The air in the shelter stank of ozone and old antiseptic.
Dr. Mirek Keln sat hunched beside a gurney slick with rust, the wheels fused into the blood-slick floor. He hadn't moved in hours. Not really. Just small tics. Tremors in his jaw. His tongue tracing the teeth he'd cracked last week during a seizure. Or maybe it hadn't been a seizure. Maybe it was the other thing again. The thing that left those marks in his throat.
He didn't check the mirror anymore. Didn't need to. He could feel the shape of his face changing.
Above him, the halogen lights blinked in a rhythm that reminded him of something — not Morse, not code. Something alive. Breathing. Tapping. He tried to ignore it. But every blink drew the shadows longer, and every time the dark returned, it felt just a little fuller. Like it had moved.
Something shifted in the vents.
Again.
He didn't flinch. That was rule one: Don't react. They liked that. It made them closer.
He looked down at the notes in his lap. Bloody fingerprints, scribbled equations, fragmented phrases:
"spatial overlay collapse"
"limbic fracturing = preliminary exposure symptom?"
"god is real but too big to see — god is a mouth"
"Aelis Thorne survived. How?"
He circled the last line in charcoal. Again. Again. It didn't matter how many times he'd written it. It was wrong. He'd seen the tapes. Aelis shouldn't have made it out of the Heartroom. None of them should've.
Unless it let her.
From the far side of the room, something clicked. Like a scalpel sliding off a tray.
Mirek looked up. Slowly.
The body on the table was still there. Covered in a stained sheet, barely human anymore. It wasn't fresh — but it had begun to twitch again two nights ago. Just the fingers. And once, the jaw. He'd bolted it shut with surgical wire, but the teeth kept grinding.
The lights buzzed louder.
The walls were breathing again. A soft flex. A pulse through the steel. Not possible. Not real.
He put the scalpel down. He wouldn't cut tonight. Not yet. He didn't want to see what the tissue underneath had become. It was better not to know. It moved when it was exposed. It looked back.
The sound in the vent came again — but not the same. Not scraping. Not skittering.
Whispering.
Mirek's breath caught. He turned slowly, his spine stiff as bone. The air had gone warm behind him. He could smell… flowers?
No.
No, that wasn't it.
Rot pretending to be flowers.
His skin crawled. Wetness formed behind his ears. His vision pulsed slightly at the edges.
From the vent above the table, something emerged.
Not quickly. Not with force.
It poured. Inch by inch. Like flesh melting off a skull.
At first it looked like shadow — dripping ink — but then the texture caught the light. Translucent. Veined. Coiling. A sack of membrane, dragging nerves behind it like jellyfish tentacles. It pulsed and whispered in a voice that sounded like Mirek's mother.
He couldn't move.
He couldn't breathe.
It touched the body on the table.
The twitching stopped.
Then it turned to him.
And smiled — not with a mouth, but with the way its membrane folded, revealing hundreds of small, baby-like teeth inside. The kind that don't belong to anything old enough to have hate in it. But this one did.
Mirek opened his mouth to scream — but what came out was not a scream.
It was a question:
"How far did we go?"
And from the thing, a single word pulsed through the air like a shudder through his skull:
"Too far."