On the thirty-third day, Gray couldn't sleep.
The pain behind his eyes had settled into a constant presence now - not the sharp spikes that came with using his sight, but a dull, persistent ache that never quite faded. He'd grown used to it, the way a person grows used to a stone in their shoe, adjusting their gait to accommodate the discomfort. But tonight, the ache seemed louder than usual, keeping him awake even as the others slept around him.
He'd taken to sitting in doorways during the sleepless hours, his back against the frame, his eyes on the darkness outside. It gave him a view of the street without exposing him to whatever might be watching. It let him feel useful without having to use his sight.
Tonight, he wasn't alone.
Ren appeared in the doorway beside him, his small form silent on bare feet. The boy had a way of moving that Gray recognized - the careful, deliberate steps of someone who had learned that noise meant danger, that visibility meant vulnerability. He'd been doing it for weeks, long before Elias had started teaching them the formal techniques.
"Can't sleep?" Gray asked, keeping his voice low.
Ren shook his head. He settled beside Gray, his back against the doorframe, his knees pulled up to his chest. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The silence between them was comfortable, the kind of quiet that didn't need to be filled.
Then Ren said, so softly Gray almost missed it, "I saw them."
Gray turned his head slightly, looking at the boy without turning his body. "Saw who?"
"The things that took my family." Ren's voice was barely a whisper, his eyes fixed on the darkness outside. "They weren't animals. They weren't like the hollows. They were... looking for something. They were hunting."
Something cold settled in Gray's chest. He'd assumed Ren's family had been taken by the same mindless creatures they'd been avoiding - the hollows, the twisted things that moved without purpose through the ruins. But this was different. This was something else entirely.
"What do you mean, hunting?" he asked.
Ren was quiet for a long moment. His hands tightened around his knees, his small fingers pressing into the fabric of his pants. When he spoke again, his voice was even quieter, as if he was afraid of being overheard.
"They moved different. Not random, not like the hollows. They had... purpose. Direction. Like they knew what they were looking for." He paused, his breath catching. "They came into the hospital at night. I was hiding in the ceiling - there was a space above the tiles, I'd found it during the day. I watched them go room to room. They weren't eating people. They weren't... doing anything to the bodies. They were just checking. Looking at everyone. And when they found someone who... who was like me..."
"Like you how?" Gray asked, though he thought he already knew.
"Like me," Ren repeated, and his voice cracked on the words. "The ones who could feel it. The ones who could hear the light. They took them. They took my mom first, then my dad. They didn't take my sister - she couldn't feel anything, couldn't hear anything. They left her behind."
Gray felt his pattern-sight stir, reaching toward Ren without conscious intent. The cold-water sensation washed over him, and through it, he saw the boy in a new way.
Ren was bright.
Not in the ordinary sense - not in the way a person looked when they were intelligent or alert. But in Gray's sight, the boy had a luminescence to him, a faint glow that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat. It was similar to what Gray saw when he looked at himself in a reflective surface, similar to the faint shimmer he'd noticed around others who seemed to have some sensitivity to the new world's strange physics.
Latent sensitivity. The boy had it, had been born with it or developed it somehow, and it had marked him. Marked his family. And something out there had noticed.
"What were they hunting?" Gray asked, though he wasn't sure he wanted to hear the answer.
Ren turned to look at him, and in the dim light, his eyes were old beyond his years. "Us," he said. "People like us. The ones who can do things."
---
They sat in silence for a long time after that, the weight of Ren's words settling over them like a shroud. Gray's mind churned, processing the implications, fitting this new information into the framework of observations he'd been building since the collapse.
The hollows were one thing - mindless, directionless, dangerous but predictable in their unpredictability. But what Ren described was something else entirely. Organized. Purposeful. Hunting.
And not just hunting randomly. Hunting people with sensitivity. People like Gray. People like Ren.
"How did you get away?" Gray asked finally.
"I hid." Ren's voice was flat, matter-of-fact. "I stayed in the ceiling for three days. They came back twice, checking the rooms again. I think they were making sure they hadn't missed anyone. When they stopped coming, I climbed down and ran." He paused. "I ran for a long time before I found the others. Before I found you."
Gray thought about the boy's thread, the way it had hummed with resonance when they'd first met. He'd recognized something in Ren from the beginning - a similarity, a kinship of sensitivity. Now he understood why. The boy wasn't just a survivor. He was a target.
"Does anyone else know?" Gray asked. "About what you saw?"
Ren shook his head. "I tried to tell people, in the beginning. But they didn't believe me. Or they didn't want to believe me. It was easier to think the monsters were just monsters, that they didn't have plans or purposes. Easier to be scared of something mindless than something smart."
Gray understood that. The human mind had a way of retreating from truths that were too terrible to accept. It was easier to fear the random, the chaotic, the meaningless. To fear something that hunted with purpose, that selected its victims with intention - that required a different kind of courage, a different kind of vigilance.
"You should have told me sooner," Gray said.
Ren looked at him, and something flickered across his face - surprise, or hurt, or both. "Why? What would you have done differently?"
The question caught Gray off guard. What would he have done? He didn't know. He was still figuring out how to survive in this new world, still learning the rules that governed the strange physics of mana and pattern and thread. The idea that there were things out there actively hunting people like him - it changed things, but he wasn't sure how yet.
"I don't know," he admitted. "But I would have wanted to know. I would have wanted to be prepared."
"Prepared for what?" Ren's voice was bitter now, the bitterness of a child who had learned too young that preparation was an illusion. "You can't prepare for them. You can only hide. And hope they don't find you."
Gray looked at the boy - really looked at him, with his full attention, the way he looked at problems he was trying to solve. Ren was twelve years old, maybe thirteen. He'd watched his family be taken by something that hunted with purpose. He'd survived for weeks on his own in a world that had gone mad. And he'd carried this knowledge inside him, this terrible understanding, without anyone to share it with.
"You're not alone anymore," Gray said quietly. "Whatever's out there, whatever's hunting - you're not facing it alone. We'll figure it out together."
Ren studied him for a long moment, his young face unreadable in the darkness. Then he nodded, once, and leaned back against the doorframe.
"Okay," he said. "Together."
---
They sat together until the sky began to lighten, the wrong-color dawn creeping over the ruined skyline. Gray didn't use his sight again that night - the pain was already too sharp, and he needed to save what strength he had for the days ahead. But he didn't need the sight to know that something had changed between them.
Ren had trusted him with a secret. A terrible, important secret that changed everything Gray thought he understood about the world they were living in. And Gray had accepted that trust, had promised to face it together.
He didn't know what was hunting them. He didn't know why they targeted people with sensitivity, or what they did with the ones they took. But he knew one thing now that he hadn't known before.
The hollows weren't the worst thing in this new world. They were just the beginning.
And somewhere out there, something was watching. Waiting. Hunting.
The thought settled into Gray's chest like a stone, cold and heavy. He filed it away with all the other observations, all the other pieces of the puzzle he was slowly assembling. The Proof Codex was still taking shape, still growing one entry at a time, but this was something that wouldn't fit neatly into any framework.
Some truths were too large for documentation. Some fears were too deep for analysis.
All he could do was keep watching. Keep learning. Keep surviving.
And hope that whatever was hunting them didn't find them first.