The silence was a physical thing.
It didn't just lack sound; it swallowed it. Leo's own ragged breathing was too loud in his ears, a shameful broadcast in the stagnant air.
He crouched behind the rusted hull of a delivery van, its front tires flat, the driver's door hanging open like a slack jaw. The concrete beneath his knees was damp, seeping a cold ache into his bones.
His HUD flickered, struggling to map the new terrain.
[Location: Outer Fringe, Apocalipse Zone 7-G. Proximity Alert: Non-Synchronized Geometry Detected.]
[Base Reality Synchronization: 67%. Stabilization Advised.]
He didn't need the warning. He could feel it. A subtle, constant wrongness, a vibration in his teeth that wasn't a sound. It was the world feeling thin.
He glanced at his hand, pressed against the gritty asphalt. Still solid, but the ghostly translucence was a permanent stain now, a reminder he was on borrowed time.
He made himself look up, towards the source of the wrongness.
The Apagamento.
It wasn't a hole. Holes implied depth, a somewhere else you could fall into. This was an absence.
A perfect, vertical plane of absolute black that cut across the cityscape with geometric cruelty.
To his left, the familiar brickwork of an old pharmacy ended in a razor-straight line, the shelves inside still stocked with colorful boxes that stopped mid-air.
To his right, the steel and glass facade of a corporate tower was sheared off, revealing a cross-section of offices, a photocopier halfway through a phantom print job suspended in the void.
No light escaped the blackness. No sound. It didn't even look like a color. It was the negation of sight, a tear in the film of reality.
Looking at it for more than a few seconds made his stomach clench, a primal, biological rejection. His mind skittered away from the edges, refusing to process the sheer nothing.
This was the penalty. Not destruction. Erasure.
A sharp, metallic scrape broke the silence.
Leo flinched, pressing himself lower against the van's tire. The sound came again, a slow, grinding drag of metal on concrete, from the alleyway across the street.
It was followed by a muffled, wet cough.
Not an echo. This was organic. Ragged.
A figure shuffled out from between the buildings. A man, maybe, wrapped in layers of grimy fabric that might have once been office curtains and plastic sheeting.
He dragged a length of rusted rebar behind him, the tip sparking faintly against the ground. A stained backpack bulged on his shoulders. He moved with a painful, lurching gait, his head on a swivel.
He had an interface. Leo could see the faint, shimmering outline of it around the man's head. But it was corrupted, a mess of jumping pixels and scrambled text.
Numbers flickered too fast to read, status bars flashed between full and empty. It was a broken thing.
The man's eyes, deep-set in a face smeared with soot and what looked like dried grease, scanned the street. They passed over Leo's hiding spot once, then snapped back.
They locked onto him.
The eyes weren't hostile at first. They were filled with a bottomless, animal terror. The man froze, his grip tightening on the rebar. He didn't raise it. He looked like he wanted to melt into the pavement.
"Another ghost?" the man rasped, his voice the sound of stones grinding together.
He took a half-step back, his boots crunching on broken glass.
"Just… fade. Go back to the quiet. This stretch is mine. The Silence already took half of me. Won't take the rest."
He was pointing the rebar now, but the tip wavered in a wide arc. His other hand came up, a protective gesture, and Leo saw it.
On the man's wrist, visible through a tear in his makeshift sleeve, was a mark. Not a tattoo. It looked drawn or burned—a series of crude, intersecting circles and jagged lines, done in a substance that was black like soot but gleamed with a sickly, oily rainbow sheen in the twilight.
It looked like charcoal mixed with congealed engine oil.
Leo opened his mouth. No sound came out. What could he say? I'm not a ghost? He was literally fading. I mean no harm? He was a walking death sentence for anyone near him.
The man's corrupted HUD flickered violently. His eyes widened, the terror spiking into something else—recognition. He was seeing something in his broken interface. A notification.
Leo knew what it was a second before the chime sounded in his own skull.
It was a soft, polite sound, utterly obscene in the dead street.
Passive Location Ping Transmitted.
In the top-right corner of Leo's vision, the red dot that had haunted him now blazed, a miniature sun of condemnation. It pulsed once, twice, a rhythmic, all-revealing beat.
He saw the exact moment the information reached the ragged man. The fear in his eyes didn't vanish. It was calcified, transformed.
The wavering rebar stilled, its point centering on Leo's chest with sudden, awful precision. The man's lips peeled back from yellowed teeth in a grimace that wasn't a smile.
"Isca de Alto Valor," the man spat, the words dripping with a bitter, practiced understanding. "Should've known. The Silence doesn't make ghosts that look that scared."
The calculus of survival in the man's face was terrible to see. The terror of the zone versus the crushing weight of the System's reward. Need versus greed.
The math was brutal, and it came out with Leo on the wrong side.
The man didn't charge. He shuffled forward, fast and low, his lurching gait suddenly efficient. The rebar, a dull gleam in the weird twilight, was held like a spear.
"Ten thousand points," he muttered, not to Leo, but to himself, a prayer and a curse. "Anistia. Could get a real filter. Could get a working interface. Could get out."
Leo scrambled backward, his back hitting the solid wheel of the van. No escape there. The open street was a killing field. The alley behind him was a dead end.
His mind, the useless analyst part, frantically cataloged the assets: his body (weak), his clothes (thin), his ability (to see tears in a world that was trying to delete him).
The man was ten feet away. Eight.
Leo's glitch-sight flared, a pain behind his eyes. He wasn't looking at the man. He was looking at the world around the man.
The street was riddled with them here, on the shore of the void. Faint, spider-webbing cracks in reality, most too small to matter.
But there, just to the left of the man's advancing feet—a larger one. A patch of asphalt that shimmered like a mirage, the size of a manhole cover.
His ability fed him the cold data:
Anomaly Type: Spatial Laceration (Minor).
Effect: Localized Gravity Inconsistency.
Stability: Low. External force may trigger inversion.
He had no weapon. No strength. Only the wrongness of this place.
Six feet. The rebar drew back for a thrust.
Leo did the only thing he could. He didn't try to stand. He kicked out, not at the man, but at the discarded hubcap of the van lying between them.
His foot connected with a dull clang, skidding it across the asphalt.
It was a weak, pathetic move. The man didn't even flinch.
But the hubcap spun, wobbled, and slid directly over the shimmering patch of distorted ground.
The effect was instantaneous and wrong.
The hubcap didn't bounce or slow. It hit the glitch and its forward momentum simply… reversed. It shot back the way it came, twice as fast, with a sharp, unnatural crack of accelerating air.
It wasn't aimed. It was physics throwing a tantrum.
The hubcap smashed into the man's shin.
The sound was a thick, wet crunch. The man screamed, a raw, shocked sound that tore the silent air.
He stumbled, his charge broken, the rebar clattering to the ground as he clutched his leg. Bone gleamed white against the grime.
Leo was already moving. He rolled sideways, coming up in a crouch. The man was down, but not out. His face was a mask of pain and fury, his hand scrambling for the fallen rebar.
"You glitched little cipher!" he snarled, spitting blood. "I'll break you apart for scraps!"
But Leo's eyes were already elsewhere.
The ping had gone out. His red dot was on the map for anyone in a kilometer. The commotion—the scream, the unnatural crack—was a dinner bell.
From down the long, corpse-gray street, a new sound echoed.
Not a scrape. A coordinated set of footsteps. Heavy, booted. And a different, cleaner HUD glow reflected in a second-story window, moving fast.
The Lealists. Or the Aproveitadores. It didn't matter. Organized hunters. Drawn by the signal.
The wounded man on the ground heard it too. His hunt for points warred with a more basic instinct. He looked from Leo to the direction of the footsteps, his eyes wide.
He grabbed his rebar, used it as a crutch, and began to hobble desperately toward the mouth of a nearby subway entrance, a dark maw leading underground.
He was leaving the prize. The footsteps were too close.
Leo was out of time. The street was death. The alley was death. The subway was… unknown.
His glitch-sight pulsed. He looked at the subway entrance. Above it, the old metal sign reading 'DOWNTOWN CROSSING' was intact.
But the brick arch around it was webbed with hairline fractures of distortion. One, thicker than the rest, ran down the center like a fault line.
The bootsteps were closer. He could hear voices now. "Signal's strong. It's right in the open. Move!"
Leo ran.
Not away from the entrance, but toward it. Toward the wounded man disappearing into the dark. Toward the thick, pulsing glitch-line in the arch.
As he passed under it, he reached out and slammed his palm flat against the distortion in the bricks.
Glitch Type: Structural Memory Loop.
Temporal Echo: High Probability.
Destination: Unstable.
The world didn't change. The dark mouth of the subway swallowed him.
But the quality of the darkness shifted. The air grew thick and cold, smelling of damp concrete and something older—ozone and rust and wet earth.
The sounds from the street vanished, not fading, but snipped off.
He stumbled down grime-caked stairs, his hands skimming a cold metal railing.
Behind him, from the street entrance, a voice called out, sharp and clear.
"He went underground! Converge! Don't lose the signal!"
Leo's foot hit the landing.
The subway platform stretched before him, lit by a single, flickering emergency light that buzzed like an angry insect. It was a tomb.
Derelict train cars, their windows dark, sat on rusted tracks. Posters peeled from the walls in slow, eternal curls.
And there, slumped against a broken ticket machine, was the wounded man. He was panting, gripping his leg, watching Leo descend.
There was no greed in his face now. Just shared, trapped desperation.
Then, the flickering light caught something else.
Further down the platform, where the shadows were deepest, shapes moved. Not people. They were too still, then too sudden.
They had the same, shimmering translucency as the data-ghosts in the office buffer, but their forms were different. Jagged. Misshapen. One seemed to be fused with a turnstile, another's outline bled into the static of a dead advertising screen.
Echoes. But not of office workers.
Echoes of the last moments of a subway station during the Initialization. Echoes of panic, of confusion, of trying to flee a reality that was rewriting itself.
One of them, a tall, elongated silhouette with too many arms, stopped its aimless drift.
It turned its blank, glowing face toward the two living men on the platform.
A new notification, soft and absolute, appeared in Leo's vision.
[Location Ping In: 00:00:00.]
[Transmitting…]
His red dot had just pulsed its location to every interface above.
And in the silence of the underground tomb, the only things with interfaces down here were him, the dying man, and the things that were now turning, in unison, toward the source of the signal.