The floor vanished under him.
One second Aiden was standing in the corridor outside Iris's office. The next, the seventh floor split open with a sound too large to fit inside a building. Carpet, concrete, broken lights, office chairs, shards of glass, and bodies all dropped together.
He saw Iris's door jerk sideways.
He heard her scream his name.
Then the world became impact.
His shoulder hit first. Something crushed into his back hard enough to empty the air from his lungs. A desk corner clipped the side of his head. Dust burst through the dark in a choking wave. He tried to catch himself and grabbed nothing. The fall kept happening in pieces, floor into floor into floor, until the building finally decided to stop killing him all at once and settled for burying him instead.
For a while there was no sound except debris still shifting somewhere above him.
Then pain arrived.
It came in layers. Shoulder. Chest. Legs. The back of his skull. Something hot at his temple. Something wet running into his collar. He opened his eyes to black so complete it almost looked solid.
"Iris."
The word came out shredded.
No answer.
He tried to move and found out what the collapse had kept. One arm, barely. The other, slower. His legs trapped from mid-thigh down. Concrete over them. Twisted metal somewhere underneath. His phone gone. The air wrong. Thin with dust and powdered cement.
He shouted once.
The sound died inside the pocket of rubble around him.
He shouted again anyway.
By the time the first voices reached him, his throat already hurt.
Not close.
Not rescue.
Just people somewhere above the collapse, screaming names into a building too broken to give any back.
He listened until he heard Iris.
He never did.
Time stopped behaving after that.
Sometimes the concrete shifted and sent fresh dust through the gap above him. Sometimes he heard sirens. Once he heard machinery heavy enough to shake the slab over his legs and thought for one bright, stupid second that they had found him.
Then the noise moved away.
He did not know if it was day or night until a line of gray light appeared high above the rubble, no wider than two fingers. It lasted for a while, faded, came back weaker, faded again.
That was how he counted the first two nights.
The second was worse.
His tongue felt swollen. His lips split every time he breathed. He licked condensation from a piece of angled metal once and got rust and concrete dust for the effort. Hunger had already burned through normal shape and become a steady, gnawing emptiness that made thought feel expensive.
He called Iris's name less often.
Not because he wanted to stop.
Because sound cost too much.
On what he thought was the third day, something started dripping near his ear.
Too thick for water.
He lay still and listened.
When the thing to his right moved, he understood two facts at the same time. The first was that a monster had come down with the building. The second was that it was trapped almost as badly as he was.
That did not help enough.
It dragged itself through the dark on damaged limbs, one foreleg folding uselessly under its own weight each time it tried to pull forward. Its rear body barely answered at all, trailing dead weight through the dust. It was slow, wet, and patient only because it did not have the strength to be anything else. A low sound rattled in its chest every few seconds. A smell rolled off it thick enough to taste.
Rot. Blood. Dungeon.
He saw its eyes before he saw the shape around them. Low to the ground. Pale. Unblinking.
It had been hurt in the collapse. One side of its torso was split open. Something inside it worked badly and still refused to stop. One of its jaws hung wrong, as if a section of bone had already cracked loose. Each breath seemed to cost it more than the last.
If it had been whole, he would have died immediately.
As it was, he only had to die slower.
His right hand searched the rubble until his fingers closed around a strip of bent metal.
It was not a weapon.
It was only the least useless thing within reach.
The monster came closer.
He waited until it dragged itself one span closer, then struck because waiting longer would not improve the odds. The first hit glanced off bone. The scream that followed tore through the dark hard enough to shake dust into his face. When it snapped at him, the broken jaw did not close properly. The second strike went into the wound because there had been nowhere else to aim.
After that there was barely a fight left.
Only a trapped, half-crushed thing jerking on failing limbs while Aiden kept shoving metal into the only part of it not protected by bone.
By the time it finally folded in on itself, more from blood loss than from anything he had done cleanly, Aiden was shaking so badly he could barely hold the metal strip.
The creature's chest still moved.
Barely.
Inside the torn opening, something dark red and wet pulsed under the blood.
He stared at it too long.
The smell changed.
Not the rot. Not the hot animal stink of the monster's body. Something below that. Something raw and immediate and wrong enough that his mouth filled with saliva before his mind caught up.
Hunger hit so hard it felt like being struck.
Not human hunger.
Not the dull pain of starvation.
This was narrower. Sharper. A command with no words in it.
He had to get out.
He had to find Iris.
He knew that.
But every nerve in him had already turned toward the exposed organ in the monster's chest like it was the only answer left in the world.
He reached into the wound.
The heat shocked him first.
Then the texture. Slippery outer tissue. Dense muscle beneath it. The thing still beating weakly against his fingers as if it wanted to stay where it was.
The monster convulsed once.
Aiden almost pulled back.
Almost.
Then the hunger surged again, violent enough to blur the edges of his vision, and he tore the heart free.
The creature's body shuddered and went still.
For one second he stared at what he had done.
His hand was covered in black blood. The heart sat heavy in his palm, dark red under the grime, twitching in small ruined spasms. Nothing about it looked edible. Nothing about it belonged in a human mouth.
He bit into it anyway.
The first taste was heat.
The second was iron so strong it felt electrical.
Then his stomach rebelled. He doubled over as far as the rubble allowed and nearly threw the mouthful back up, coughing and choking on blood, bile, and shame. He forced himself to swallow because there was no world left where he had crossed that line and could afford not to finish.
One bite.
Then another.
He did not let himself think about what he was doing. Thought would have made it impossible.
By the time the last piece was gone, his body had already started to change its mind about dying.
Pain flared through him all at once.
Not from the collapse.
From inside.
Heat ripped through his chest, up his spine, down his arms, into the crushed weight of his trapped legs. His vision flashed white, then black, then white again. Every muscle in his body locked so hard his teeth ground together. He tried to breathe and could not. Tried again and dragged in dust and blood and the last of the monster's heat.
His heartbeat turned violent.
Too fast.
Too strong.
He felt it in his throat, his wrists, his teeth.
Something under his skin seemed to wake and pull tight.
Then came the hunger again, uglier than before, as if the thing he had swallowed had not satisfied it at all, only taught it what to ask for next.
He might have screamed.
He was not sure.
The dark shifted around him. Every sound in the rubble grew sharper by degrees. The grit settling from the crack above. The small ticking contraction of cooling metal. The distant groan of the building's broken weight. Farther still, beyond all of it, voices.
For one fractured instant, something else appeared with the sounds.
Not a voice.
Not a thought.
A pale line of text suspended in the dark where nothing should have been.
It was there and gone too fast to read fully.
███RT █████████ █████████.
Below it, another line tried to form.
██R██P████ ███████.
Then the letters smeared under black and folded in on themselves before his mind could catch up.
Human.
Not close enough yet.
But real.
The fever hit a moment later.
It rolled over him so hard his thoughts came apart. He felt cold and burning at once. His grip failed. The strip of metal slipped from his fingers. He let his head fall back against the concrete and tasted blood running into his mouth from somewhere he could no longer locate.
His last clear thought was not of the monster.
It was Iris, trapped somewhere in the ruins above him, still waiting in a world that had stopped keeping promises.
Then the fever took him under.
Somewhere above the rubble, a human voice shouted that they had found another void space.