Screaming.
Jennifer woke up screaming.
10:15 AM. Day nine. —70°C exterior. 21°C inside Unit 1418.
Not a normal scream. A frequency. A single sustained note that came from somewhere deeper than her throat, somewhere behind her ribs, in the same place where Jae-min's void lived. The glow beneath her sternum flared white-hot. The comms equipment on the dining table popped and staticked. Ji-yoo's knife hummed in her hand across the room.
Jae-min was on his feet before the first wavelength peaked. He crossed the living area in three strides, his Spatial Awareness screaming a threat signal his body couldn't ignore, and hit the sectional on his knees beside her.
He pulled Jennifer upright and into his chest, one arm around her back, the other cradling her head against his shoulder. She was trembling. Violently. The scream still tearing out of her throat in waves that shook her entire frame. He shifted his grip, pulled her onto his lap, her legs folding beneath her against the cushions, and locked both arms around her. Tight. Immovable. The way he held everything he refused to lose.
"I'm here. I'm right here," Jae-min said, a fierce, desperate concern roughening his low voice against her hair.
Jennifer's arms wrapped around his neck. Tight. Desperate. Her fingers dug into the back of his thermal shirt, bunching the fabric in white-knuckled fists. She was crying. Not soft, not controlled. The ugly, gasping sobs of a woman breaking open, the sound of a dam that had held for nine days finally splitting apart. Her face pressed into the curve of his neck, her whole body shaking against his chest, the frequency of her scream dying into a shuddering wail that vibrated through his collarbone.
Alessia was beside them in seconds. She didn't try to pull Jennifer away. She pressed her palm flat against Jennifer's back, between her shoulder blades, and held it there. Steady. Warm. The controlled pressure of a doctor who knew that sometimes the only treatment was presence. Her other hand found Jae-min's shoulder. Anchoring both of them.
"Jennifer. Jennifer, look at me," Alessia said, a desperate, terrified warmth cracking through her clinical composure.
The scream cut off.
Jennifer's eyes snapped open.
The irises were entirely blue. No pupil, no white, just an ocean of light that made everyone in the room take a step back. Even Ji-yoo, who had crossed the room with her knife drawn, stopped three feet away and didn't come closer.
She wasn't looking at Alessia. She wasn't looking at Jae-min. She was looking through the wall. Through the building. Through the frozen city. Southeast.
"I can feel it. The leakage, it's overwhelming," Jennifer whispered, her voice layered with two tones at once, like a chord played on a single string, a trembling awe shaking the words.
"The spatial frequency coming off it... it's not aggressive. It's not predatory. It's something else," Jennifer thought, a cautious, bewildered curiosity fighting through the terror in her chest.
— • • • —
10:22 AM. —70°C exterior.
Jennifer was sitting up. Jae-min had shifted her from his lap to the cushion beside him, his arm still around her shoulders, her body still leaning into his side. The glow had dimmed to a manageable pulse. Alessia had forced two glasses of water and a protein bar into her. Her hands were shaking. But her mind was clear.
Her fingers found the edge of the sectional and gripped. White knuckles. The only thing keeping her tethered.
"The leakage is intense," Jennifer said, a clinical precision fighting through her exhaustion as she pressed her fingers to her temples. "Think of it like standing next to a speaker at a concert. I can feel the bass in my chest without hearing the words. The entity's spatial signature is so strong that it bleeds into my telepathic range. I'm not reading its mind. I'm feeling the volume," she said, a measured, analytical focus steadying her delivery despite the tremor in her hands.
"What does it feel like?" Rico asked, a steady, patient warmth grounding the question. The voice of a man who understood that sometimes the best thing a leader could do was listen.
"Like standing next to something enormous that's in pain and doesn't understand why," Jennifer said, a sorrowful empathy softening her face as she closed her eyes. "The emotional tone is... I don't know how to describe it. It's not hostile. It's not calm either. It's confused. Frightened. Young. Not physically. It's been alive for a very long time. But emotionally. Cognitively. It broadcasts like something that doesn't know what it is," she said, a quiet conviction steadying her voice as she opened her eyes.
They found the far wall. The glass slider. Anywhere but Jae-min.
"Based on its behavior, the way it followed Jae-min's frequency across a continent, the way it knelt instead of attacking, the way the field contracts when it's wounded, I think the gamma didn't just change its body. It gave it abilities it can't control," Jennifer said, a grim realization tightening her throat. She paused. "Like waking up with a loaded gun in your hands and no memory of how to fire it," she said, a heavy fatalism dragging her voice lower.
"The wound. The crack in its leg," Jennifer said, an analytical precision sharpening her delivery, her voice steadying into a crisp, clinical focus. "From what I can sense through the leakage, the wound isn't from a fight. It's from travel. It jumped, spatially, the way Yue blinks but on a planetary scale. The jump tore its leg apart because it doesn't know how to control its own power yet. And it's been limping across Asia for nine days, following Jae-min's frequency, because Jae-min is the only thing in this hemisphere that broadcasts on the same channel," she said, a grim, clinical certainty anchoring every word.
"The only thing on the same channel," Rico repeated, a heavy dread weighing down the words.
"Same species. Same frequency. The void inside Jae-min hums the same note the void inside the entity hums," Jennifer said, her voice wavering for a fraction of a second, a raw grief cracking through her professional mask. She pressed her jaw tight and kept going. "And the entity has been alone for nine days in a frozen world where nothing else makes sense," she said, a quiet, aching sorrow bleeding through the clinical tone before she could seal it shut.
Jae-min sat on the floor. Back against the wall. The void pulsed in his chest, the low, persistent hum that had been there since he first touched the void with the entity in proximity. He could feel it too. Not clearly. Not the way Jennifer could. But the resonance was there. A dull ache in the void's frequency that matched the glowing crack in the entity's leg.
Pain. Loss. Longing. Not words. Not thoughts. Just the spatial equivalent of a wounded animal's breathing.
"Can you tell anything else from the leakage?" Jae-min asked, a careful, insistent hope warming his tone. "Specifics. What it might do next," he said, a gentle but insistent warmth pressing through his low voice.
"I shouldn't push any closer. The last time I reached toward it, I ended up unconscious for three hours," Jennifer said, a fearful exhaustion trembling beneath the words, her voice barely a whisper.
"I know. But I need an independent read on this. My void could be projecting my own feelings onto it. I need to know if what I'm sensing is real," Jae-min said, a warm but insistent urgency softening the edge of his voice.
Jennifer studied him. Blue eyes still too bright. Blood vessels burst across the whites. She looked like someone who had stared at the sun and survived. She let her gaze graze the floor near his boots. Close. But not his face.
"He needs me. Not Alessia, not Ji-yoo. Me. My telepathy. My frequency," Jennifer thought, a desperate purpose igniting in her chest.
"I'm useful to him right now, and if I die doing this, at least I die being useful," Jennifer thought, a bittersweet surrender bowing her shoulders as they hunched forward.
"That's all I've ever wanted," Jennifer realized, a quiet grief settling like stone in her stomach.
"What can I safely pick up?" Jennifer asked herself, a trembling calculation running through her exhausted mind.
She closed her eyes. Extended her senses southeast. Not pushing. Just listening. The way you listen for thunder after lightning.
The leakage was constant. A low drone of spatial energy bleeding from the entity's distortion field. Emotional overtones bled through the carrier wave, grief, confusion, the raw need of something that had lost its whole world.
"The emotional tone is grief," Jennifer said, her voice thin, a fragile sorrow pulling at each word. She was picking up fragments. Not thoughts. Emotions. Raw and unfiltered. "It's grieving. Something happened to it, before. Long before. It lost... others. A group. A family of some kind," she said, a fragile sorrow pulling at each syllable.
She paused. Her face contorted.
"The grief is old. Very old. But it's fresh too, like the wound never closed," Jennifer said, swallowing hard, a deep empathy aching behind her sternum. She wiped a strand of ice-blue hair from her face. Her hand was trembling.
"It's been searching. Across its planet. Across whatever distance brought it here," Jennifer said, a staggering realization robbing her of breath. She drew a breath that shuddered in her chest.
Jae-min said nothing.
"Not Jae-min's power. Jae-min. The person. The void inside him. The piece of broken time," Jennifer said, a quiet devotion anchoring her gaze as she looked at the floor beside him. At the shadow his knee cast on the white porcelain tile. As close as she could bring herself. "His frequency is the only one that matches. The entity isn't hunting him. Based on what I'm sensing through the leakage, it tracked him because he's the first thing it's found that feels like what it lost. And it doesn't have the capacity to express that any other way than following," she explained, a bittersweet understanding softening her clinical tone.
"The entity wants him. Something ancient and impossible wants him, and it's using the same frequency I've been memorizing for years," Jennifer thought, a jealous grief twisting like a knife in her chest as her fingers dug harder into her thighs.
"The frequency of the man I love," Jennifer realized, a devastating clarity cutting through her.
"And I can feel it wanting him. Through the leakage. Like listening to someone else whisper the words I've never been brave enough to say," Jennifer thought, a silent agony screaming beneath her skin as her nails pressed deeper.
The heater hummed. The comms equipment flickered. Outside, the entity knelt in the frozen dark, seventy meters of impossible material and wounded space, and its leg pulsed blue-white in time with Jae-min's heartbeat. Beyond it, Manila lay entombed in ten meters of snow, hard-packed frozen snow dense as concrete, only rooftops breaking the white plain, their antenna arrays poking through the snowpack like skeletal fingers.
"Jae-min. Don't," Ji-yoo said, a fierce terror sharpening every syllable, her voice razor-thin.
She crossed the room in three steps and stood in front of him, blocking his view of the glass slider. The fierce protectiveness in her posture was unmistakable. Shoulder squared, jaw set, black eyes burning with a fire that had nothing to do with the cold.
He looked at his twin.
"Whatever you're thinking right now, stop. This thing is seventy meters tall. It bends reality. And just because it's lonely doesn't mean it's safe," Ji-yoo said, a desperate love cracking through her warrior's mask. "A hurt child with a loaded gun is still a loaded gun," she said, a fierce, protective fury hardening every word.
Ji-yoo's eyes were narrowed, but beneath the fierceness, something cracked.
"I know," Jae-min said, a heavy resignation settling behind his calm, his eyes unreadable.
"Then why does your face look like that?" Ji-yoo said, a raw grief fracturing her fierce composure.
"Like what?" Jae-min asked, a hollow emptiness draining the words.
"Like you're about to do something stupid," Ji-yoo said, a desperate fear for her twin breaking her voice.
He didn't answer. The silence that replaced his words was heavier than any reply.
— • • • —
11:07 AM.
Jae-min went to the glass slider alone. Alessia let him. She didn't follow. She didn't argue. She just pressed her hand against his back as he passed and left it there until he was out of reach. Gentle pressure. A reminder that she was behind him. That she would always be behind him. Her fingertips lingered on the curve of his shoulder blade, then trailed down his spine before falling away. A touch so intimate it made his breath catch.
He stood at the glass. Forehead pressed against the cold. Eyes on the southeast.
The entity was smaller now. Not physically. Still seventy meters. But the distortion field had contracted further. Tighter. The shimmer barely extended fifty meters from its body now. Beyond the distortion field, Manila was a white void. Ten meters of snow had swallowed the city. The only landmarks still visible were the rooftops of the tallest towers, poking through the snowpack like tombstones.
All that energy funneling inward, feeding the wound. The crack in its right rear leg was sealed halfway. The blue-white glow was fading. In another five or six hours, the fracture would close completely. The entity would stand. And then it would either come to him or it would leave. Or something else would happen.
Jae-min reached into the void. Not to push. Not to send. Just to listen. The way he had that first night when the glass fell and vanished and the world cracked open and showed him the hunger underneath.
The void responded. The hum deepened. The resonance strengthened. And somewhere in the frozen dark, the entity's head lifted. Not toward the building. Toward him. Through the wall. Through the concrete. Through the steel and the glass and the fourteen floors of frozen air.
The entity was orienting on his frequency the way a compass orients on magnetic north. Not communication. Just physics. Two identical spatial signatures in proximity.
And on that wire, a new note traveled. Lower than the others. Slower. Fading.
"Alone. Long time. Alone. You. Same. You. Come," the entity crackled, a faint, fractured longing traveling across the spatial frequency.
Jae-min's hand trembled against the glass. He pressed his palm flat against it. Focused. Read the resonance. What came back wasn't language. It was texture. The void carried the entity's spatial signature like a current carries a scent.
Pain. Deep, chronic, the bone-deep ache of a wound that had been healing for days without rest. Loneliness. Vast and old, the kind of emptiness that carved canyons. And beneath both, something that Jae-min could only describe as need. Not need for food. Not need for violence. Need for something that matched.
He pulled out of the void. Walked back to the center of the room. Everyone was watching him.
"The leg is half-healed. Five or six hours before it's fully functional. After that, it either comes here or it walks away," Jae-min reported, a clinical detachment flattening his voice.
"Or?" Rico said, a wary suspicion tightening his tone as he sensed the catch.
"Or something else finds it first," Jae-min said, a dark certainty clenching his jaw.
"What do you mean?" Yue said, a sharp alarm snapping her upright from her position at the glass slider.
"Jennifer said the entity was part of a group. A cluster. Most of them were lost when the gamma hit. But most isn't all," Jae-min said, a grim logic assembling the pieces as he stared ahead. "What if there are others? What if something else followed the same signal the entity followed, my frequency, and it's out there right now, moving toward Manila?" he said, a tactical dread weighing down each word.
The room was silent.
"Two of those things," Ji-yoo said, a cold horror draining her voice.
"Or ten. Or a hundred. We don't know how many survived the gamma. We don't know how many are out there. All we know is that this one found me, and it found me because I'm loud," Jae-min said, a tactical dread weighing down each word as his mind calculated.
"You're loud?" Alessia said, a trembling confusion cracking her whisper, her eyes wet.
"Every time I open a portal. Every time I pull something from the storage dimension. Every time the void hums, I'm broadcasting a spatial signal. The entity heard it from hundreds of kilometers away," Jae-min said, a grim acceptance settling over his features. "If there are others, they heard it too," he said, a cold certainty hardening his voice.
Rico set the Benelli on the crate. Rubbed his face with both hands. The weight of command sat heavy on his shoulders. He'd never sat in a room where the building itself was a beacon.
"So what you're telling me is that we're sitting in a building that's broadcasting a dinner bell to every spatial nightmare on the planet," Rico said, a weary incredulity roughening his deep voice.
"Yes," Jae-min said, his voice cold and absolute.
"And your solution is to keep sitting here?" Rico said, a frustrated urgency tightening his jaw as his patience frayed.
"No," Jae-min said, picking up his phone, opening the notes app. "My solution is to stop broadcasting," he said, a quiet, iron resolve grounding every word.
He typed:
[DAY 9]: 11:07 AM. ADDENDUM: OPTION 5 — STOP ALL SPATIAL ACTIVITY. CLOSE THE VOID. NO MORE PORTALS. NO MORE STORAGE DIM. STARVE THE SIGNAL.
He stared at it. Then added:
[RISK]: IF I CLOSE THE VOID, I LOSE THE ONLY CONNECTION TO THE ENTITY. I GO BLIND. WE GO BLIND.
"Jennifer. If I seal the void completely, shut down every spatial frequency I'm emitting, can you still track the entity's leakage through telepathy?" Jae-min asked, his voice dropping to a grave murmur.
Jennifer was pale. Exhausted. The glow beneath her sternum was barely visible. But her mind was sharp. She sat with her knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, chin resting on her kneecaps. The position made her small. Made her young. Made her look small enough to need protecting, even though her mind was a weapon.
"I can try. The leakage is faint. If you shut down your void, I might lose the connection too," Jennifer said, a cautious uncertainty slowing her words. She paused. "But I might not. The entity's signature is getting stronger as it heals. The closer it gets to full functionality, the louder it leaks," she said, a cautious hope threading through the uncertainty.
Jennifer paused again. Her fingers twisted the comforter.
"It's a gamble," Jennifer said, a quiet fear trembling beneath her professional assessment.
"Everything is a gamble," Jae-min said, a warm determination softening his features as he looked around the room at the people who had followed him into this bunker, who had trusted him with their lives. His eyes were warm as they moved from face to face. Even now, even terrified, he looked at them like they were worth protecting.
"I'm not going out there. Not today. But I'm also not going to sit here with a neon sign on my chest. From this moment, no spatial activity. No portals. No storage access. Nothing that emits a frequency. We go dark," Jae-min said, a quiet authority sealing the decision.
"And supplies?" Rico asked, a practical concern grounding his question.
"Whatever's in the unit stays in the unit. We ration what we have. If we need more, we raid. On foot. Like everyone else," Jae-min said, a grim resolve hardening every line of his face.
"Jae-min," Alessia said, a cautious love trembling beneath the words, her voice quiet and careful. "You're not everyone else. You're the only one who can—" she said, a trembling confusion cracking her whisper.
"I know what I am. And right now, what I am is a liability. Every second the void is open, something out there is tracking it. The entity found me. If there are others, they're finding me too. I need to shut it down before this gets worse," Jae-min said, his voice gentle but unyielding as he met her eyes. The voice of a man who had just calculated the cost and decided it was acceptable.
Alessia didn't argue. She just looked at him with those calm blue eyes and nodded once.
He crossed the room. Took her hands. Kissed her knuckles, slow and deliberate, his lips lingering on each one. Then the inside of her wrist, where the pulse hammered beneath thin skin. Then the tender crook of her elbow, his breath hot against the soft skin there.
She shivered. Her ears flooded crimson.
His hands slid up her arms, fingertips tracing the curve of her biceps through the thermal fabric, settling on her shoulders. He pulled her close. Not a kiss, just proximity. His forehead against hers. His hands on her waist, thumbs drawing slow circles on her hip bones.
"I'll still be me. I'll just be quieter," Jae-min murmured, his eyes warm on hers, a tender reassurance softening the blow.
"Promise?" Alessia said, barely audible, her scarlet ears burning.
"Promise," Jae-min said, a quiet warmth wrapping around the word as he kissed the tip of her nose.
Gentle. Sweet. The kind of kiss that had nothing to do with the end of the world and everything to do with two people who had found each other in the middle of it.
— • • • —
11:48 AM. —70°C exterior. 20°C inside Unit 1418.
Jae-min sat on the floor in the corner of the room. Back against the wall. Eyes closed. The void was still there. It was always there. A cold ocean behind his ribs, vast and patient and hungry. But he wasn't touching it. Wasn't reaching into it. Wasn't letting it sing. He was holding his breath. And the silence was suffocating.
But outside the glass slider, the entity's leg pulsed. The blue-white glow flickered. The heartbeat that had matched his own for the last three hours began to slow. Desynchronize. The entity couldn't feel his frequency anymore.
On the sectional, Jennifer watched him through half-closed eyes. Her fingers curled in the down comforter. The glow beneath her sternum flickered in response to his silence. She could feel the void dimming, feel the frequency dying, feel the wire between Jae-min and the entity going slack.
"He's sealing it. The thing that makes him different. The thing that makes him him," Jennifer thought, a quiet grief aching behind her ribs as her nails pressed crescents into her palms.
"And he's doing it because of me. Because I confirmed what he sensed. Because I told him the truth," Jennifer thought, a bitter guilt settling over her as she closed her eyes.
"If the entity comes for him and I can't hear it coming because he went dark..." Jennifer thought, a suffocating dread freezing her lungs as her breath caught.
"Then I failed. After everything. After all these years. I failed him by being right," Jennifer realized, a devastating irony crushing her chest.
Jae-min pressed his back harder against the wall. Closed his eyes tighter. Ignored the pull. Ignored the hum. Ignored the frequency that pulsed in the darkness behind his ribs like a second heartbeat.
"Come." Jae-min thought, a cold, gravitational pull settling in his sternum, the void's last call echoing in the dark.
The void went dark. And for the first time since the freeze, Jae-min was alone in his own mind.
He hated it.