Chapter 2 Capítulo 2

5. Depth

First Hour

Nalla stared at his foot.

Being dragged from the office to the living room had left a blood trail on the floor, and it was humiliating. God, it was.

But that didn't compare to having to beg Einah to bring the cockroach carcasses out with him.

The bandages were white. Too white. Mocking how much red had soaked through before they'd finally gotten the bleeding to stop. Three attempts. The entire first aid kit spread across the coffee table now. Gauze wrappers. Empty antiseptic bottles. Scissors still sticky with blood.

Three toes gone. Just gone. The big one among them. The balance toe. Very instructive. He'd never been much for balance anyway.

The space where they should have been felt wrong, like looking at a sentence with words missing.

He tried to wiggle them anyway.

The phantom sensation came immediately. His brain insisted the toes were still there, just sleeping, just waiting to wake up. The bandages didn't move.

The trash bag with the corpses sat in the corner where Einah had left it, too near to ignore and too far to touch with his good foot. Even from here he could smell them. Rot and something chemical-sweet.

Einah moved through the apartment like a small hurricane, dragging furniture, stacking boxes against the windows, then changing her mind and hauling everything toward the front door instead. One hand stayed clamped over the rough bandage at her neck while the other did the work.

When she reached for the armchair, Nalla tried to get up before she could.

One palm on the floor. The other on the chair seat. Good foot under him. Ruined one dragging wrong behind the wrap. Then the bandaged foot brushed tile and the pain came white and immediate. His knee folded. He went sideways into the floor, shoulder first, breath punched clean out of him.

The wrap had slipped. Fresh blood welled through at once.

He caught the foot in both hands and saw too much of it. The front had been chewed open in ragged sections where three toes used to be. Meat torn into wet strips. One slick glimpse of bone when the cloth shifted. Nothing clean about it. Nothing surgical. A foot half-eaten and still arrogant enough to hurt like it planned to keep him.

Nalla wound the cloth back around the foot. Once. Twice. Too loose. He pulled tighter. Blood found the seams anyway. The fingertips pressing the knot had gone flat grey under the red. Encouraging.

Einah braced the armchair, went back for the sofa, and started shoving it after.

Barricade, Nalla thought, watching her work. She's building a barricade while I'm here.

She could drag furniture. He could sit on the floor rewrapping meat and pretending that counted as help.

Here's the hero, he thought. Unable to stand.

His hand—the one not clamped around the foot—started to shake. A fine tremor. Stupid fingers twitching against the tile, reaching for nothing.

"Fuck," he hissed, and bit the word in half before it became a sob.

His hand wouldn't stop.

"Stop," he said, to himself or the hand or both.

Einah stopped piling furniture with both hands on the sofa back. Her eyes dropped from his face to the hand twitching on the tile.

"You don't have to do this."

"Don't have to do what?"

She crossed the room, crouched, and caught his shaking hand against the tile. Held it there. Her thumb pressed once into the heel of his palm, hard enough to mean stop, not comfort.

"This."

"There's nothing to be done. Not this time."

"There's always something to be done."

No. No. Not when the body won't even—

Something knocked in the bedroom.

Not loud. Barely more than wood settling. Einah's hands stopped on the sofa back.

"What?" The word came out thinner than he meant.

She kept listening. Head angled toward the apartment's far end. "Thought I heard something."

The silence that followed did not help.

She gave him one sharp look, then turned back to the barricade. Faster now. Less tidy. The sofa scraped tile, then the armchair, then three boxes stacked in front of the door. No strategy left in it. Just weight.

He knew it would not help. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth anyway. Nothing came out. His hand shook against the floor, small and useless, while the ruined foot kept pulsing as if it too had an opinion.

By the time Einah stepped back, there was no more furniture worth moving between the door and the rest of them.

She leaned her shoulder into the last box and looked at the gap above it.

"Not enough. Air won't do."

That hurt, because it was practical. Worse, it was correct.

Einah looked back at him then, expecting something like the little collapse after surviving. A breath. A sob. One second where being alive got to matter.

Nalla was staring past her at the gap over the barricade, eyes flat and emptied of everything except measurement.

Her hand tightened once on the box. She said nothing.

Her eyes stayed on the door one second longer. Then she jerked her chin toward the couch and looked down at him on the floor.

"Can you get to the couch?"

He looked at the foot. "Not in one dignified attempt."

"Good. Don't try one."

She crossed to the shelf by the door and reached up without looking, fingers going straight to the worn black notebook wedged between two paperbacks. The pen was clipped inside the cover where he'd left it months ago, back when leaving it there still implied intention.

Nalla frowned. "Now?"

"Now."

She came back and crouched in front of him, one hand still pressed to the bandage at her neck. With the other she shoved the notebook against his chest until his good hand came up to take it.

"If it gets worse, I want it written down."

"Einah—"

She pulled the pen free with her teeth, clicked it, and laid it across the cover.

"You said once panic lies."

He stared at the notebook. The leather had gone smooth where his thumb used to worry the corner. He remembered buying it. Remembered the first page, the weight of the pen, the private arrogance of believing words would always be there when he reached for them.

She set it in his lap. Her fingers stayed there one beat too long before letting go.

"Before we remember wrong."

The barricade filled the doorway. The bedroom stayed quiet in the wrong way. The foot pulsed under the wrap. The notebook lay across his thighs.

He opened it.

Not the old pages. Not yet. He turned past them until he found a blank one.

The paper waited. Clean. Blank. Unreasonably patient.

6. Pulse

First Hour

Nalla's foot was whole. Five toes. The skin smooth and unmarked, as if the attack had never—

He stopped.

Read it.

The lie sat there in wet ink, immediate and embarrassing.

The notebook lay open across his lap. The pen sat in his hand like something borrowed. Fingers stiff. Grey still clinging under the nails where blood had been.

Reports didn't count. Messages didn't count. Notes in the margin of a meeting doc sure as hell didn't count. Writing was where he made the ugliest version of a thing sit still long enough to be looked at. Resentment. Wanting. Shame. Ambition. All the private overflow he had no right to pour into another person.

From the kitchen came the small clink of glass. Einah, giving him room by force while keeping the knife.

Before we remember wrong.

It felt false immediately. Worse than false. Embarrassing. Like trying to lie to a locked door and expecting the handle to feel guilty. He scratched through the line hard enough to roughen the page.

His hand moved again. This time he stopped trying to improve reality and let it tell on him.

The pain in Nalla's foot pulsed like a second heartbeat. Each wave brought back the wet sound of chitin breaking skin. The crack of small bones snapping.

Three toes gone. Not lost. Gone. Gone meant they were rotting in a trash bag three feet away. Gone meant the phantom sensations were lies his nervous system told because it couldn't accept the subtraction.

He'd spent too long wanting a world that sorted people cleanly. Useful or not. Fast enough or meat. Now he was in it and it had taken three toes off him before he'd done anything worth surviving.

The air thickened.

Not enough to change the room. Enough to make the next breath feel late.

Nalla stopped writing.

His hand ached. When had he started gripping the pen so hard? White impressions marked his fingers where he'd squeezed.

The notebook felt warm under his palm. Not burning. Just present. More real than it had any business being.

He looked at what he'd written. The page had not fixed anything. It had only pinned the truth in place. That was closer to relief than lying had managed.

His eyes drifted to the trash bag in the corner.

No decision in it. His hands were already moving.

He set the notebook against one thigh, leaned, regretted the lean at once, and dragged the bag closer by the knot. Rot and that chemical-sweet stink rolled out harder when he opened it. The nearest carcass gave under his thumbs where the plates parted easiest, wet and wrong, as if his hands had known the seam before he found it. His fingers went straight to something round and hard buried under the ruin and brought it free before the rest of him had caught up.

Black. Smooth. Warm. Too warm to have been sitting inside dead meat. The surface swallowed the light instead of giving any back.

He opened the second one the same way. Same seam. Same certainty. By the time thought arrived, there were two dark spheres in his palm, pulsing not with him but with each other — and, unless pain was teaching him new tricks, with the notebook too.

He looked down at his hands as if they belonged to somebody with plans.

A syllable pressed once at the back of his teeth.

Con—

It broke before it could become a word.

His fingers closed around both spheres. Then, before the rest of him could ask why, he shoved them into his pocket.

Einah had come back without his hearing it. Glass in one hand. Knife in the other. Her eyes on him, not the page.

"What did you write?"

He did not answer.

Her gaze dropped to the notebook, then climbed back to his face. The suspicion in it was small, new, and already tired.

A sound came from the bedroom.

Faint. Like something scratching.

Nalla's head snapped toward the far end of the apartment. "You heard that?"

Then it came again.

Not scratching.

Chewing.

Wood being methodically worried apart.

Einah had frozen in the kitchen doorway, glass in one hand, knife in the other. "What was it?"

"Don't know."

They waited.

Silence stretched.

Nalla and Einah stared toward the bedroom end of the hall, waiting hard enough that breathing started to feel optional.

The doorbell rang.

They both jumped. The normal, stupid sound was so jarring after the chewing that for a second neither of them seemed able to place it.

Einah did not move. Her eyes stayed fixed down the hall. "That's Rodrigo."

The bell rang again. More insistent this time.

"Go," Nalla said. His own voice came out thinner than he meant. "But don't take your eyes off that end of the hall."

Einah moved to the door backward, still watching the dark at the apartment's far end. The glass trembled once in her hand. Her fingers fumbled at the lock.

Rodrigo hit the doorway already shouting. "WHERE'S MY FRIEND?" Left shoe gone entirely, blood-soaked sock showing. Jaw bruised dark. A wet stain spreading across his chest. Long hair swaying with the kind of confidence that should have been illegal in a building where things ate people's feet. He was still wearing the good shirt, open at the throat, dressed for a night that had expected admiration instead of blood.

His eyes swept the room, deliberately avoiding the couch where Nalla sat. When they finally landed, he grinned.

"Brought you a present." He held up a single sneaker. The joke landed crooked even in his own mouth. "A shoe. Just one. Turns out there's a discount if you don't buy the pair. You can take advantage of that now."

Nalla watched his friend stride across the room, tall, muscular, moving like the apartment still belonged to people.

"You saw my foot and still came in performing," Nalla muttered. "Very comforting."

Rodrigo waved the shoe like evidence of his genius, then made a quick, stupid feint toward the bandaged foot.

"Rodrigo, don't—" Nalla cursed and flinched back.

Pain shot up his leg. White hot. The room swam for a second, edges going grey.

"Just kidding. I wouldn't do that." Rodrigo pulled back too fast, concern flashing through the mockery. "Would I?"

"You would." Nalla's hands were shaking. He hid them under his thighs.

Behind Rodrigo, Amanda stepped in and closed the door with both hands, quick and deliberate. Her curly hair was escaping its ponytail. She did not announce herself. She was simply there.

Then Rodrigo's eyes found the corpses.

He stopped moving. The grin didn't fall — it froze, which was worse. His jaw worked once, twice. The bravado that had carried him through the door crumbled in silence. His hand went to the doorframe behind him, gripping it like a man who has just realized the floor is not reliable.

Rodrigo's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. He never quite let go of the doorframe. "What the fuck am I looking at?"

Amanda was already moving toward the bodies. She crouched beside the nearest one, knife out, and tipped its head with the blade's flat. Mandibles. Six eyes. Scaled plating. Her face on it stayed the same face she'd use on faulty wiring.

She rolled the carcass an inch farther and leaned in without touching it twice. "How big were they alive?"

Nalla stayed sunk into the couch cushions and watched the knife move instead of the body. His thumb worried the notebook edge without him noticing. "Big enough to eat my foot." The words came out flat. The foot pulsed beneath them.

Rodrigo's eyes dropped to the bandage and came back up too fast. The whole ugly conclusion showed on his face before he could hide it.

"Those were in here?" His hand tightened on the frame. "With you?"

Einah nudged the door shut with her heel and came one step farther into the room, knife still low at her thigh, glass trapped against her ribs in the other hand. "Still are. They're not going anywhere."

Rodrigo let go of the frame and took three steps toward the nearest body, then stopped when his shoe hit something wet. He looked down. Wiped the sole once against the tile like that could fix anything. Looked up again. The color around his mouth had gone grey.

Nalla shifted the bad foot an inch and regretted it immediately. His jaw locked. He looked at the body instead of Rodrigo. "Less than an hour ago."

Rodrigo held still for one beat too long. Then the mask came back — imperfect, rushed, like a coat thrown over pajamas. He smoothed one hand over his jaw because his face had stopped obeying him. "Well. At least you save on shoes now."

Amanda did not look up. She only turned the knife in her hand and kept studying the mandibles. Einah set the glass down on the nearest flat surface without taking her eyes off Rodrigo. Nalla looked at the open notebook in his lap.

Nobody laughed.

The notebook was still open across Nalla's lap.

Three toes gone.

The room, to its credit, did not argue.

7. Blackouts

First Hour

Amanda stopped looking at the bodies.

That should have been comforting. It meant the dead things had become less urgent than the living ones.

The notebook was still open across Nalla's lap when she read the rest of the room in a few hard glances, thumbnail ticking once against the knife handle as if counting failures.

"Can you swallow?" Amanda asked Einah first.

Einah's hand went to the bandage at her neck before the answer did. "Hurts."

"That's not what I asked."

Einah swallowed. The effort showed all the way down her throat. "Yes."

Amanda accepted that with a small nod and crossed to the couch without ceremony. She crouched by Nalla's bandaged foot, followed the blood trail back toward the office with one narrowed look, then peeled back the outer edge of the wrap.

"Based on the bleeding pattern, you lost a lot fast." Her face did not change. "I've seen a foot go septic from less."

Rodrigo looked from the barricade to the blood on the floor and stopped there, one hand pressed over the wet stain on his own chest. "You barricaded the front door with the whole living room."

"It was available," Nalla said.

Einah caught the back of a chair with one hand to steady herself. When she swallowed again, Nalla watched the bandage instead of her face. Nothing fresh spread through the white. He let himself keep breathing.

Amanda pressed where pressing was needed. White pain climbed his leg and nailed itself behind his eyes.

"Cockroaches gave me a manicure," Nalla said through his teeth. "Lost three toes. I'm great."

Amanda stood, knife already back in hand, and crossed to the nearest carcass. One tap of the blade's flat turned up antennae sheared short, segmented shell under the scales, mandibles too long for anything decent.

Nalla looked at the body instead of Rodrigo. The notebook edge had found its way under his thumb again. "Roaches. Less than an hour ago."

Amanda rolled the carcass one inch farther and watched the scales catch the light. "Roaches don't usually grow plating."

"These did." Nalla could still smell them from the couch. Rot and that chemical-sweet reek that made the back of his tongue think of poison and kitchens. "And opinions."

Rodrigo glanced at Einah's throat at last. "How bad is that?"

She gave him the stubborn little calm she used when panic would only waste oxygen. "Bad enough to be boring later."

Amanda did not look up from the body. "If it starts bleeding again, it stops being boring immediately."

"Useful," Nalla muttered. "Comforting. Keep both coming."

Rodrigo moved to the window in three long steps, then stopped at the curtain and looked back at the room as if wanting somebody to veto him.

No one did.

"So what," he asked, fingers already hooked in the fabric, "there are more of those things out there?"

Nalla rubbed the heel of one hand over his mouth. "The sky went black at midnight. The moon went black with it. I saw something from the balcony big enough to make the trees look decorative." His eyes flicked toward the curtain. "Open it if you want the bigger problem."

Rodrigo pulled it aside.

Something crossed the glass fast enough to steal the room's light for a heartbeat: a black plated flank slick with city glow and one jointed limb folded close against it, larger than the whole window wanted to admit.

Far below, somewhere between the parking lot and the tree line, something flashed green once and went out.

Fourteenth floor in a seventeen-story building. Too high for anything that belonged in a city, and still not high enough. The pane gave a small shudder in its wake.

Rodrigo jumped back hard enough to clip the armchair with his calf. "What the fuck was that?"

Amanda was up before the question finished, knife in hand again. "How big?"

"Too big." Rodrigo kept looking at the curtain instead of touching it again. "Way too fucking big."

Nalla swallowed against the taste that rose in his throat. "Saw one earlier from the balcony. Before they came in."

Einah dragged the curtain fully shut with her free hand. "I've been trying my parents."

Rodrigo looked at her.

"I told them to come here if they can." She pulled the phone away, checked the dead screen, and put it back to her ear anyway. One hand still hovered near the bandage at her neck, as if skin might need supervision now. "If we're trapped, we stay trapped together. Call yours."

Amanda was already digging her phone from her pocket. Her thumb stalled over one name for half a beat before she called. Rodrigo followed a beat later, slower, like the instruction had to pass through shock before becoming action.

No one got a ring.

No one got a voice.

Just dead glass, dead tone, or nothing at all.

Amanda turned the dead screen into her palm and closed her fingers around it once before lowering her hand.

Nalla watched all three of them fail at once and felt the old shape of the problem settle into place. Not explanation. Recognition.

Einah lowered her own phone. Her eyes did not leave his face. "First you stop the bleeding in my neck and don't tell me how. Now you're making that face again."

"I got attacked by roaches in my apartment," he said. "If I have a face for this, it's new on me."

Amanda lowered her dead phone first. "This is getting strange. You sound like you know more than you're saying."

He looked at the notebook instead of her. Useful object. Silent object. Much easier than the woman bleeding through a bandage three feet away and acting like the room had not almost watched her die.

Bad question. Nalla's hand found the couch edge instead of an answer.

Rodrigo saved him by opening his mouth first. "Name it whatever you want. I lost time. I was standing there and then I wasn't. Eyes open the whole time. Body locked. Then it had me somewhere else."

Einah folded her arms carefully, phone trapped in one hand. "It wasn't just dark."

Rodrigo shook his head. "No."

"What did you see?" Her voice had gone quieter now. More careful.

He looked at the floor between his shoes when the answer came. "Myself."

No one answered fast enough. That was answer enough.

He started pacing again. Not the old perimeter. Smaller now. Frayed. "Not in a mirror. Not like that. I was inside something bigger. Massive. Not human. Walking on all fours." His hand went through his hair and stayed there. "More sensation than memory. Strength. Speed. Like the whole world had gotten small around me."

Nalla's jaw tightened. His fingers pressed into the couch cushion until the knuckles ached. He knew the shape of what Rodrigo was describing even if he refused the details.

"Despertar," he said before he could stop himself.

Rodrigo stopped pacing. "A what?"

Bad word. Too late now.

"A guess," Nalla said.

Amanda was watching him instead of Rodrigo.

"That's what I mean," she said quietly. "That face. The one that isn't about the foot."

His hand bit harder into the couch edge. "It's about the foot."

She did not believe him. She did not press.

Rodrigo glanced from one of them to the other, then back to the shut curtain. "There was something else." He swallowed. "It felt like whatever had me was checking fit. Like it was trying me on."

Chosen, Nalla thought. Not because he believed it. Because that was exactly the kind of stupid word Rodrigo would use for terror if terror offered him a flattering angle.

As if on cue, Rodrigo said it out loud. "Chosen."

Amanda made a small sound through her nose. Not agreement. Not dismissal either.

Einah's hand had gone back to her neck. "I froze in the stairwell. Saw something outside. Couldn't move."

Amanda lowered her eyes to the dead phone in her palm. "I saw it too."

Three blackouts. Same shape. Same stolen time.

No one had anything useful to do with that except reach again for furniture and objects and positions. Better to move a table than stand there and understand what had just been said.

The barricade held, which should have been comforting. It wasn't.

Nalla's foot kept pulsing under the bandage. Each pulse said the same useful thing: walls were lies.

Einah leaned past the kitchen split to glance toward the bedroom end of the apartment. "We should board that side too. If they came through the front—"

She was already reaching for the narrow console table by the wall. Rodrigo dragged the armchair out of the front-door pile with one hand and shoved the sofa harder against the door with the other, trading tidy for weight. Beyond it, the tree line sat too high against the dark.

Then came the sound.

Nalla's breath caught.

Not from the front door.

Behind them.

The bedroom.

Amanda's hand found the knife before anyone else moved. "Bedroom."

Nalla froze. The sound was small enough to be domestic, if you hated yourself and all language. A patient little crunch. Wood giving way in measured bites.

Rodrigo stopped pacing. His eyes went first to the front door, because of course they did. Exit calculation. Always flattering to see instinct in its underwear.

Rodrigo's whisper barely cleared his teeth. "That's eating something."

Nalla swallowed once and failed to get any moisture for it. "The frame." The word came out thin. The foot pulsed with each crunch, as if the sound had found a nerve and was testing it for purchase.

Einah listened again, head angled, one hand on the bandage at her throat. "Not the door?"

Crunch. Pause. Scrape.

The sound was not random. Not scratching. Not panic. It moved along a line, stopped, worried at one point, then moved again. Methodical. Efficient. The door was not being attacked. It was being solved.

"Not the door," Nalla said. "The frame."

Amanda's face did not change. Somehow that made it worse. She only shifted the knife higher in her grip. "I knew it."

"You knew they were going to eat through the bedroom?" Rodrigo hissed, his body already angled toward the front door. Not running. Not yet. But his feet had cast their vote before the rest of him was done pretending.

"I knew there'd be a worse option than the front door."

Einah moved toward the kitchen.

Nalla got one hand off the couch before the pain took the idea back. "Don't."

"I need something heavier than a knife." Her free hand closed around the heaviest pan on the counter.

"Don't go alone."

His eyes went to her bandage before her face. Neck-to-shoulder wound. Blood slowed but not stopped. Left arm usable. Grip weak on the pan. Range short if the thing came low.

Only after the inventory did he ask, "Does it hurt when you lift?"

Einah's mouth changed by less than a word. She had seen the order of it. Wound, function, question.

She gave him one look. No smile. No bright little lie dressed up as hope. Just the look of a woman who had already counted the seconds and found too few. "Then come with me."

That landed where she meant it to land.

Nalla tried to move.

Bad plan.

The foot answered with white pain.

Jaw locked.

Hand clamped around the couch edge.

One inch. Maybe two.

Then nothing.

The sound paused.

Everyone went still.

Crunch.

The bedroom door trembled in its frame.

Not much, but enough.

The wood cracked once, sharp as a knuckle breaking.

8. Breach

First Hour

The bedroom door gave way without drama.

It sagged.

For half a second it still looked whole. Then the frame breathed dust. The top hinge tilted in wood that had no wood left inside it. A strip of trim slid down in one piece and hit the tile as brown powder. The door folded out of the opening, not broken exactly, emptied.

Nalla flinched so hard the ruined foot hit the floor.

White pain. No thought. Just teeth, breath, hand clawing at the couch edge while the room tried to tilt him off the earth.

The thing that came through was not one of the ones from before.

It came in low, belly near the tile, shoulders dipped and hindquarters high, like it had not decided whether it meant to crawl or pounce. Smaller than the roaches. Big-dog small, which was still too much creature for one doorway.

Pale. Translucent.

Its gut moved under the skin in slow dark threads, full of wood dust and something wetter. Scales plated the head in dirty little rows. Two horns curved from the skull like bad handles.

The feet ended in small black hooves that clicked once on the tile. Beneath the chitin, white bone showed where no insect skeleton should exist, a private architecture being built from the inside because apparently outside armor had offended it on principle.

A second came behind it. Then a third. A fourth worked itself half out of a hollow line in the frame, mandibles dusted brown. Beside it, the wall blistered open and a fifth pale head pushed through plaster that had been solid ten seconds ago.

Amanda breathed the word more than said it. "Oh."

Not fear. Not surprise. Confirmation.

At first, the creatures kept chewing.

The frame. The trim. The soft inside of the wall.

Then the first one lifted its head.

Something under Nalla's ribs answered before his eyes understood what had changed.

The pale heads turned toward him. Toward Rodrigo. Toward living meat with something under it that the new world apparently considered a dinner bell.

The first creature did not rush them.

It tested.

One hoof touched the threshold. Pulled back. Mandibles clicked through wood dust. Another tapped the hollow frame. The second creature shifted sideways, pale gut pulsing, searching for a cleaner line.

Rodrigo barely moved his mouth. "They stopped eating the door." His eyes stayed on the second creature's pulsing gut, as if looking away would let it cross the room.

Nalla did not take his eyes off the tapping mandibles. "They're thinking." The words made the ruined foot burn harder, as though even the missing parts understood the upgrade.

Rodrigo made a small sound that wanted to become something clever and died young. The mandibles clicked over it until even his mouth understood the market was bad.

The chainwork between them and death had started to hum like a bad tooth.

Not a wall. Not a shield. Definitely not a miracle. Those asked less from the soft parts. This thing pulled through his chest in crooked links, silver flashes showing and vanishing in the air while the creatures worked at it from the other side.

Three of them now.

No. Four.

No. Five.

Five. Counting past that seemed ambitious. His foot kept interrupting.

White pain. Black edge. Blood under the bandage, warm and spreading where warmth had no business being. Every time the creatures struck the chainwork, the force traveled through the room, through the floor, through the ruined place where his toes had been, and up into his skull. Something hot slipped from one nostril. He tasted iron.

Nalla bit down until his jaw hurt.

He tried to shift his weight. Failed. The ruined foot gave him a white flash and nothing useful. The notebook slid off his lap and landed open on the couch beside his thigh, pages fluttering once in the air that stank of chewed wood and acid.

He tried to lift his hands. The fingers twitched, once, pathetic as a dying insect.

The first creature spat acid at the air. It hissed over nothing. The links flickered, one after another, like a necklace being dragged through boiling water. A second creature tapped after it, not hard. Precise. Testing what the acid had softened. The third moved to the wall beside the bedroom frame and started to saw.

Not rage. Not hunger.

Work.

Bad craft. Too many angles, one cripple.

"Nalla," Einah said.

He did not look at her. Eyes on the acid hissing against nothing, on the links flickering where the barrier thinned. If he looked at her, he would look at the blood on her leg, the kitchen knife in her hand, the place where her smile should have been and was not. He had enough problems without inventorying the death of optimism.

"I know," he said.

"No, you don't." Amanda's voice came from the left, flat enough to be used as a shelf. "The one by the wall is not scraping. It's cutting around you."

Nalla looked.

She was right.

Horrible habit, Amanda had. Being right in precisely the least comforting direction.

The creature at the wall had opened its four-way mouth against the plaster, mandibles flexing north, south, east, west. Powder fell in soft little drifts. The hole was small.

The darkness behind it was not. Nalla's stomach tightened so hard the room narrowed to the chewing.

The barrier covered the doorway, if covered was the word for a thing Nalla had no memory of choosing and no idea how to widen. It did not cover human arrogance, cheap plaster, or whichever engineer had once signed off on this building and gone home proud. Nalla's throat tightened around the stupidity of it.

"Rodrigo," Nalla said.

Rodrigo sat with his back against the sofa, one hand pressed to his bleeding chest, eyes flicking between every exit that no longer existed.

Every exit said no.

He had the look of a man who had seen the ending too early and hated it.

"Rodrigo."

"I heard you the first time." His voice came out sharp. Good. Sharp was better than empty. Sharp meant there was still a man in there, even if the man was mostly trying to crawl out of his own skin.

Nalla opened his mouth. Closed it. His teeth pressed into his lower lip hard enough to leave marks. Something was rising in his chest — not the barrier, not pain — information. The kind that arrived without being invited, without being earned, without leaving a return address.

Nalla held his gaze.

"I need you to do something."