BECKY POV
The shift at the diner had been a brutal six-hour marathon of spilled coffee and demanding tourists, and all I wanted was to crawl into bed and forget that Jorgen City existed. The night air was thick, carrying that weird, wooly heaviness June and I had joked about earlier. It felt like walking through invisible cobwebs. I pulled my jacket tighter, the streetlights flickering with a rhythmic, sickly buzz that made my skin crawl.
I was cutting through the old district, a shortcut that usually felt safe enough, when I heard it.
It was a sound that didn't belong in the city's mechanical hum. A low, ragged sob. It was the sound of a woman weeping, so full of genuine, soul-crushing despair that it bypassed my "stranger danger" reflexes and hit me straight in the gut. It sounded close, like she was right around the next corner, yet somehow distant, as if the sound were traveling through a long, hollow pipe.
"Hello?" I called out, my voice sounding small and fragile against the damp brick walls. "Is someone there? Are you okay?"
The sobbing didn't stop. It led me down an alleyway I'd never noticed before, terminating at the iron gates of a run-down church. The stone was blackened by soot and time, the stained glass long ago replaced by plywood and shadow. The weeping was coming from inside.
I pushed the heavy oak doors. They groaned on rusted hinges, revealing a sanctuary that smelled of stagnant water and old incense. The only light came from a few guttering candles near the altar. There, in the very center of the aisle, sat a woman. She was dressed in the heavy, flowing black robes of a nun, her head bowed so low her chin touched her chest. Her face was buried deep in her palms, her shoulders shaking with those rhythmic, terrible sobs.
"Excuse me?" I stepped into the nave, my heart hammering against my ribs. "Ma'am? Do you need help? I can call someone."
I walked deeper into the church, the sound of my sneakers on the stone floor sounding like gunshots. I had just passed the third row of pews when it happened.
SLAM.
The heavy oak doors behind me swung shut with a violence that shook the floorboards. I whirled around, heart in my throat, but the entrance was sealed. There was no wind. No one was there. Just the dead weight of wood against stone.
"Okay," I whispered, my breath hitching. "Not funny. June, if this is a prank, I'm going to kill you."
Silence. Even the sobbing had stopped.
I felt a cold sensation on my forehead. A single, heavy drop had landed right between my eyes. I reached up, wiping it away with my thumb, expecting the lukewarm leak of a rainy roof. I looked at my hand.
It wasn't water. It was a thick, viscous crimson. The smell hit me a second later—the metallic, copper tang of fresh blood.
My stomach did a slow, nauseating flip. I didn't want to look up. Every instinct I had screamed at me to keep my eyes on the floor, to find a way out, to crawl through the floorboards if I had to. But my neck felt like it was being pulled by invisible wires. I forced my head upward, my breath hitching in a jagged sob of my own.
I didn't scream. I couldn't. The air in my lungs simply vanished.
Tied to the rafters with what looked like translucent, pulsing veins were people. At least a dozen of them. They were bundled together like grotesque cocoons, their skin a translucent, waxy white. They looked like hollowed-out husks, their eyes sunken and their mouths frozen in silent, dry gasps. I recognized a few faces from the news—the missing citizens. They were being held aloft, their life force—their blood—being sucked dry by the very vines that held them.
The blood I'd wiped from my forehead was just an overflow. A leak from the harvest.
Panic, cold and absolute, took hold of my limbs. I turned to bolt for the door, my legs feeling like leaden weights. I didn't care if the doors were locked; I was going to break them down. I was going to scream until the "prodigies" heard me. I was going to—
The nun was there.
She wasn't at the altar anymore. She was standing directly in front of the exit, her back to the wood. She was taller than she had looked while kneeling, her black robes billowing in a wind that didn't exist. Her hands were still over her face, her long, pale fingers interlaced across her features.
"Welcome to your new home, kind girl."
Her voice didn't sound like a woman's. It sounded like the chime I'd heard on the news—a melodic, vibrating resonance that made the marrow in my bones ache. It was beautiful and utterly hollow.
"Please," I gasped, my knees finally giving out. I collapsed onto the cold stone, my hands scraping against the grit. "Please, let me go. I won't tell anyone. I promise. I just want to go home."
"Home is where the pulse is steady," the nun whispered. She began to move toward me, not walking, but gliding across the floor. Her face remained covered, but I could feel her gaze—cold, violet, and hungry—pressing through the gaps in her fingers. "The city is so noisy, Becky. So full of chaotic, wasted heat. Here, you will be part of something... quiet."
I tried to scramble backward, but my body wouldn't obey. The "wool" in the air had turned into a physical weight, pressing down on my shoulders until my forehead touched the floor. I could feel the presence of the things in the rafters—the rhythmic, wet throb of the vines as they transported the stolen blood toward the altar.
The nun stopped inches from me. The smell of the sea—that sickly, rotting violet scent from the coast—was overwhelming now.
"Don't be afraid," she said, her voice a chime that vibrated in my very skull. "The others were afraid at first. But now they are the song. You have a very bright resonance, Becky. June Miller's friend. You will make a fine addition to the choir."
June. My heart spiked at the mention of her name. How did this thing know?
"Leave her alone," I croaked, my voice breaking. "Don't you touch her."
The nun tilted her head, her fingers shifting just enough for me to see a flash of what lay beneath. There was no skin. Just a swirling, translucent violet void, pulsating with the same rhythm as the things in the ceiling.
"June is already being watched," the nun whispered. "The sun and the moon have taken an interest in her. But you? You belong to the deep."
The intense, localized fear finally became too much. My vision began to fray at the edges, the flickering candlelight stretching into long, distorted spears of gold. The last thing I felt was a cold, wet vine brushing against the back of my neck, and the melodic, terrifying chime of the nun's laughter echoing in the hollow space of the church.
Everything went black.