Days bled together and softened at the edges. Morning meant checking bandages, rotating cans, and listening to the quiet outside his door until it told him the street was empty.
Noon meant slipping out, head down, knife tucked at the small of his back and the worn pipe wrapped in a rag so it didn't glare in the sun. Evening meant returning the same way he'd left—quiet, careful, ordinary.
The Totem stayed on the nightstand. He didn't move it. He didn't touch it if he didn't have to. Whatever he'd done—whatever intent had clicked on that Saturday—it still held.
The apartment hummed with a pressure he'd started to recognize as safety, like the air changed pitch just inside his walls. Sometimes, standing by the window, he thought he felt a thin line where safe ended and the world began. He never tested it.
That night, as he rested his thoughts wandered. He thought of better shelters than this crumbling apartment. Stronger places. Cleaner places. Somewhere worth defending. A worry for tomorrow.
On a new Monday he started a list in a torn notebook he kept tucked beneath the mattress: Better base? He wrote criteria like he was a contractor instead of a man hiding from monsters. High sightlines. Choke points. Back exits. Close to supplies. Solid doors. Good roof.
He thought about warehouses with loading bays, schools with courtyards, police stations with reinforced doors. He paused looking around the room and then out the window. Maybe better city too. The power had already long cut off across the city and the water was likely to follow soon too.
Then he eyed the Totem, sitting there like a squat judge, and scratched a line under the list: Only if the box comes with me. And he didn't know if it could.
He tried not to think about what would happen if he picked it up and whatever protection it offered blinked out like a failing bulb. He tried not to think about the rain that had followed him out of the jungle, the way rocks had risen like they were lighter than air. He did not think about whether the Totem—still and heavy and mute—had wanted him to stay.
When he let his mind wander, it drifted to the rest of the map he was drawing. Not this city—these blocks of broken glass and veined concrete—but everything beyond it. He pictured the coastlines, the long freight spines, the quiet towns by the rivers. He wrote names under his criteria list as if names alone could keep them real.
Iron Bridge City—A giant city that surrounds a wide, slow river, carving the place into east and west. Two massive iron bridges that give it it's name connect the two sides. Each city side split into four quadrants, a geometrical city of neighborhoods and block grids.
Tempest Reach City—the weather city sat on the northern cliffs. One hour sunlight and heat, a half-hour later hail or fog would tear across the same street. People joked the sky was indecisive. He wondered if anyone would even want to willingly survive there. If you wanted an unpredictable place to hide, this one had that in spades.
Ashford City—sprawled across the central plains. Wheat and corn swaying like a golden tide, roads that ran straight to the horizon. Eerily quiet and unassuming fields outside the city and large forests. He wondered if those fields were just empty now, or if something had made its nest in the silos.
Grimhaven City—industry and salt, docks and rust and wind that smelled like tar and old metal. Factory's, machines and seemingly endless construction dominated the city, one of the military's many bases are also located there. He imagined the harbor cranes like skeletal arms now, frozen in place while things crawled in the cargo holds below. The thought of soldiers still holding down the city fighting the creatures also crossed his mind.
And far beyond them, The Capital—he just wrote The Capital and left it at that. He could have written the street he'd grown up on, the bus routes he'd memorized, the market where his mother used to buy food, the cracked step everyone tripped on before they learned. Instead he wrote a single line under its name: No reason to go back.
There was nothing left for him there.
He closed the notebook and watched dust drift in the light until it stopped feeling like sinking.
Tuesday, he stood in the bathroom brushing his teeth with a fresh toothbrush he'd scavenged from a pharmacy, staring at his face in the new mirror he looted like it belonged to someone new.
The cut across his palm tugged each time he flexed. The healing skin shone tight and tender under the gauze. He gripped the pipe afterward and felt the hairline crack again, that tiny give near the handle. One more fight and it might fold. He wrapped more tape around it and told himself he'd find a replacement soon.
Wednesday, he went looking for one.
He took the side streets that held fewer cars and more shade. Laundry still swayed on some balconies—ghost shirts and motionless jeans, right where people had left them. A bus lay wedged across an intersection like a beached animal, windows spidered, seats empty.
He didn't hear regular birds anymore, not like before, instead replaced with the distant screech of a harrower traveling farther away. The city's sounds had thinned into the occasional creak of settling steel and the distant hiss of wind through gaps that didn't exist last week.
Movement flickered at the edge of his vision. Instinct pulled him flat behind a delivery truck carcass, cheek pressed to cold metal, breath held.
Across the street, three of them rode the light poles like children at a playground.
They were smaller than the ones he'd glimpsed in the tower, but only just. Gaunt frames coiled with wrong strength. Cheeks split along invisible seams to show more teeth than made sense. Hands were like claws, feet that mirrored their hands, spreading wide into pads that stuck to glass and metal like glue.
They swung from pole to pole in silence, then one opened its mouth and the sound that came out rattled street signs: a layered howl that swelled and split and seemed to echo itself from different angles.
The other two answered, throwing their heads back until their throats stretched, until those cheeks unzipped again into wide, wet rifts. The chorus rolled down the block and came back thinner as it dissipated, like they were trying out the acoustics of the city.
They weren't hunting. They were… exploring. Testing. Claiming.
Lucian stayed still and counted his heartbeats.
The trio skittered down like spilled ink and dropped to the street to paw at a row of newspaper boxes. One slapped its palm against the glass and left a smeared handprint. Another pried a lid off a trash can and sniffed. The third climbed a storefront the way a spider navigates its web, flat and fluid, until it reached a blown-out second-floor window. It peered in for a long moment, then slipped through like a whisper.
The first one climbed into a car and started playing with the console.
Lucian's shoulder ached against the truck's fender. He didn't move. He didn't blink.
A reflection bloomed across the glass ahead of him. He saw himself and the truck and the pale street and—behind the glass—a human eye. Too close, far too close, as if a face leaned just on the other side. But the skin around the eye wasn't skin at all—it was smothered in shadow, a void that pressed up to the lashes.
The eye stared at him. Every screen in the electronics store window showed the same uncanny gaze.
The speakers crackled. A voice poured into the street, low and layered, like four or five different throats had agreed to speak at once and couldn't decide who would finish the sentence.
"Hello again, Lucian."