The scream from the lobby snapped upward through the stairwell like something dragged on a hook.
Lian was already moving. Rajan followed, the air in the corridor thick with the metallic tang of spent incense and old blood. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead, not in a random stutter but in a slow, arrhythmic blink, as if the building itself were trying to stay awake and failing.
The landlord screamed again, higher this time. Then it cut off, abruptly, like a wire severed mid-conversation.
They reached the stairwell landing. The concrete walls were damp, sweating with a film that looked like condensation until Rajan saw the color—too dark, too viscous. The handrail had impressions in it, as if fingers made of fire had cinched down, melting metal into warped grooves.
The Veil's heartbeat tremored again underfoot.
"Stay behind me," Rajan said.
"You're bleeding Echo," Lian shot back. "You stay behind me."
It was true. He felt it, a low simmer under his ribs, the Karmic Echo stirring, tasting the fear the building exhaled. It coiled around his spine like hot wire, whispering in languages he had no name for but understood instinctively: rend, unmake, equalize.
He shut his eyes for half a heartbeat, focused on breath. In. Out. Kalaripayattu stances mapped inside his mind, precise and grounding. His mentor's voice, rasped from memory: You are not the storm. You are the vessel it passes through. Do not mistake possession for power.
Sometimes the storm answered back: Then why do they die when you arrive?
He opened his eyes and descended.
The lobby, which had been merely dingy when they entered, had changed. Wallpaper peeled in slow, curling strips, revealing not plaster but something like grayed flesh beneath—veined, pulsating faintly. The vending machine in the corner hummed, its glass front fogged from the inside, a pale handprint smeared across it from within.
The landlord lay sprawled near the check-in desk. His glasses were intact, resting neatly beside his head. His eyes were not intact.
They weren't gouged out. That would have been mundane. Instead, they had turned inward, irises rotated so far back that only the slick whites showed. A thin, dark line traced from the corner of each eye down his cheeks—tears of ink, still fresh, soaking into the frayed collar of his shirt.
His mouth hung open. It was empty.
Not toothless. Tongueless.
Empty.
His tongue lay a meter away, shuddering like a severed worm. Words bubbled from it in tiny, airless bursts—half-formed syllables in Mandarin, Marathi, Japanese, fragmented prayers and curses rolling over each other, dissolving before they were fully born.
Lian inhaled sharply, hand flying to her mouth. "It… it pulled the language out of him."
"Not language," Rajan murmured. "Guilt."
He could see it shimmer around the tongue, a dark nimbus, crowded with faces that were not really faces—blurred shapes of tenants cheated, promises broken, wives shouted at, children ignored. The accumulated residue of small cruelties, every petty selfishness fermented into something hungry.
The Echo wanted it. He felt it lurch inside him toward that writhing tongue, recognizing kin. His vision flared at the edges; the lobby swam, warping.
Lian's fingers closed, hard, around his wrist. "Stay with me."
Her Illusory Threads stirred—he could see them when they were this close, fine silver motes slipping from her skin, weaving around his hand in a gentle lattice. They cooled the fever buzzing in his bones, reasserting outline where his self wanted to bleed away into something red and indiscriminate.
"You should leave," he said, voice low. "If it knows what I am, it'll use you."
She snorted, though her eyes never left the tongue on the floor. "You really think you get to be the tragic martyr alone? How self-centered."
He almost smiled. Almost.
The landlord jerked.
Every bone in his body seemed to crack at once, a brittle cascade. His limbs folded inward, fingers clawing at nothing. A sound tore out of his empty mouth, a wet gasp like someone sucking air through a throat filled with leeches.
His chest ballooned.
Literally. The ribcage rose, skinned from inside by an invisible pressure; something pressed outward against his sternum, stretching skin thin, showing veins like dark roots. His heart hammered visibly, too fast, too hard, as if trying to punch its way out.
Then it did.
It pushed through bone and flesh with a sick, tender rip. A glistening, red-black mass forcing itself between his ribs. Tendrils of slick tissue unfurled, searching, tasting the air. The landlord's body convulsed around it, more puppet than host.
Lian whispered, "Oh, that's new."
The thing beating in his chest cavity was not a heart anymore. It was larger, swollen with what it had drunk from the building: frustration, resentment, fear soaked into cracked tiles and leaking pipes. Each pulse extruded a vein outward, thin as thread, seeking purchase.
One latched onto the vending machine. The machine shuddered, glass fissuring with a high, keening whine. The pale handprint inside smeared, fingers elongating, nails scraping at the inner surface as if desperate to get out—or to stay in.
Another vein shot for Rajan.
He moved.
Kalaripayattu flowed through him on instinct, body low, twist and strike—his palm met the vein, Echo flaring, spiritual impact detonating through the tendril. It screamed—not a sound, but a pressure behind his eyes, stabbing white-hot. The vein blackened where he touched it, shriveling like burned hair.
The backlash hit him a breath later.
The Karmic Echo surged up his arm, thrilled by the contact. His skin crackled, faint luminescent fissures spiderwebbing beneath the surface, like lightning trapped in glass. For an instant, he saw past the lobby—through the Veil, into the Realm of Echoes.
An endless city of shadows, built from fractured memories and unfinished regrets, towering over him. Every window a mouth, every alley a throat. He felt himself falling forward into it.
"Rajan." Lian's voice, sharp, desperate. "Hey. Hey. Look at me."
The Threads braided across his chest, around his neck, over his jaw, pulling his gaze to hers. Her eyes were steady, pupils blown wide, reflecting him back in two dark circles.
"Anchor," she said. "Now."
He grabbed the word like a rope. Breath again. In. Out. The city of shadows receded, grinding back behind the Veil with a reluctant shudder. The fissures beneath his skin dimmed, left spiderweb burns along his forearm that throbbed like fresh brands.
The heart-thing in the landlord's chest hissed soundlessly, veins snapping back, retreating.
"Why the hell is it focusing on guilt?" Lian murmured. "Scouting usually just flays, feeds, moves on. This is… curated."
"Because it knew me," Rajan said. "And it knows what I carry."
The landlord's tongue finally stopped twitching. The syllables died mid-birth, leaving a vacuum in the air that felt colder than any breeze.
Far above them, somewhere in the building, a door slammed. Then another. Then dozens.
They weren't actually slamming. He realized it with a slow dread. The Veil was flexing around the structure, mimicking sounds from its own side. Echoes of doors that had closed on chances never taken, apologies never spoken. The building remembering every unfinished moment within its walls and replaying them all at once.
"They're waking up," Lian said, and he knew she didn't mean the tenants.
He could feel them now—small things at first, skittering in the corners of awareness. Shadows unhooking themselves from their owners. The residue of arguments, bitter tears, lonely dinners eaten in silence, all congealing into whispering shapes on the other side of the thin, thin membrane that passed for reality here.
"Stairwell's a choke point," Rajan said. "If anything comes down—"
"You'll blow the entire floor," Lian cut in. "Your Echo's already flirting with a meltdown. We need information, not a crater."
He almost snapped at her. The instinct to lash out rose sharp and sudden, born less from anger than from fear of being right. His fingers curled.
She watched him flinch and gentled her tone by a sliver. "If you burn yourself out here, what happens when the real rupture starts? When the Great Unbinding isn't just scouting shots through nameless cities?"
"You're assuming I'll still be human when that happens," he said.
"We're all assuming that," she replied quietly. "It's the only way we can keep moving."
The building groaned, a long, low moan like metal under too much weight.
Rajan stepped over the landlord's body. The heart-thing inside had gone still, veins hanging limp, dripping a thick, dark fluid that smelled like rusted coins and stale sweat. It wasn't gone. Just waiting. Listening.
"Other rooms," Lian said. "We have to know how far it spread."
He nodded.
As they reached the stairwell, his phone buzzed in his pocket. The screen glowed with an encoded caller ID: TANAKA_K.
Kira never called without reason.
He thumbed it on, pressing it to his ear. "We're busy."
Her voice came out ragged, stripped of its usual teasing lilt. "Yeah, so are we. Put me on speaker. Now."
He did. Lian leaned in, Threads twitching, as if they wanted to climb into the signal itself.
"You ever get an urge to say 'I told you so' and then immediately regret being right?" Kira said. In the background, something roared—far away, muffled, but wrong, like a lion with too many throats.
"Location," Rajan said.
"Outskirts of Kyoto," she replied. "Old onmyodo ground my family swore was sealed. Emphasis on 'swore' and 'sealed.' We've got a fusion case. Rakshasa patterns wrapped in a yokai shell with yaoguai feeding behavior. It's… improvising."
Vikram's voice cut in, lower, strained. "It's learning mid-fight. Adapting to both of us. Every hit we land teaches it a counter."
Lian's eyes met Rajan's. "Hybridization's accelerating."
"As is the arrogance of whichever cosmic bureaucrat thought mixing our ancestors' worst ideas was a good test case," Kira said, forced humor brittle. There was a wet crack through the speaker, followed by a grunt that sounded like it was punched out of Vikram's lungs. "We can't restrain it and trace its origin alone. We need a vector."
"Can't help you," Rajan said. "We're in… a situation."
Lian took the phone. "City that doesn't remember its name," she said. "Scouting Echo. It called him Key Vessel."
Silence.
Then Vikram, carefully: "It spoke prophecy?"
"It named function," Rajan said. "Which means someone on your end is leaking cosmology they shouldn't."
"Or," Kira said slowly, "something dug deeper than any of us. Raj, the Unbinding pulse we tracked last night? It didn't just flare and fade. It… anchored. Like a probe. The coordinates line up roughly with where you are now."
The stairwell lights flickered. For a moment everything went black.
In that instant, Rajan felt the Veil thin to the point of transparency. He saw shapes pressed against it from the other side—hands without arms, faces without features, a swarm of almost-beings desperate for form. They crowded against his skin, whispering in a thousand overlapping voices that tasted like ash and salt and grief.
He saw himself among them, too.
Not as he was, but as he could be—limbs elongated, torso hollowed, ribs splayed like a shrine's torii gate, Echo pouring from him in a constant, corrosive waterfall. A walking breach.
It was comforting, in the way an addiction was comforting. No more restraint. No more fear of losing control. Because control would, by then, be irrelevant.
"Rajan." Vikram's voice, distant but insistent through the speaker. "You still there?"
The lights flared back on. The shapes snapped away like rubber recoiling.
"Still here," Rajan said. His mouth felt dry, full of dust.
"The thing we're fighting," Kira said, "it keeps trying to burrow. Not into the ground. Into us. It wants a Key. If it finds one on this side, it won't need a full Unbinding to punch through."
Lian shivered. "So we're all under the same storm, just getting hit by different lightning."
"Poetic," Kira said. "Hate it."
A crash echoed on their end—stone yielding, a shrine toppling. Vikram cursed in Mandarin, then Sanskrit, then something that sounded like a mantra twisted inside out.
"We'll hold as long as we can," he said. "But if you feel a large-scale Veil thinning from our direction—"
"Run," Kira finished. "Away from us. Don't play hero, Raj. Heroes die early and messily. Survivors might actually fix this."
The call cut with a hiss of static, like something biting the line.
Silence seeped back into the stairwell. Above, the doors continued their spectral slamming. A child's laughter echoed faintly then strangled itself halfway, looping, corrupting into a wet gurgle.
Lian slipped the phone into her pocket. Her hand brushed his, lingered for the barest moment.
"Do you ever regret saving me in Hong Kong?" she asked, voice too casual, eyes fixed on the ascending shadows. "If I hadn't jerked you out of that possession loop, maybe the Echo would have eaten you early. Spared you this."
He thought of that night—the alley slick with rain, his own hands around his throat under a spirit's compulsion, squeezing hard enough to burst blood vessels, the voices cheering him on. And Lian, a stranger then, stepping through a conjured mirage of neon and ghosts to cut the thread binding him.
"I regret a lot of things," he said. "You're not on that list."
She nodded once, looked almost disappointed, like she'd wanted him to say yes so she'd have permission to run.
"Then," she said, exhaling, "I guess we keep going."
He took the first step up. The building's breath grew colder, more crowded, with each floor. Psychological dread settled over him not as a spike but as a slow, suffocating blanket—the realization that every door they passed contained not just potential victims, but potential catalysts. Each person another pocket of karma ripe for harvesting.
Behind them, the lobby heart pulsed once, faintly.
Above them, in a room that remembered him better than he remembered himself, something waited with the patience of stone and the hunger of an open grave.