The seventh day found him in a district of small shops and smaller apartments, the kind of neighborhood where people used to live close together because they couldn't afford to live apart. The buildings here had collapsed into each other, creating canyons of rubble and twisted metal that funneled the wind into something that almost sounded like voices.
He had been following the pull in his chest for hours, weaving through the debris with the map clutched in one hand and a scavenged metal pipe in the other. The pipe was useless against the things that moved through shadows, he knew that now, but it made him feel less like prey and more like something that might fight back.
The smell hit him first.
Smoke. Real smoke, not the phantom scents that sometimes drifted through the ruins. Something was burning, and burning recently enough that the air still carried the heat of it.
He followed the smell around a corner and stopped.
A pharmacy stood at the end of the street, or what had been a pharmacy. The front windows had blown out, and flames licked at the frame, crawling up the walls in patterns that seemed almost deliberate. The fire was wrong somehow, the colors too vivid, the movement too controlled. It didn't spread like normal fire. It danced.
And in the doorway, curled into a ball that seemed too small to contain a human being, was a child.
Gray's feet moved before his mind could catch up. He crossed the distance in strides that ate the ground, the pipe forgotten, the map crumpling in his grip. The child couldn't have been more than ten years old, a boy with dark hair matted with blood and dust, his clothes singed but not burning, his body wrapped around itself like he was trying to disappear into his own bones.
The fire should have consumed him. The flames were close enough to touch, close enough that Gray could feel the heat pressing against his skin like a physical weight. But the boy wasn't burning. The fire flowed around him like water around a stone, parting and rejoining in a dance that made no sense.
The cold sensation flooded Gray's skull.
The threads appeared, and this time he didn't fight them. He let them wash over his vision, mapping the impossible thing he was seeing. There, around the boy, a bubble of something. Not solid, not visible to normal eyes, but present in the language of silver and gold lines that traced patterns in the air. A shell of force, flickering and unstable, holding the flames at bay through sheer refusal to let them pass.
The boy was doing this. Somehow, some way, the child was pushing the fire back without touching it, without even being conscious of what he was doing. The threads showed the pattern of it, a desperate geometry of denial, the shape of a mind that refused to accept that fire should burn.
The bubble was failing.
Gray could see it in the threads, the cracks spreading through the pattern, the places where the force was thinning and the flames were pressing closer. The boy was dying, not from the fire but from whatever it cost to hold it back. The threads showed the drain, energy being pulled from somewhere deep inside the child and poured into the barrier that was keeping him alive.
He had to do something.
Gray reached for the boy, his hand crossing the threshold of the bubble, and the world went white.
The threads screamed. The bubble popped. And fire licked across his arm in a stripe of agony that made him gasp.
He grabbed the boy anyway, hauling the child out of the doorway and onto the street, rolling them both away from the burning building. The flames roared behind them, angry at being denied, and then the pharmacy collapsed inward, sending a shower of sparks into the bruised sky.
Gray lay on his back, the boy clutched against his chest, and tried to remember how to breathe.
His arm was burning. He could smell his own skin cooking, could feel the pain pulsing in time with his heartbeat. But the cold sensation was stronger, flooding through him in waves that seemed to be trying to numb the damage, to push the pain somewhere it couldn't reach him.
The boy's eyes opened.
They were bright, too bright, filled with a light that had nothing to do with the flames. For a moment, Gray saw recognition there, saw the child understand what he was seeing. A man who could see the threads. A man who knew what the bubble meant.
Then the light faded, and the boy went still.
Gray held him for a long time, feeling the small body grow cold against his chest, feeling the fire in his arm spread into a deeper ache that had nothing to do with burns. Another one. Another person he couldn't save, another death that would sit in his stomach like a stone.
But this one was different. This one had shown him something.
The boy had pushed fire away with nothing but will. He had created a barrier that shouldn't exist, held it together with nothing but the desperate need to survive. And Gray had seen it, had watched the threads map the pattern of it, had understood the shape of what the child was doing even if he couldn't name it.
The cold sensation pulsed behind his eyes, and for a moment, he saw the threads again, tracing the edges of the burn on his arm. The pattern of the damage, the shape of the injury. And beneath it, something else. A pattern that might be healing, might be something else entirely.
He didn't understand it. But he was beginning to understand that understanding might come later, if he survived long enough to earn it.
He stood on shaking legs, the boy's body still in his arms, and looked for a place to bury him. There was no one else to do it. No one else to remember that a child had died here, had held back fire with nothing but the force of his own refusal to burn.
The pull in his chest pointed him toward a small park, one of the places he had marked on his map. The grass there was silver now, the trees twisted, but the ground was soft enough to dig.
He worked until his hands bled, the burn on his arm screaming with every movement. When the hole was deep enough, he laid the boy inside and covered him with earth. He didn't have words for a ceremony, didn't have prayers or rituals. Just the act of putting a body in the ground and marking the place with a stone.
He stood over the grave for a long time, watching the sky pulse with its wrong colors, feeling the cold sensation ebb and flow behind his eyes.
"I'm sorry," he said finally. The words felt inadequate, but they were all he had.
He walked away, leaving the boy to the silver grass and the twisted trees. The burn on his arm throbbed with every step, but the pain felt distant now, separated from him by the cold sensation that seemed to be doing something he couldn't quite perceive.
He didn't know what was happening to him. He didn't know what had happened to the boy, or to Lira, or to the world. But he knew that he was changing, that the threads were becoming more real to him with every passing day, and that somewhere in the patterns he was learning to see, there might be answers.
Or there might be more graves.
He kept walking.