Chapter 3 – The Whisper Beneath the Skin
The city no longer felt empty.
It felt watching.
Adam ran until his lungs burned, until the cold night air sliced through his chest like shattered glass. The streets stretched endlessly ahead of him, illuminated only by trembling streetlights that flickered as though afraid of what lurked beyond their glow.
Behind him, his shadow did not follow.
It moved differently now.
Under the pale light, Adam could see it clearly—his shadow lagged half a second behind his movements, twitching when he stood still, stretching unnaturally across the pavement like spilled ink.
He stopped.
The shadow kept moving.
A pulse of terror shot through him. Slowly, very slowly, he lifted his hand.
The shadow's hand lifted too… but the fingers bent backward at impossible angles.
Adam stumbled away. "No…" he whispered.
The air around him grew heavier, pressing against his skin. The distant hum of the city was gone. No cars. No wind. No sound except his heartbeat.
Then he heard it.
A whisper.
Not from behind him.
Not from ahead.
From within.
Adam…
He clutched his head, gasping. "Stop!"
The whisper slid beneath his thoughts like oil through water.
You feel it now, don't you? The space where we belong.
His shadow peeled itself off the ground.
Not completely—but enough for Adam to see the outline rising, detaching like smoke lifting from fire. It remained connected to his feet by a thin strand of darkness, stretching, trembling.
The streetlights burst one by one.
Darkness swallowed the road.
Shapes began forming in the black—tall, crooked silhouettes crawling out from beneath parked cars, slipping from the cracks of buildings, unfolding from beneath benches.
Other shadows.
Dozens.
They surrounded him silently. Their forms were distorted, elongated, wrong. Some had too many limbs. Some bent at unnatural angles. None had faces.
But all of them faced him.
The whisper inside him grew stronger.
You were chosen.
Adam's shadow rose higher, its head tilting as though studying him. The thin tether at his feet pulsed like a living vein.
"Why me?" Adam choked out.
The shadows around him shifted closer. The ground beneath him darkened unnaturally, swallowing even the faintest reflection of light.
Then his shadow answered.
For the first time, it spoke aloud.
Its voice was his own—but hollow.
"Because you survived the first night."
The surrounding figures shuddered as though pleased.
Adam's mind raced. Survived? That meant others hadn't. The empty streets. The silence. The abandoned cars.
The city wasn't sleeping.
It had already been taken.
His shadow stretched upward until it was nearly his height, its edges rippling like liquid. Slowly, it stepped forward. The tether thinned.
Pain exploded through Adam's body. He dropped to his knees as a freezing sensation spread beneath his skin, like something crawling through his veins.
Let us in, the whisper urged.
The other shadows began to close the circle.
Adam forced himself to stand despite the agony. "You don't control me," he said through clenched teeth.
For a split second, the tether between him and the shadow flickered.
The figures around him hesitated.
Something inside Adam pushed back—an instinct, a surge of resistance. The darkness under his skin recoiled as though burned.
His shadow shrieked.
A sound that was not human tore through the air, echoing between buildings. The surrounding figures scattered backward like smoke caught in a gust of wind.
The tether snapped.
Adam collapsed forward as the shadows retreated into cracks, beneath cars, into walls—vanishing as quickly as they had appeared.
Light flickered back to life.
Streetlights hummed.
The city seemed normal again.
But Adam knew it wasn't.
Because when he slowly looked down at the pavement—
He had no shadow at all.
And from somewhere far above, hidden in the darkness between rooftops, something watched him…
Smiling.