The tenth day found him at the base of a residential tower that had sheared in half.
The building had been one of those tall concrete structures that housed hundreds of people in apartments barely large enough to contain their lives. Now it stood like a broken tooth, its upper floors collapsed into rubble, its lower levels compressed into a maze of cracked walls and fallen ceilings. The pull in his chest had led him here with an urgency that made his heart race, the cold sensation pulsing behind his eyes in a rhythm that suggested something important waited in the ruins.
He found the stairwell by following the threads.
They appeared without his permission now, spilling across his vision whenever the cold sensation surged, mapping the world in silver and gold lines that showed him structure and stress and the paths that would hold his weight. The threads led him through a gap in the collapsed wall, down a flight of stairs that groaned under his feet, into a space that had once been a lobby but was now a tomb of concrete and twisted metal.
And there, under a section of collapsed stairwell that had somehow formed a shelter of its own destruction, he found them.
A woman lay on the ground, her body broken in ways that should have been fatal. Her chest was crushed, her limbs bent at angles that bones didn't naturally make, her face pale with the gray pallor of someone who had already begun the journey toward death. Blood pooled beneath her, too much blood, the kind of blood that meant organs had ruptured and arteries had torn and the body was simply waiting for the final breath.
But she was breathing.
Her chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven gasps, each breath a battle that should have been lost already. And kneeling beside her, hands pressed against the ruined chest, was a girl.
No, not a girl. A woman. Young, maybe early twenties, with dark brown hair tied back from a face that was covered in dust and tears. Her hands were pressed flat against the dying woman's chest, and between her palms and the broken body, something was happening.
The cold sensation surged, and the threads mapped it.
Silver lines, but different from the ones he usually saw. These were softer, gentler, weaving through the dying woman's body in patterns that suggested repair rather than structure. The threads showed him the damage, the crushed ribs and the torn vessels and the organs that had begun to fail, and they showed him something else. A force, invisible to normal eyes, that was holding the pieces together. Not healing, not exactly, but maintaining. Keeping the woman alive through sheer refusal to let her die.
The young woman's hands trembled with exhaustion. Sweat beaded on her forehead despite the cold of the underground space. Her breathing was ragged, each exhale carrying the weight of whatever it cost her to do what she was doing.
She looked up as he approached.
Her eyes were hazel, warm even in the dim light, steady despite the tears that tracked through the dust on her face. There was no fear in them, no panic, just a calm acceptance of the situation that seemed impossible given what he was seeing. She looked at him like he was exactly what she had been waiting for, though she couldn't have known he was coming.
"Please," she said, and her voice was hoarse with exhaustion. "Do you know where to find clean water?"
Not help. Not rescue. Not even acknowledgment of the impossible thing she was doing. Just a practical question from someone who had been doing this long enough to know what she needed.
He stood frozen for a moment, the threads still mapping the scene, the cold sensation pulsing with something that felt like recognition. This woman was like him. Not the same, not exactly, but similar. She could do things that shouldn't be possible, see things that weren't visible, affect the world in ways that defied explanation.
And she was using it to hold a dying woman together with her bare hands.
"I have some," he said finally, his voice rough from disuse. "In my bag."
The young woman's eyes closed briefly in what might have been relief. "Please. I need to wash my hands. I can't..." She looked down at the blood seeping between her fingers, the red mixing with something else, something that shimmered faintly in the language of the threads. "I can't keep this up much longer."
He moved without thinking, dropping to his knees beside her, pulling the water bottle from his bag. The dying woman's breathing was still shallow, still uneven, but it hadn't stopped. Whatever the young woman was doing, it was working. It was keeping someone alive who should have been dead ten times over.
"Here," he said, holding out the water.
She didn't take it. Instead, she kept her hands pressed against the woman's chest, her eyes meeting his with a steady gaze that seemed to see more than it should. "I need you to pour it over my hands. Slowly. I can't stop what I'm doing or she'll..." The sentence trailed off, but the implication was clear.
He understood. The threads showed him the delicate balance she was maintaining, the way her force was holding the woman's body together. If she stopped, even for a moment, the damage would resume its fatal course.
He uncapped the bottle and began to pour.
The water ran over her hands, washing away the blood and the shimmering substance that had mixed with it. As the liquid cleared, he could see her skin more clearly, the small scars that marked her palms and fingers, the calluses that suggested she had been doing this for a while. The water turned pink, then red, then ran clear as the last of the blood washed away.
The young woman took a deep breath, and something shifted in the air. The threads flickered, and he watched as the silver lines around the dying woman's body began to stabilize, the patterns becoming more solid, more permanent. The breathing beneath her hands steadied, becoming deeper, more regular.
"She'll live," the young woman said, and her voice was barely a whisper. "I think. I think she'll live."
She slumped backward, her hands finally releasing the woman's chest, her body collapsing against the rubble with the exhaustion of someone who had given everything they had. Her eyes were still open, still watching him, still steady despite everything.
"I'm Mina," she said. "Mina Park."
He looked at her, at the dying woman who was no longer dying, at the impossible thing that had just happened in the ruins of a collapsed building. The cold sensation pulsed behind his eyes, and the threads mapped the scene in silver and gold, showing him connections he couldn't quite understand.
"Gray," he said finally. "My name is Gray."
Mina smiled, a small, tired expression that somehow managed to be warm despite everything. "Nice to meet you, Gray. Do you have any food? I'm starving."
He laughed, a sound that surprised him, the first laughter he had made since the world ended. It felt strange in his throat, unfamiliar, but not unwelcome.
"Yeah," he said, reaching for his bag. "I have some food."
They sat together in the ruins of the residential tower, a man who could see the threads that held the world together and a woman who could weave them into something that kept people alive. The dying woman breathed steadily beside them, her body still broken but no longer failing, held together by patterns that neither of them could name.
The sky pulsed with its wrong colors above them, and somewhere in the distance, the ruins of Ash Harbor continued their slow collapse. But here, in this small space under a fallen stairwell, something new had begun.
Two people who could do impossible things, sitting together in the darkness, sharing food and water and the quiet understanding that they were no longer alone.