The winding corridor beneath the orchard had narrowed. The mural above had ended in a smear of blackened vines and fractured faces—silent, hollow-eyed things that still seemed to look. Lance didn't want to blink near them.
Now, the three of them stood at a fork in the chamber's skeletal spine. Two passageways veered out, crooked and wrong—one choked with creeping roots, the other flickering under a light source that didn't appear to exist.
Dani adjusted the strap across her back. The lunchbox of horrors swung gently, clinking with far too many moving parts for something that small. Her grenade launcher—unholstered, slung casual—rested against her hip like an extension of her body.
Lance's voice came out before he could stop it.
"Okay, no offense, but how the hell do you just have all this stuff? Like… the milk monster made sense in context. Somehow. But you have a grenade launcher in a lunchbox, Dani. And a slug that devours space. That's not something you buy at Hollow Depot."
She paused.
Kenton stopped too, mid-step, and didn't turn around.
That was the part that hit Lance the hardest—Kenton froze. The guy who barely even looked up from his brain-churn when eldritch nonsense happened was now stiff, mouth tightening. And not at Lance.
At Dani.
She looked at them both.
Then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, she tilted her head and said, "Some tools don't need hands. Just recognition."
Lance squinted. "That's not a real answer."
Kenton glanced sideways at her—brief, sharp. A silent caution. Like a field operative watching a warhead wake up.
But Dani just gave a faint shrug and moved on, slipping into her rhythm again. Her footfalls were nearly silent now, even on warped stone.
Lance opened his mouth, but Kenton caught his eye and shook his head once. Not forcefully—gently. Like he was saying, not now. Not like this.
So Lance shut up.
But it settled in the back of his ribs like a thorn. She had too many weapons that weren't built for anyone. Yet they never resistedher.
She didn't carry them.
They followed her.
The fork split further than they realized. The path Dani took sloped upward, where faint lights pulsed in a rhythm that seemed almost biological. The other—the one Lance chose—curved low, descending toward a hum. Not a sound, exactly.
More like a presence, flexing.
"We'll loop back in five minutes," Dani said, eyes already scanning the angles, every gesture loaded with the casual confidence of someone who once outlived an ambush.
"Don't get milked," she added flatly.
Lance made a face. "That phrase is ruined forever."
Kenton lingered behind Dani for half a second. Then, as Lance turned to go, he murmured, "Don't touch anything that looks like it wants to remember you."
"What?" Lance called back.
But they were already gone.
And the hallway ahead of him pulsed again—just once. Like something not alive taking its first breath.
The stone under Lance's feet wasn't stone anymore. Not really.
It looked like stone, but it gave just slightly when he stepped—like old muscle. The deeper he went, the more it flexed, and the more he tried not to look down. Dario walked at his side, calm as ever. His paws made no sound at all.
The corridor sloped low and gentle, until even the memory of Dani and Kenton felt scraped away.
No echoes.
No footsteps.
No one to see the way Lance's hands trembled, even as he tried to keep them at his sides.
His breath misted in the air—but there was no cold. Only pressure. Like a basement two miles below something you should never dig through.
Then—
A door.
It stood there, impossible and casual.
A white wood apartment door.
Chipped paint. Silver handle. A deadbolt that had always stuck unless you jiggled it first.
Lance froze. His breath hitched.
"…That's my door," he whispered.
Dario sat beside him and stared.
The hallway behind him vanished like breath on a mirror.
Lance didn't remember opening the door. He just blinked and—
He was inside.
Not the safehouse.
Not the corridor.
His old apartment.
Down to the cheap lamp with the crooked shade. The cracked mug he never threw out because it was from a convention he never really enjoyed. The scatter of wires from his last attempt to fix a keyboard he never actually planned to use again.
His computer was on. Monitors aglow. Background hum like a lullaby made of electricity and burnout.
Dario's nails clicked against the floor.
"None of this is real," Lance whispered.
But his voice didn't echo. It got absorbed.
There were no windows.
And the milk jug—the milk jug—was back on the counter.
Still sealed.
Still sweating from invisible cold.
He walked toward it, slow.
And then—behind him—
A chair scraped.
Lance turned so fast he almost lost balance.
Someone was sitting in his office chair.
Not quite a person.
The outline was him.
But wrong.
Pale, reflective. Skin the tone of plastic packaging left too long in the sun. Hair matted, face too smooth—like someone drew it from memory but forgot where the mouth went.
The thing had his eyes.
But they were hollow. Opaque and milky.
It didn't move. But the chair did—turning slowly on its own.
And then—words.
Not spoken. Played.
Like audio clipped from moments he hadn't meant to be heard.
"I know I'm not important. I'm the background guy."
"No one would care if I left."
Lance took a step back.
The lights dimmed.
Dario growled, low and uneasy. But didn't bark.
The thing—the echo—tilted its head.
And its voice finally spoke on its own.
Glitching. Flickering. Like an old cassette caught in its own guilt.
"Why did you think the milk picked you?"
Lance's spine locked.
"I didn't—"
"You're not the main character. You never were."
"I know that."
"Then stop struggling."
The lights snapped to red.
The walls buckled like flesh.
And the other Lance stood up.
But the body wasn't his anymore.
It lengthened.
Swelled.
Bones clicked in the wrong direction.
A dozen mouths opened across its chest—each one shaped from different versions of him. Younger. Sadder. More tired. More afraid.
And they all screamed at once.
Lance turned to run.
But his foot didn't move.
It couldn'tmove.
Not frozen—anchored. As if the linoleum floor had grown teeth, latched onto his heel, and whispered: Stay. Watch. Understand.
Dario snarled beside him, hackles raised, but his paws made no sound on the floor anymore. Like reality itself had been muted around them.
The echo—no, the thing—finished its transformation.
It no longer resembled Lance.
Not really.
Its limbs bent inward, then outward again, as if joints were being corrected from a deeper version of anatomy no human was ever meant to understand.
Flesh sloughed and bloomed.
One arm became a bundle of sleeved wires wrapped in bruised skin, dripping a slow, iridescent fluid that smelled like spilled battery acid and warm dairy.
Its torso cracked open like a drawer. Inside were files—actual files, manila folders crammed with documents, Polaroids, medical scans, all of them charred at the edges. One photo fluttered loose and landed by Lance's shoe.
It was of him.
Seven years old.
Crying into the corner of a wall.
He didn't remember that photo being taken.
He didn't remember anyone taking it.
The creature's face split downward, the seam parting vertically through the center of its head, revealing another face inside. Not his.
His father's.
But glassy-eyed. Hollow. The lips too stiff.
It spoke in that voice again—like cassette tape over warm milk.
"This is where it lives, Lance. Right here. All the parts you try to forget."
Lance's muscles screamed. But his leg still wouldn't lift.
Think.
He had to think.
The panic screamed through him, animal and loud, but there was something quieter underneath it—older.
This was the cycle.
Run.
Trip.
Break.
Repeat.
But if he was stuck—maybe he wasn't meant to run this time.
Maybe he had to trick it.
He glanced at the mug.
The one from the con he didn't enjoy.
It sat—too clean—on the desk nearby.
The one place untouched.
He lunged for it.
Not with grace. Not with confidence. But with desperation sharpened by confusion.
The mug was heavier than it should've been.
He flung it at the wall.
It didn't shatter.
It splashed—like liquid pretending to be ceramic.
The wall behind it buckled like it had bones.
The creature shrieked, a dozen mouths opening along its neck like unfurling zippers, all screaming with different tones and accents and ages of his own voice.
He saw the reality around it then—not shifting like before, not bleeding.
It was looping.
Repeating fragments of his apartment again and again like a corrupted video game—drawer here, then there, then again. Chair. No chair. Milk jug. No jug. Jug inside chair.
A logic flaw.
He could break it.
Dario lunged at the creature, snapping, drawing its attention. It snarled—not at the dog—but at Lance.
"You made me, Lance."
"I'm your unspoken."
"I'm everything you filled away."
Lance's heart pounded in his ears.
And then, like a whisper inside his own head—not from the symbiote, but something deeper—he remembered his training.
Not combat. Not hacking. Nothing heroic.
Printer repair.
What did you do when a system froze, looping back on itself?
He spotted it.
A wall segment flickering—just slightly.
Wrong frame.
Wrong resolution.
Lance bolted for it, finally moving his leg, leaving behind a bloody bootprint of pale, milk-colored fluid.
The monster screamed again—but now it was slower. Lagging. As if its own reality was collapsing.
Lance slammed into the glitched wall.
And fell—
—through.
He landed hard on concrete.
For a moment, he didn't move. His breath came in uneven gasps. Dario appeared beside him, panting, muzzle smeared with a strange, chalky residue.
Above them, the glitched "apartment" warped one final time—
And then compressed into a black dot.
Gone.
No fanfare.
Just void.
Lance sat there for a long time.
Eventually, he looked at his hand. His sweat had dried in patches of pale chalk, crusting over like salt from a too-deep ocean.
He didn't say anything.
But he felt the thing was still with him.
Not that it followed.
That it belonged.
And worst of all...
It knew how to get back in.