Thomas opened his eyes and for a while he didn't know whether he was awake or still inside something that had already happened.
The ceiling was white. Too white. Clean in a way that made it seem new, as if someone had installed it there that very morning.
Beside the bed, Sunny was reading.
"There comes a moment in the history of a species when it ceases to be what it was. It is not destruction. It is transformation."
She read aloud, as if the room needed to hear those words in order to keep existing.
Thomas watched her for a moment.
"What kind of things do you read, Thomas?"
Thomas smiled faintly. He recognized the book even without seeing it: Childhood's End. There was something comforting about Sunny reading it, as if the world still remembered certain habits.
Sunny closed the book and set it on the bedside table. Then she frowned slightly. The bookmark wasn't where she had left it.
She said nothing.
She simply stared at it for a moment longer than necessary, as if the book might explain it on its own.
"Sunny… are you okay?"
She looked up.
"Of course I am, dummy. You're the one who isn't okay."
She placed the book on the table.
"You almost died yesterday."
Thomas felt something rush back all at once, like when a door opens inside a dark house. The beasts. The metallic smell. The red moon.
He pushed himself up slightly in the bed.
"What happened? How did I survive?"
Sunny stood up and walked to the window. From there she could see the city center: the buildings, the avenues, the distant movement that made it seem as if everything were still the same.
Looking at it always calmed her.
"You're alive thanks to me," she said. "While I was escaping, I ran into a group of explorers."
She kept looking at the city for a few more seconds.
"One of them was… well."
She turned toward Thomas with a smile that barely fit on her face.
"The Impossible One."
Thomas blinked.
"Who?"
Sunny looked at him as if she were trying to decide whether to laugh or push him out the window.
"Are you stupid or what? The Impossible One. The first explorer who became a soldier enhanced with materials from the Seventh City."
Thomas had never paid much attention to those things.
The Impossible Cities, the explorers, the television programs, the sponsors. All of that belonged to a kind of global spectacle he had always kept himself slightly apart from.
Sunny noticed the blank look on his face.
She seemed irritated, but only a little.
"Anyway," she finally said. "He saved you."
She picked up her jacket.
"Now I have to go to work. Oh, by the way. My father sends his regards. He wanted to come see you, but he couldn't."
"No problem. Thank him for me."
Sunny was already at the door when she stopped.
She turned back toward him.
"I'm going to regret saying this," she said, "but you're a pretty cool geek."
Thomas raised an eyebrow.
"What made you change your mind?"
Sunny gestured vaguely toward him.
"That tattoo you have on your back."
And she left the room.
It took Thomas a few seconds to realize that he was completely naked. He sat on the bed with an uncomfortable mix of embarrassment and confusion, then walked to the bathroom.
Nothing hurt.
Not a scratch.
And yet he remembered the pain clearly: the fangs entering the flesh, the claws, the weight of the bodies on top of him.
He looked at himself in the mirror and turned his body to see his back.
Then he noticed it.
The mark he had been born with—the one everyone had always mistaken for a tattoo—had changed.