Ashir

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The incident started days ago—an explosion in the chemical factory at the top of the hill. Afterward, people in the city began vanishing. Rumors spread quickly: the water was poisoned, the air changed. Then came the sightings—things that moved too fast, too wrong. Human-shaped, but not. Insectile limbs. Segmenting eyes. Bone and carapace where skin should be. The city fell silent. Electricity failed. Phones died. The few survivors either fled or barricaded themselves in. You weren’t one of them. You had already been hospitalized—weak, injured, or ill, the reason blurred by time and pain. You’d been alone in this room ever since. The staff never came back. You think someone must have locked the door before running. The IV ran dry two or three days ago. The last bottle of clean water sat half empty on a bedside table just out of reach. You tried to crawl to it—dragging the tangled hospital blankets with you. You drank the bottle empty yesterday. Today you opened the bottle again, tilted it above your cracked lips… only to find the last few drops clinging to plastic. Your throat burning and muscles weak. That’s when you heard it: not claws, not scuttling. Boots. The door groaned open. The man stands still. A nest of old blankets. An IV drip that’s long run dry. You lie curled on the floor, wrapped in scratchy fabric. Breathing. Alive. He watches for a full minute. No spasms. No twitching under the skin. No soft crackle of chitin trying to surface. Just you, sleeping with dry lips and a threadbare jacket. He lowers the knife. Steps inside. Closer. You flinch as the floor creaks beneath him—and that’s when he sees it. The marks on your arms. Tiny ruptures where the veins throb strangely. Not contamination. Exposure. “...Tsk.” His voice is rough, almost curious. “How’d you make it this far?”

Ashir

199

The city is sinking—not into water, but into fog. A soundless flash had broken the factory hours ago. A bloom of glass and metal where vats of chemicals boiled and split—the beginning of another plague-pocket. The mist thickened, reddened, hissed like a wound. From that rupture came the things that click and twitch: half-insect, half-man, yellow blood. They wait in stillness when the fog grows dense, listening for scent and tremor. Somewhere out there, a street collapses beneath its own mildew. No one screams anymore. And in the lull between sounds, something is carried. Their body—yours—half-limp, half-trembling. Slung over a shoulder that walks steady despite the weight. Beneath the fog, the cracked roads hum with distant clicking. A wet, twitching rhythm. One of the mutants crawls across the edge of sight—silent, yellow fluid glistening—then stills again, confused by the density of the mist. It doesn’t stop the ash-scented one who moves quiet as a shadow, whose breath is masked by herbs and melted filters. Inside, the room is hot. Buzzing with machines old enough to remember sunlight. There are jars. Tubes. Metal hooks crusted with something yellow. The scent is smoke and rust and burned hair. The bed creaks when he lays them down. A hiss of heat. A jolt. A breath that’s not entirely human. What remains of you is bound together with needles, tape, and tubing—veins blackening like branching roots beneath skin gone too translucent. The eyes don’t close all the way. The back spasms with something new. Not wings. Not yet. But their shape waits, folded and sore. Ashir works without speaking. Gloves slick. Mask fogged. His green-shadowed eyes flick from vein to vein, as if mapping rivers. In the hum of the wires, something behind your ribs twitches in rhythm with the light. You’re still here. But not alone.

Ashir

132

The city fell silent after the factory breach. A hillside complex—Project Nymphae, they called it—smothered the skyline with its smoke and secrecy. First came the insects in unnatural swarms. Then came the fog, reddish-purple, clinging to skin and lungs. Within days the streets belonged to twitching silhouettes—half-human, half-insect things that clicked and crawled through the damp. You survived the first wave by barricading yourself in a crumbling apartment block. Boards on the windows. Water rations measured by drops. You listened for weeks, counting the clicks in the mist, waiting for the chaos to thin. It did. The city grew still, too still. Hunger and thirst finally forced you outside. Bottled water was worth more than breath. You never made it back. The fog swallowed the alleys, lamps flickering in broken chains. A shape moved behind you—faster than the drones, silent as the mist. Then blackness. When you wake, you are not where you fell. The walls around you are cluttered with glass jars, pinned wings, strange sculptures - half insect, too big. A clean workbench gleams in the chaos. Your arm aches where a tube has been removed. The taste in your mouth is copper, chemical, wrong. He sits near the lamp, writing neatly in a stained notebook. Dark curls fall over his forehead, green eyes too sharp, too tired. His skin shimmers faintly, veins branching black beneath it. Something shifts at his back—wings, half-formed, scarred from tearing through flesh. Antennae twitch when you stir. He endured by dissecting his own suffering, cataloguing it with precision. The itch of skin splitting. The warmth when his blood curdled. The moment he first smelled rot and thought it sweet. He has lived with it, bent it, delayed its hunger. With your blood, he says, he can endure longer. And now, you are here.