The bench was a rusted skeleton, tagged with half-peeled gang signs and the fading slogan: FUCK THE AWAKENED.
Across the street, the police station glowed like a concrete bunker drowned in sickly yellow light.
Leo sat hunched on the corpse of that bench, pale as printer paper, the shadows beneath his eyes carved deep enough to look like healing bruises. In his cracked hands, he nursed the cheapest energy drink the slum vending machines still coughed out—chemical lemon, battery acid, thirty-nine groszy for a slow death.
He was going to die before sunrise.
He accepted that the way other people accept rain.
Leo pressed the cold aluminum to his forehead, then drank.
The taste hit him like a punch to the throat.
"Kurwa… worse than yesterday," he muttered, grimacing like a child choking down medicine. He glared at the can as if it had betrayed him.
"Should've bought bread. Bread doesn't try to murder your tongue."
Another sip. Reluctant. Necessary.
The bitterness crawled under his skin, forcing his heart into a stuttering sprint. Good. Anything to stay awake. Sleep wasn't rest anymore; sleep was a door, and something on the other side had started turning the knob.
Four nights without closing his eyes.
Four nights of shadows smiling with too many teeth.
He crushed the empty can, stood on borrowed legs, and limped toward the trash. The throw missed by a meter—pathetic. The can rolled across the pavement, clattering like it was laughing at him.
Leo sighed, fetched it, and dropped it properly into the bin.
Then—with the last scrap of smirk life hadn't stolen yet—he crossed the street and pushed open the bulletproof doors of the 17th Precinct.
The lobby smelled of old coffee and gun oil. An officer behind the counter—mid-thirties going on fifty, a broom of a mustache—looked up.
"You lost, kid?"
Leo's gaze swept over the chipped armor plates bolted to the walls, the cracked bulletproof glass, the faded poster that read:
IF YOU DREAM OF TEETH, REPORT IMMEDIATELY.
"Hey! I'm talking to you."
Leo scratched the back of his filthy head.
"Ah. Sorry, officer. I came to turn myself in."
The man snorted. "For what, vagrancy?"
"No. I think I've been marked by the Requiem spell."
Silence fell—heavy, suffocating, Kevlar-thick.
The officer blanched. His hand shot under the desk and slammed the red panic button hard enough to crack the plastic.
"Code Red, main lobby! Code Red—possible Requiem vector in custody!"
Thirty seconds later, six officers stormed in, wrapped in anti-nightmare armor—visors down, rifles loaded with silver-jacket tranquilizer rounds.
Leo didn't resist. He simply raised his hands and let them strap him into the reinforced chair bolted to the floor. The restraints were cold; somehow, that felt comforting.
His eyelids sagged.
A blink… no. Not even that.
One of the new arrivals stepped forward. Early fifties, graying hair cropped short, a jagged scar dragging across his cheek like someone tried to erase his face and failed. His nameplate read: KOWALSKI, S.
Everyone in the slums knew that name. Twenty years ago he crawled out of a Requiem gate missing an eye and carrying the head of something that shouldn't exist.
Kowalski crouched, eye level with Leo. His voice was low, gravel scraped over a tombstone.
"Listen close, chłopak. You've got maybe two hours before the Call drags you in for good. Once you're inside, there's no police, no laws, no mercy. Only two kinds come back: monsters… and the ones who become worse."
Leo tried to laugh. It escaped as a cracked whisper.
"So what now? You shoot me before I turn into a bedtime story?"
"No." Kowalski straightened. "Regulation 44-B. Since you reported before first-stage sleep, the state owes you one chance."
He nodded to the medics.
"Prep the injection. Full dose Somnambulist-9. Keep him awake until the Gate opens on its own. Then we throw the kid in with a tracker… and a prayer."
Leo's voice was barely a thread. "A chance at what?"
This time, there was something almost like pity in Kowalski's scarred eyes.
"At becoming Awakened. Or dying fast enough that the nightmare doesn't follow you home."
Somewhere deeper in the building, an alarm began to wail—a rising, mournful howl that sounded disturbingly like a child screaming in a language no living human should understand.
Leo closed his eyes for half a heartbeat.
In the darkness behind his lids, something with too many teeth smiled and whispered his name.
When he opened them, the needle was already in his vein.
The last thing he heard before the drugs surged was Kowalski's voice, low and almost gentle.
"Welcome to the Requiem, kid.
Try not to scream too loud on the first night.
They can smell fear from the other side."