Volume 2 – Chapter 4: Into the Unknown

[April 26 – 7:15 AM]

It was a rayless world, a labyrinth, a twisting, infinite puzzle of concrete and glass. No matter how many times I zig-zagged around a corner or ducked into an alley, it felt like I was getting only more lost. But the sense of being watched remained.” It clung to me like a second skin, weighting each step I took.

Rika and I slipped in the shadows, shallow breaths, hearts drumming with the cadence of a deadly game we didn’t realize we were playing. The footsteps we’d heard behind us were gone, but that didn’t mean we’d be safe. I knew we could not end our relaxing, not yet.

“You think we lost them?” Rika’s voice was tight, the frill of her words glistening with an uncertainty that mirrored my own.

I paused, eyes surveying the street ahead of us. The city had been eerily silent for minutes. Too quiet. No voices, no distant car engines. To behold it was to catch a glimpse of an otherworld, a world just outside the reality we know.

“I don’t know,” I said, my words dropped to a whisper. “But we can’t stay here. If there’s still out there, they will come for us.” We need to keep moving.”

Rika clutched my hand, faster again, our feet a study of blurring cobblestones in our wake. We had to get out of the city, away from whatever had been following us. But the further we went, the more we realized we didn’t know where we were going. The outskirts, the safe zone — they seemed like a distant world, a dream out of reach.

The city was shattered, its infrastructure crumbling in places, its residents dispersed and reeling. But the flood had transformed a vibrant metropolis into a skeletal version of a city, the haunt of shadows and peril. But as the decay writhed around us, there was a strange pull to its core, one that suggested to me we were just skimming over the surface of a much larger, more wicked story.

I glanced at Rika, seeing the fleeting look of fear in her eyes. I couldn’t tell her I felt just as lost, just as terrified. All it would accomplish is make her worry more. Instead, I pulled her closer, my voice soothing.

“We’ll find a way out. Together. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

Her eyes softened, but there was still that sliver of doubt. She didn't speak, but I could tell how she clung to my words as if they were the only flotation device in an ocean of uncertainty.

We walked the desolate road, our feet crunching against the shattered asphalt, the sound almost inaudible. There was no end point, there was no plan.” We were just running. Running away from something that we didn’t understand.

But suppose we couldn’t escape it?

Think of it as the kind of flesh-eating bacteria that discounts hope, slowly chewing the last bits of hope I had left. There was a sense of being hunted, a sense of being part of something bigger than us — it felt like choking.” Something warned me that even more was coming for us all, darker than any threat we had met up to that point.

We turned another bend, and that’s when we saw it.

A silhouette in the shadows at the end of the street. The figure was tall, its features lost to low light, but there was something unmistakable in the aura it exuded. It was just the familiar feeling I had felt before — being watched, being hunted.

I barely had a chance to respond when the figure advanced, its transitions smooth and strange. I froze there for one precious moment, as a pair of eyes gleamed out from the dark, with none of the warmth of a living being, only the calculation of an eye in the head of a machine.

Rika clung more tightly to my arm. “Who is that?” she sputtered, her voice quaking.

I didn’t answer right away. It was also nearly too calm, too composed. It was as if it wanted us to go first, to lay our cards on the table. But I had learned previously not to underestimate it.

“Makes sure you stay close,” I said softly, as my hand dropped reflexively to the small knife I had sewn into the inside of my jacket. It was small, but it was all I had.

At first, the figure did not change. And how it stared at us with a piercing intensity that made my skin crawl. I could feel Rika’s anxiety beside me, hear her breath quickening in time with my own.

After some time, the figure spoke, its voice low and velvety. “You’ve been on the run for quite a while, haven’t you?”

I froze. The voice, in a soft-spoken delivery, was unsettling. How could it know that? How would it know that we had even been running?

“Who are you?” I demanded, my voice trembling yet defiant.

The figure did not immediately reply. Instead it stepped slowly and deliberately forward and its body slipped out of the shadows. It was sturdier than I expected, her build lean but powerful. It moved in a way that felt almost predatory, its steps deliberate, measured, calculated.

“I’m a person who’s been watching you” said the figure, its voice a strange, almost hypnotic thing. “You and your friend. And I think we need to talk.”

Rika cramped up against my arm and I felt her fear squeeze. “What do you want?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

The figure’s eyes glowed in the darkness. “Oh, nothing for now. I’m just here to tell you that there’s no wriggle out of it. Not anymore.”

My heart skipped a beat. It knocked the air out of me, and I felt myself sinking with the weight of it -- the crushing of what little will I had, what little spirit was left. There was no escape, no escape whatsoever. It was all closing in on us.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” the figure said, its mouth curling into what passed for a smile. “So now, it’s time to determine whether you’re really ready to face the truth.”

The truth? What truth?

Aside from that, it sent a cold wave of dread washing over me. It wasn’t a happenstance meeting. This was more than a final case of being at the wrong place at the wrong moment. That was something much bigger than that, something that was supposed to happen. Que havia sido posto em movimento muito antes de pisarmos na cidade.

“We’re not afraid of you,” I said, wishing my tone had sounded a little bolder. “If you believe that you can intimidate us —”

The silhouette cackled, and its sound vibrated in the silence. “Intimidate you? No, no. I’m going to show you something. To make you understand. Helper: “But you have to come with me.”

I recoiled in horror, dragging Rika along with me. “We are certainly not leaving anywhere without you.”

“Oh, you’re,” the figure said, voice now rich with something dark, something infinitely more dangerous. “You see, you don’t have any choice.

I hadn’t even had time to respond when he stepped forward, faster than I could process. And then suddenly the lights went out.