The beacon cracked open the night like a bone.
A white column punched from the sanctuary's heart into the low clouds, pulsing—one breath, two, three—until the whole district seemed to answer. The palisade hummed under the light. The river hissed in the dark. And then the city woke up wrong.
The first sound was barking. Hundreds of throats, all at once. It sharpened into a tearing choir—dogs slipping into something that wasn't dog anymore. Birds screamed. Rats seethed in the drains. Somewhere far off, a horse shrieked the way metal screams when it tears.
[Beast Mutation: ACTIVE]
The words burned across their vision and vanished.
"Positions!" Lena snapped, already moving. "Gate team, on me—Marcus, Keith, Ellie, Ethan. Kira: wall and alley sweeps. Maya, top rail—call flows, keep the line straight. Tina—"
"I know," Tina said.
Warm light spilled from her like someone uncorked a hearth. It rolled out across the stones, climbed the inside of the wall, and then pressed through, ballooning into the street like a veil turned inside out. Twenty meters of soft gold became a killing edge. The first crow that crossed it hit fire without flame and fell as a cinder. The second didn't get that far.
"Hold it," Ethan said, already feeling the suck of her stamina in his own bones. "We pull as many as we can through."
The beacon pulsed. The night answered.
Shapes staggered into the road—first a man in a torn suit, then a trio clinging to each other, then a knot of a dozen, all running toward the light with the blind faith of people sprinting for a door during a fire. Behind them came the fire.
A rottweiler loped out of the dark, ragged fur already armoring into plates, eyes like hot coals. It hit the barrier and went to steam, burning in a soundless spasm as Tina's aura chewed it from the skin in. The crowd didn't even slow. Where the dog had been, a woman slammed into the golden line and bounced like glass off water.
"Wait for the seam!" Maya shouted from the wall, voice carrying clean. "Left—two at a time—now!"
The barrier flexed with a heartbeat. Ethan and Marcus wrenched the gate wide on that exhale. Keith's lion and tiger braced like carved guardians.
"Inside! Inside!" Ethan called. Hands clawed at him. He took wrists, forearms, coat-sleeves slick with sweat and other things, hauling bodies across the threshold. The first three collapsed and sobbed. The fourth tripped, pinned the fifth, and both would have been crushed if Kira hadn't blinked to them, knives out—not to kill, but to cut tangled straps and fling the ruined pack aside.
The pack hit the stones. Something inside it moved.
"Don't," Kira said without looking, and her dagger took the thing's head off in a clean, ugly whisper.
The night tore again.
They came in waves. Skinny, heavy, limping, bleeding. A child with both hands around a cat carrier that rattled like a box of bones. A courier with a man flung over his shoulders like a sack, legs dangling, shoes gone. A woman in a chef's coat with blood to her elbows and a cleaver she would not let go of.
Behind them, beasts learned.
The next dogs didn't hit the barrier head-on. They skittered and snapped and hunted the edges, hot minds tasting for a seam. Rats poured like a living oil slick toward the light and cooked into a carpet of smoldering grit when they reached the gold. A flock of pigeons arrowed in a furious spear, hit the veil as one, and became a crown of ash.
"Left seam opening," Maya sang down, voice warbling just wrong enough to make the beasts flinch. "Step. Step. Pause. Step. You—blue coat—don't shove him. Next pulse—now!"
They made a door out of timing. It wasn't enough.
Screams cut the road. Not the soft panicked kind—the ones that hook under the ribs. Out of the alley to the right, a pack slid into view—four dogs, spines lifted like saw blades, muzzles slick. They weren't strays anymore; the system had fitted them with hunger.
"Hold!" Marcus barked.
They didn't.
The first one sprang for a man carrying a toddler. Marcus didn't swing for its head—he planted the hammer in the asphalt and let the shock roll. The impact spread like a ring on pond water. The dog's leap faltered. Keith's tiger was there the next breath, front paws punching it flat, jaws closing until the skull unzipped. Bone cracked like ice under a skate.
The second went low for a calf. Kira was simply there, blades a silver parentheses. The dog opened and didn't close again.
The third hit the barrier and tried to push through on instinct: it ignited and howled in a voice that wasn't made to howl like that. The fourth dodged back and started to circle—
—and the lion hit it from the side like a bus, low and absolute.
"Gate!" Lena called. "Open—now—close!"
Inside, Tina swayed. The gold around her flickered for a breath, then steadied. Sweat slicked her hair to her temples. Jamie stood at her shoulder with a bucket of water he was too small to carry gracefully, thrusting it into her hands when her mouth went white.
"I can hold it," Tina murmured, voice too even. "Keep the gate clear."
The beacon throbbed.
From far left, a new sound—a wet, tearing slide. A shape dragged itself into the road: a deer, long legs stuttering, eyes white with pupil. Antlers had grown wrong—too many points, too heavy. It saw the light and surged.
"Do not let that touch the line," Keith said, voice flat.
Ethan's silver threads lashed. The first wrapped a foreleg and held; the second looped an antler and yanked it sideways; the third bit into hide and hissed as corruption burned his palms from the inside. He tasted metal.
"Anchor?" Marcus asked.
"Too far gone," Ethan gritted—he could feel the slip, the way the genome had already fallen into a new gravity well. "Kill."
Keith's hawk scissored in low. The tiger leapt. Kira flickered to its throat. The deer stopped being a deer in a handful of movements and became meat cooling on cold tarmac.
They kept coming.
A man reached the line with a girl over his shoulder, face grey, her arm a ruin of teeth. "Please!" he shouted. "Please—she's—"
"Set her down," Ethan said, already on his knees. He pressed both hands to the wound. Silver roared out of him like a river trying to go up. The girl's eyes rolled under their lids. Black threads crawled quick and eager up her neck.
"Stabilizing!" Ethan shouted. "Sixty seconds!"
The world narrowed to a minute. His essence bled at five points a heartbeat. He could feel Tina's aura eating beasts two strides away; he could hear Marcus swear and hear Kira's knives hit bone and hear Maya's voice fall into a pitch that made a grown man vomit with vertigo—but none of it mattered except the threads in his hands. He forced them to bind, to knot, to hold the girl between the gears.
"Talk to me," he said, not sure who he was talking to. "Pick something. Strength. Speed. Intelligence. Anything. Say it."
Her lips moved. Nothing came out. Thirty seconds. Twenty. Ten—
"Strength," she breathed, so quiet he wasn't sure he heard it.
The system heard.
[Path Selected: Strength]
The black stopped climbing. Color flushed back like a load of laundry flooding a sink. Ethan sagged, then shoved her toward Ellie and the dogs. "Inside! You're okay—go!"
He stood. The road swam. The next scream had a human name in it.
"Ethan!" Maya cried from above. "Right! Three more—no, four—big one!"
It crawled out of the bus yard like a piece of the bus that had learned to hate. A mastiff, oversized even before the world broke, now plated in ridge and thorn. It opened its mouth and half a street fell silent with the sound.
"Back!" Marcus snapped.
It didn't come for the gate. It went for the people still in the line.
"Out!" Ethan barked. "We go!"
Marcus was already moving. Keith with him. Ethan ran into the teeth. Kira flared left, a ghost with edges. The mastiff hit a man and threw him like luggage. The man didn't get up.
"Dog!" Ellie shouted, voice cracking. Her husky surged two steps and checked itself at the gleaming edge of Tina's aura, whining, nails skittering on stone. The Alsatian crashed its shoulder against the gate, frantic to be allowed, and Ellie sobbed once and held their collars tight. "No—stay—stay—"
"Together!" Marcus roared.
They hit it together.
Marcus took the charge and didn't give ground. The hammer came up from the road like a sun, caught the jaw, and made a noise skulls aren't supposed to make. Keith's lion took the hindquarter. The tiger lanced in for the throat and found plates instead; claws screeched. Kira blinked behind and severed a hamstring in a slice that left a silver shadow still hanging in the air.
Ethan's threads bit. He dragged back legs out from under it, yanked ear and eye, wrapped the mouth and felt the teeth try to bite his power like meat. It rolled, thrashed, kicked. Someone screamed. Someone else stopped.
"Now!" Ethan shouted.
Marcus buried the hammer in its chest. Bone exploded. The mastiff spasmed and went still—and then kept twitching, that leftover hate still firing through a body that didn't know it was dead.
They kept moving.
Bodies clogged the road—some breathing, some not. The barrier ate everything that tried to force through like a second sun on the street. Flesh charred, feathers flashed, fur went to smoke. People tripped over smoking carcasses, slipped in blood, clawed their way through the seam when Tina's light budged in its pulse.
"Inside—inside—inside!" Lena's voice cut through, never panicked. "You on the blue chalk—wait for the next count—good—now!"
A woman reached the line with a baby wrapped to her chest. The bundle didn't move. She wasn't crying. She was not anything except walking. Kira stepped, a hand held out, and the woman stopped like a sleepwalker who finds a wall. Her voice arrived late. "Please," she said, and that was all.
"Take her," Kira said to Tina, and Kira—who cut throats like writing her name—touched the baby with a carefulness that felt like blasphemy. Tina's light washed over the small shape. Ethan didn't look. There were some things his threads couldn't stitch and wouldn't if they could.
Beasts tested the veil and died. People tested it and lived or bounced. The line bent, broke, and re-formed. The gate opened and shut like a heart valve. Water moved from hand to hand. Blankets appeared and became roofs on shoulders. Mara handed out broth that hadn't existed five minutes ago. Caleb's small hands had rope and made lanes out of chaos because he could not make a garden out of this night.
Tina faltered.
The light dipped for a long breath. Three beasts hit the line at once—a fox whose mouth had split sideways, a cat with its spine laddered in bone, a thing that used to be a goose and had too many joints. They hit and smoked. Tina's knees kissed stone.
"Up," Jamie said, voice too big for his chest. He shoved the bucket into her hands. "Up, Mum. You're doing it."
Tina's head lifted. The gold brightened. She drank without breaking the glow and set the bucket down in a movement that looked like prayer and stubbornness stitched together. "We're not done," she said softly. The aura answered. The next crow didn't make it close enough to die.
The beacon pulsed. Time crawled.
They saved dozens. They didn't save all.
A teenage boy reached for Ethan's hand and missed. A woman tripped and the crowd went over her with that terrible animal logic crowds have when death is behind them; when Ethan dragged her out the other side, her face was a smear of someone he might have known. A man refused to leave a dog that couldn't get up and died with his arms around it because the barrier would not admit what was in his arms. A child ran back the wrong way because she heard someone say her name, and there was no one there when she reached the sound.
By the time Ravi's hoarse voice said, "Two minutes," the road looked like a butcher's alley after a festival. Steam and ash. Shreds and shoes. Teeth skittered when someone kicked the wrong place.
"Last pull!" Lena shouted. "Last pull—this is it!"
They opened to take ten and took fifteen. They closed, shook, opened again to take four, took six, and a seventh, fingers brushing Ethan's and missing with spiteful geometry.
"Shut it," Marcus said, voice gone.
The gates came in. The bar slammed home. The light climbed the sky once more, held, and then winked out like a match pinched between two dirty fingers.
[Beacon: DEACTIVATED]
No one cheered. Cheering felt like a language from a world they didn't live in anymore.
The barrier still hummed. Tina's gold sank back through wood and flesh and bone and pooled around her heart where it belonged. She sat down hard. Jamie sat with her, his small shoulder under her hand like a tent pole.
Keith whistled once. The eagle returned, ragged and proud. The tiger licked someone else's blood from its claws as if it were its own. The lion watched the road with the eyes of a god that had chosen a side.
Ellie pressed her face into her bear's shoulder and shook and made no sound. Her husky leaned hard against her shin. The Alsatian put a paw on the dog carrier in the arms of a man who had nothing inside it anymore.
Kira cleaned her blades on a dead man's coat again and this time her hands shook like she needed to bleed too and didn't know how.
Maya slid down the inner ladder on legs that had forgotten stairs. She sat and held the cup Tina gave her and stared at the steam like it was a map.
Lena counted. She wrote. She counted again. The numbers didn't behave. They never would.
Ethan stood with his hands braced on the gate until splinters bit. The silver in him went quiet by degrees. When he finally turned, the square was full of the living. Not safe. Not saved. Just—here.
He looked back through the gap between planks. Beyond the last scorch of Tina's light, the road shone wet and black and offered nothing back.
"The light saved us," Marcus said, voice a gravel scrape.
Ethan nodded once. "And burned the rest."
No one argued. The sanctuary held. The city didn't.