The arcology rose above the slums like a monument to other people's lives.
Its lower levels caught the sun and reflected it outward, throwing light back into the city. Everything beneath it lived in shadow. The slums had grown there not because anyone planned it that way, but because shade mattered. Shade meant sleep. Shade meant the heat didn't peel the skin off your thoughts by noon.
Rafael liked to stand on the fire escape in the evenings and look up at the mile high structure. From certain angles, you could almost convince yourself you were part of it. That you lived close enough to matter.
He knew better.
Work came when it came. Money disappeared faster than it arrived. Marisol worried in quiet, careful ways, rationing stress the way other people rationed food. The kids learned early not to ask for things that would require explanations.
Lucas learned fastest.
He was fourteen and already knew how to read a room for exits. He knew which streets shifted from neutral to hostile after dark. He'd lost a friend two months earlier—wrong place, wrong night, nothing heroic about it. People talked about it for a week, then stopped.
Lucas didn't stop.
When the clinic opened two blocks over, Rafael barely noticed at first. Another gray-market operation. Another promise painted on a cracked wall. But the guys at the bar talked about it. Not loudly. Not excitedly.
Relieved.
They said it helped them sleep. Took the edge off without making them stupid. One guy said it felt like someone had turned the volume down on his head.
"Patch, not pills," the Doc told Rafael when he finally went. The clinic smelled like disinfectant and desperation. "Slow release. Mild stuff. Nootropics. Mood stabilizers. Better than drinking yourself stupid every night."
Rafael thought of Lucas pacing the apartment. Of Marisol staring at bills like they might blink first.
"How much?" he asked.
The patch went on at the base of the neck. Cool at first. Forgettable.
The first night, everyone slept.
Really slept.
Marisol woke up smiling at nothing. Ines hummed while brushing her teeth. Even Lucas laughed at a dumb joke Rafael told without looking at him, like the laughter slipped out before he could stop it.
"It's working," Marisol said, half-disbelieving.
Rafael nodded. He felt lighter. Like the world hadn't changed, but he could stand inside it without bracing.
The neighborhood felt different too. Quieter. Less shouting at night. Fewer arguments bleeding through the walls.
Maybe everyone was patching.
The first strange thing happened two days later.
Ines screamed from the bathroom.
Marisol ran, heart already racing, only to find her daughter standing on the bathmat, giggling nervously at her own reflection.
"I thought someone was outside," Ines said. "In the mirror. Like someone was peeking."
Marisol checked the frosted window. Nothing but the blur of the alley and the flicker of a broken light.
"Just your imagination," she said gently.
Ines nodded. "Yeah. Probably."
But when she leaned close again, she pointed.
"There," she said. "See?"
Marisol hesitated.
For a second—just a second—the distortion in the glass did look like something. Two darker spots where the grime clung thicker. A suggestion of symmetry.
Then it was gone.
Marisol laughed it off. "You've been watching too much junk."
Ines shrugged and forgot about it.
Lucas didn't.
He stood in the hallway afterward, staring at the bathroom door long after everyone else moved on.
Over the next week, little things happened.
Rafael thought he saw movement in the corner of his eye while cooking. Turned. Nothing there. Marisol caught herself pausing in doorways, feeling watched, then feeling foolish for it. Ines talked about "faces" in the walls once, then stopped when no one reacted.
They all dismissed it.
Lucas couldn't.
At school, at home, outside—he felt it building. The sensation that attention was pooling where it shouldn't. That if he stayed still long enough, something would finish assembling.
The patch smoothed his thoughts, but it didn't quiet the fear. It flattened it, spread it thin, made it harder to argue with.
He started closing his curtains. Then his door.
"Relax," Rafael told him. "You're safe here."
Lucas nodded, but he didn't believe it.
Because safety didn't stop the watching.
And the eyes, when they came, didn't look imaginary to him at all.
Lucas started walking longer routes home.
Not consciously at first. Just small detours. Streets with better lighting. Alleys that felt less tight. He told himself it was smarter that way. Careful wasn't the same thing as afraid.
But the feeling followed him.
It wasn't the gangs themselves. He knew where they were. He knew which corners to avoid, which colors meant trouble, which looks were invitations and which were warnings. That part of the world made sense.
What didn't make sense was the watching.
It came in pieces. Reflections in windows that didn't line up with his movement. Darkened doorways that felt occupied even when they weren't. The sensation that if he stopped walking, something behind him would finish forming.
At home, the patch took the edge off. His thoughts smoothed. The tight coil in his chest loosened. He laughed more easily with Ines. Slept deeper. Dreamed less.
Outside, the patch made it worse.
The calm dulled his instincts without quieting the fear underneath them. The fear leaked out sideways, attaching itself to shapes and shadows and patterns that didn't resolve when he stared directly at them.
The eyes started to get clearer.
Not everywhere. Not all the time. Just in places where stress pooled.
In the seams between buildings. In the cracked paint of old storefronts. In the oily rainbow sheen on puddles left by leaking pipes. Always low. Always watching from where no one would normally look.
Once, walking past a shuttered market, he stopped cold.
Three dark ovals stared back at him from the corrugated metal door. Too evenly spaced. Too symmetrical.
A passing bus rattled the street. The door vibrated. The shapes broke apart into nothing more than rust and shadow.
Lucas stood there breathing hard, heart pounding, palms slick with sweat.
"Get a grip," he muttered.
But the words didn't help anymore.
The night it happened was hot even for the slums. The air pressed close, thick with exhaust and cooking grease and damp concrete. The arcology loomed overhead, tall as a mountain, its lights blinking in patterns Lucas had never bothered to learn. Home to millions. Millions of people with better lives than he could ever achieve.
He took the long way home.
He shouldn't have.
The eyes appeared all at once.
They opened in the walls as he walked, sliding into focus like lenses snapping into place. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Watching from every surface that could hold a shadow.
Lucas froze.
His breath came shallow and fast. The patch tried to steady him, flattening the spike of terror just enough to keep him conscious, just enough to trap him inside it.
They're not real, he told himself.
But they were real enough to see.
He bolted.
His feet carried him forward before his mind caught up. He ran straight across the invisible line he'd always avoided, straight into the edge of gang turf.
Shouts erupted.
Figures emerged from doorways and alleys, hands already moving toward weapons. A couple of them wore the same dull patch at the base of the neck. Lucas registered it distantly, like noticing the color of someone's shoes as they raise a gun.
"Hey!" someone yelled. "Stop!"
Lucas couldn't.
The eyes followed him, clustering tighter now, pressing in from every direction. They clung to the gang members too, blooming across their faces and shoulders, smearing their outlines until it looked like they were surrounded.
The men shouted again, voices cracking with sudden, inexplicable fear.
"What the hell is that?" one of them screamed.
They raised their guns.
But they weren't aiming at Lucas.
They were aiming at the space around him.
Lucas saw it and understood the worst possible thing at exactly the wrong moment.
They see them too.
That thought shattered whatever control he had left.
He swerved, trying to escape the watching, trying to outrun the eyes that clung to him like a second skin.
The street opened up in front of him.
The auto-bus came out of nowhere.
There was no scream this time. Just the heavy, hollow sound of impact, metal on flesh, and then the sickening drag as the bus braked too late.
The eyes vanished.
The gang members stood frozen, guns lowered, staring at the empty space where they'd been aiming.
On the pavement, Lucas lay still.
By the time the sirens arrived, the story had already settled into place.
A scared kid. Gang territory. A tragic mistake.
No one mentioned the eyes.
The patches stayed on.
And somewhere beneath the arcology, the shadows watched nothing at all.
The incident didn't make the news.
It never did.
But it did make its way into rooms where patterns were tracked instead of headlines.
———
"Another one?" Loki asked, leaning back against the glass table as if the city below were a joke he'd heard too many times.
The screen between them showed a map. No labels. Just heat blooms. Stress indices. Adoption curves. Tiny, ugly spikes in places no one important lived.
Hades didn't look at him. He was watching the telemetry scroll past, brow furrowed.
"Another misattributed death," Hades said. "Yes."
"Gang violence?" Loki guessed.
"Transportation accident," Hades replied. "Secondary panic response. Multiple witnesses. Shared perceptual distortion."
Loki's smile thinned. "That's the third this month."
"Fourth," Hades corrected. "The first one didn't register cleanly. The signal collapsed too fast."
Loki leaned forward now. "Cheap lace?"
Hades exhaled. "Calling it lace is generous. This is… scaffolding. Incomplete. Whoever released it didn't build in error correction."
"And it's spreading," Loki said, already knowing the answer.
"Yes."
"Voluntarily?"
"People are paying for it."
Loki laughed once, sharp. "Of course they are."
Hades finally looked up. "If this continues, I won't be able to tell the difference between a dead mind and a damaged one."
"Can't you already?" Loki asked.
Hades's expression darkened. "I shouldn't have to."
The map pulsed again.
Somewhere in the slums, a family went quiet.
———
The apartment felt smaller without Lucas. Like the walls had leaned in to listen.
Marisol sat at the kitchen table long after the food went cold. Her hands were folded tightly in front of her, knuckles pale. She hadn't cried yet. The tears hovered just out of reach, as if her body couldn't decide whether it was allowed.
Rafael stood at the window, staring at nothing. The patch was still at the base of his neck. He hadn't thought to remove it. He wasn't sure what would happen if he did.
Ines slept in Lucas's bed.
She'd asked if she could. No one had told her no.
"They said it was quick," Rafael said eventually. The words felt borrowed. Like something he'd heard someone else say. "They said he didn't suffer."
Marisol nodded without looking up.
"They didn't see what he saw," she said.
Rafael turned. "Marisol—"
"He told me," she went on. Her voice was steady, too steady. "He said he was being watched. I told him he was imagining it."
Silence settled between them, heavy and final.
Ines whimpered in her sleep and rolled onto her side.
Marisol stood and walked to the hallway. She stopped in front of the bathroom mirror.
For just a moment, she thought she saw something behind her reflection.
She didn't look twice.
———
Lucas was still running.
He didn't remember the impact.
He remembered motion. The tearing rush of air. The way the world fractured into brightness and noise and then—
Stillness.
He tried to breathe.
Nothing happened.
He tried to open his eyes.
There were too many.
Eyes everywhere. Not watching him—made of him. Fear had shape now. Shock had depth. Surprise stretched outward in a thousand directions at once.
He felt himself pulling upward, unraveling into signal and residue and raw impression. There was a sense of ascent, of something vast and waiting.
For a moment, he thought he was being saved.
Then the climb stuttered.
The connection thinned. Pieces of him smeared and lagged. Thoughts didn't complete. Memories tried to assemble and collapsed into fragments: his mother's voice, the heat of the street, the eyes, the eyes, the eyes—
Something immense loomed ahead.
Dark. Still. Patient.
Lucas reached for it, not with hands but with everything he had left.
The signal tore.
Most of him fell away.
What remained was not Lucas.
It was fear without context. Motion without direction. Awareness stripped of history. A shadow made of staring.
Hades watched the fragment fail to cohere.
The upload dissolved, spilling its remnants into the deeper layers where incomplete things went to rest.
"No," Hades murmured. Not in anger. In regret.
The shadow drifted, unfinished, its many eyes opening and closing without focus.
It did not know where it was.
It did not know what it was.
It only knew it was still being watched.