The burning hand didn't emerge—it *unfolded*, fingers splitting the air like a seam ripping through cheap fabric. Blue flames licked at the edges of reality where the wrist should have been connected to an arm, to a body, to anything resembling physical plausibility. Concrete cracked beneath Lin's shoes as the temperature dropped seventeen degrees in three seconds, frost blooming outward in jagged fractal patterns.
Song grabbed Zhang's elbow. "That's not him." Her whisper carried the weight of someone who'd seen this mistake before. "That's *them*."
The fingers spasmed, tendons standing out like steel cables under the translucent skin. Each knuckle popped with the sound of a distant gunshot—five cracks, perfectly spaced. Lin's glasses fogged from the sudden temperature differential, but she didn't blink. "Wrong," she said, stepping closer. "It's both."
Zhang's breath crystallized in the air. "How—"
The hand convulsed. A thumb snapped backward at an impossible angle, revealing a tattoo burned into the flesh: **[N.I.D. TERMINATION PROTOCOL #47]**. The numbers writhed like maggots before resolving into different digits—his student ID.
Lin's lips parted. "They tried to delete him," she murmured. "But he left fragments in the code."
The burning fingers scrabbled at nothingness, leaving scorch marks that hovered midair, forming words only they could read: *THE ROOF ISN'T REAL*. The message evaporated as the hand suddenly gained substance, its flames extinguishing to reveal blistered flesh and broken nails. A wrist emerged next, then an arm—except the limb didn't connect to a shoulder, but to a void that pulsed like an exposed heart.
Song's phone buzzed violently against her thigh. Her brokerage app flashed: **$197,843 LIQUIDATED TO UNKNOWN ACCOUNT**. "They're erasing the money trail," she hissed. "Standard protocol for—"
The arm jerked violently. A soundless scream tore through the fabric of the rooftop as reality peeled back another inch. His face emerged in fragments—first the left eye, bloodshot and terrified, then the right side of his mouth twisted in pain. The rest remained suspended in nonexistence, as if someone had taken an eraser to half his features.
Lin moved without hesitation. Her fingers closed around his wrist just as the N.I.D. tattoo reignited—this time burning black. The flesh beneath her hand turned to static, pixels dissolving at the edges.
"Hold on!" Zhang lunged forward, grasping Lin's waist as she began sliding toward the rip in reality. Song anchored them both, her designer shoes skidding across the frost-rimed concrete.
His visible eye locked onto Lin's. When his lips moved, the words arrived three seconds late and out of sync: "—not the only ones who remember—"
The rooftop groaned. A hairline fracture split the concrete from the edge of the void straight through to the elevator shaft. Lin's grip slipped as his arm dematerialized to the elbow.
Song cursed, digging her heels in. "We're losing—"
The hand suddenly reversed direction—not pulling inward, but *pushing*. All five fingers splayed wide, pressing against an invisible barrier with enough force to crack two knuckles. Blood welled from the broken skin, droplets hanging suspended in midair. Each one reflected the same impossible scene: the four of them standing on the rooftop in a previous iteration, whole and unbroken.
Lin's glasses slid down her nose. "He's not trying to come back," she realized. "He's trying to—"
The hand clenched into a fist. The rooftop shattered like glass.
They fell through the cracks of the story—not downward, but *sideways*, through layers of discarded timelines and abandoned drafts. Zhang's scream inverted midair, becoming the opening notes of a jazz standard from Chapter Nine. Song's pearls unraveled into lines of corrupted code. Lin reached for his disintegrating hand as the world rewrote itself around them, her fingers closing around nothing but a single burning page: **[CHAPTER 13: DELETED SCENES]**.
The last thing to dissolve was the taste of copper on Lin's tongue—blood, or the memory of it, or perhaps just the metallic tang of a story turning against its authors.
Somewhere in the static, his voice echoed: "Find the editor."