The sky tore open on the thirty-ninth day.
It happened without warning, without the slow buildup that usually preceded the world's strange phenomena. One moment, Gray was standing in the warehouse doorway, watching the morning light filter through the ruins. The next, the air itself was rippling, distorting like heat-shimmer over summer asphalt, and the pressure behind his eyes exploded into something unbearable.
His pattern-sight activated on its own.
He'd never lost control of it before. The ability had always been something he chose to use, a tool he deployed when needed, a sense he could engage and disengage at will. But now the sight seized him, forced itself open, and the world became something his mind was not built to comprehend.
Threads. Everywhere threads.
They connected everything, the walls and the floor and the ceiling, the people behind him and the ruins beyond, the sky above and the earth below. Lines of light that pulsed with energy, that hummed with a frequency he could feel in his bones, that wove together into a web of complexity so vast it threatened to unmake everything he thought he understood.
He saw the warehouse's strange stability made visible, the threads flowing around its walls in ordered patterns, curving and bending in ways that created the pocket of calm they'd been living in. He saw the distortion in the sky, a tear in the fabric of reality that bled wrong-color light into the atmosphere. He saw the energy flowing through everything, a constant current that moved through stone and metal and flesh, that connected every living thing to every other, that pulsed with a rhythm that was almost like breathing.
It was too much.
His mind tried to process it, tried to find patterns in the chaos, tried to make sense of something that exceeded its capacity. The pressure in his skull built and built, a white-hot spike that drove through his brain from behind his eyes to the base of his spine. He felt his knees buckle, felt his body hit the concrete floor, but the sensation was distant, irrelevant compared to the flood of information threatening to drown him.
He saw Mina's thread, warm and golden, pulsing with the healing energy she'd been pouring out for weeks. He saw Elias's thread, cool and blue, structured and organized even in this chaos. He saw Ren's thread, small but bright, the latent sensitivity glowing like an ember waiting to ignite. He saw the threads of everyone in the warehouse, eight people connected by proximity and survival, their energies interweaving in patterns that shifted with every breath.
And beyond them, beyond the warehouse, beyond the ruins of the city, he saw other threads. Distant but present. Some bright, some dim, some pulsing with the same wrong-color light that bled from the tear in the sky. The world was full of them, a vast network of energy and connection that he'd only ever glimpsed in fragments.
Now he was drowning in it.
His vision fractured. The threads multiplied. Every point of light became a thousand points, every connection spawned a dozen more, and the complexity compounded until it was no longer a web but a universe, infinite and incomprehensible and pressing against the inside of his skull with the weight of a collapsing star.
He heard someone screaming. Distantly, he recognized his own voice.
Then hands were on him, warm and urgent, and a face swam into his fractured vision. Mina. Her golden thread blazed with concern, her energy reaching toward him as if trying to anchor him to something solid. Her lips were moving, forming words he couldn't hear over the roar of information flooding his mind.
"Gray. Gray! Look at me. Come back to me."
He tried. He tried to pull himself out of the flood, to find the edge of the current and drag himself to shore. But the sight wouldn't release him. It held him under, forcing him to see, forcing him to process, forcing him to witness the true scope of what the world had become.
The tear in the sky pulsed. Energy poured through it in waves, and with each wave, the threads throughout the city shifted and realigned. Something was coming through. Not hollows, not the predators Ren had described, but something else. Something vast and patient and hungry.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the sight released him.
The threads vanished. The complexity collapsed. The world snapped back to ordinary reality, and Gray found himself on the warehouse floor, his cheek pressed against cold concrete, his body shaking with aftershocks he couldn't control.
Mina's face was above him, her eyes wide with terror, her hands cradling his head. Blood was running from his nose, he could feel it, warm and thick, pooling beneath his cheek. His head felt like it had been split open, like someone had driven a spike through his skull and twisted.
"What happened?" Mina's voice was barely a whisper. "Gray, what happened to you?"
He tried to answer, but his throat was locked, his jaw clenched too tight to form words. The world swam in and out of focus, and for a moment, he was certain he was dying.
Then the darkness at the edge of his vision rushed in, and he knew nothing more.
He woke to dim light and the smell of antiseptic. Mina's medical corner. He was lying on a makeshift bed of blankets, a pillow beneath his head, a cool cloth across his forehead. The pressure behind his eyes had faded to a dull throb, but when he tried to move, his body protested with a wave of nausea that forced him back down.
"Stay still." Mina's voice came from somewhere to his left. "You've been out for three hours."
He turned his head, slowly, carefully, and found her sitting beside him. Her face was pale, her eyes shadowed with exhaustion, but her hands were steady as she reached out to check the cloth on his forehead.
"The sky," he managed, his voice a cracked whisper. "Did you see it?"
"See what? The clouds? It was clear this morning."
"There was... a tear. Something wrong. The light was bleeding through."
Mina's expression shifted, concern deepening into something closer to fear. "I didn't see anything, Gray. The sky was normal. And then you started screaming."
He closed his eyes, trying to reconcile what he'd seen with what she was telling him. The tear in the sky, the wrong-color light, the vast network of threads connecting everything. Had it been real? Or had his mind finally broken under the strain of abilities it couldn't sustain?
"I saw everything," he said quietly. "All at once. The threads, the connections, the energy flowing through everything. It was too much."
Mina's hand found his, her fingers intertwining with his. "You scared me. You were on the floor, bleeding, and you wouldn't stop screaming. I thought..." She stopped, swallowed hard. "I thought I was losing you."
He opened his eyes, looking up at her face, seeing the genuine fear she was trying to hide. "I'm still here."
"For now." Her voice hardened slightly. "But this can't keep happening. Whatever your sight is doing to you, it's getting worse. If you keep pushing yourself like this, one day you won't come back."
She was right. He knew she was right. But he also knew that what he'd seen in that moment of terrible clarity was important. The tear in the sky, the energy pouring through, the something vast and patient and hungry that was coming. These were things he needed to understand, things that might mean the difference between survival and extinction for everyone in this warehouse.
"I need to rest," he said, because it was what she needed to hear, and because his body was screaming for it. "But when I'm stronger, I need to try to understand what I saw."
Mina's grip on his hand tightened. "Promise me you'll be careful."
"I promise."
It was a promise he wasn't sure he could keep. But as exhaustion pulled him back toward sleep, as Mina's warmth anchored him to something solid and real, he held onto the hope that understanding would come before the next storm.
Before whatever was coming through the tear in the sky finally arrived.