Chapter 1 Capítulo 1

1. Coverage

First Hour

It was the first hour of the Unlimited Night, and Nalla was still chained to a Sunday meeting that should have ended ninety minutes ago and refused to stay dead.

Stay, he told the pain behind his eyes. Stay where you are. As if pain had ever listened. As if anything attached to him — the five jobs, the six screens, the bills in their white envelopes, the body that had started collecting debts faster than the mind could count them — had ever once obeyed when he told it to hold still.

Hold. Ninety more minutes. After that you can do whatever you want to me.

He had been making that deal since he was fourteen. The universe had never once held up its end.

His skull felt like somebody was trying to drive hot nails through it from the inside out. The pain had started at noon as pressure and upgraded steadily from nuisance to vendetta. Five managers stared at him from five little rectangles. Five jobs. Five streams of demands. Five versions of the same professional hunger wearing different shirts and calling themselves opportunities. He kept his face neutral for the camera while his pulse thudded at the temples hard enough to make the screen seem slightly out of time with itself.

The call stuttered. Every box froze for half a second. Then the voices snapped back in a burst, and the office light dipped just enough to make his stomach tighten. For one hot second the ache behind his eyes became a spike and stayed there, thin and mean.

"And regarding the Q3 report development, Nalla?"

"In progress," he said, looking at the lower edge of Denis's box instead of Denis himself. "Three hours."

The report had been finished five days ago. Denis did not need to know that. There were rules to survival, and one of them was basic engineering: if you ever looked free, management would take it as a personal insult. He flexed one hand under the desk because the fingers had started to twitch with pain.

"We need someone to lead the Wilson project," Denis announced. "Any volunteers?" His voice came back with a faint drag left by the stutter, half a syllable behind itself, as if the call had recovered without ever quite becoming whole again.

Silence followed. Professional silence. Coward silence. None of the little faces moved. Nalla could still feel the thickening darkness at the edge of his vision when the metallic drag began across the office floor, the old phantom warning he had heard for years whenever new responsibility came stalking. Chain over tile. Link after link.

Cowards. All of us.

He felt the heat of it before he heard his own voice say, "I can take it."

The drag stopped. The weight arrived. Wilson settled over his shoulders like fresh-forged iron, hot enough to burn even through habit. Automatic, inherited, idiotic: the kind of yes that left his mouth before the useful part of his brain had time to ask whether he had finally become too stupid to save himself. The spike behind his eyes drove deeper, as if his body had taken the decision personally.

Only then did he glance at the far window. Fourteen floors down, Rio should have been there in pieces, headlights and towers and the thin stitched glow of a city too stubborn to accept darkness quietly. Instead there was only a blackness too complete to be night. Not cloudy. Not stormy. Just — off. Off in a way he couldn't name and didn't want to. He looked at it a second too long, long enough for his stomach to tighten around the stupid animal certainty that skies were not supposed to do that.

A light tap on the glass door stole his attention. Einah stood there in a thin nightgown, crossing her eyes and flattening her face against the pane until a laugh escaped him before he could stop it.

He slapped a hand over his mouth and glanced at the crawling meeting. Still going. Of course it was still going. When he looked back, she was making a heart with both hands, bright and absurd and alive in a way the office never was.

Behind her the darkness through the apartment glass had not improved while he was distracted. If anything it had become flatter, more decided, wrong behind the one living thing in the room that still felt warm. The ache behind his eyes stayed sharp while he looked at her, and the fresh weight of Wilson stayed hot across his shoulders.

So free she could make hearts at a glass door while he sat there collecting chains.

Nalla killed the camera a heartbeat before Einah came through the door and wrapped herself around him. Her cheek was warm on his shoulder. Her perfume was sweet, familiar, safe. His free hand went to the knot at the base of his neck before it found her waist. For one moment the headache stepped back a pace and the office remembered it was part of an apartment instead of a punishment device.

"Did you see outside?" she murmured against his shoulder. Her voice started steady and didn't finish that way. "More than weird, right?" She paused. Opened her mouth as if something else was coming — something about the sky, about the shape of it — then closed it again and chose the version of herself that worked. "Sleep, sleep, sleep. That is my official diagnosis."

He let out a breath through his nose and kept his eyes on the dead corner of the monitor. "Can't. Meeting."

"Meeting, meeting, meeting." She pulled back enough to inspect him properly, fingers under his eyes. "You look tragic."

He rubbed one temple with the heel of his hand. "That's rude."

"It's accurate." She brushed her thumb over the dark crescents there. "Eight hours. Minimum. Before your face files an official complaint."

He laughed once, and even that hurt.

The office remained what he had made it: desk too hard, chair too cruel, white light chosen specifically because it made lingering unpleasant. An architecture of discomfort. The theory had been simple enough: make the room hostile and he might spend less time in it. Instead he had adapted to the hostility like an idiot adapting to prison food. The only soft thing in it was the photo of Einah hidden beside the second monitor. Now she was here in the flesh, warm against him.

He turned with her still half in his arms. The black moon hung over the city as a darker circle cut out of the dark, visible only by the shape it stole from the sky. Not bright. Not silver. No shine to it at all. Just a contour where no contour ought to be. Both of them went still. Einah's hand tightened at his side.

"That was not there before," she said.

His eyes stayed on the glass when he answered. "No," he said. As if that helped. If that thing had been there yesterday, half the city would have been out on balconies filming the end of the world for social media.

Condensation ribboned down the glass. In the reflection beside it the moon sat too low, too near, wrong enough to make the window look faulty. His coffee had gone cold hours ago, and when he nudged the mug the thin skin on top trembled inward instead of out.

Einah pressed closer to him. She wasn't shaking yet. Just softer somehow. "You know you don't have to do all of this, right?"

He shifted and felt the chair's work along his lower back, a thin mean ache from hours of sitting wrong on purpose. He looked down at the mug, then at the envelopes, then back to the black shape outside. "All of what?"

"This." She gestured at the desk without looking at it. At the five open tabs, the cold coffee, the chair designed to hurt. "All of it. For me. For my parents. For yours. For the aunt."

On the desk the bills waited in their white envelopes. His parents' medication. Her mother's physical therapy. Her father's lenses. The apartment. The aunt and the chemotherapy. Every bill another link. Every link another reason to stay in the chair until the body gave up before the reasons did.

He said it to the envelopes, thumb rubbing at the corner of the nearest one. "Promises don't buy medicine," he muttered, eyes on the paper instead of her. "Need doesn't wait."

The second sentence came out in a voice older than his and irritated him on contact.

Einah's mouth tightened. "That isn't the same as letting five companies and a sixth idiot project grind you into powder because nobody else raised a hand. You need to think about yourself sometimes. Just you. Not everyone attached to you."

He rolled one shoulder. The joint clicked and gave him nothing. "I didn't sell myself. I leased me at competitive rates."

"Martyr humor is still martyrdom."

He braced one hand on the desk, swallowed the anxiety pill with cold coffee, and regretted both. The headache answered at once, a hard pulse through the temples. Einah caught it immediately.

"Your eyes are doing the thing."

He answered after a beat, eyes on the coffee skin. "I'm fine."

"You say that like it has legal value."

He glanced toward the monitor, then the window, then her. The black sky remained. Even the coffee looked untrustworthy now. Talking hadn't fixed a thing. The room had only closed in around them. Her warmth on one side. That sky on the other.

Einah let go of his arm and stepped back half a pace. The change in distance was small. The change in tone was not.

"When was the last time you wrote?" she asked.

His eyes dropped to the seam where the desk met the wall. He opened his mouth and found nothing there. Not a lie. Not an excuse. Nothing. "I don't remember," he said at last.

That hurt worse than the headache. Months. Months since the only valve he trusted had sealed shut.

"You used to do it every night," said Einah.

"I know." He pressed thumb and forefinger into his eyes until sparks moved in the dark. His shoulders rose and dropped in a breath that did nothing for him. "I want to write. I want to sleep. I want one Sunday where my phone dies in a ditch and nobody can find me. But wanting things is cheap." The pressure behind his eyes had become something hotter than pain now, something that felt as if it were trying to open him from the inside.

They stood forehead to forehead, sharing breath. Her skin was warm. His was not.

"Bed," she said softly. "Now."

She tugged his hand. He felt the tremor in his own hand when he squeezed back.

Then the floor gave a deep mechanical shudder under both of them.

Einah grabbed him. Not playfully. Both hands fisting his shirt. The building answered in a single ugly chord — intercom shrieking through torn metal, elevator grinding down the shaft in a long descending note that sounded like machinery being buried alive, pipes and walls and something structural groaning beneath it all. The lights flickered once. Twice. Held, but dimmer.

His eyes went to the clock in the corner of the monitor.

00:05.

Five minutes past midnight. Sunday had ended and whatever this was, it wasn't Monday.

"Don't," Einah said. She could already feel him shifting his weight. "Nalla. Don't."

He was already moving.

The vertigo hit before the second step. Not from outside. From the center of him — a lurch behind the sternum, as if gravity had lost interest in his skeleton and something else had taken over the lease. The room tilted. The floor went soft under his good foot. His hand missed the desk by a margin that should have been embarrassing but wasn't, because embarrassment required a brain still accepting input, and his had stopped.

Einah said his name. Far away. Through water, through walls, through something thicker than air.

He tried to answer.

His mouth opened. His knees didn't hold.

The clock on the screen said 00:05 and then it said nothing at all.

2. Chains

First Hour

There were no eyelids to open. No lungs to fill. No body to fail him. The relief of that hit first, so sudden and complete it felt almost indecent. Apparently total physiological collapse did have one or two professional upsides.

Nothing could reach him here. The chain had gone with the body left behind. No weight across the shoulders. No harness. No hot iron settling into place because a room had gone quiet and he had mistaken that for duty. The gratitude was instant and ugly.

Space surrounded him, if space was the right word for a place without floor, wall, or honest direction. He moved anyway. Not walking, not falling. He chose, and the place obeyed.

One direction flooded him with euphoria so pure it almost passed for truth. Another offered peace. Downward, or what felt like downward, came freedom: no bills, no meeting, no medicine, no one depending on the steadiness of his hands. A frankly unreasonable amount of reward for the simple act of ceasing to function.

Down there the relief translated into terms even his ruined nervous system could understand. No notification. No Sunday meeting. No Denis saying his name like a fresh administrative inconvenience. No careful performance of usefulness. No Wilson. No apartment conscripted into overflow workspace. His first honest response to total collapse was thank God I don't have to log back in. The indecency of it went through him like warm water.

That one almost got him. Freedom with nothing waiting for him. Freedom with no rent due, no mother counting pills, no father pretending not to be frightened, no Einah carrying his exhaustion on her face with him. He drifted toward it anyway because every part of him that had ever wanted to disappear recognized the offer instantly. Which was not flattering, exactly, but it was honest.

The place smelled of cinnamon, black pepper, and burnt incense. Impossible smells without a nose. Impossible pleasure without nerves. Yet he felt both as surely as he had ever felt pain.

Then his mother's voice cut through everything, clear as kitchen light.

Too much laughter means too much crying, my son.

The pleasure curdled at once. Fear knocked him sideways. Shame spun him. Something like longing pulled him too far toward the bright places and panic tore him back out of them before he could settle. The place had no floor, no wall, no honest direction, and suddenly every feeling seemed to think it had a right to steer. Wonderful. Even stripped of a body he still found a way to be jerked around by himself.

"No," he said, though there was no mouth to form it.

Metal answered. Real metal this time. Chains striking stone somewhere in the impossible dark. Link after link. The first thing there that did not shift when he did. Of course it would be chains. Why should the universe suddenly discover originality now?

He reached for them as a drowning man reaches for rope. Each one arrived carrying weight he knew by touch alone: prescriptions, envelopes, the apartment payment, the aunt, the abandoned pages, Einah. Not freedom. Never freedom. But real. Real enough to hurt. Real enough to hold.

The links bit into him in pieces he knew too well. Prescription bottles. White envelopes. The aunt's hospital bracelet. His mother's pills. His father's careful smile when the bill came. Einah asleep at the table because he had stayed awake too long. His. Heavy enough to trust.

The chains dragged him against the tide of ecstasy. Pleasure pulled one way. Peace tried another. The voice of his mother kept cutting through both, not comforting exactly, but returning again and again like a hand finding his collar in the dark. Weight that hurt. Weight that held. He would have taken that over the bright nothing every time.

He hauled on the chains with whatever passed for hands in that place. The void buckled. Relief tore away from him. Pain rushed back from some unimaginable distance like weather returning across open water.

Consciousness slammed back into his body as if somebody had dropped him from a height and called it mercy.

Pain arrived in waves centered on his right foot. At first there was only numbness, thick and unreal, and then the numbness melted and the fire under it came up all at once. So much for death. So much for rest. So much, generally, for anything good.

Nalla opened his eyes to the office floor and the sight of two scaled things crouched over his foot, chewing.

Einah screamed his name the way she only did when something had already gone too far.

For a second his eyes did not go to the blood.

They went to the room.

Einah against the wall. Desk between them. Glass door behind her. One thing at his foot, another half-turned toward the sound of her voice, the third still near the shadow under the chair. Route to her blocked. Route to the hallway open only if something with a mouth allowed it.

Then he looked at his foot.

For a second there was no thought in him at all. Only the sight catching up to what the room had already counted.

Too big for roaches. Too far from anything that belonged in a building. Black plated backs, ridged with something that caught light like wet shell. Wet clicking legs. Jaws working. And between the plates, where chitin should have been enough, pale ridges of bone pressed outward through the joints — dense, structural, growing where no insect had ever needed a skeleton.

Something moved through his head. Not a thought. A sequence. Four words in a row, unbidden, arriving from a place he couldn't name: scales, hooves, horns, bones. They arrived together and vanished before he could hold them.

His face did something he couldn't stop. Eyes squeezing shut, brow pulling down hard, the whole expression crumpling inward like a fist made of skin — a grimace that looked like pain but wasn't, or was, but not the kind the foot was selling. Something behind the eyes. Something that knew more than he was ready to name.

One of them lifted its head.

Blood on the hooks. His blood.

A strip of him hung there, shivered, vanished.

The thing at his foot was still chewing when the sound hit him a beat later. Wet. Tiny. Tearing. Flesh first. Then tendon. Then something harder. Not cracking. Not chewing the way anything living ought to chew. His stomach clenched so hard it hurt. Nothing came up.

He hauled at the leg with both hands, breath whistling through his teeth.

Nothing.

Again.

Nothing but fire up the shin. White-hot. Blinding.

"Don't look at it." Einah's voice, from somewhere near the wall. Her hand reaching toward him across a distance that might as well have been a canyon, shaking hard enough to blur. "Nalla, don't — just look at me. Look at me."

He looked at the foot instead. Her hand stayed there between them, open on nothing.

"Fuck."

The room shook around the word. Or maybe he did.

Then the shape of the damage came clear. The outer edge of the foot ragged and open. Bone showing through red. Toes gone. Not all gone clean, either. Some gone. Some half gone. Some reduced to a mess his brain kept refusing and then accepting all over again.

Bright pink flashed through him. Einah laughing on the bed while she painted his nails as a joke. Three days before the color chipped off.

Gone now.

Tears burst out of him. Hot. Immediate. He could not have stopped them if someone had put a gun to his head and offered him the moon for trying.

Black ash had drifted over the tile by the sill.

He planted both palms and tried to shove himself backward.

His arms shook. The foot touched tile.

Pain tore straight through him.

He dropped flat again with a sound that was half sob, half scream.

3. Teeth

First Hour

Einah was against the wall.

The third creature was on her chest, bigger than the feeders, its clicking legs spread across the thin cotton of her nightgown while the hooked mouth worked higher.

Not fear. That old freeze. He had seen ordinary roaches buy it from her before thought could interfere.

One hooked leg ripped across the place where her neck became shoulder.

Skin opened.

Blood ran at once, bright and fast, into the collar of her nightgown.

Then silver flashed between the creature and her throat.

Links snapped into the air, wet and silver and wrong. The thing struck and rebounded. Nalla felt the impact inside his own chest a heartbeat later — not a tap, not an echo, a wrench under the sternum. His vision spotted. Pain burst from the foot.

But the line at her shoulder kept spilling.

His eyes stayed on the links for one wrong, empty half-second.

Not miracle. Coverage. Impact transfer. Cost through the sternum. Stable at the throat, failing nowhere yet, diameter too small to reach the wound.

Then Einah made a sound and the human part of him arrived late enough to be ashamed.

Then the sound came. Not a scream. His name. Just his name, bitten in half by the thing on her chest.

"Nal—"

That was worse.

The hooked mouth kept testing the silver at her throat.

Done lying there. Done watching.

Cinnamon. Pepper. Incense burnt too long. The scents rolled through the office so strongly they cut through blood and rot for one impossible second. At the same time the silver links around her throat shivered again, and the pull under his ribs answered.

The creature hit the barrier once more. Warmth left his hands. Color left the edges of his vision. More blood spread beneath his ruined foot.

A breath scraped in and out of him. Blood and incense. Pepper and wet plaster. Pain hammered at the end of his leg, counting the seconds.

He tried to push himself up.

The bad foot folded under him.

Pain burst all the way to the hip and he slammed back down hard enough to bite his own tongue. Blood filled his mouth. For a second the room went white.

No.

He scrabbled blindly instead, hand slapping through blood and ash until his fingers closed around the broken monitor stand. Cold metal. Jagged edge.

The nearer feeder was still at his foot.

He swung from the floor. Awkward. Weak. Missed the head and clipped plated shoulder instead. The thing skittered, turned on him, mouthparts slick and opening.

He hit it again.

This time the stand caught under the jaw and drove the head sideways with a wet crack. He kept shoving until the body kicked itself empty.

The second one leaped for his chest before the first had finished twitching. It hit him claw-first. He went over sideways, the bad foot screaming, and drove one forearm into its throat to keep the jaws off his face. Its breath smelled of wet plaster and drain filth. He found the monitor stand by touch, jammed the broken edge up under the plated jaw, and shoved until the thing spasmed and went loose.

The third was still hammering itself against the barrier around Einah. Each impact rang through the room, dull and metal-deep. With every blow the thing under Nalla's ribs pulled again. Harder now. Deeper. His fingers were going numb. His lips tingled. The blood under him had stopped being warm.

He spat blood onto the tile and missed his own chin. "Coming," he said. The word came out wrecked. "I'm coming."

Nalla dragged himself toward it, leaving blood behind. One pull. Stop. Another. The foot dragging after him. The barrier flickered again. Einah's face was behind it, white with terror and fury.

He drove the broken stand into the hinge of the creature's jaw and held on through the thrashing. When it finally went slack, he stayed braced over it for two breaths longer, waiting for it to move again.

Blood streaked the wall behind Einah to shoulder height. More had soaked through the front of her nightgown and run down her ribs. His own blood crossed hers in dragged red lines from the wreck of his right foot. Black ash kept falling through both and turning the floor to paste.

Einah had one hand clamped over the place where neck became shoulder. Blood came through her fingers anyway.

No.

He dropped the stand and dragged himself to her. The bad foot left a bright trail behind him. By the time he reached the wall, the room was tilting in slow mechanical lurches.

Something below his sternum kept taking from him. Stopping it meant knowing how. He didn't. Einah was bleeding on the other side of silver.

He swallowed once against the blood in his mouth. "Stay with me," he said.

He reached for her and hit silver. The barrier bowed under his palm and held. He tried lower. Higher. Shoved at the curve of the thing. Every place he touched turned him back. Einah jerked on the other side, one hand still clamped over the place where neck became shoulder. Blood came through her fingers anyway.

He was crying. He noticed only when one tear struck the back of his hand and vanished into the silver.

He kept crying. His hands quit shaking.

Einah made a raw little sound and then another. Tears had gathered at the corners of her eyes. Her free hand found the barrier and flattened there, not strong, just desperate.

His forehead nearly touched the silver when he said it. "I'm here," he said.

His eyes skidded across the room and held nowhere for more than half a second. Split feeders. Scale. Bone. The black moon beyond the glass. The silver links trembling around her. The phone on the floor by the desk, dead weight until someone could make a call.

Too far.

Maybe not. Three steps. Four. It did not matter. He was not leaving her boxed inside that thing while he crossed the room for a phone.

He did not look away from her mouth when he said it. "I'm here," he said.

Her palm stayed against the silver. Her mouth opened on air and panic. Another tear slid off his chin and struck the links.

His eyes moved once more. Ash in the blood. The pull under his ribs. Her throat. The links again.

The silver held shape when he focused. Lost brightness when he panicked. Pulled harder when struck. The information arrived clean, obscene in its usefulness, and his face stayed blank around it for half a breath before fear found the room again.

Then the links were all he could see.

He closed his eyes.

When he opened them, he wanted the barrier gone.

It listened.

The links tore loose at once. The drag under his ribs reeled inward so hard it nearly folded him. Einah made a small broken sound when the last link vanished.

He was on her at once.

He tore a strip from the bottom of her nightgown and jammed it hard against the wound. She made a thin sound through her teeth. The cloth darkened at once. He folded more cotton over it and pressed harder. Warmth forced itself between his fingers and ran over his knuckles.

Too fast.

He changed angle. Pressed lower. Higher. Harder. Nothing.

Two fingers slipped from the cloth to the hot slick at the side of her neck. Pulse. Torn skin. The lip of the opening. He changed the pressure by millimeters. Thumb lower. Palm higher. Inward. Again.

Iron, cinnamon, pepper, incense burnt too long. The smell came up off her blood wrong and familiar. He swallowed against it, choked once on a breath that wanted to turn into a sob, and did not let it pull his eyes from the wound.

Blood slipped through the gaps between his fingers, over the heel of his hand, down his wrist. Leaving.

Einah caught a breath and lost it again. His own face had gone wet and ugly by then. Tears. Snot dragged hot under his nose when he sucked air too fast. Her hand found his wrist and locked there, not strong, just desperate.

His voice had dropped so low it was almost just breath. "I'm here," he said.

He stripped the soaked cloth away and set his bare palm over the torn place.

He said it again with his eyes on the wound. "I'm here," he said.

Blood forced itself between his fingers.

His hand tightened.

"Stay."

The room leaned. Black came in at the edges. He pressed harder.

"Stay."

"Stay."