His chest moved.
Not a heartbeat. Something colder. A flutter behind his ribs where the warmth used to live.
Lucien opened his eyes.
Ceiling. Concrete. Emergency lights pulsing orange. And at the edges of his vision—red. Flickering text he couldn't focus on. Symbols. Numbers. Words that swam and broke apart before he could read them.
[HUNGER].
The word held for a second. Then scattered.
He was on his back. The floor was wet beneath him. His shirt was soaked through, stiff in places where the blood had started to dry. His blood. Pints of it. He could smell it—copper and iron and something sweeter underneath.
His hand moved to his throat.
The wound was there. He felt the edges. Deep. The kind of deep that meant dead. Except the skin was knitting under his fingers. Pulling together. Closing.
That wasn't right.
None of this was right.
[DAMAGE], the red text flickered. [CELLULAR RECONSTRUCTION: 4%]. [INTEGRATION: 1%].
Lucien blinked. The text stayed. He blinked again. Still there. Pulsing at the periphery. A hallucination. Had to be. Dying brain throwing sparks. Except he wasn't dying. He was breathing. His lungs worked. Air moved in and out. His chest fluttered with that cold pulse and he was alive.
He sat up.
The room tilted. Steadied. The hunter was three feet away, slumped against the doorframe. Eyes open. Throat cut ear to ear. The blood beneath her had stopped spreading. She was done.
Down the hall. Greaves.
Lucien looked. Looked away. His stomach didn't turn. That was wrong too. He should be sick. He should be screaming. Instead there was nothing. A flatness where the horror should live.
And underneath that flatness—hunger.
He got to his feet. His legs held. Barely. The UI flickered again: [HUNGER - CRITICAL]. A number beside it. Climbing.
Move. He needed to move.
The hallway stretched ahead of him. Emergency strips glowing along the baseboards. He'd walked this path a hundred times. Clocked in, clocked out, watched monitors, counted inventory. Now the lights were too bright. The hum of electricity in the walls was a roar. He could hear water in the pipes. Rats in the ceiling. His own blood—no, not blood anymore, something else—moving through his veins.
He passed Storage C. Didn't look at what was left of Greaves.
The side entrance was ahead. He hit the push bar. The door swung open. Cold air rushed in and Lucien stumbled out into the night.
Pre-dawn Los Angeles. The sky was purple-black, bleeding orange at the edges. The access road was empty. Streetlights buzzed overhead. In the distance, the containment field around Rift 23-D hummed its low constant note.
Everything the same. Everything different.
Lucien walked. Then ran. His shoes slapped pavement—the left sole still flapping where the tape had given out. His throat was almost closed now. He could feel the skin sealing, the tissue rebuilding. His body fixing itself without his permission.
The UI pulsed. [HUNGER. CRITICAL]. The number kept climbing.
He didn't know where he was going. Didn't matter. Away. Away from the bodies. Away from the blood. Away from whatever he'd become.
The city sprawled ahead of him, dark and quiet and full of things he didn't understand yet.
He kept running.
The streets swam.
Colors bled at the edges. Streetlights left trails when Lucien turned his head. The buzz of electricity in the power lines above him was a dentist's drill buried in his skull.
His throat was still open.
He touched it as he walked—couldn't stop touching it. The wound hadn't closed. Instead, something was moving inside it. Tiny fibers, threading through the meat of him, knitting tissue to tissue. He could feel them working. Wet little worms burrowing through his neck, pulling the edges together stitch by stitch. When he pressed too hard, fresh blood leaked between his fingers.
What the fuck am I.
The thought was too big. It bounced around his skull and found no purchase. He was walking down a street in Los Angeles with his throat cut open and things crawling inside the wound and a dead woman's blood drying on his chin and none of it made sense. None of it fit into any shape he recognized.
[HUNGER — 67%]
Red text. Pulsing. He'd stopped trying to blink it away.
Voices.
Lucien's head snapped toward the sound. Automatic. A dive bar on the corner, lights going dark. Three people on the sidewalk. Two women holding each other up. A man on his phone.
The smell reached him before he'd taken another step.
Oh.
Warm. Alive. It cut through everything else—the garbage, the exhaust, the piss-stink of the alley he'd just passed. Their bodies radiated it. Heat and pulse and the wet red thing moving under their skin. He could see the flush in their cheeks. The throb at their throats. The soft blue veins in the woman's wrist as she gestured, laughing at something.
His feet moved.
Toward them.
[HUNGER — 74%]
Yes. Closer. They're right there. Just a few more steps and—
The thought wasn't his. It was in his head, wearing his voice, but it came from somewhere lower. Somewhere in the cold flutter behind his ribs. His legs carried him forward. Ten feet closer. Five.
He could hear their heartbeats now. Three of them, overlapping, a rhythm section made of meat. Thu-thump. Thu-thump. The drunk woman's pulse was faster than her friend's. The man's was slow and steady. Lucien's mouth hung open. Saliva dripped down his chin and mixed with the blood already there.
Bite. Tear. Drink.
Five feet.
The man looked up from his phone.
"Hey—what the fuck?"
The woman turned. Screamed. Short and sharp, cut off by her own hand over her mouth.
Lucien saw himself through their eyes. A thing stumbling toward them in the dark. Throat gaping. Mouth wet. Eyes wrong—he didn't know how, but he knew they were wrong. He was a nightmare wearing a person's shape and he was three feet away from the closest heartbeat and his jaw was already opening and—
NO.
He stopped.
His whole body locked. Muscles straining against each other. The hunger screamed. The flutter in his chest pounded cold and furious. But somewhere underneath—buried, nearly crushed—Lucien was still there. Still him. Still refusing.
"Call the cops!" The man was backing up, phone raised. "Hey! Someone call—"
Lucien ran.
Away. The opposite direction. His legs barely obeyed. Each step was a war against the thing that wanted to turn around. The heartbeats faded behind him. The smell thinned. The hunger didn't stop—it clawed at his insides, punishing him for leaving—but the distance helped.
[HUNGER — 71%]
Still critical. Still climbing back down from wherever it had spiked.
He ducked into an alley. Collapsed against a dumpster. His hands shook so hard he couldn't hold them still.
I almost ate them.
The truth sat in his chest beside the cold flutter.
I wanted to. I still want to. Jesus Christ, I can still smell them from here.
What. The. Fuck. Is going on?