He had walked for hours after leaving the townhouse, following the pull in his chest through streets that had grown stranger with every step, until he found a place where a building had collapsed into a pile of concrete and brick. The debris was loose enough to move, heavy enough to stay, and he had spent the better part of an afternoon carrying pieces of it to a corner of the ruins where the shadows were long and the wrong-colored light didn't quite reach.
He didn't have her body. He couldn't go back to the townhouse, couldn't face the room where she had died, couldn't look at the sheet-covered shape that had been a girl named Lira who had shared her peaches with him. So he buried the memory instead, piling concrete on top of nothing, building a monument to someone who would never have a proper grave.
His hands shook for hours afterward.
The trembling had started while he was still moving the rubble, a fine vibration in his fingers that spread to his wrists, his arms, his shoulders, until his whole body was quivering with something that wasn't quite grief and wasn't quite fear. It was exhaustion, maybe. Or shock. Or the simple weight of being alive when someone else was not.
He sat beside the pile of rubble he had built and watched his hands shake, and he didn't try to stop them. Some things needed to be felt. Some tremors needed to run their course.
The city had gone quiet in a way that felt deliberate.
It wasn't the absence of sound—there were still groans from settling buildings, still the whisper of wind through broken windows, still the distant crash of something falling somewhere he couldn't see. But the quality of the silence had changed. It pressed down on him like a physical weight, thick and heavy, as if the buildings themselves were holding their breath.
Gray had noticed it after the predator. After Lira. As if the creature's presence had silenced something in the city, or as if the city was waiting to see what would happen next. The air felt different too—charged, somehow, like the atmosphere before a storm, but without the promise of rain. Just the tension, the anticipation, the sense that something was coming.
He didn't know what it was. He didn't want to know.
The pull in his chest had gone dormant, a faint pulse that neither guided nor warned. The cold sensation behind his eyes had retreated to a dull ache, a headache that had become so constant he barely noticed it anymore. Even the bruised sky seemed to have dimmed, its purple deepening toward something darker, something that might have been twilight if twilight had ever been that color.
Gray whispered to himself to fill the void.
Nonsense words, mostly. Fragments of songs he couldn't remember the tunes to. Names of streets that no longer existed, shops that had collapsed, landmarks that had been swallowed by the ruins. He spoke without thinking, letting the sound of his own voice remind him that he was still here, still breathing, still capable of making noise in a world that had gone terribly silent.
"Third Street," he said, his voice rough. "The coffee shop on the corner. They had these windows that faced east, and in the morning the light would come through and hit the counter just right."
He didn't know why he was remembering this. He had never particularly liked that coffee shop. But it was something to say, something to fill the space between breaths.
"The pharmacy on Fifth. I used to get my prescriptions there. Blood pressure medication, nothing serious. The pharmacist had this tattoo on her wrist, a little butterfly. I always meant to ask her about it."
The words felt strange in his mouth, foreign, as if they belonged to someone else's life. Maybe they did. Maybe the person who had gotten coffee on Third Street and prescriptions on Fifth was gone now, buried under rubble alongside Lira's memory.
"The sky used to be blue," he said, and his voice cracked on the last word.
He didn't say anything after that for a long time.
When he slept, he dreamed of threads.
Millions of them, weaving through everything—through the buildings and the streets, through the rubble and the ruins, through the bruised sky and the warped geometry of a city that no longer made sense. They were silver and gold and black, interlocking in patterns that his sleeping mind couldn't quite grasp, forming a tapestry that covered the entire world.
In the dream, he could see the threads connecting things. He could see how the collapse of one building had pulled on threads that led to another, how the predator had been woven from threads of darkness and hunger, how Lira's fear had been a web of light around her chest. He could see his own threads too—thin silver lines that ran from his eyes to his hands, from his chest to his throat, connecting him to something vast and incomprehensible that pulsed at the edge of his vision.
He tried to follow the threads, to see where they led, but every time he reached for them, they slipped away like water through his fingers. The patterns shifted, reformed, became something new before he could understand what they had been.
And then, at the edge of the dream, he saw something that made him freeze.
A figure, standing in the distance. Human-shaped but not human, made entirely of threads that glowed with a light that hurt to look at. It was watching him. He couldn't see its face—it didn't have a face, just a woven mass of silver and gold—but he could feel its attention like a weight on his chest.
The figure raised one hand, made of threads, and pointed at him.
And Gray woke with blood on his pillow from his nose.
The headache was worse than it had ever been—a splitting pressure behind his eyes that made him taste copper, that made his vision swim and his stomach clench. He pressed his palms against his temples and breathed through the pain, waiting for it to subside, waiting for the cold sensation to drain away.
It took longer this time. The cold water feeling lingered, filling his skull, pressing against the inside of his eyes, refusing to release him. He could still see the threads when he closed his eyes—could still see the patterns, the connections, the figure at the edge of the dream.
When the pain finally faded, Gray sat up and looked at the blood on his pillow.
It was bright red against the gray of the fabric, a vivid reminder that he was still alive, still bleeding, still capable of being hurt. He touched his nose, felt the wetness, wiped it away with the back of his hand. The blood left a streak across his skin, a mark he couldn't see but could feel.
He didn't know what was happening to him. He didn't know why he could see threads, or why the cold sensation came and went, or why his dreams were filled with patterns he couldn't understand. He didn't know what the figure in his dream had been, or why it had pointed at him, or what it meant.
But he knew, with a certainty that bypassed thought, that something had changed.
The world had ended. The sky had bruised. Buildings had collapsed and predators had crawled out of the shadows. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, Gray had become something other than what he had been.
He didn't have a name for it. He didn't have words to describe the cold water behind his eyes, or the threads that mapped the world, or the scream that had torn a creature apart. He only knew that he was different now, and that the difference was growing.
The silence pressed around him, thick and deliberate. The bruised sky watched from above, patient and hungry. And somewhere in the ruins of Ash Harbor, something was waiting for him to figure out what he had become.
Gray stood, brushed the dust from his clothes, and started walking.
The pull in his chest stirred, faint but present, guiding him onward through the labyrinth. He didn't know where it was leading him. He didn't know what he would find when he got there. But he followed it anyway, because following was all he had left.
The city crumbled around him, building after building surrendering to the weight of the sky. The shadows lengthened, reaching toward him like fingers. And Gray walked, alone, through the grave of what had been, toward whatever was coming next.
Behind him, the pile of rubble he had built stood silent in the wrong-colored light. A monument to a girl named Lira. A marker for a life that had ended too soon.
He didn't look back. Looking back was for people who had the luxury of memory, and Gray had learned that survival required a certain selective blindness.
He walked, and the threads waited in the back of his mind, coiled and ready.
And the silence between screams stretched on.