for his pulse to stop roaring.
The dream had come and gone since he was a boy. This week it had come three times: the same chains, the same glass, the same patient shapes in the dark. He looked down at his wrists, half expecting bruises. The skin was clean, though a dull ache lingered underneath, which seemed rude of something that only existed in his head. He felt more tired than when he had lain down, the way he always did after those nights, and the days that followed them were always his worst. He had noticed that years ago and had never found a way to explain it.
His phone was screaming on the floor. The alarm had been going since seven, and he had slept through every second of it, chained under that glass. He silenced it and read the time.
7:43 on a Thursday morning. He was supposed to be at the warehouse at 7:30.
"Perfect," he told the ceiling.
In daylight the apartment looked exactly like what it was. The paint was peeling, and water stains spread across the ceiling like continents on a badly drawn map. The air conditioner had died two weeks ago, the landlord had not fixed it, and the heat made everything smell of mold and old regret.
The shower coughed twice before it gave him lukewarm water. He stood under it longer than he had time for, trying to rinse off the feeling of the chains.
In the mirror, bruises spread along his ribs. The yellow-green ones were from last week, when a shelf at work had collapsed the moment he walked past it. His supervisor had called that his fault. Equipment broke around Makun and accidents followed him like stray dogs, and at some point he had stopped arguing, because arguing had never once changed the outcome.
He met his own eyes in the mirror and found something harder in them than usual. Maybe the dream had left it there.
Today I push back, he thought.
It sounded hollow even inside his own head, but he kept it. It was better than the alternative.
He dressed in the least wrinkled shirt he owned and a pair of jeans that had seen better months, and took his work badge from its nail by the door. The photo made him look younger than twenty-three. Keys, phone, wallet. It was 8:02, so he was officially late, and the traffic would make him later.
He opened the door and found his landlord waiting in the hallway.
Mr. Okoye was a big man, the kind who filled a hallway simply by standing in it, and he stood there now with his arms crossed and his face set like poured concrete. He held a single sheet of paper.
"Makun." His voice was flat and businesslike. "We need to talk."
Makun's stomach dropped. He had heard that tone his whole life, usually right before something went sideways.
"I'm late for work, Mr. Okoye. Can this wait until—"
"You're three months behind." Okoye turned the paper so he could read it. EVICTION NOTICE ran across the top in bold letters, the kind that made sure nobody could misunderstand. "I've been patient. More than patient. I can't keep carrying you."
"I get paid Friday. I can give you something then."
"Forty-eight hours." Okoye pressed the notice into his hand. "That's what the law gives you, so that's what you get. Saturday, you're out. I'm sorry, but this is business."
He didn't sound sorry. He sounded tired, which was somehow worse.
Makun looked down at the letterhead and the date stamp. Two days to find three months of rent, or lose the only roof he had. The old Makun would have begged, or bargained, or made promises he couldn't keep. This morning something colder settled in his chest instead, cleaner and sharper than panic.
He folded the notice and put it in his pocket.
"Fine," he said, and his voice came out steady. "I'll figure it out."
Okoye studied him for a moment, then walked away without looking back.
Makun locked his door and headed for the stairs. He always figured it out. He had never once been sure how, but he had always managed, and he saw no reason to tell the universe he was running out of ideas.