The forty-sixth day arrived wrapped in gray light, the kind that pressed against the warehouse windows like a tired hand. Gray woke with the familiar ache behind his eyes, the residue of yesterday's pattern-work still humming in his bones. He lay still for a moment, listening to the warehouse breathe around him: Mina's soft exhales from the corner where she'd made her bed near the medical supplies, Ren's restless shifting against the far wall, Tala's surprising silence for one who talked so much during waking hours.
The sound that woke him came again. A scraping at the main entrance, deliberate and unhurried. Not the random scrabble of an animal or the desperate pounding of someone fleeing. This was someone who knew exactly where they were going and why.
Gray rose, his hand finding the pipe he kept beside his bedroll. He moved through the warehouse's shadowed interior, his pattern-sense unfurling ahead of him like a cautious tendril. He felt the others before he saw them: Elias already at the door, his posture rigid with controlled alertness, and behind him, Tala hovering with a knife held wrong, blade angled toward himself rather than any threat.
"Wait," Gray said, his voice low. "I know this pattern."
He didn't, not exactly. But something about the rhythm of that scraping, the patient pause between each contact, tugged at a memory he couldn't quite name. He reached the door and looked through the gap Elias had already opened.
The scarred woman stood in the gray morning light, her face a map of old violence. But something had changed since Gray last saw her. Her left arm hung in a crude sling, bound with strips of cloth that had once been a shirt. She leaned to one side, favoring her right leg, and when she raised her head to meet his eyes, he saw exhaustion carved into the lines around her mouth.
"I told you," she said, her voice flat as hammered metal. "The noise. You're making too much noise."
Elias opened the door wider, his expression shifting from suspicion to something more complex. "You're hurt."
"I'm alive." She stepped inside without waiting for an invitation, her gaze sweeping the warehouse with the practiced assessment of someone who had learned to count exits before counting friends. "That's more than some can say."
"What happened?" Mina's voice came from behind Gray, soft with the concern that seemed to flow from her like water from a spring. She'd moved to the woman's side without Gray noticing, her hands already reaching toward the injured arm.
The scavenger woman stepped back, her good hand rising in a gesture that was not quite a refusal. "It's not the arm that matters. It's what I saw."
"Sit," Elias said, and there was command in his voice now, the tone he used when decisions needed to be made. "Tell us."
She lowered herself onto a crate, her movements careful and deliberate. Gray watched the way her eyes tracked each member of the group: Ren peering from behind a stack of supplies, Tala standing too close to Elias like a shadow that had learned to walk, Mina with her healer's hands still half-extended.
"Three days ago," she began, "I was scavenging near the old marina. There's a building there, a warehouse like this one, where a group had set up. Maybe fifteen people. They had someone like you." Her eyes found Gray. "Someone who could do things. Make the light move wrong."
Gray felt the cold-water sensation ripple through him, his pattern-sight stirring despite his efforts to keep it quiet.
"They were careful," she continued. "Quiet. But it didn't matter. The things out there, the twisted ones, they could feel it. Like sharks smell blood in the water from miles away. The group didn't even know they were being hunted until the walls came down."
Silence settled over the warehouse, heavy and suffocating. Gray thought of the wrong-color light that pulsed through the world now, the way it seemed to pool and eddy around certain places, certain people. He thought of Tala's water moving without being touched, of Mina's hands knitting flesh with nothing but intention, of his own pattern-sight that showed him the hidden architecture of a world gone mad.
"The hollows," he said, and the word felt right in his mouth, a name for something that had needed naming. "They're drawn to it. To the... noise."
The woman nodded, something like respect flickering in her eyes. "You're starting to understand. But you're not understanding fast enough." She turned to Elias. "They're massing. Near here. I counted a dozen before I stopped counting, and there were more in the buildings I couldn't see into. They're not hunting yet. They're waiting."
"Waiting for what?" Tala's voice was sharp with fear he couldn't quite hide.
"For you to make more noise." The woman's gaze swept across the group again. "Every time one of you does something, every time the light bends wrong around you, it's like a beacon. They feel it. And they come."
Elias's hands tightened on his notebook, the leather creaking under his grip. Gray noticed the way his friend's jaw set, the subtle tension in his shoulders that spoke of an argument being swallowed.
"We've been careful," Elias said, and his voice was controlled, reasonable, the voice of a man who had learned to make doubt sound like wisdom. "We've kept the abilities minimal. Controlled. If what you're saying is true, we should have seen signs by now."
"You've seen signs." The woman's laugh was short and humorless. "You just didn't know what you were looking at. The way the birds stopped singing three days ago. The way the shadows have been moving wrong. The way your own people have been waking up at night, sensing something they can't name."
Gray remembered. The silence that had fallen over the warehouse's surroundings, the stillness that should have been peaceful but instead felt like held breath. He'd noticed, and he'd dismissed it as another strangeness in a world that had become nothing but strangeness.
"We should increase patrols," Elias said, but his voice had shifted, the certainty bleeding out of it. "Set up a rotation. Make sure we're not caught off guard."
"Patrols won't help." The woman rose, her movements stiff and pained. "You're not listening. They're already here. They're already watching. The only question is whether you're going to wait for them to come through your walls, or whether you're going to leave before they get the chance."
"Leave?" Tala's voice cracked. "Leave to where? This is the safest place we've found in weeks."
The woman looked at him with something that might have been pity. "Safety isn't a place anymore, boy. It's a decision. And you've got maybe two days to make it before that decision gets made for you."
She moved toward the door, her injured arm pressed against her side. Mina stepped forward, her hands raised in entreaty. "At least let me look at your arm. If you're going to travel, you should--"
"Save it for your own." The woman paused at the threshold, her scarred face half in shadow. "You've got healers. You've got seers. You've got people who can make the world bend. But none of that matters if you don't understand what you're up against."
She looked at Gray one last time, and in her eyes he saw something that looked almost like recognition. "You see the patterns. That's what you do, isn't it? You see how things connect." She gestured at the air around them, at the wrong-color light that pulsed through everything. "Start looking at the big picture. Before the big picture swallows you whole."
Then she was gone, limping into the gray morning, leaving the warehouse in a silence that seemed to press against Gray's ears like water.
Elias exhaled slowly, his hand releasing its grip on the notebook. "She's paranoid," he said, but his voice lacked conviction. "Survivors like her, they see threats everywhere. It's how they stay alive."
"Maybe." Gray moved to the window, looking out at the ruins beyond. His pattern-sense stretched outward, searching, and for a moment he thought he felt something at the edge of his perception. A mass of wrongness, like a hole in the fabric of the world. "Or maybe she's the only one who's been paying attention."
Elias came to stand beside him, his shoulder almost touching Gray's. "What do you see?"
"Nothing certain." Gray let his pattern-sight unfurl further, wincing as the cold-water sensation intensified. "But she's right about one thing. The birds have stopped singing. And something is watching us from the old apartment complex on the east side."
He felt Elias stiffen beside him. "How many?"
"I can't tell. My sight doesn't work that way. But there's... mass. Weight. Something gathering."
Elias was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was carefully neutral. "We should discuss this with the group. Make a plan."
"Yes." Gray turned from the window, his eyes meeting Elias's. "But we should also consider that she might be right. That staying here might be the last decision we ever make."
Elias's jaw tightened again, and for a moment Gray saw something flicker in his friend's expression. Fear, perhaps. Or something else, something that looked almost like calculation.
"We'll discuss it," Elias repeated. "That's what we do. We discuss, we plan, we decide together."
But as Gray watched his friend walk away, notebook clutched tight against his chest, he couldn't shake the feeling that the decision had already been made. That the hollows massing in the shadows had already decided for them.
And that the cost of staying would be paid in blood.