The streets of Hollow Reach groaned under the weight of memory. Bent traffic signs, flickering ghostlights in broken windows. The air smelled like scorched ozone and something... older. Like wet stone and rot.
Lance didn't limp.
His stride was too even. Too balanced. He stepped over debris without looking down. His shoulders rolled slightly as he walked, like a man used to tight alleyways and high-speed turns behind the wheel. His fingers flexed absently at his sides—not in pain, but in readiness. The way someone might test a trigger-happy reflex without knowing it.
Dani kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye.
Not just checking for wounds. Checking who he was.
"How's your leg?" she asked, too casually.
Lance blinked, like she'd interrupted something internal. "Fine."
"You couldn't walk twenty minutes ago."
He looked down at his leg like it was a stranger. "Guess I got lucky."
He grinned.
It wasn't his grin.
It was tight. Confident. Almost charming. It unsettled her more than the screaming had.
Kenton trailed behind them, arms crossed, scanning the shadows. But every few steps, he looked at Lance too. Not like a friend. Like a variable in an experiment that had gone off-script.
They reached the relay station.
It was half-sunk into the ground like some half-digested building trying to disappear. A leaning spire of warped metal and concrete ribs, with broken wires curling like veins across its outer walls. A dented security panel blinked amber at them.
Dani stepped forward, raising her wrist controller.
But Lance beat her to it.
He knelt beside the panel and pried open a corroded plate with his fingers—far too easily. His hands moved fast, efficient. He twisted two wires, held a third against the edge of a broken capacitor.
The door hissed open.
Dani stared at him. "Where the hell did you learn that?"
Lance opened his mouth.
Paused.
Then said, "I—I don't know."
A beat of silence.
He stood slowly, jaw clenching, eyes flicking down to his own hands like they'd betrayed him.
"I just... knew it. Like I'd done it before."
"You haven't," Dani said flatly. "Not in this life."
Kenton stepped past them into the relay station's dark corridor. "If he was rewritten, then maybe those skills aren't new. Just... inherited."
"I guess we know from who." She added, voice low.
Neither of them said it.
But all three thought it.
Inside the station, the air was dry. Dust drifted in beams of emergency light. Wires hung like vines. It felt dead—but watchful. Something about the quiet made Lance sweat.
But he wasn't breathing hard.
That scared him more.
He caught his reflection in a broken wall panel.
Not his face.
Tighter jaw. Slight curl to his hair. A short, neat beard shadowing his chin. His eyes—the shape was the same, but the way they held focus, the attitude behind them—wasn't his.
He turned away from the glass, chest tight.
"This isn't me," he muttered.
"What?" Dani asked.
"I said—" His voice cracked. The deeper tone slipped for half a second. "I said I'm gonna check the back. For supplies."
He walked off.
Dani made a move to follow—but Kenton put a hand on her arm.
"Let him go," Kenton said softly. "If what's happening is what I think it is... pushing him might make it worse."
Her jaw clenched.
"The anomaly didn't just fix his body. It's refitting him. Piece by piece. And whatever it's turning him into... that persona has muscle memory."
"And a history," Dani said quietly. "One I'm starting to remember."
In the back of the station, Lance stood alone, hands braced against a rusted countertop. His breath came in shallow pulls. He stared down at his fingers—steady. Scarred.
He saw a flicker—memory, maybe—of a steering wheel under those hands. Not his car. Not his roads. A blur of city lights. Bullets. A woman's voice in his earpiece. Her voice.
"Rico, hit the corner on 39th, and don't stop."
He flinched.
"No," he whispered. "That's not mine. That's not me."
But the memory didn't fade.
It fit.
His muscles responded like they'd been through that route a hundred times.
He looked at his reflection again, trembling now. His beard looked darker. Fuller.
"Stop," he begged. "I'm not him. I'm not..."
But something answered back.
A voice inside him, velvet and smooth.
"Why fight it? You're perfect now. You're loved."
Lance's knees buckled.
Memories flooded in again.
Dani's hand on his shoulder.
Her laughter beside him.
A rooftop chase.
Gunfire.
Heat.
"I'm sorry."
He fell forward onto the floor, palms smacking the cold tile.
He screamed again.
Not in pain—in grief.
Because part of him was starting to like how it felt. The way his body moved. The casual confidence. The way he could look Dani in the eyes and not feel small.
Was that who Rico was?
The voice inside whispered again, this time softer.
"She needed him. You were never supposed to be here. Let me finish the rewrite. Let me save you, Lance Mercer."
He wept, gripping his face, fingers pressed into skin that didn't feel like his.
Footsteps.
Dani.
She stood in the doorway, arms folded.
Her voice came low. Careful.
"...Lance?"
He didn't look up.
"I don't know if I'm still him," he said. "I think I'm becoming someone you knew."
Her silence was long. Heavy.
Then, finally:
"You're not him yet."
He looked up.
And in her face—there wasn't fear.
Just mourning.
"I don't need Rico." she said.
He laughed, bitter and low. His voice was hoarse.
"Would you still say that if I wasn't—if I didn't sound like him? Look like him?"
Dani blinked.
"If I wasn't turning into your perfect getaway driver with the cool grin and the steady hands and the voice you probably used to fall asleep to—would you still care?"
She opened her mouth. Hesitated.
That hesitation cracked something in him.
"That's what I thought," he muttered, eyes glassy.
"Lance—"
"You paused."
"Because it's not that simple," she snapped—too quickly, like a reflex.
"It's never been simple. You think I don't see the change? You think I like it?"
He recoiled, face twisting. But she stepped forward.
"You're right. Rico was... confident. Composed. Charismatic. But he also died screaming, and I couldn't save him. And now the person standing in front of me is bleeding, terrified, and still trying to make jokes."
Her voice shook, just a little.
"You think I don't see you?"
Lance's throat tightened.
She knelt beside him, not touching him. Not yet.
"I didn't pause because I don't care." Her voice dropped. "I paused because it hurt that you even had to ask."
Silence.
The voice inside him stirred, low and muttering, pressing thoughts that weren't his into the cracks of his skull. Thoughts about smooth words, steady hands, a practiced grin—a better man.
He gritted his teeth.He shivered. The voice inside hissed, recoiling like smoke from light.
"I... I don't know how to stop it."
"We'll figure it out," she said. "But you don't get to vanish. Not on my watch."
Lance blinked, and the tears finally fell.
The surface came back in fragments—shards of light, dust motes in sunbeams, the city's smog-smothered skyline reintroducing itself like an old, half-forgotten dream. The train station behind them was little more than crumbling concrete and buzzing silence now, the door sealed. Not with magic.
Not with machinery.
Just done.
Final.
Lance limped forward, body aching even with the symbiote's crude repairs. His skin still carried a ghost of Rico's heat—his hair curled where it shouldn't, his jawline stung with new weight. He kept touching his face like it would peel off and reveal something underneath. It didn't.
Dani walked beside him, quieter than usual. No grim quips, no sarcasm buffering her stress. Just her steps matching his, slow and careful.
Kenton, trailing behind, had tried to reinforce one of the exit paths with a new barrier—a shimmering, over-simplified dome—but it blinked out of existence the second he took his eyes off it. He muttered a half-apology, half-analysis, but no one answered. He stopped talking soon after.
They reached the edge of the city just before nightfall. The skyline flickered unnaturally, like it hadn't fully decided what era it belonged to. A holographic billboard played a milk commercial, but the voiceover repeated the wrong script in reverse. No one paid it attention. The city always did this now.
As they split off from the main tunnel, Dani finally spoke.
"I'm not going to follow you home."
Lance turned. She wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were somewhere else. Some *time* else.
"You don't have to—"
"I know," she cut in. "But I'm saying it anyway. You've got Dario. He'll keep you grounded. And Kenton's… whatever he is."
Kenton squinted at a rusted vent, like it might hold a solution to everything. "I'm working on it."
"Sure you are," Dani said, not unkindly.
Lance reached out. Not to touch her—just to be near her, one last moment before everything collapsed back into normalcy. "Are you okay?"
"No," she said, and for once, she didn't follow it with a joke.
She turned. "But you're alive. So I can be not-okay and still keep going."
There was something raw in that. A confession. An apology. Maybe even trust.
He opened his mouth to say something, anything—but his throat tightened. Rico's words still rose too easily. Too *smoothly*. He didn't trust his own voice anymore.
So he just nodded. And then turned away.
---
Lance's Apartment – Hours Later
The walk to his apartment should have felt like coming home. It didn't. He unlocked the door like it belonged to someone else.
Inside, Dario was asleep on the couch, head tilted awkwardly. The TV still played the same bootleg anime he left running—swords, screaming, overly long flashbacks. It felt distant now. Disconnected.
Lance stepped inside and closed the door. The symbiote twitched inside him.
He dropped into the chair by the window. His body still felt… wrong. Rico's posture haunted his spine. His voice carried too much weight. But he was here. Still here.
Not Rico.
Him.
Even if he didn't fully believe it yet.
---
Kenton – NOT FRANK'S, MAYBE
Kenton's usual haunt had changed. It was still a bar. Probably. But the door now said "DON'T ASK" instead of "FRANK'S," and the bartender was a massive ceramic doll that blinked too slowly.
He didn't question it. Not now.
Kenton took his usual seat, ordered a drink that didn't exist last week, and stared at his own hand. He tried to manifest a small barrier between his fingers—a sphere, a prism, anything stable. But every time he *thought* it into existence, it twisted.
One attempt became a Möbius strip. Another dissolved into steam. The third cracked into a small cube with a heartbeat.
He swallowed hard and closed his hand.
CHARLENE or SIX stared at him. Or didn't. Their eyes just clicked.
"Whatever you're doing," Kenton muttered, "I'm doing worse."
---
Dani – Elsewhere
She didn't go home. She didn't have one.
Instead, she returned to the alley behind the drugstore—where the milk had first gone wrong, where she'd meant to meet Rico, not Lance. The place was dim, nearly silent, the hum of vending machines the only heartbeat.i
She sat on the curb, boots muddy and cracked. Her arm ached—her mutation still too raw to hide. Part of her wanted to scream. The rest of her knew there was no point.
She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes.
You're not him yet.
She hadn't meant to say that. Not like that. But it was true. And she didn't know what would happen if Lance ever did become Rico. Would she love him again? Would she lose them both?
The worst part?
She didn't know which scared her more.
---
Meanwhile – The Thing Beneath
Deep below the surface, in the hollowed guts of the subway system, the door they'd left behind pulsed once.
The glass shimmered with a faint, spiraling residue.
Rico's reflection lingered for a moment too long—unmoving, unblinking, half-smiling.
Then it was gone.
But not forgotten.