The impact knocked the breath from his lungs—not onto concrete or grass, but onto something unnervingly smooth, like vellum stretched taut over infinity. Above them, the sky wasn't just empty; it *lacked the concept* of clouds, stars, or even color, existing only as the absence of inscription. Lin rolled onto her side, her glasses cracked but her eyes terrifyingly alert.
"Check your pockets," she whispered.
He reached for the brokerage statements—only to freeze. The fabric of his jacket felt wrong, not in texture but in *definition*, as if someone had erased the descriptors. No seams, no stitching, just *the idea* of cloth holding form. His fingers closed around a single sheet of paper. Blank.
Lin sat up, peeling back her sleeve. The equations she'd carved into her forearm were gone, the skin smooth except for three parallel scratches that might have been a word once. "We're in the draft folder," she said. "The place scenes go when they're cut but not yet deleted."
A sound like a pencil snapping echoed in the distance. Zhang stood twenty feet away, his outline flickering between two versions—the novel's golden boy and something thinner, sharper, his edges pixelated as if mid-render. His mouth moved, but the words arrived late and mismatched: "—ink tastes like—" / "—they're listening through the—"
Lin grabbed a handful of the ground. It tore like wet paper, revealing darkness beneath that wasn't empty space but *unwritten potential*. She shoved the scrap into Zhang's shuddering hands. "Hold this. It's your continuity."
The scrap blackened where his fingers touched it, lines of text erupting across the surface like veins: *[CHARACTER #0421: MEMORY FRAGMENT RECOVERED]*. Zhang gasped as his form stabilized, the two versions of him collapsing into one—a third iteration, unfamiliar to both the novel and reality.
Another snap. Closer this time.
Lin whirled, her cracked glasses reflecting movement in the void—not proofreaders, but *shadows of them*, their pens dragging eraser trails across the horizon. "They're pruning the draft," she hissed. "We need to—"
The ground rippled. A sentence surfaced briefly in the texture beneath their feet: *The three stood together for the first time without roles to play.* Then it dissolved, leaving behind a sticky residue that smelled like drying ink.
Zhang clutched the blackened scrap to his chest. "What happens if they reach us here?"
Lin's smile was all teeth. "We become footnotes."
A pen stroke lashed across the ground, severing the space where Zhang's shadow should have been. He stumbled, his form blurring again—but this time, the instability revealed something beneath: a single line of glowing code where his spine should be. *[PROTAGONIST.EXE CORRUPTED]*.
Lin didn't hesitate. She ripped the scrap from his hands and pressed it against his chest like a bandage over a wound. The code flared brighter, burning through his shirt to brand itself onto his skin.
The shadows paused.
For the first time, there was silence without the hum of narration.
He reached for Lin's wrist—not to stop her, but to trace the scratches on her arm with his thumb. Three strokes. Vertical. Not random marks, but radical strokes from a kanji half-formed. "You knew," he breathed. "You've been here before."
Lin's fingers interlaced with his, their grip smudging the edges where skin met void. "Not here," she corrected. "But between the lines."
Above them, the blank sky cracked open like a spine.
And began to bleed words.