I used to think my life was proof that reincarnation wouldn't bother with me.
Not because I was a bad person. Not because I was a good one either. I was… average. A background character. The kind of guy you could sit next to on a train for a year and still not know his name.
Which, to be fair, did happen.
My name is Patrick. It was Patrick yesterday, anyway. Patrick in a gray suit with a gray lunch and a gray sense of humor that only came out when I was alone and didn't have to pay for it socially.
I liked routines because they didn't argue.
The alarm didn't really need to ring. My body woke up at 06:30 like it had signed a contract and couldn't find the clause that allowed it to quit. I lay there for thirty seconds exactly because I'd once read that giving yourself a half-minute to "transition" improved productivity and then I got up.
Shower. Two minutes too hot because I was human and weak, then cold until the sting made me feel awake enough to justify existing. Toothpaste that tasted like mint and regret. Socks first, then shirt, because if I did it the other way I sometimes got distracted and walked around in a shirt and underwear like a man waiting for a life coach to rescue him.
Breakfast was toast and a boiled egg. Not because I loved it, but because it was predictable. The egg was always the same size, the same effort, the same calories. If life had taught me anything, it was that the universe loved changing things on you. The egg did not.
I left my apartment at 07:12. Not 07:10, because that meant I'd arrive early and then have to stand around with my hands in my pockets like a lost tourist. Not 07:15, because that meant rushing, and rushing meant mistakes, and mistakes meant emails, and emails meant my manager putting "Quick question" in the subject line like a threat.
07:12 was optimal. I'd timed it.
The city outside was doing what it always did: pretending it wasn't a machine. Cars flowed like blood through streets. People moved in herds, faster when the light was green, slower when the light was red, like animals that had traded instinct for signage.
I walked to the station and took my usual spot on the platform third pillar from the stairs, the place where the door would line up with the seats most often. Patterns weren't guarantees, but they were close enough to make me breathe a little easier.
There were always the same faces.
Red Scarf Guy, who looked perpetually offended by wind. The woman with the stroller who arrived ten minutes late every day and stared at the train like it personally hated her. Two teenagers who laughed too loudly at their phones, as if volume could prove happiness was real. An old man who fed pigeons even though there were signs telling him not to, because at his age the consequences of rebellion were mostly theoretical.
I noticed things. It wasn't a superpower. It was a habit. Some people collected stamps. I collected tiny details and filed them away like receipts I would never use.
At 08:41, the digital advertising screen above the platform flickered.
It did it every day. A single blink. A stutter of light. Like the screen was wincing.
I once mentioned it to a coworker.
"Huh," she said without looking up from her phone. "Never noticed."
That was also a pattern.
Most people didn't notice wrong things until the wrong thing got big enough to hurt them. I noticed the first domino because I spent my whole life expecting something to fall.
The train arrived. The doors opened. I sat. I exhaled. I watched my reflection in the dark window as the city slid by.
My face was fine. Not handsome, not ugly, just… there. A face made for ID cards.
At the office building, I scanned my badge and entered a place that smelled like toner, coffee, and microwaved sadness.
The lobby had inspirational posters. The kind with mountains and the word TEAMWORK in all caps. Every time I saw them, I wondered if the mountain had asked to be involved.
Up the elevator. Fourth floor. My desk was the same as it had been yesterday: a rectangular island in a sea of other rectangular islands, each one populated by someone trying not to look tired.
I sat down. Opened my laptop. The same three windows came up, because I'd saved them that way: email, spreadsheet, task board.
The task board was full of bright colors that pretended everything was under control. Little rectangles labeled things like Follow Up and Touch Base and Action Item. Words that made panic sound polite.
My job was operations planning. Which meant I took chaos and tried to convince it to walk in straight lines.
Schedules. Orders. Delivery windows. Supplier delays. A never-ending puzzle where the pieces kept changing shape and everyone still expected you to produce a picture that looked like confidence.
I didn't mind the work. I minded the noise around it.
I hated conflict. Not in a dramatic way. I wasn't traumatized by a shouting match in childhood or anything like that. I just… couldn't stand the way conflict made people stop thinking. How it turned adults into animals with email signatures.
In meetings, I spoke carefully. I used phrases like "Just to clarify" when I meant "This is wrong." I used "I might be missing something" when I meant "You are missing something." I smiled at the right times. I nodded in the right places. I made myself small in conversations because being small meant being overlooked, and being overlooked meant being left alone to do my work.
And doing my work was the only thing that made sense.
At 09:12, I found the wrongness.
It wasn't loud. It didn't flash. It didn't announce itself with an error message and a helpful suggestion. It was a number in a delivery schedule an extra digit that shouldn't have been there. A 4 where a 1 should've been. A single line that, if left alone, would shift an entire shipment by three days.
Three days didn't sound like much until you realized three days meant clients calling, supervisors panicking, and someone getting blamed because someone always got blamed.
I stared at the screen and felt that familiar itch behind my eyes. The pattern itch. The something is off itch.
If this line was wrong, then the previous line might be wrong. If the previous line was wrong, the whole batch might be wrong. If the batch was wrong, the warehouse would be wrong. If the warehouse was wrong, finance would be wrong.
And if finance was wrong, someone would die.
Not literally. Probably. But some people treated budget meetings like blood sports.
I opened the change log and traced the edits. It was tedious. It was slow. It was also the kind of work I was good at: following breadcrumbs nobody else cared to see.
At 09:47, I found the origin.
It was our new hire. An intern. Her name was Lina, and she was quiet and eager and had the kind of tired eyes you got from trying too hard to be perfect. She'd entered the data from an email chain that had been forwarded too many times, the numbers corrupted like a story retold by people who didn't care about the ending.
It wasn't really her fault.
But offices weren't ecosystems built on fairness. They were ecosystems built on blame.
The first message in the team chat popped up at 10:05, as if summoned by the universe itself.
URGENT: Shipment schedule mismatch. Who touched the file?
A second later:
Finance is asking questions.
And then, like sharks smelling blood in water, people began circling.
My manager, Anders, leaned over the divider between our desks. He had the expression of a man who had just found a small fire and was considering whether it was easier to put it out or throw it onto someone else.
"You saw this?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Who… did it?"
His tone was careful. Neutral. But I heard the shape of the question underneath it. The part he didn't say out loud: Who can we feed to the wolves?
I glanced across the office. Lina sat stiffly at her desk, fingers hovering over her keyboard as if touching it might make it worse. She didn't look up. She didn't need to. You could feel the pressure of attention like heat.
Anders wasn't a monster. He was a manager. In a corporation, there was a difference.
"What happened is the chain had incorrect info," I said. "The system didn't flag the mismatch. I can fix it."
He frowned. "But who approved"
"I did the final check," I said.
It wasn't even completely a lie. I had glanced at it yesterday. I hadn't noticed the error because it had been buried in a hundred correct lines. The fact that I could have caught it didn't matter. The fact that Lina was about to be crushed by it did.
Anders opened his mouth.
I kept going before he could finish.
"I'll reconcile the batch. I'll send the correction to finance and the warehouse. We'll be fine."
He studied me for a second. I saw calculations flicker behind his eyes. If he accepted this, he avoided drama. If he fought me on it, he had to do something.
He liked not doing things even more than I did.
"Alright," he said, and clapped my shoulder like he was praising a loyal dog. "Good. Good initiative."
He walked away.
Lina's head turned slowly toward me. She looked like she wanted to speak and didn't know how.
I didn't give her a chance. I lowered my eyes to the screen and started working, because gratitude turned into obligations, and obligations turned into meetings, and meetings turned into… you get the idea.
Still, when I stood to refill my water later, Lina came over with her hands clasped in front of her like she was holding herself together.
"Patrick," she said quietly. "Thank you."
I shrugged. "It's fine."
"It wasn't fine," she said. "They… they were going to"
"I know," I said.
She blinked fast. Her cheeks were red, and for a moment I saw myself in her someone trying to survive in a place that didn't care if you were kind.
"I'll be more careful," she promised.
"I know," I said again. Then, because I couldn't help myself: "When you forward an email chain, always cross-check the first message against the last. Numbers mutate when people panic."
She stared at me, then nodded like I'd handed her a weapon.
After she left, I sat down and stared at the task board.
I wasn't a hero. I wasn't noble. I just hated unfairness enough to inconvenience myself.
It was a small moral tell, I guess. A quiet refusal to be part of the office food chain.
If I'd known I was about to enter a real one, I might've laughed.
Or cried.
Or called in sick.
The rest of the day moved like syrup.
I fixed the batch. I sent the emails. I sat in a meeting where someone said "moving forward" three times in one sentence and I briefly considered moving forward into traffic.
At 15:30, someone brought donuts. I took one because refusing would have been a conversation. It tasted like sugar and guilt.
At 17:00, Anders walked by and said, "Good work today," like the whole problem had been a test designed to see whether I was obedient.
At 17:10, Lina sent me a message that said THANK YOU with too many exclamation points.
At 18:20, the office lights were still on, and most desks were empty, and my eyes burned from staring at the same cells all day.
I closed the laptop with the feeling of finishing a task you'll have to do again tomorrow.
Outside, the sky was the color of unwashed glass. The air had that wet edge that suggested rain had happened recently or was considering it.
My stomach growled. I checked my phone. The last train home would be easy to catch, but if I wanted food that wasn't convenience store sadness, I needed to move.
I walked toward the intersection outside the station, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets. The city around me pulsed with life that had nothing to do with me. Couples laughed. Someone argued on the phone. A child ran in circles around a lamppost like gravity was optional.
I stopped at the crosswalk and waited.
The light was red.
A cyclist rolled past, earbuds in, oblivious. A delivery scooter hummed by. Somewhere, a siren wailed, distant enough to be background music.
My mind drifted, the way it always did when I was tired. It fell into patterns.
Tomorrow I need to follow up on the supplier delay.This weekend I should do laundry.I should buy eggs.The platform screen will flicker at 08:41.
The light changed.
I stepped forward.
And that was when I noticed something small and wrong.
The street was too quiet.
Not silent cities weren't silent but quiet in the way an animal goes quiet before it bolts. Like the sound had been pulled away for a second, leaving a gap.
I turned my head without thinking.
Headlights. Too bright. Too close. Moving too fast for an intersection where the light was red.
For a heartbeat, my brain tried to file what I was seeing into a category that made sense.
Truck.Delivery.Late.Brake distance.Angle.No time.
A horn blared one sharp note that felt more like an accusation than a warning.
My last thought was not profound.
It wasn't about family or love or regret. I didn't see my life flash before my eyes. If anything flashed, it was the stupid digital ad screen on the platform.
My last thought was: I forgot to submit the weekly summary.
Then impact.
A sensation of weight and air being stolen. A flash of white. The sound of metal, rubber, and something softer, and then
Nothing.
No tunnel of light. No mysterious voice. No warm hand guiding me toward the afterlife with the gentle professionalism of a corporate HR representative.
Just
Cold.
Not winter cold. Not the cold of an office air conditioner set by someone who hated joy. Wet cold. Soil cold. The kind of cold that had never known sunlight.
My eyes snapped open.
Darkness first, broken by drifting motes of pale green light. Leaves overhead, but not leaves like I knew them these were huge, layered, thick like overlapping hands. The canopy above was impossibly high, like the ceiling of a cathedral built by trees.
I tried to inhale and gagged.
The air was heavy with rot and life. Damp moss. Wet bark. Mushrooms and mud. And underneath it… iron. A metallic tang that made my mouth fill with saliva in a way that wasn't thirst.
I pushed myself up
And froze.
My hands were wrong.
Small. Gray-green. The fingers short and thick, nails dark and curved like claws. The skin wasn't human skin. It was tougher, rougher, like it belonged to something that spent its life crawling and grabbing and fighting.
Panic surged.
I tried to stand, and the world shifted because I was too low to the ground. My knees bent differently. My balance was different. Everything about my body felt like a suit that didn't fit and couldn't be removed.
I opened my mouth to scream.
A sound came out, but it wasn't a scream.
It was a harsh, throaty noise that made my ears twitch at the vibration of it. My ears my ears were
I reached up, and my fingers brushed something long and pointed.
Ears. Long ears.
My heart did I have a heart? pounded hard enough to make my ribs ache.
Sound punched into the world like someone had turned the volume back on.
Screeches.
Not birds. Not anything I recognized. High, frantic, wet with fear or rage. The crack of branches. The thump of feet on dirt. The low, hungry growl of something that was too close.
I turned my head.
Between the roots of a massive tree, shadows moved. Shapes darted in and out of the dim green glow. One shape went down with a yelp. Another leapt on it. There was the wet slap of flesh, the tearing sound of something being ripped open.
The iron smell intensified.
My stomach twisted.
Not nausea.
Hunger.
A deep, animal pull that didn't ask my permission.
My throat tightened. My mouth watered. My hands clenched, claws flexing like they already knew what to do.
I tried to back away, but the ground behind me was slick with damp leaves and something sticky.
Something warm.
My foot slipped. I caught myself on a root.
The screeching stopped for half a second, as if the forest itself had noticed me.
Then something turned in the shadows.
Eyes reflected the green light. Low to the ground. Multiple.
A shape prowled forward, and I saw quill-like fur along its back, like a wolf wearing needles. Its head tilted. It sniffed.
The hunger in my gut surged so hard it hurt.
I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think. The world narrowed to scent and sound and the trembling urge to move.
The thing in the shadows took one step closer.
I took one step back.
My heel hit something soft.
I looked down.
A torn piece of meat, half in mud, half in blood. Fresh enough that the smell made my vision blur.
My body reacted before my mind could argue.
I grabbed it.
Blood-smell. Close. Mine.