Lance turned to run.
But his foot didn't move.
It couldn't move.
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.