The first scream didn't sound human.
It rose from the bowels of the old district like metal torn slowly apart, like rusted rebar reeled through a throat. Rajan heard it before anyone else in the alley—before the vendors stopped hawking counterfeit charms, before the neon kanji flickered and died, before the incense in the shrines guttered sideways as if a wind had suddenly remembered how to hate.
He stopped mid-step, one boot on cracked concrete, the other hovering over a rain-slick patch smeared with old oil and betel spit. The air tasted wrong. Like burnt hair and funeral ash, layered over the usual exhaust and frying chili.
Beside him, Lian's illusion-mask fractured for a heartbeat. The doe-eyed tourist face she'd wrapped around herself shimmered, revealing the sharper planes: thin scar along her jaw, fox-like eyes that never fully relaxed. Her hand brushed his wrist before she realized she'd done it.
"You hear that?" she whispered in Mandarin, the tones clipped.
Rajan's reply came in the clipped Hindi-tinged Japanese their world had grown used to. "Too late if I didn't."
He forced his lungs to slow. His Karmic Echo had started humming beneath his skin the moment they crossed into this street, but now it rattled, a black moth in a glass jar. His mentors used to say: When Echo sings first, corpses usually follow.
The alley was part of Mumbai, technically, but no map app claimed it. Overhead, strings of Diwali lanterns—long faded from last year—hung tangled with Japanese wind chimes and red Chinese paper talismans, all layered grime, all motionless despite the humid draft that kept brushing the back of his neck like fingers.
The scream came again, closer now. Less metal. More meat.
Lian scanned the cramped lane, pupils thinning, Illusory Threads twitching invisible in the air around her fingers. Her voice slid into Hindi for him. "Your client said one possession. One tenant. This sounds like… more."
"He lied." Rajan flexed his right hand. At his knuckles, that faint auric tremor again—gray like ash, edged with night-violet. The Echo. "They always lie."
She made a face that was not quite a smile. "Then next time, let me charge extra for the lies."
Next time. As if she'd decided there would be one.
A generator buzzed and clicked out behind them. The alley fell into a deeper dim, the only light now the sickly tube glow filtering from the tenement windows overhead. Faces hovered there—brown, pale, in-between—watching with the flattened expressions of those who had seen too many things vanish and too many things remain.
No one leaned out to help.
They reached the building at the alley's dead end—a four-story tumor of concrete, its walls webbed with cables and moss, its balconies stacked with prayer flags, satellite dishes, and laundry stiff as desiccated skin. Over the doorway, someone had painted a crude hybrid symbol: an om winding around a torii gate, bisected by a Chinese trigram. Under it, the nameplate had been gouged out. No name. No address. An unwritten place.
Rajan's stomach tightened. "Liminal house," he said. "Veil-thin."
Lian's gaze flicked to the symbol, then to him. "You're shaking."
"Echo's restless."
"Or you are."
He didn't answer. She was right in a way that hurt.
The landlord waited inside the narrow lobby, sweating through a polyester shirt that had once been white. Jade beads clacked at his wrist; a rudraksha mala hung at his throat; a Shinto ofuda was taped to his phone case. Insurance policies against things he didn't understand.
"You came," the man blurted as they entered. His Marathi-hinged English stumbled over itself. "Second floor. Room 2C. She—she's been… three days now. No food. No water. The others…" His eyes flicked up the stairwell where the concrete dissolved into darkness. "They gone. All gone. Doors open but no one inside. No one comes down. Only the… sound."
As if on cue, something moved above: a slow, scraping shuffle, a wet thud. Then silence, edged sharp and hollow.
Rajan studied the landlord's face. Behind the terror was calculation—how much he could charge supernatural cleaners, how much he would deny ever knowing them. Rajan's Karmic Echo stirred, tasting the man's smears of greed, his years of quiet exploitation.
The urge to let Echo uncoil, just a little, pulsed like heat in Rajan's bones. He pictured the man's skin peeling in strips of remembered guilt.
Lian's fingers brushed his forearm again, gentle but deliberate. Don't, her eyes said. Not the living. Not tonight.
He pulled his power back with effort, like shivering a broken limb into a sling. "Lock the door after us," he ordered, voice flat. "If anything except us comes down, run."
The man nodded too quickly, but Rajan saw the lie in his eyes: he'd stay. He'd listen.
They climbed.
The building swallowed sound. Each step up, the street noise faded—a radio cut off mid-verse, a baby's cry strangled at birth. On the first landing, a shrine lit niches along the wall: a laughing Buddha plastered with marigold petals, a stern-faced bodhisattva garlanded with jasmine, a chipped Ganesha sticky with incense. Melted wax pooled like fat at their bases. All the candles had burned down at once, blackened wicks bent toward the same direction: up.
The second floor reeked of iron and mildew. Rajan's throat constricted.
"Do you smell…" Lian trailed off. Her illusions were thickening around her, invisible unless you knew where to look: the slight blur at the edge of her silhouette, the way her feet ghosted a centimeter above the grime. Illusory Threads, ready to weave.
"Blood," Rajan answered. "A lot of it. Old, and not."
The hallway to 2C was lined with doors hanging slightly ajar. Inside each room gaped a thin rectangle of darkness. No furniture scraped, no televisions murmured. Yet Rajan felt the presence of people, like a pressure against his eardrums. The building was holding its breath.
"Check the others?" Lian asked softly.
He shook his head. "One anchor first. Then we see how big the rot is."
They reached 2C. The door was closed, but the wood pulsed under his hand as if something on the other side were leaning against it. The house's silence concentrated here, thick as coagulated blood.
Lian's voice dropped to a murmur; Sanskrit bled into classical Chinese as she traced a sigil in the air—glimmering flickers of foxfire that sank into the frame. A veil of illusion settled over them, bending perception away, dulling their presence.
"Ward's up," she said. "We walk in, room thinks we belong. Whatever's wearing her skin might take longer to notice."
Rajan met her eyes. "If it's not alone?"
Her smile didn't reach her eyes. "Then we improvise."
He turned the knob. The door opened without resistance. No creak. No complaint. Just a yawning grayness beyond.
The smell hit first—sour, sweet, septic. The stench of bedsores and stagnant water, of flowers rotting in vases long gone dry.
His Echo surged forward like a shadow trying to outrun him.
The room had been… normal once. A small rented flat. A bed pushed against the wall, sheets now stiff with old stains. A plastic deity calendar curled from the damp. A kitchenette where pots had welded to greasy burners. At the far corner, near a window swallowed by a black curtain, sat the woman.
Her back faced them. She sat naked on a plastic chair bolted to the floor with wax and something darker, stringier. Her spine was a question mark of protruding vertebrae, each knob crowned with a ring of bruised purple. Her hair hung in lank ropes. Her skin—what was visible—bore a lattice of thin, crimson lines. Not cuts. Markings. Symbols etched with something more stubborn than ink, thin hills of scar tissue.
Lian inhaled. "Threads," she whispered. "Someone tried to bind something inside her."
Rajan's jaw clenched. "Or keep it from getting out."
"Same thing, if you're bad at it."
He took one step closer. The floor squelched. He looked down.
The grout between the tiles was gone. In its place: a pulpy gray mass, like chewed paper, like meat pushed through a sieve. Embedded in it, like fruit in gelatin, were teeth. Human. Too many. Tiny milk teeth. Yellowed molars. They shifted almost imperceptibly as his boot sank in, pressing against each other with a faint, grinding whisper.
Lian swallowed audibly. "That's… new."
The woman in the chair shuddered.
Her head turned, vertebrae cracking one by one as if pried apart by invisible hands. It rotated too far before stopping—chin almost aligned with her shoulder. Her face was wrong in tiny ways that magnified into horror. Eyes too wide, rims raw and red, whites veined with thin black threads that writhed like worms. Mouth parted, lips split in a ring of old fissures, revealing teeth filed down to flat stumps.
She smiled. The skin at the corners of her mouth tore further, thin spits of blood trickling down her chin.
"Echo Hunter," she cooed. Her voice sounded like three people trying to harmonize through the same throat. Marathi, Japanese, Mandarin layered imperfectly. "Key Vessel."
The temperature dropped so fast his breath plumed in front of him. Rajan's Echo exploded within his chest, trying to tear itself free, slamming against the inside of his ribs. The scar along his sternum—left by the ritual that had killed his family—lit up like molten metal.
Lian's hand shot out, grabbing his sleeve. "Rajan—"
He barely heard her over the sudden roar in his skull.
The woman's eyes—no, the thing behind her eyes—focused on him with terrible intimacy. "You remember the fire, don't you?" she lilted. "Mother screaming without a tongue. Father burning without a name. Sister crawling toward you without… without… without…"
Her voice skipped, like a record scratching over a gouge. Her neck snapped the rest of the way around, head now inverted, hair slapping against her chest. The bones did not tear skin. They simply rearranged.
Rajan saw the ritual circle superimposed over the stained tiles: the ruined mandala, the torii splintered by ash, the gui-shadow that had entered first. He tasted smoke and taxidermy chemicals and his own childhood terror, distilled.
His fingers curled into fists. The Echo begged to be unleashed. If he let it, it would rip this room apart. It would pulp the teeth-flesh, snap the woman's spine, smear whatever parasite nested within her across the walls. It would feel good.
"Not like this," Lian hissed. "You'll tear the Veil here."
"I can't—"
The woman leaned forward until her neck creaked, head hanging upside down, hair dragging on the floor. Her chest rose and fell as if with someone else's breath. "You will unbind us," she crooned. "Little Key with no door. You will open and open until you are inside out. Until the streets drink you. Until your bones sprout temples."
Behind her, the curtain over the window pulsed. Not with wind. With something pressing from the other side, too large for the glass, too eager for the crack.
Lian's Threads lashed out. Illusion tore through the room—the walls stretched away into an endless hallway, the ceiling became a sky of roiling ink, the floor shimmered like calm water. To the entity inhabiting the woman, reality fractured. Disorientation, she'd told him once, was the cheapest weapon.
The woman's gaze flicked, unfocused for a moment. Her lips peeled back farther, revealing gums inflamed and glistening. "Fox-child," she whispered now, voice falling into perfect Beijing register. "Liar. Thief. You think you weave truths? You're only good at decorating cages."
Lian went very still.
Rajan felt her Threads tremble, her control strain. The entity was not just seeing through her illusions—it was feeling along them, tasting her. He heard a faint sound like paper being delicately torn, and realized it was her breath, shuddering.
"Stop listening," he snapped, more harshly than intended.
Her jaw tightened. The illusions flickered, then steadied. The entity laughed, a sound that crawled along the spine.
Somewhere below, a door slammed. Or a body fell. Hard to tell.
The teeth-meat in the floor heaved.
Small mouths opened between the tiles, lips of gristle forming over each tooth. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Tiny child mouths, all whispering different prayers in different languages, overlapping into a susurration of pleading and accusation.
Rajan gagged on the stench. His Echo answered the chorus, the curse in him recognizing the curse without. His vision blurred at the edges, black strands creeping inward.
"Rajan," Lian said, voice strained. "We need to sever its anchor. The woman. Before whatever's pressing at that window gets in."
"And if it already has?"
"Then we do it anyway."
He stepped forward. The mouth-floor clung, sucking at his boots. Little tongues, slick and cold, probed the leather, tasting him.
The woman's hands shot up, nails tearing grooves in the plastic armrests as they moved. Her fingers elongated, skin stretching, bones cracking like wet bamboo.
"Touch me," she taunted. "Open, little Key. Show us the Unbinding."
His scar burned hotter, the pain a white knife. The room seemed to tilt toward her, every shadow pointing, every particle of dust suspended in anticipation.
He thought of his mother's face, half-charred and yet somehow gentle in his memory. Of his father's hand pushing him toward the door as the ritual circle collapsed. Of his baby sister's cry cutting off mid-syllable.
He let the Echo climb to his throat—but not break free. Not yet.
"Lian," he said softly. "When I move, wrap her mind. Make her think she's alone. No witnesses. No Key."
Lian's lips pressed into a bloodless line. "This will hurt you."
"It already does."
She nodded, Threads coiling tighter, ready to strike.
Down the hall, on the floor above, and in the city beyond the alley, other things stirred. In neon-lit Tokyo, Kira Tanaka paused mid-ritual as her lesser spirits screamed and imploded in their paper prisons. In smog-choked Shanghai, Vikram Chen dropped to one knee on a rooftop, clutching his cursed side as the rakshasa-yaoguai scar flared, veins blackening beneath his skin.
All of them felt the same thing: a tremor in the Veil, a shiver like a thin wall remembering it was only an idea.
In the nameless house, in room 2C, surrounded by teeth and whispers, Rajan moved.
He stepped through the grasping mouths, lifted his hand, and touched the woman's forehead with two fingers. The Echo howled, eager to tear, to unmake, to free. He forced it into a single point, a needle of annihilation.
"Sleep," he told the thing inside her. "Not beyond. Not below. Nowhere."
Lian's Illusory Threads snapped around the entity's perception, folding it inward, turning all its senses back on themselves. For a heartbeat, the room vanished for it. There was only its own writhing awareness, looped and looped until it choked.
The woman's jaw unhinged. A thick, black mist poured out, shot through with red sparks—like embers drowned in engine oil. It clawed at the air, forming limbs, tendrils, faces that were almost human but for their emptiness.
It saw him.
It saw the Key.
Its voice shredded into a shriek that made the teeth in the floor chatter. "UNBIND—"
Rajan drove the Echo through it.
The room exploded with silence.
The black mist imploded, shriveling around the spear of his power like paper around a match. The faces collapsed inward, eyes melting into the void. The tendrils snapped, flailing blindly, then fell as ash that wasn't ash, sinking straight through the tiles, leaving hairline fractures in reality that glimmered with sickly colors.
For a moment, Rajan felt himself falling with it, his mind dragged down a spiral of other places—mountains flayed by wind and claws, cities grown from bone and grief, oceans that were mouths drinking stars. He felt the Veil itself tremor against him, thin, hungry.
Lian's hand on his shoulder yanked him back. "Rajan. Breathe."
He inhaled raggedly. The Echo receded, leaving behind a vast hollowness and a metallic taste at the back of his tongue, as if he'd been sucking on coins minted from sin.
The woman slumped forward, strings cut. Her hair hid her face. The teeth-floor stilled, the tiny mouths closing, sinking back into the grout as if ashamed.
The curtain over the window sagged, whatever had pressed against it withdrawn. For now.
Rajan listened. The building was still too quiet, but something had shifted. The pressure eased. The watching presence slackened, disappointed.
"Is she…?" Lian began.
He stepped closer and gently lifted the woman's chin. Her eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, pupils blown, irises milky. No breath fogged her lips. Her skin was cool, but not yet corpse-cold.
"No," he said. "Not anymore."
Lian flinched. "We were too late."
"We were exactly as late as we always are."
He let her head drop, softly. There was no ritual that could untangle a soul used as a lodger by something that old. There was only this: the brutal kindness of finality.
The floor under them thrummed—a low, distant heartbeat. The Veil's.
"We should check the other rooms," Lian said, voice thin. "If it spread—"
"It didn't," Rajan cut in. He knew it with the same sick certainty with which he'd known the ritual at twelve would fail. "This one was scouting. Testing. And it knew me."
He felt her gaze on him, sharp as a blade. "You heard what it called you."
"Key Vessel," he said. The words tasted like rust and prophecy. "It shouldn't know that. No one should."
Outside the room, down in the lobby, the landlord screamed.
Rajan and Lian exchanged a glance, the unspoken tension between them electric and bitter. There was fear there, and something like dependence, like the reluctant trust of two people chained to the same sinking ship.
"You ready?" she asked.
"Never," he answered. "But go."
They stepped back into the hallway, leaving the nameless woman in her chair, eyes fixed on a ceiling that would never answer her. Behind them, the cracks in the tiles glimmered faintly—as if something on the other side of the floor were listening, waiting for the next fracture in the world.
The Great Unbinding had not begun. Not yet.
But the city that forgot its name had just remembered his.