The burn on his arm should have been screaming.
It had been hours since the fire licked across his skin, hours since he buried the boy in silver grass and walked away from another grave he couldn't prevent. By all rights, the wound should have been a constant presence, a voice of pain demanding attention with every movement. Instead, it felt cold.
That was the wrong part. Not the absence of pain, but the presence of something else. A coldness that seeped through the burned flesh like frost spreading across a window, numbing the damage in ways that had nothing to do with healing as he understood it. He had stopped to look at the wound once, pulling back the singed sleeve of his jacket to examine the angry red stripe across his forearm. The skin was damaged, clearly damaged, but beneath the surface he could almost see threads of silver tracing patterns through the injury, weaving around the ruined tissue like they were trying to remember what the skin had looked like before.
He didn't understand it. He was beginning to understand that he didn't need to understand it, not yet. The cold sensation had kept him alive this long, had guided him through collapsing buildings and shadowed streets and the death of a girl who had shared peaches with him in a ruined store. If it wanted to work on his arm while he walked, he would let it.
The pull in his chest had led him to another pharmacy.
This one was intact, or close enough. The windows were cracked but not broken, the door hanging open on hinges that had been wrenched but not torn free. Someone had been here before, the shelves showed gaps where supplies had been taken, but the scavengers had been hurried, careless. They had missed things.
Gray moved through the aisles with the careful attention of someone who had learned that survival lived in the details. Antibiotics, half a bottle, tucked behind a fallen display. Bandages, a roll that had rolled under a shelf and been forgotten. Painkillers, a handful of pills scattered across the floor like someone had grabbed a bottle and run. He gathered what he could find, stuffing supplies into the dead woman's bag he had taken to carrying, his movements automatic while his mind wandered.
The burn on his arm pulsed with cold.
He paused, looking around the pharmacy, and felt the cold sensation sharpen into something like warning. The threads flickered at the edges of his vision, not fully manifesting but present, suggesting patterns he couldn't quite see. Something was different about this place.
The mirrors.
They were everywhere. Behind the counters, on the walls, even a few standing in corners where they had fallen and been propped back up by hands that weren't his. Pharmacies needed mirrors, he supposed. People needed to see themselves when they were sick, needed to check symptoms, needed to watch their own faces while they asked questions they were too embarrassed to speak aloud.
But the mirrors in this pharmacy were showing things that weren't there.
He noticed it first in a small hand mirror lying on a counter, its surface cracked but still reflective. When he looked into it, he saw his own face, exhausted and hollow-eyed, but behind him, reflected in the glass, stood a figure that wasn't in the room. A woman, her features blurred, her hands raised as if reaching for something she couldn't quite touch.
He spun around. The space behind him was empty.
The cold sensation pulsed, and the threads flickered stronger. He looked back at the mirror, and the woman was still there, still reaching, her mouth moving in words he couldn't hear. Behind her, he could see other shapes, other figures, a crowd of reflections that had no originals in the room.
He moved to a larger mirror on the wall, a rectangular sheet of glass that had once hung above a sink. The reflection showed the pharmacy, but not the pharmacy he was standing in. The shelves were fully stocked, the lights were on, and people moved through the aisles with the purposeful strides of a world that still made sense. A pharmacist in a white coat. A mother holding a child's hand. An old man counting pills into his palm.
None of them looked at him. None of them seemed to know he was watching.
The sky in the reflection was wrong.
He noticed it through the window in the mirror's version of the pharmacy, a sky that pulsed with the same wrong colors he had been seeing for days. But in the reflection, there were two moons. Two pale circles hanging in the bruised sky, one where the moon should be and another where no moon had ever been.
He stepped back from the mirror, his heart pounding, and the cold sensation surged through his skull. The threads appeared fully now, mapping the glass in patterns he couldn't interpret. The mirror wasn't just reflecting light. It was reflecting something else, something that existed in a way he didn't have words for. Echoes, maybe. Memories. Fragments of a world that had been, or a world that could have been, or a world that existed somewhere else entirely.
The figures in the mirrors didn't move like reflections. They moved like people, with the independent purpose of beings who had their own thoughts, their own goals, their own reasons for being. The woman was still reaching. The pharmacist was still counting. The mother was still holding her child's hand, walking toward a door that didn't exist in Gray's world.
He couldn't stay here.
He moved through the pharmacy with new purpose, tearing cloth from fallen displays, ripping curtains from rods, grabbing anything that could cover glass. He draped fabric over the hand mirror, hung cloth across the wall mirror, propped debris in front of the standing mirrors in the corners. With each covered surface, the cold sensation eased slightly, the threads settling back into the background of his awareness.
When the last mirror was hidden, he stood in the center of the pharmacy and tried to breathe.
The figures were still there, he knew. Still moving behind the cloth, still living their reflected lives in a world that wasn't his. He could feel them in the cold sensation, could almost hear the whisper of their movements through the barriers he had created. But he couldn't see them anymore, and that was enough.
He didn't sleep that night.
He sat in the pharmacy with his back against a wall, the bag of supplies clutched to his chest, and watched the covered mirrors for any sign of movement. The burn on his arm pulsed with cold, and somewhere in the darkness, the sky continued its wrong-colored pulse, and the figures in the glass continued their silent reaching.
He was beginning to understand that the world had broken in ways he couldn't see, that the collapse of Ash Harbor was just the surface of something deeper. The threads, the pulses, the mirrors that showed things that weren't there, all of it pointed to a change that went beyond falling buildings and bruised skies.
Something had torn. Something was leaking through.
And he, for reasons he didn't understand, could see the seams.
When dawn finally came, gray and weak through the cracked windows, he gathered his supplies and left the pharmacy behind. The covered mirrors watched him go, their hidden surfaces still reflecting worlds he couldn't touch, lives he couldn't save.
He walked on, the cold burn on his arm a constant reminder that nothing in this new world was simple, and that the worst things were often the ones you couldn't see until it was too late.