The wind carried whispers.
Not the kind spoken by survivors huddled around dying fires, murmuring half-truths and superstitions. These whispers came from the spaces in between, from the cracks in the world that Kaden could feel but not see—until he did.
He exhaled slowly, adjusting the strap of his pack as he followed Juno through the skeletal remains of what had once been a neighborhood. The houses stood like hollowed-out corpses, windows shattered, walls caved in. The air smelled of dust and something faintly metallic, something Kaden had learned not to question.
Juno walked ahead, keeping a tight grip on the rifle slung across her back. She wasn't much of a talker when the air felt thick like this—when the world pressed down on them, reminding them that reality was no longer solid.
Kaden's gaze flicked to the sky. It had changed again.
The clouds twisted in slow, unnatural spirals, shifting through colors no sky should hold—deep reds bleeding into bruised purples, flickers of gold at the edges, like embers barely contained. It made his skin crawl.
"This place is wrong," he muttered.
Juno didn't stop walking. "It's all wrong. Been wrong for a long time."
But that wasn't what Kaden meant. This place, this exact stretch of ruined street—he had been here before.
A flash of memory hit him.
A child's laughter, high and clear. His mother's voice calling from a porch. The smell of something warm—freshly baked bread?
Then gone.
Kaden stiffened.
Memories didn't work like that. Not anymore.
"Kaden."
Juno's voice pulled him back, sharp, urgent. She had stopped just ahead, shoulders tense, eyes fixed on something in the distance.
He followed her gaze.
The road ahead fractured—not broken like the usual decay of the world, but something else entirely. The asphalt twisted, curling upward in jagged formations, as if reality had tried to fold in on itself and failed. Pieces of the world hovered just slightly off the ground—fragments of pavement, shards of glass, an entire streetlamp suspended in the air at an unnatural angle.
It wasn't just broken.
It was shifting. Changing.
Juno took a slow step back. "We shouldn't be here."
Kaden felt it, too—that pull, that invisible force pressing against his ribs, urging him forward.
His fingers twitched.
Something inside him stirred, the same strange energy that had been growing stronger, the one he tried to ignore. He felt it now, curling under his skin like a living thing, whispering that he could step forward, that he could reach out—
And what?
Fix it?
Or make it worse?
A sudden noise—too sharp, too close.
Kaden turned fast.
The air behind them rippled.
Not wind. Not movement. But something deeper.
Like the world had inhaled.
Then—
A figure emerged.
At first, it was just a shadow, stretched and wrong, sliding across the pavement where no shadow should fall. Then it took shape—tall, humanoid, but the edges of it blurred, flickering between solid and something else entirely. Its limbs moved in jerks, like a puppet with tangled strings.
Juno whispered a curse, hands already on her rifle.
Kaden didn't move. He couldn't.
Because the thing was looking at him.
Not at Juno. Not at the world around them.
At him.
And when it spoke, the voice was his own.