The cameras always left first.
They rolled away on rubber wheels, their little red tally lights winking out one by one, following the Hunters back through the barricades like obedient pets. The crowd noise went with them—cheers, chants, the sharp little screams that meant someone had gotten a good shot of blood on their phone.
Then came the silence.
Not real silence. The kind you get when a city pretends it didn't just watch something impossible happen in the middle of an intersection.
Streetlights still hummed. Drones still drifted above the police tape. Ambulances still idled with their hazard strobes painting everything in slow, nauseating pulses. But the air—thick with soot and ozone and wet copper—settled into something heavy. Something you had to breathe with care.
That was when the clean-up crews were allowed in.
Kai waited at the edge of the cordon with the other disposables, head bowed, hands in his pockets, as if looking too directly at the scene might get him billed for it.
A young officer in a bright vest stopped them with a palm.
"IDs."
Five pairs of hands rose, presenting laminated cards that were all the same shade of institutional grey:
MUNICIPAL ANOMALY SANITATION
TEMPORARY CONTRACTOR
Temporary. Like the city expected nightmares to stop on schedule.
In the crews' slang, it was simpler.
Sanity cleaner.
Because you weren't just hosing blood off asphalt. You were scraping off whatever didn't belong in the world—whatever made people's eyes itch and their dreams go wrong.
The officer scanned Kai's badge, eyes flicking to the crack that ran through the laminate.
"You're late," the officer said.
Kai didn't answer. If he opened his mouth, he might cough. If he coughed, the officer might decide he didn't like the sound of it and send him away. And if Kai got sent away, he didn't get paid.
And if he didn't get paid—
A notification buzzed in his pocket like a wasp, as if on cue.
Kai didn't take the phone out. He didn't need to. The numbers had burned themselves into the back of his skull weeks ago.
DEBT: 5,420,000 CREDITS
DUE: 72 HOURS
PENALTIES: AUTO-ENFORCEMENT
Seventy-two hours until interest turned into something with teeth. Until "case management" stopped sounding like paperwork and started sounding like men in plain jackets with polite smiles.
Kai kept his face blank. He kept his breathing steady.
The officer finally nodded him through.
Kai ducked under the tape and stepped into the aftermath.
The smell hit him.
It wasn't just blood. Blood had a clean, iron edge to it, a metallic tang humans could recognize even if they'd never seen it outside a meat tray.
This was blood plus something else. Something that didn't belong in any animal.
Burnt plastic. Mold. A storm condensed into fluid and then spilled out.
Kai pulled the respirator up over his nose and mouth, felt the filter seal, and forced himself to breathe slow. The gear was old—secondhand from a contractor who'd "lost" it in a warehouse fire. The straps bit his cheeks. The filter tasted faintly of rubber and somebody else's sweat.
He adjusted the oxygen bottle on his back. It wasn't full. It never was.
Budget cuts didn't touch Hunters. Budget cuts touched the people who mopped up what Hunters left behind.
The intersection had been a normal place a few hours ago. Kai could tell by the pieces of it that still clung to normality: a smashed traffic light, a delivery bike bent like wire, a lunch bag spilled open beside a curb with a half-crushed carton of milk leaking into the gutter.
The center, though—where the Hunters had fought—looked like reality had been put through a grinder.
Something huge had hit the asphalt repeatedly. Deep gouges radiated out from a crater, and the road surface had been turned to a dark paste, as if the heat of impact had liquefied the tar. Shattered glass glittered in it, embedded like stars.
And there were… parts.
Kai's job wasn't to flinch. He'd learned that the first week, when a hand had still been a hand to him and not just a "Category B biological fragment." He'd learned it again the first time he'd found a child's shoe inside a clump of rebar and flesh.
Now he just catalogued.
He nudged the child's shoe with his boot. Too small. Too clean under the gore. He bagged it anyway, wrote UNCLAIMED in block letters, and sealed it like a name could leak.
Fragment. Tissue. Bone. Foreign matter. Contamination grade pending.
He pulled his kit from the duffel bag: hazard bags, tongs, solvent sprays, sealing tape, a compact UV wand, a strip of disposable tweezers, and two sealed sample vials—standard issue for people the city pretended didn't exist.
And the one item that didn't belong in a sanitation kit.
A scalpel.
It wasn't fancy. It wasn't even medical-grade anymore. The handle was chipped and the metal was dull in places where someone had used it to pry something open. But it held an edge well enough if you treated it right.
Kai had treated it like religion.
He moved toward the crater, boots sticking to the tacky surface.
A clean-up lead waved from a safe distance.
"Hey. Don't touch the center until we get the readings," the lead called. He had the posture of a man who knew exactly how much life insurance he didn't have.
Kai lifted one hand in acknowledgment without looking back.
The lead cursed under his breath but didn't stop him. None of them did.
Kai was the one who went in first. Kai was the one who moved fast. Kai was the one who didn't get sick until later.
Disposable.
He crouched by the nearest chunk of something that had once been alive.
The Hunters had called it an Aberrant. The news feeds would call it a "mutated monster" with dramatic B-roll and sponsor ads. The official report would assign it a code and bury it in a database.
To Kai, it was meat that paid.
He flipped the UV wand on. The light washed the gore in cold violet, and a faint sheen rose from the surface like oil on water.
Contamination.
Kai frowned. It should have been lower. The Hunters in their sealed suits and branded rifles were supposed to neutralize most of it before they left.
Unless—
His phone buzzed again. Another stack on top of the first.
PAYMENT FAILED
CREDIT LOCK PENDING
Kai ignored it. Forced his attention back down.
He sprayed solvent on the fragment. The sheen retreated… mostly.
But something didn't.
It wasn't on the surface. It was inside.
Kai leaned closer.
At first he thought it was a trick of the UV, like the glimmer of glass embedded in tar. But then it shifted, just slightly, like something responding to his attention.
A thin line. Pale. Almost luminous.
Not a tendon. Not a vein. Too straight. Too clean.
Kai's breath caught, fogging the inside of the mask. He blinked hard and looked again.
The line was still there.
A thread that ran through the meat with purpose.
His throat tightened. The filter's rubber taste went sharp, suddenly sweet at the edges.
A thought rose uninvited in his mind—not quite a voice, more like a memory of one.
Cut it.
Kai froze.
He hadn't heard anything. Not through his ears. His comm was off. No one else was near enough to whisper through his mask.
And yet the instruction felt like it had been placed directly into his skull.
Cut it.
Kai's fingers tightened on the scalpel handle.
He told himself it was stress. Sleep deprivation. Exposure. A brain looking for patterns in gore because it couldn't handle the randomness of being poor in a city that birthed monsters.
He should step back. Report the anomaly. Let the people with hazard pay handle it.
Instead, he brought the scalpel down.
The blade slid into the meat with familiar resistance, the drag of tissue and fat, the faint grit of contamination. He followed the luminous thread, slicing carefully, not because he knew what it was, but because his hands had learned to be precise when his life depended on it.
As the cut opened, the air changed.
A pressure built behind his eyes, like a storm front pushing against the inside of his skull. His vision fuzzed at the edges. The UV wand's light stuttered.
Then the thread snapped free.
Not like a tendon tearing, but like a wire being unplugged.
The luminous line came out in his tweezers—no longer a line, now a small, hard object, wet and pulsing faintly as if embarrassed to be seen.
It looked like… a knot. A bead of something too dense for flesh.
Kai stared at it.
The pressure behind his eyes intensified until it felt like his brain had been clamped in a vise.
Then something opened.
Not in the world.
In him.
A translucent overlay flashed across his vision—clean, sharp, impossible. It hung in the air as if the world had always had a menu and Kai had simply never been allowed to see it.
[ANATOMY SYSTEM — INITIALIZATION COMPLETE]
User: Kai
Role: Anomaly Sanitation Contractor (Unofficial: Sanity Cleaner)
Status: Alive (Conditional)
Contamination Load: 12% (Rising)
Precision Rating: Uncalibrated
Detected: Law-Knot Fragment
Grade: Low (Damaged)
Options:
— Extract (Completed)
— Stabilize (Requires Tools)
— Assimilate (Not Recommended)
Kai's mouth went dry. He tried to speak and only managed a thin exhale that sounded too loud inside the mask.
The overlay didn't flicker. It didn't care whether he believed it.
Below the options, a thin bar pulsed, faintly red.
WARNING: Contamination exposure increasing.
WARNING: Cognitive strain detected.
RECOMMENDATION: Cease operation. Seek decontamination.
Kai jerked his head up, as if looking away would make it vanish. The crater was still there. The drones still hummed. His coworkers still moved at the perimeter, bagging chunks with bored, careful motions.
No one screamed. No one reacted.
As if the interface belonged to him alone.
Kai's hands shook.
He lowered his gaze back to the bead in his tweezers. The system labeled it again, as if eager to narrate his new reality.
Law-Knot Fragment: A degraded anchor point within anomalous biology.
Notes: Damage suggests prior interference.
Potential Yield: Minor attribute reinforcement.
Kai swallowed.
Prior interference.
Meaning someone had done this before.
Meaning—
A wet sound came from the crater.
Kai went still.
He told himself it was settling debris. A piece of rebar shifting. The tar cooling and cracking.
The wet sound came again, closer, accompanied by a faint scraping.
Kai's head turned.
A larger mass of flesh—what he'd assumed was a corpse—twitched.
Then it moved.
The Aberrant's upper half lay against a broken median, its torso split open in a way that should have ended anything. But as Kai watched, black tendrils—thin, hairlike strands—began to stitch the open cavity together, pulling meat like thread.
A ruined head rolled slightly, jaw unhinging.
One milky eye fixed on Kai.
The mouth opened.
No roar came out.
Only a breath.
A human breath.
Kai's chest tightened so hard he felt it through the respirator straps.
It shouldn't be alive. The Hunters had torn it apart. He'd watched the last shots on a bystander's stream before it got scrubbed—bright tracers, a blade of light, the Aberrant collapsing.
Unless the last thing they'd done was wrong.
Unless they'd left the important part.
Unless the "thread" he'd cut had been—
A wet, affectionate sound came from the creature's throat. The tendrils accelerated, pulling it together faster, like a machine switching to emergency mode.
Kai backed up, boots sticking.
The creature's arm—too long, too many joints—pushed against the asphalt. It dragged itself forward in a grotesque parody of a crawl.
Kai's mind flashed blank.
Then the overlay blinked again, uninvited.
[TARGET DETECTED]
Entity: Aberrant (Ruptured)
Threat: Severe
Key Point: Law-Knot Cluster (Chest)
Recommendation: Sever connection. Prevent re-stitch.
Sever connection.
Kai's gaze snapped to the creature's chest. The tendrils were drawing inward, gathering around something deeper.
And there—beneath the gore, beneath the frantic movement—he saw it.
A faint glow.
More than one thread. A cluster of knots, pulsing in a pattern that made his teeth ache.
His hands stopped shaking.
Not because he was brave.
Because he understood something simple, something ugly.
If he ran, the thing would catch him. If he screamed, no one would come fast enough. Hunters were gone. Police wouldn't cross the line. His coworkers would die trying to help. And the debt notices would still be waiting in his pocket when they scraped what was left of him into a bag.
But if he cut—
He could live.
Kai yanked the oxygen bottle's valve wider, feeling cool air hit his lungs. He slipped the bead he'd extracted into one of the sealed vials without looking, then tightened his grip on the scalpel.
The creature lurched toward him.
Kai didn't aim for its head. He didn't aim for its heart. Those were human instincts.
He aimed for the glow.
He sprinted forward before his fear could argue, closing the distance in three sticky steps, ducking under a flailing limb that cracked the air like a whip.
The scalpel flashed.
He plunged it into the creature's chest, not deep, not random—precise. Following the glowing threads like he could see the seams of reality.
The blade met resistance.
Not bone.
Something denser.
The tendrils spasmed.
The creature's mouth opened, and this time a sound came out—not a roar, not a scream, but a static-laced whisper that seemed to vibrate inside Kai's skull.
"—return—"
Kai's vision narrowed. The overlay's red warning bar surged.
WARNING: Cognitive strain critical.
WARNING: Contamination load 19%.
The threads tried to twist away from his cut, like living wires avoiding the knife.
Kai adjusted.
0.1 millimeters.
He didn't know where the number came from. It floated up like a fact he'd always known, like breathing.
He moved the blade a hair to the left.
The resistance shifted.
He felt something catch.
And then he cut through.
The effect was immediate.
The glow went out like a light switched off. The tendrils in the chest slackened, falling limp. The creature's limbs convulsed once, twice, then collapsed.
The milky eye rolled back.
The mouth opened and closed soundlessly, trying to draw breath without a reason.
Kai yanked his scalpel free and stumbled backward, slipping on tar, catching himself with a palm that came away wet.
The creature lay still.
Dead this time.
For real.
The overlay updated with cold satisfaction.
[SEVERANCE SUCCESS]
Law-Knot Cluster: Severed (Damaged)
Potential Yield: Moderate (Unstable)
A new option appeared.
— Extract
— Stabilize (Requires Tools)
— Assimilate (Not Recommended)
Kai stared at the words.
Not recommended.
He could almost hear the tone behind it—dry, amused, as if whoever had written the system's warnings had watched thousands of people ignore them.
His respirator rasped as he dragged air in. His heart hammered so hard he thought it might burst.
From the perimeter, someone finally noticed.
"What the—Kai!" the clean-up lead shouted. "Back! Back from the center—are you trying to get this pinned on us? You think insurance covers the center?"
Kai didn't look up. If he looked up, he might remember he was only a man with a knife. If he looked up, he might lose the thin, unnatural clarity that had settled over him the moment he'd seen the threads.
He crouched over the creature's chest again.
His hands moved.
Fast, but not sloppy.
He cut around the cluster, peeled tissue aside, followed the faint remnants of glow.
The pressure behind his eyes returned, sharper now, but he ignored it. The red warning bar pulsed angrily.
WARNING: Contamination load 23%.
WARNING: Cognitive strain critical.
RECOMMENDATION: Cease operation.
Kai's jaw clenched.
He had spent years ceasing operations. Ceasing dreams. Ceasing hunger. Ceasing hope.
He wasn't going to cease now.
The scalpel slipped under the knot cluster with a delicate motion, and he lifted.
The object that came free was larger than the first bead—an irregular shard, dark as dried blood, pulsing faintly as if it resented being removed.
The system labeled it instantly.
Law-Knot Cluster (Damaged): A degraded anchor network.
Yield: Attribute Reinforcement (Minor–Moderate)
Risk: Contamination backlash possible.
Kai's vision wavered. For a second, the intersection doubled, the streetlights smearing into halos.
A whisper skated along the edge of his thoughts.
Good.
Kai stiffened.
That word didn't come from the system overlay. It had a voice. A tone.
Dry.
Amused.
Familiar in a way that made Kai's skin crawl, like a hand on the back of his neck.
He forced his gaze to the empty air ahead of him, as if he could stare down whatever had spoken.
"Who are you?" he whispered through the respirator.
No one around him heard. The clean-up crew was yelling now, rushing closer, but their voices were muffled, as if the world had been turned down.
The response came not as sound, but as certainty.
You can call me Mentor.
Kai's breath hitched.
"I'm hallucinating," he said, because that was safer than believing.
If you were hallucinating, the voice replied, you'd be doing something more interesting than unpaid overtime.
Kai's fingers tightened around the shard. His glove creaked.
"What is this?" he demanded. "What's happening?"
The voice sighed as if Kai had asked why water was wet.
You're finally looking at what's actually there.
Kai's head pounded. The red warning bar flashed.
WARNING: Contamination load 27%.
WARNING: Cognitive strain severe.
STATUS: Operational capacity degrading.
He should stop. He knew it. He felt it in the way his thoughts started to slide, in the way the edges of the world frayed.
But he also felt something else.
For the first time in years, a door opened in front of him instead of closing.
He looked down at the shard in his hand. It was heavy for its size, like it carried more than mass.
"How do I use it?" Kai asked.
The voice in his head chuckled softly.
Greedy. Good.
Kai swallowed a laugh that was too close to a sob.
He thought of the debt notice. The seventy-two hour timer. The way the city chewed up men like him and spat them out as bagged fragments.
He thought of the Hunters walking away with praise and sponsorships and clean hands.
He thought of the creature's mouth whispering "return."
And he thought of the threads. The knots. The seams.
"Teach me," Kai said.
The voice paused, just long enough for the words to land.
Then, with the casual cruelty of a doctor delivering a diagnosis, it answered:
You don't owe money, Kai.
Kai's stomach dropped.
You owe a hand.
The overlay flickered once—almost like a blink.
A single line appeared at the bottom of the interface, plain and indifferent.
NEW DIRECTIVE: Acquire a hand that can cut the universe.