His chest fluttered—the twitch that had been faint, small, now roared, pulsing like a heartbeat that wasn't his own. It tangled with the reality around him, pulling edges loose, bending space until even Dario's small yips sounded hollow and far away.
Then—he landed, but not on solid ground.
The world folded beneath him, the safehouse—or what he thought was a safehouse—stretched impossibly long, walls bleeding into hallways that didn't exist. Fluorescent lights hung at impossible angles. The air thickened, dense and viscous, tasting of metal and milk and something far worse.
He pressed Dario close. The dog shivered but didn't pull away, steadying Lance against the chaos.
Behind him, the cow-thing's hooves pressed weight into the warped floor. Its eyes were everywhere, watching, judging, waiting.
He felt the twitch surge again, uncontrollable, bending reality around his fingers, tugging at the walls. Shapes flickered—walls stretched, floors rolled, corners vanished. He stumbled, almost losing balance as the ground buckled beneath him.
Dani's voice cut through the chaos. Sharp, unwavering.
"Lance! Move!"
He followed her, though the hallways no longer obeyed physics. Each step was uncertain. Each breath a labor.
The creature lurked, dragging the world with it. Every time it moved, the air around it thickened, bending space, threatening to pull Lance into its unnatural gravity.
And then—somewhere in the distance—he saw a door.
A small, familiar shape in the madness. Concrete walls. Rough and cracked. A dim, flickering light humming above. It didn't move. It didn't warp. It just stood there, a fragile promise of stillness amid the tearing world.
He didn't think. He ran.
Dani followed, eyes scanning, grenade launcher ready. Dario padded close, warm, tethered.
The door clicked shut behind them with a soft thunk that sounded impossibly final.
For a moment, the world outside obeyed no rules. But inside that small, imperfect room, reality held. It was small—smaller than any safehouse he'd known—but still. Silent. Solid.
Lance sank against the wall, knees pulled up, clutching Dario like the dog was the only constant in a life that was no longer his own. The twitch inside him pulsed faintly, a reminder of the fracture that followed him even here.
Dani stepped forward, quieter now, her movements deliberate in the dim lamplight. No more tattered dress. No more chaos. Field jacket, boots, sleeves rolled—every line and motion precise, a tether in her own way.
Her shadow lagged half a heartbeat behind her, but she didn't acknowledge it.
"…You're staring," she said, not turning.
"I'm just…" He hesitated, searching for the right phrasing. "Noticing you actually belong here now."
Her mouth twitched. "Appreciated, printer guy."
Lance's breath caught.He blinked.Printer guy.
The words shouldn't have hit so hard, but they did—like a record skipping over a scar in the vinyl.
"…What did you just call me?" he asked quietly.
Dani froze, mid-step. Her head turned just enough that the faint, blue emergency light traced the edge of her cheekbone. "What?"
"You said—printer guy," he pressed, voice tightening. "You've never asked what I do. Never asked where I worked. You just… knew."
"Lucky guess."
"No, it wasn't," he said. His tone sharpened—not loud, but surgical. "You knew my name too. You said it like you'd been saying it for years."
Dani exhaled slowly. "You're paranoid, Mercer. Comes with the trauma. Don't overthink it."
"I'm not overthinking anything!" He stepped closer, boots scraping against the floor. "I don't even know where you came from. How do you know me?"
The air around them seemed to pulse—subtle, but wrong. The light buzzed overhead like a failing nerve.
Dani kept her eyes on the corridor ahead. "You want me to say something that makes you feel better," she murmured. "But there's nothing I can tell you that won't make it worse."
"That's not an answer."
"No," she agreed softly, "it isn't."
He stared at her—at the faint shimmer of her outline, like heat warping glass. There was a sound in the distance, a low tremor in the walls. But his focus stayed on her.
"You said once that when the symbiote sees something, it reacts," he said, almost to himself. "What did you see when you saw me?"
Dani turned then, and for the first time, he saw hesitation—something faintly human flickering beneath the weaponized calm.
"I saw someone," she said quietly, "who wasn't supposed to exist anymore."
Lance's stomach dropped."…What does that mean?"
"Drop it." Her voice carried a sudden edge now, the kind that cut through air like static.
He didn't move.Didn't breathe.
Her shadow lagged again, then caught up.
Without another word, Dani walked past him—faster this time. Her armor creaked softly with every step.
The silence she left behind was heavier than before.And for the first time since meeting her, Lance realized he wasn't sure if Dani was protecting him…
…or watching him.
He clung to Dario, the dog's steady heartbeat a solid, grounding pulse amid the fractured reality and the twitch that wasn't his own.
"I don't want this," he whispered. "I don't want any of this."
For now, the dog's warmth was answer enough.
The symbiote wasn't gone. Not inside the milk. Not inside him.
It was watching. Waiting. Learning.
And the longer it stayed, the harder it would be to tell where Lance ended—and where it began.
For now, he had the simplest anchor left: Dario. Unblinking, loyal, real.
The silence stretched, taut as wire.
Lance stayed hunched in the corner, a human coil of breath and nerves, his hands buried in Dario's fur as if afraid they might betray him the moment he let go. His whole body was taut, every tendon straining to keep still, the way prey sometimes does when the shadow of a predator drags across the ground—hoping that stillness might be mistaken for survival.
His eyes flicked between the door and Dani, wide and bloodshot, rimmed with veins from sleepless nights. His chest rose and fell too quickly, shallow, like his lungs couldn't remember what steady air was supposed to feel like. The memory of the thing that had chased him—skin shifting, eyes that weren't eyes, the weight of reality bending just to keep it alive—still bled through his thoughts like a bad afterimage. Every time he blinked, it was there.
Finally, his voice broke out, hoarse, cracked from disuse and strain.
"What... what was that?" His words trembled, as though naming it might call it back.
Dani didn't soften. She didn't crouch down or offer her hand. She stayed standing, arms crossed, her shadow long against the wall. Her tone came blunt, like steel dragged across stone:
"An anomaly. That's what you saw. And there are more. All over. Anywhere. Everywhere. Doesn't matter where you hide."
Lance's throat worked, dry. "Anomalies..." He spat the word like it tasted foul. His hand clenched tighter in Dario's fur, and the dog whimpered softly. "Things like that shouldn't exist. They shouldn't even be possible. It's—" He shook his head violently, hair falling in his eyes. "It's wrong. All of it. Just wrong."
His voice cracked, rising, desperate. "You people talk about them like... like categories in a file. But I saw it. I felt it. It was real. A cow—if you can even call it that—twisting the world around it just to kill me. How do you live with things like that walking around? How does anyone sleep knowing they're out there?"
Dani's eyes flickered briefly, unreadable, but her tone didn't shift. "You don't. You adapt. Or you break."
"I don't want to adapt," Lance hissed. His voice was raw now, all nerve and bile. "I want them gone. Every single one. I didn't ask for this. I didn't choose this. Whatever they are—whatever they want—" He bit down on the words, tears threatening. "They don't belong in this world. None of them do."
The silence that followed stretched taut. Dario pressed closer against Lance's ribs, grounding him with warmth, but it wasn't enough to soften the bitter truth in his words.
Then Dani spoke again, quieter now, but edged with something that cut deeper than her bluntness ever could. "You're more like them than you think."
Lance froze.
The words hung in the air, heavy, venomous, impossible to dismiss. His blood ran cold, his pulse hammering in his ears. He didn't need her to explain—he already knew. The implications coiled in his chest like a blade turning. The visions. The fractures. The way reality bent around him without his control. He had seen it, felt it, in the cracks of his own life.
"No," he rasped, shaking his head, eyes glinting with panic. "Don't—don't say that. I'm not one of them. I'm not." His nails dug crescents into his palms, as if pain could ground him in denial.
Dani's gaze didn't waver. "Keep telling yourself that. But deep down, you know."
The room thickened, silence pressing in around them. Lance's chest heaved, every inhale like a plea. His body quaked—not from the anomaly this time, but from the realization that no matter how much he hated them, no matter how much he wanted to carve them out of existence... part of him was already infected by the same wrongness.
And Dani had just named it.
She didn't move immediately. The briefcase sat at her feet, the lunchbox sealed again at her side. Her weapons were at the ready, her stance loose—but her eyes didn't stray from Lance.
He didn't notice at first.
That she'd dropped into a crouch, halfway across the room, as silently as a shadow.
That she'd pulled something small from her pocket—a worn metallic disk no larger than a watch face.
She rolled it between her fingers as she watched him breathe.
His pupils were clouded again. Not milky. Veiled.
Not full infection, she thought. Not yet.
But it was leaking through.
She activated the disk.
A soft vibration hummed in the air—low, almost imperceptible.
Lance flinched.
Dani narrowed her eyes.
Not from the sound. From something deeper. A reflex. A symbiote reaction.
Her jaw tightened. She pocketed the disk and stood.
"Hey," she said, voice casual, like they were still sitting in a diner booth deciding on pancakes.
Lance looked up slowly, his gaze lagging behind the movement of his head by a beat too long.
His eyes refocused. Sluggish.
He didn't respond.
Dani approached—measured steps, not too slow, not too sudden. She crouched next to Dario first, scratched under his chin like this was any other quiet evening after any other world-ending situation.
The dog didn't move. He just pressed harder into Lance's chest.
"Your pupils aren't responding," Dani said, not unkindly. "That's usually a fun one."
Lance blinked hard. "What?"
She leaned in a fraction, gaze steady and clinical. "They've been cloudy since you came back. Thought it was blood loss. It's not."
He tried to focus on her, but the edges of her outline seemed to breathe—too sharp one second, too soft the next. His stomach knotted. "So what is it?"
She didn't answer immediately. Just watched him. Like she was waiting for something to happen.
Lance swallowed. "You keep watching me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like I'm about to—" He stopped himself. "You're not checking if I'm okay. You're checking what's changing."
Her posture didn't shift, but something in the air did. A quiet confirmation.
He gave a brittle laugh. "You're monitoring me, aren't you?" His voice was low now, almost afraid to rise. "That's why you've taken me here. Not to protect me. Not to save me. To study me."
Dani exhaled slowly, crossing her arms and leaning against the wall—a shrug turned into posture. "You make it sound so personal."
"You said they swapped the milk," Lance continued, words spilling faster now. "At the store. While I was distracted. But you were there, Dani. You distracted me."
"Look," she said evenly, her tone clipped but calm. "The swap didn't happen while you were there. It was already done before you showed up. I was chasing—"
She stopped herself, the word catching like shrapnel behind her teeth.
Lance's eyes narrowed. "Chasing who?"
Dani didn't look away, but her silence was answer enough. She folded her arms again, a wall reassembled brick by brick. "Doesn't matter," she said quietly. "What matters is you never stood a chance of avoiding it."
"At this point, I don't know what to think," Lance muttered, staring at the floor.
She tilted her head. "If I wanted to do this to you, you'd have been drinking demon yogurt in a padded room three days ago."
That silenced him.
For a moment.
"I'm scared," he admitted.
She didn't scoff. She didn't soften—at least not in her voice. But her eyes flicked away.
She just nodded once. "Good. It means the right you's still steering."
"Then why do I feel like I'm watching someone else wear my face?"
Her mouth pressed into a thin line. She crouched again, scratching Dario behind the ears, letting the dog nudge her hand closer to Lance's knee as if guiding her.
"That," she said, "is usually the part where people run into traffic or join a cult. You're ahead of the curve."
Dani tapped the comm clipped to her jacket, her voice low but sharp, muttering into the earpiece. "Target evaded. Took host. Took what I wanted… The subject's emotional state is manageable. Minimal interference for now. Not my finest, but we move."
She cut the channel and slid the comm back, not looking at Lance.
He blinked, frowning. "You… called me 'the subject'?"
Her flat tone didn't soften, but she let a smirk tug at the corner of her mouth. "It's not a name. It's a classification. Chill."
Lance's shoulders sagged. "Feels like a name when it comes out of your mouth."
Dani crouched again, scratching Dario behind the ears. The dog nudged her hand toward Lance's knee, a subtle invitation, grounding him. "Look, I've got bigger problems than you whining about labels. You're alive, coherent-ish… That counts."
He stared at her, quiet, weighed down. For a second, he could almost ignore the tremor in his own chest.
"Subject," he repeated, quieter this time, not accusatory. Just empty.
Dani let it hang, her eyes scanning the perimeter. "Classification, emotion, containment… paperwork, basically. You'll live. Now sit still."
"Right," Lance muttered, rubbing his temples. "Like 'printer jam' or 'overdue password reset.' Completely normal."
She didn't crack a smile.
"You're scared, angry, and yeah, you're even cracking jokes. All signs of a brain that's still very much alive."
Lance exhaled, exhausted. "So... not dead yet. That's something, I guess."
She smirked, eyes glinting. "Hey, if you're going down, at least go down with a punchline."
Lance looked at her, disbelief tangled with relief.
"That was so corny.." he said, voice low.
Dani's eyes flickered for a moment, but she didn't answer.
The air was still. For once.
Dani shifted herself, paused, then reached into the interior pocket. A small vibration pulsed from within.
Lance didn't notice. He was too busy trying not to throw up.
She turned her back to him and pressed the earpiece in.
Static. Then a broken voice. Fragmented. Male.
"I'm... sorry."
A harsh wheeze. "Dani, I... I'm—"
A wet sound. Then silence.
She didn't move. Not for a long time.
When Lance finally looked up, her eyes were dry, but red. Her jaw locked so tight the muscle twitched.
"We keep moving," she said.
And that was all.