The creature sealed itself around its prey, the face-slit closing with a wet sound like a kiss. For a moment, it stood perfectly still, processing, dissolving the meat it had consumed.
Then it turned, those backward-bending legs carrying it in smooth, gliding steps toward the next hunting ground.
The fog swirled.
The creature froze.
Ahead of it, standing in the center of the alley where no one had been a moment before, was a figure.
Tall. Human-shaped. Wearing a long dark coat that hung to the ankles, a wide-brimmed hat that shadowed the face. Hands loose at their sides.
The creature's skin rippled. Every pore on its white surface opened, releasing that smell of spoiled milk, and from deep inside it came a sound—a high, keening wail like steam escaping a thousand kettles at once.
Competition. Threat. Hunter.
The figure didn't move.
The creature lunged.
It covered fifteen feet in half a second, those pointed arms driving forward like spears, the face-slit already beginning to open—
The figure's hand moved.
Just a small gesture, fingers together, cutting through the air in a smooth diagonal line from left shoulder to right hip.
Nothing happened.
The creature's momentum carried it forward, arms extending, finger-mouths already tasting victory—and then reality screamed.
A line appeared in the air where the figure's hand had passed. Not a line on the air, but a line in the air, a cut, a wound, and for half a heartbeat Thomas's unconscious mind, floating in the black fluid inside the creature, registered something impossible:
Empty space. True emptiness. The absence of everything, even the quantum foam that separated atoms. A surgical removal of reality itself.
The creature saw it too—too late.
It twisted mid-leap with horrifying flexibility, those backward-bending legs contorting, spine arching in ways that would have shattered a human body, and it barely missed the spatial cut, landing on the cobblestones with a wet slap.
For the first time since it had crawled out of the Between, the creature felt something almost like fear.
The figure stepped forward into the gaslight.
A woman. No—something wearing a woman's shape. Late twenties perhaps, with sharp features and sharper eyes. Dark hair pulled back in a practical bun. Coat well-tailored but worn, like it had seen a hundred fights and expected a hundred more.
And those eyes.
Even the creature, which had no eyes of its own, could sense the wrongness in them. They had depth. Dimensions that human eyes shouldn't possess. Looking into them was like looking through layers of folded space, reality stacked upon reality upon reality—
"You're getting slow," the woman said, her voice carrying a crisp British accent that marked her as educated, upper class. "Three weeks ago, you lot could cross twenty feet in the time it takes a heart to beat. Now? I count two beats. You're dying."
The creature's face-slit peeled open, the finger-mouths extending like a grotesque tongue, and they all whispered in perfect unison:
"HUNGRY. SO HUNGRY. FEED. MUST FEED."
"Yes, I imagine you are," the woman said, and her hands rose. "The problem with eating humans, you see, is that we're poison to your kind. The more you consume, the more you dissolve. It's deliciously ironic, really."
She moved her hands in precise patterns, like a conductor leading an orchestra.
Cut. Cut. Cut.
Lines appeared in the air around her, brief wounds in reality that existed for half a second before space rushed in to seal them. But in that half-second, they were death—perfect voids that would erase anything that touched them.
The creature scuttled backward, those pointed limbs finding purchase on the brick wall, and then it was moving—wall to ceiling to ground to wall again, too fast, too fluid, those many-jointed arms and backwards-bending legs allowing it to move in three dimensions like a spider from hell.
The woman's eyes tracked it, her hands never stopping, creating a web of spatial cuts, a deadly latticework of impossible geometry.
The creature had learned. It had fought hunters before. It knew the patterns.
It saw the gaps.
With terrifying speed, it dove through the web, contorting its boneless body, folding itself through spaces too small for anything with a skeleton to fit, and suddenly it was inside her guard, the face-slit opening wide enough to swallow her head, the finger-mouths reaching—
The woman's hand shot forward.
Straight into the creature's face-slit.
Straight into that mass of writhing finger-mouths.
The creature froze.
"Gotcha," the woman whispered.
Her fingers moved inside the creature's head, invisible to anyone watching, but the effect was immediate and catastrophic.
She cut.
Not outward. Not downward. Inward. Into the hollow space where the creature stored its prey, where Thomas Webb floated unconscious in black digestive fluid.
The creature convulsed, its white body rippling violently, skin going from milk-white to grey to almost translucent, and then—like a seed pod bursting—its entire face split open from the inside out.
Geometric sections. Perfect lines. The head peeling apart like a flower blooming in fast-forward, revealing the hollow interior, the black fluid, and the boy suspended in it like a butterfly in amber.
The woman grabbed Thomas by the collar with her free hand and yanked him free, stepping back smoothly as the creature collapsed.
Its white body lost cohesion all at once, melting into a puddle of pale sludge that steamed against the cold cobblestones, releasing one last whisper from mouths that no longer existed:
"...hungry..."
Thomas hit the ground hard, his body convulsing, black fluid pouring from his mouth and nose as his lungs remembered how to breathe. He retched, gasped, vomited up mouthfuls of that terrible black saliva that smelled like rot and copper and sealed rooms.
The woman knelt beside him, two fingers against his throat, checking his pulse. Then she pulled back one of his eyelids, studying his pupil with those impossible eyes.
"You'll live," she said, matter-of-fact. She produced a handkerchief from her coat and wiped the black ichor from her hands with the calm efficiency of someone cleaning up after dinner. "The dissolution hasn't started yet. You're lucky. Another five minutes and your bones would have been soup."
Thomas coughed, his whole body shaking with cold and shock and residual terror. "W-what... what was—"
"A Hollow." The woman stood, tucking the soiled handkerchief away. "They've been taking people for three weeks now. Started in Edinburgh, spread to Manchester, then London. Now they're all over Europe. You're the first I've pulled out alive."
She paused, looking down at him with an expression that might have been pity or might have been calculation.
"Congratulations," she said. "That means you're compatible."
Thomas tried to sit up, failed, settled for propping himself on his elbows. His clothes were soaked through with that black fluid, his hair plastered to his skull. "C-compatible? With what?"
The woman tilted her head, and gaslight caught her eyes at just the right angle. Thomas saw it then—really saw it—the way her eyes didn't reflect light properly, the way looking into them was like looking down a tunnel that went on forever, folding through dimensions that shouldn't exist.
"With the cut," she said simply. "Your body survived submersion in a Hollow's essence. Do you understand what that means? The dissolution fluid should have broken down your molecular bonds in under three minutes. But you're still here. Still whole. Still you."
She extended a hand toward him.
"That means your body recognized the fluid. On some level, on some genetic, quantum, dimensional level, you have compatibility with the space between spaces. Which means—"
Her smile was sharp.
"—you can learn to see the seams in reality. To cut them, like I do."
Thomas stared at that offered hand. Behind the woman, the puddle of pale sludge that had been the creature was evaporating into mist, leaving behind nothing but a faint discoloration on the cobblestones.
"I don't understand," he whispered.
"No," the woman agreed. "But you will. So here's your choice, Thomas Webb—yes, I know your name; I've been tracking you since the Hollow marked you four days ago—you can come with me, and I'll teach you how to fight back. How to cut the things that shouldn't exist out of the world."
She paused.
"Or I can take you home. You'll forget this ever happened. I'll make sure of it. You'll wake up tomorrow thinking you had a bad dream."
"That... that sounds better," Thomas managed.
"It would be," the woman said. "Except in three days, another Hollow will find you. They always find the compatible ones. And next time, I won't be there to pull you out."
She crouched down, bringing her face level with his.
"Most students don't survive their first year," she said quietly. "The training is brutal because it has to be. The Hollows are just the beginning—there are worse things coming through, and they're getting stronger. But those who do survive? They become something more than human. Something necessary."
In the distance, somewhere in London's twisting maze of streets, something screamed. It cut off abruptly, leaving only silence.
"That's number four hundred and eighteen," the woman said, standing. "Tonight alone. The disappearances are accelerating. In a month, it'll be thousands per day. In three months, if we don't stop this, there won't be enough humans left to matter."
She extended her hand again.
"So what's it going to be, Thomas? Home and three more days of normal life? Or do you want to learn why you're still alive when four hundred and seventeen other people aren't?"
Thomas looked at that hand. At the woman's impossible eyes. At the fading stain where the creature had melted.
His whole body was shaking. With cold, yes. With terror, absolutely.
But also with something else.
Something that felt dangerously close to purpose.
He'd spent sixteen years loading cargo on the docks, coming home smelling like fish and tar, watching his mother's hands crack and bleed from laundry work, watching his father's back slowly break under the weight of crates. A life measured out in wages and bruises and the slow grind of poverty.
And tonight, he'd been swallowed by a monster and cut free by a woman who could slice through reality itself.
Thomas Webb reached up and took her hand.
Her grip was strong, calloused, and when she pulled him to his feet, he felt the strength in her—not muscle exactly, but something else. Something that hummed just beneath her skin like electricity.
"Good lad," she said. "My name is Vera Blackwood. I'm what's called a Cutter—someone who can see and manipulate the dimensional boundaries that separate our world from the spaces between. And as of tonight, you're my apprentice."
She released his hand and started walking down the alley, coat billowing behind her.
"Keep up," she called over her shoulder. "We have a lot of ground to cover before dawn, and the Hollows hunt more aggressively in the dark. First lesson: never stay in one place too long. They can smell compatible humans from half a mile away."
Thomas stumbled after her, still coughing up traces of black fluid. "Wait—where are we going?"
"Blackfriars Station," Vera said without slowing. "There's a door in the underground that leads to the College. That's where you'll train. Where you'll learn what you are and what you can become."
"The College?"
"The College of Necessary Arts," Vera said. "Founded in 1666, after the Great Fire. Dedicated to protecting humanity from the things that slip through the cracks in reality. We're very old, very secret, and very, very good at what we do."
She glanced back at him, and her smile was almost kind.
"Welcome to the war, Thomas Webb. Try not to die in the first week. I hate doing paperwork for dead apprentices."
Behind them, in the shadows where the Hollow had died, something stirred.
Not the creature itself—it was truly gone, dissolved back into the Between.
But something had been watching. Something that had seen Vera Blackwood pull a living human from a Hollow's grasp. Something that understood what that meant.
Compatible.
Useful.
Necessary.
In the deeper darkness, in the spaces between spaces, something vast turned its attention toward London. Toward the College of Necessary Arts. Toward the door that should never have been opened.
The Hollows were just the beginning.
Just the scouts.
The Breaching had started twenty-three days ago, but the thing that had opened the door?
It had been waiting far, far longer.
And now it was hungry.