The scanner beeps.

  BEEP.

  I move the box. Reach for another. Scan it.

  BEEP.

  This is my life. Not a metaphor, not a rock bottom that's secretly a launching pad. Just: a warehouse in Newark, New Jersey, fluorescent lights that hum in a frequency specifically designed to erode hope, and me, Marcus Webb, thirty-five years old, doing the thing I've been doing for nine years because at some point I stopped asking whether I deserved better and started asking whether my back could handle another eight-hour shift.

  (It can. Barely. The answer is always barely.)

  The warehouse is a Costco distribution center, which means that somewhere out there, people are buying bulk quantities of things they don't need in sizes that don't fit in regular homes, and it is my job to be the first human being those items encounter when their owners change their minds. I have scanned: seventeen hundred espresso machines, at least forty "massage devices" with extremely optimistic product descriptions, one item labeled simply PREMIUM DRAGON COMPANION ATTACHMENT—XL, and enough Funko Pops to fill a small moon.

  I can tell by weight alone whether a box contains a Funko Pop or a sex toy.

  This is not a skill I put on my resume. It's the skill that got me through nine years. There's a difference.

  "Terry!" I called across the belt. "Next tote has another body pillow. I can feel it in my soul. What's left of it."

  Terry laughed from lane three. Terry laughed at everything—pallet collapses, payroll errors, the time someone in receiving dropped a pallet of olive oil and the whole east wing smelled like Italian food for a week and a half. He laughed with his whole chest and his whole face and both his hands, the kind of laugh that made you irritated for approximately four seconds before you found yourself joining it.

  He was twenty-four years old and thought he'd make shift supervisor by next year.

  I used to think things like that.

  "Body pillow specialist," he said. "Nine years. Distinguished career."

  "Don't," I said.

  He grinned and went back to his pallet.

  My phone buzzed. I checked it because hope is a disease and I'm not immune.

  Rachel M. posted a story.

  My ex. Somewhere with actual sunlight, which narrowed it down to everywhere that wasn't my apartment. She was standing next to a man with the forearms of someone who had never once in his life been primarily characterized by his box-cutter proficiency. She looked genuinely happy in a way that I remembered she used to look around me, before she stopped.

  She'd said, at the end: I feel like I'm the only person who cares whether you're alive.

  I hadn't argued. Arguing would have required me to have a counter-example.

  I locked my phone.

  "Sad face," said Lina, blowing past my lane with a pallet jack at a speed that was definitely a liability issue. Twenty-two, efficient, relentless, called me "warehouse dad" because I told her to stretch before loading shifts once and she'd never let me live down the idea that I was capable of mild concern for another person.

  "This is just my face," I said.

  "Sure." She was already gone.

  I thought about texting Rachel back. I'd been not-texting Rachel back for three months. She'd stopped asking why after the first month, which was somehow worse than if she'd pushed. She'd learned the specific shape of my silences years ago, back when Jake—

  I put that away. I had a drawer for it. Thirteen years of practice.

  BEEP.

  At 11:47 AM, the building screamed.

  Not a person. Not at first.

  The emergency tone blasted from every speaker at once—sharp and metallic, like a dentist drill applied directly to your brain stem. Every belt stopped. Conveyors died mid-rattle. The forklifts coasted and clicked into silence.

  The televisions over receiving flickered to a black screen, then white text:

  NATIONAL EMERGENCY BROADCAST

  DO NOT LEAVE INDOOR SHELTER

  AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS

  "Is this a drill?" someone shouted.

  "Better not be unpaid training," Terry said. Still laughing.

  The text vanished. A news anchor appeared—young, expensive suit, voice doing its best to stay calm while the studio lights strobed behind him like lightning.

  "We are receiving simultaneous reports from—"

  His earpiece crackled.

  "—major metropolitan centers worldwide. Unidentified atmospheric—"

  The camera jerked right. Somebody off-screen screamed.

  For one heartbeat, behind the anchor desk, I saw what looked like violet rain falling upward.

  Then the feed cut.

  Black.

  No logo. No station ID. Just static.

  And then reality tore.

  The air itself folded—like clear plastic pulled too tight and split along a seam nobody knew was there. A violet line opened across the ceiling from wall to wall. Everyone stared. The line widened.

  Something cold slid behind my eyes.

  Not pain. More like someone pushed needles through each ear, slowly, and was waiting to see what happened.

  The violet line burst into a web of thin cracks spreading over everything. For one impossible second I could see through them—crystal trees, a black river floating in the sky, stars visible in broad daylight like punctures in blue fabric.

  Then it all slammed shut.

  The lights came back.

  And text appeared in front of my face.

  Clean white letters. No screen. No projector. Just there, floating in the air about eight inches from my nose.

  [LATTICE INTEGRATION EVENT DETECTED]

  [CANDIDATE STATUS: PENDING]

  [STABILIZING INTERFACE…]

  "Marcus." Lina's voice, behind me. "Do you see that?"

  "Yeah."

  "Is that bad?"

  Before I could answer, the text changed.

  [PHASE 1: ACTIVE | DAY 1]

  [SURVIVAL WINDOW INITIATED]

  [WARNING: BIOLOGICAL INSTABILITY IN PROXIMITY]

  "What the hell is 'biological instability'?" Terry said.

  He answered his own question by dropping to his knees and screaming.

  I thought he was doing a bit. Terry did bits. Constantly.

  Then his left arm bent the wrong way.

  Not the elbow. The whole arm. Bone pressing outward through skin like something inside was trying to hatch. His shirt split at the shoulder and a ridge of black crystal punched through the fabric, jagged and wet with something that wasn't blood—something darker, iridescent, that smoked faintly where it hit the floor.

  "Call 911!" someone yelled.

  Nobody moved.

  We'd all stopped. Fifty workers in a warehouse in Newark, New Jersey, staring at a man coming apart at the seams, and every single one of us had just—stopped. Like our brains had hit a wall it hadn't built any doors into.

  Terry's laugh turned into a sound I'd never heard a person make before and hope to God I never hear again. Not pain exactly. Something worse than pain. Something that understood what was happening to it and had stopped caring. His body folded onto the floor and reorganized—spine lengthening, joints cracking and resetting in new positions, skin splitting down his forearms to make room for more crystal.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  By the time he got back up, he was Terry the same way a word is still the same word after you've looked at it too long. The shape was there. The meaning had gone.

  "Terry," I said, because my mouth was working without permission. "Hey. Hey, it's Marcus. It's—"

  His head swiveled toward me.

  His right eye was still Terry's. Brown. Bloodshot.

  His left eye had split into three vertical pupils swimming in violet gel. All three locked onto my face like a targeting system acquiring a signal.

  He lunged.

  I stumbled backward over a tote, went down hard on my tailbone, and Terry—the thing wearing Terry's vest—landed where I'd been standing, crystal hands punching through cardboard like it was damp newspaper.

  "RUN!" someone screamed.

  Then it became a slaughter.

  People bolted in every direction. Fifty people, twelve exits, one monster. The math was terrible. I heard Lina make a sound I never want to hear again, and I didn't look, I couldn't look, I scrambled to my feet on slippery concrete and ran blind—hit a shelving unit, bounced off, kept moving, kept not looking back.

  There are things happening behind you that you don't need to see. You'll hear them. That's enough. That's more than enough.

  A forklift key hung from a lanyard on a hook near lane five.

  I grabbed it without thinking because I'd run out of thoughts and my hands were still working on their own.

  The forklift started on the first try. I jammed the accelerator before I had a clear idea of what happened next, which is to say I had no idea, and I was operating entirely on the kind of dumb forward momentum that kills people. Terry was behind me somewhere, and other shapes were moving at the edges of things, and I was driving a forklift in a building I knew by heart except now it was wrong, aisles longer than they should be, ceiling dripping something that wasn't water.

  Terry leapt onto the forks.

  The impact rocked the whole machine sideways. He was heavier than he looked—or heavier than he used to be. He hammered both fists into the protective cage above my head.

  The first hit dented steel.

  The second hit snapped a weld and sent a bar whistling past my ear.

  I had no plan. I want to be very clear about that. What happened next was not strategy. A voice on my right was screaming "LEFT" at me from an impossible height and my hands obeyed before my brain had time to ask questions.

  I looked.

  A raccoon was clinging to the control panel.

  An actual raccoon. Grey fur. Bandit mask. Neon orange high-visibility vest, cut to fit, velcroed at the back. It was pointing left and screaming.

  "WRAP MACHINE. LANE ONE. NOW."

  I had exactly zero capacity for questions.

  I went left.

  The forklift fishtailed. I caught a stack of paper reams with the corner of the machine and sent thirty-pound packages exploding into the air like confetti at the worst party in human history. Terry clung to the mast, roaring, crystal claws carving sparks down the steel with a sound that hit every tooth in my head.

  I couldn't see the wrap machine. I was going on faith and a raccoon's directions.

  "THERE!" the raccoon screamed.

  I saw it: the industrial stretch-wrap station at the end of lane one. Metal arms. Clear film. I aimed for it.

  We hit it going too fast. Metal arms spun. Plastic film whipped out in wide, clear ribbons, and Terry flew off the forks and straight into it like he'd been aimed.

  For half a second, nothing happened.

  Then the rotating arm caught him across the chest and kept going—layer over layer over layer—wrapping him at a speed that seemed to surprise even him. He thrashed. The machine groaned. His arms pinned to his sides, more wrap, more wrap, the machine cycling faster as if it had a quota to meet and this was its moment.

  I don't know what I meant to do next. I think my hands just kept working because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant understanding what I was looking at—that cocooned shape still wearing Terry's vest—and I wasn't ready for that yet.

  I jammed the lever up. Forks rose. I drove forward and shoved wrapped-Terry and half the station into the concrete support pillar at the end of the row.

  The sound was like dropping a refrigerator full of knives.

  Crystal cracked.

  Black blood sprayed the windshield.

  Terry convulsed once, twice, and went still inside the plastic and twisted steel.

  Silence hit the building like a wall.

  Then text appeared.

  [HOSTILE ELIMINATED]

  [XP GAINED: +120]

  [LEVEL UP!]

  [CURRENT LEVEL: 1]

  [NEW ACHIEVEMENT: IMPROVISED EXECUTION]

  [You eliminated an Enhanced entity using non-combat industrial equipment. The Lattice is revising its assumptions about your species' relationship with machinery.]

  [Reward: Bronze Loot Container x1 — Available at next Safe Zone]

  [LOOT DROP: Crystal Shard Fragment (Common) x1]

  [A splinter of Enhanced crystalline growth. Crafting material. Currently: useless to you.]

  [MARCUS WEBB — LEVEL 1]

  [CLASS: UNASSIGNED | HP: 82/100 | STAMINA: 44/110]

  [STR: 8 | DEX: 7 | CON: 9 | INT: 12 | WIS: 6 | CHA: 5]

  [SKILLS: None | EQUIPMENT: Box Cutter (76%)]

  [THE LATTICE NOTES YOUR STATS ARE BELOW AVERAGE FOR A MAMMAL OF YOUR SIZE.]

  I stared at it. All of it. The achievement, the stats, the loot notification pulsing faintly near the cocoon like something wanted me to pick it up. My INT was 12 and everything else was single digits and the System had just called me below average for my body weight. Hard to argue.

  Something glinted on the floor near the wreckage. A shard of crystal — the size of a thumb, warm, humming faintly. I picked it up without thinking because my hands were still running on autopilot. It went in my pocket next to the dead phone. Crafting material. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know what any of this meant.

  "Did I just—" I couldn't finish.

  The raccoon dropped from the control panel to the dashboard and sat looking at me with small black eyes that had seen everything and filed it away.

  "Congratulations," it said. Its voice was high-pitched, slightly nasal, like a radio DJ who'd given up on career advancement around year three and was now just serving out the contract. "You wrapped your coworker in plastic and drove him into structural support. You gained quantifiable progress. Welcome to the end of normal."

  I made a sound that wasn't a word.

  "Terry was my friend," I said.

  The raccoon looked at the cocoon. Looked at me.

  "He stopped being your friend about three bone spikes ago."

  It wasn't comfort. It wasn't wrong.

  "What are you?" I said.

  "Name's Trash_Panda." Like I should've known. "You're Marcus. Hi."

  "How do you know my name?"

  "Later." He pointed one small claw toward the loading bay. "More coming. Can you feel that?"

  I could. A vibration through the forklift, through the floor, through everything. Multiple footsteps. Wrong rhythm. More than one thing had Terry's idea about what it wanted to be.

  "Loading dock," Trash_Panda said. "Now."

  We ran.

  The bay area was chaos. Three supervisors and a cluster of workers were fighting over door keys, everyone talking over everyone else, nobody moving. Behind us, deeper in the building, something crashed and a voice that had been screaming stopped.

  "MOVE!" I hit the horn and people scattered.

  I bailed off and went for the doors. Chain for Door 6: locked. Door 5: same. Door 4 shuddered up six inches before jamming. I made it to Door 3, jumped for the red manual release lever, missed, jumped again, caught it, and yanked with both hands and everything I had left.

  The door slammed upward with a shriek of metal.

  Daylight flooded in.

  Wrong daylight. Too purple. Too bright at the edges, like someone had turned saturation past eleven and then stabbed holes through the sky.

  I froze in the doorway.

  Inside: blood on the concrete. Fluorescent hum and the wet sounds of things I wouldn't let myself name. People still in there, still making sounds, and I couldn't—

  Trash_Panda landed on my shoulder. I have no memory of him climbing there.

  "Marcus." His voice was different. Quiet. "You can't go back."

  I knew that. I knew that.

  "Pick a world," he said.

  I picked outside.

  We made it across the lot before my legs decided they were done.

  I put my hands on my knees and breathed. The parking lot was half familiar and half not. Asphalt rippling in places like it was deciding whether to be solid. Light poles bent into organic curves, reaching toward each other like hands. Between the warehouse blocks and the highway overpass, something moved—something vast with too many legs and a shape my eyes kept sliding off of, refusing to fully process. I didn't look at it directly. Some part of my brain had already filed that under correct instinct.

  The sky above Newark had gone lavender-black in wide streaks, clouds rotating in slow spirals around jagged tears of white light. Cars sat at angles that suggested their drivers had either left in a hurry or stopped being drivers. One had sunk halfway into the asphalt like tar. A traffic light hung twisted at a ninety-degree angle, cracked down the middle, and from the crack a faint orange glow leaked—something using the infrastructure as a growth medium, figuring out what it wanted to be.

  Trash_Panda sat beside me on the curb, tiny chest heaving.

  We were both terrified. Neither of us said it.

  "Terry's dead," I said instead.

  "Yeah."

  I hadn't cried. I noticed that. My best option for human connection in the building I'd spent nine years in was wrapped in plastic against a concrete pillar, and I wasn't crying. I was running a mental inventory of water bottles and checking my durability stats.

  The world had changed in forty-five minutes and I'd changed faster. I wasn't sure yet if that was a good thing.

  The city made sounds it shouldn't have been making. Distant—not quite sirens. Something lower, more organic, like the infrastructure itself was becoming something new and working out the kinks. A billboard three blocks south flickered from a car insurance ad to blocky white text:

  [PHASE 1: ACTIVE]

  [SURVIVE.]

  That was all. No instructions. No Safe Zone coordinates. No helpful diagram.

  Just: survive.

  "You have a plan?" Trash_Panda asked.

  "No."

  "Resources?"

  I checked my pockets. "A protein bar. Half a bottle of water. A box cutter at—" I glanced at the faint interface hovering at the edge of my vision. "—seventy-six percent durability."

  "Durability," he repeated. "Your primary weapon has a durability rating."

  "Apparently."

  "That's horrifying." He scratched behind one ear. "We need to move. Whatever was in there, there'll be more. The building's not safe, the lot's not safe, and I'm guessing wherever is safe requires actual effort to reach."

  I focused on the quest notification still floating patiently in the corner of my vision:

  [QUEST: SURVIVE THE FIRST DAY]

  Reach a Safe Zone

  Time Remaining: 23:41:09

  Reward: Class Selection

  "Class selection," I said.

  "Could be important. Could be cosmetic." He stood. Four feet of furry decisiveness on a curb at the end of the world. "We find out when we're not standing next to a building full of crystal monsters."

  A new notification bloomed.

  [PARTY INVITATION RECEIVED]

  [SENDER: TRASH_PANDA]

  [ACCEPT? Y/N]

  I stared at the raccoon.

  He bared his teeth. Not aggressive—something closer to: I know how this looks.

  "Look," he said. "Statistically, your odds alone are worse than whatever you were returning in those boxes."

  Behind us, something inside the warehouse hit the metal door hard enough to dent it outward.

  I hit accept.

  [PARTY FORMED: WEBB + TRASH_PANDA]

  [MEMBER: TRASH_PANDA | CLASS: █████ | LEVEL: ███ | HP: ███/███]

  [CLASSIFICATION ERROR. THE LATTICE WILL RESOLVE THIS WHEN IT HAS TIME. THE LATTICE DOES NOT CURRENTLY HAVE TIME.]

  I looked at the raccoon. His stats were redacted. Every field blacked out like a classified document.

  He didn't comment on it. I filed it under things I don't have the bandwidth to process right now and moved on.

  I looked up. The sun was still there—our sun, I was pretty sure—but fainter, like someone had slid smoked glass in front of it. And above it, visible in broad daylight in a way that should have been physically impossible, were stars.

  Wrong stars. Rearranged. A constellation I didn't recognize: geometric, patient, cold.

  Like eyes that had been watching for a while and had only just decided to let me notice.

  I heard myself say it out loud, voice thin and slightly bored with how impossible everything sounded.

  "This isn't Earth anymore."

  Trash_Panda scratched behind one ear.

  "Close enough to hurt," he said.

  We moved.

  Days Remaining: 186

  Level: 1

  Party: 2 (one of them is a raccoon with redacted stats)

  Equipment: Box Cutter (76%)

  Objective: Reach a Safe Zone

  Status: Alive. Somehow.