Pablo woke with a start, his heart thudding against his ribs.

  He'd been dreaming of running through an endless maze of corridors in a glass skyscraper—every turn leading to another hallway, every door opening onto another stairwell. Agent Murphy was always there, sometimes behind him with her blue-gray eyes burning with accusation, sometimes ahead of him, blocking his path with her badge raised like a shield. No matter how fast he ran, no matter which direction he chose, she was there waiting.

  The dream shattered as consciousness returned, leaving only fragments and the taste of copper fear on his tongue. It was still dark outside, and the only light in Sasha’s bedroom came from her softly glowing bedside clock with a built-in sound machine, which was emitting the gentle burble of a brook flowing over stones. Her room was smaller than his, but somehow cozier—mismatched furniture that actually worked together, plants on the windowsill that she swore she'd kill but never did, a corkboard covered in photos and ticket stubs and dried flowers. It smelled like her: something floral and warm, underlaid with the faint mineral scent of turned earth that had only become stronger since she'd awakened her affinity.

  "Hey." Sasha's voice was sleep-rough, her hand sliding up his back in slow, soothing strokes. "You're okay. You were just dreaming again, hun."

  Pablo forced himself to take a deep breath, then another, letting his heart rate settle as the lingering images dissolved. The sheets were tangled around his legs. His shirt clung to his back. Beside him, Sasha waited with the quiet patience they'd both learned over the past four months—how to be present without pushing, how to offer comfort without demanding explanation.

  "Was it the lake again?"

  The lake. The NecroMaster. Mark's body crumpling to the ground under Razor’s radiant blade. The screaming chaos of that horrific battle, when everything had gone wrong, and nothing had made sense, and they'd all been about to die.

  "No." Pablo shook his head, frowning as the dream's details crystallized into something sharper. "It wasn't that. It was...Shit, I think I just figured something out."

  “What?”

  “Let’s hope I’m wrong.” With a thought, he reached out with his affinity and felt his phone on Sasha's nightstand—the familiar weight of its aluminum frame, the copper traces of its circuitry. A tug of will sent it sailing across the dim room into his waiting palm. He pulled up Delta's contact and hit call.

  The line connected on the first ring. Delta didn't need sleep.

  "You're awake sooner than I expected." The AI's voice carried its usual blend of condescension and impatience. "Are you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and on your way with the core?"

  "No. I have a question."

  "When don't you hatchlings have questions for me?" Delta groaned with theatrical exasperation. "If you'd just pay attention to my presentations, you'd find that approximately 73.4% of your queries are already addressed in materials I've prepared—"

  "How did Agent Murphy find us at Denny's?"

  Silence.

  In four months of dealing with Delta, Pablo had learned that the ancient AI rarely fell silent. Delta filled every conversational gap with lectures, tangents, and observations/complaints about Earth culture that ranged from insightful to baffling. Silence meant Delta was thinking. And when Delta needed to think, it usually meant trouble.

  "Well, I don't know," Delta said finally. "Hmm. That's a remarkably valid concern."

  "Thank you." Pablo rolled his eyes. Even compliments from Delta came wrapped in surprise that humans could be deserving of them.

  "I'm reviewing traffic camera footage, plate readers, and electronic toll collection data from last night. One moment." Another pause, shorter this time. "Interesting. I've tracked her drive out of San Francisco. She didn't come anywhere close to keeping pace with Warren's vehicle during his return."

  "That's what I was worried about." Pablo sat up straighter, his gut tightening. "She wasn't directly on his tail. She couldn't have followed him from the warehouse. So, again, how did she know where to find us?"

  Sasha pushed herself up onto one elbow, her dark hair tumbling across the pillow. Even half-awake and clearly exhausted, her mind was already working. "Could she be tracking our phones?"

  "No," Delta said without hesitation. "I'm securing your phones with my own advanced encryption protocols. The computational power required to crack my security would exceed anything your civilization currently possesses. And even if I weren't protecting them, she'd need a court order to access cell carrier tracking data, which she definitely doesn't have. I've been monitoring federal judicial databases, and no warrants have been issued for any of you."

  "She's a cop," Sasha snorted, sitting up fully now. The sheets pooled around her waist, and she tugged Pablo's discarded flannel shirt tighter around her shoulders. "Like they never bend the rules."

  “Regardless, if anyone had even attempted to access that data, it would have failed and set off twelve different alarm protocols I have in place.”

  "What about tracking our cars?" Pablo asked.

  "I..." Delta trailed off for a long beat. Pablo could almost hear the AI's vast processing power redirecting, running new calculations, checking assumptions that should have been checked months ago. The silence stretched for three seconds. Five. Seven.

  Then Delta sighed—a remarkably human sound for an alien consciousness that didn't need to breathe. "...I had not considered that."

  Pablo exchanged a look with Sasha. Her expression had sharpened from sleepy to alert, her jaw tight with the same cold understanding settling into Pablo's chest.

  "Scanning now," Delta continued, his tone clipped. "I'm accessing satellite imagery and cross-referencing with known retail GPS tracking device signatures. The technology is primitive enough that I initially filtered it out as background noise, but—ah. Yes. There it is."

  "There, what is?" Pablo had to resist the urge to call Razor from his Inventory just to keep himself calm.

  "Retail-grade GPS tracking units. Small, battery-powered, magnetic mounting. The kind any civilian can purchase from an electronics store or order online." Delta's voice had gone flat. "There's one attached to each of your vehicles."

  "All of us." Pablo's hand tightened on the phone. "She's been tracking all of us."

  "For how long?" Sasha demanded.

  "The devices appear to have been activated at different times over the past several weeks. Warren's is the oldest, approximately eighteen days. The others were added more recently, likely as she found the opportunity to install them."

  Eighteen days. More than two weeks of surveillance. Murphy had been watching them move across Napa Valley like pieces on a game board, and they'd had no idea. Fortunately, with Delta buried in the hillside behind the Quester estate, their in-person visits to the AI would likely seem innocuous in the data. Just a group of friends gathering at one friend’s plush house.

  "Alright." Pablo forced his voice steady, forced his tactical mind to engage despite the adrenaline flooding his system. "We need to deal with this. Delta, can you hijack the GPS signals? Feed her false data?"

  "Hatchling’s play. I can make it appear that all five vehicles are traveling anywhere you desire. I could—"

  "I want you to make it look like we're fleeing south toward Mexico," Pablo said. "All of us, different routes, but all heading for the border. That should keep her busy for a while."

  "That won't work if she's physically staking any of us out right now," Sasha pointed out. "If she's watching one of our houses and sees the car sitting in the driveway while her tracker says it's in Bakersfield, she'll know something's wrong."

  "She's not," Delta assured them.

  "Are you sure?" Pablo pressed. After the GPS blindspot, he wasn't inclined to trust Delta's surveillance confidence.

  "I'm monitoring her sleeping in her hotel room via her laptop's webcam as we speak. She really should be more mindful about her digital hygiene. A simple sticky note over the lens would force me to be much more creative."

  Pablo decided not to unpack the ethical implications of that statement right now. "Alright. Hijack the GPS data and—"

  "Wait." Sasha grabbed his arm, her grip tight. "If she was tracking all of our cars, then she knew that before Denny's, we were all at the clinic together."

  The words landed like a punch to the solar plexus.

  The clinic. Where the dungeon portal had opened. Where Rowan and Sam had been taken. Where they'd fought their way out of an alien nightmare and emerged covered in blood and glowing with tonic backlash, the melted remains of the parking lot asphalt still smoking from Warren putting down the two Raptor-Hounds.

  "Oh no." Pablo's voice came out strangled. "Oh hell. Delta, have you been monitoring the clinic the entire time since we left?"

  "Well, I was..."

  "What do you mean 'was,' lizard-lips?" Sasha's voice had gone sharp enough to cut glass.

  "It was so boring!" Delta snapped, suddenly defensive. "I got distracted—"

  "Distracted?" The two of them demanded in unison.

  "You have no idea how tedious it is while you five humans are sleeping!" The AI's voice rose with genuine frustration. "With my processing speed, I experience subjective days during your rest cycles. Days! So, in an effort to facilitate smoother interpersonal relations with humanity, I've been endeavoring to assimilate as much of your art, literature, and popular entertainment as I can. It's the only way to maintain my sanity!"

  "Let me get this straight." Pablo licked his lips and took a second to decode Delta's verbal smokescreen. He'd learned that the AI tended to veer into the lexiphanic whenever he was trying to confuse or distract his human Paladins. "You were reading books and watching movies instead of monitoring the FBI agent who suspects us of having something to do with her fiancé's death?"

  "As a matter of fact, this evening I was focused on romantic works. Shakespeare's sonnets, Lord Byron's collected poetry, and Love Island UK—specifically seasons four through seven—in an effort to understand your primate mating customs. I thought perhaps I could provide you two with some much-needed pointers given your somewhat clumsy courtship rituals—"

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Sasha made a sound that was half growl, half groan, and lunged across the bed for Pablo's phone like she could strangle the AI by crushing it in her hands.

  Pablo held up his free hand to forestall her rising fury and mouthed the word Later with as much emphasis as he could manage. They could yell at Delta about his viewing habits and unsolicited relationship advice once they knew the extent of the damage. Right now, they needed answers.

  "The vet clinic," Pablo said, forcing calm into his voice. "Have you been watching their security cameras at all since we left?"

  "Look, I created an automated monitoring subroutine that was supposed to alert me if anything significant occurred. The parameters were quite sophisticated, actually, designed to flag any unusual activity, emergency services, or—" Delta trailed off. A long pause. Then: "...Huh."

  "'Huh'?" Sasha repeated dangerously. "'Huh' what?"

  "Well, it appears that the monitoring subroutine I created also got unbearably bored observing static footage and instead began monitoring my entertainment stream. It's been engaging in an online debate about Bridgerton rather than alerting me to events at the clinic."

  "Are you telling me," Pablo said slowly, "that your computer program got bored?"

  "I may have inadvertently modeled it too closely on my own cognitive patterns. An oversight I shall correct in future iterations."

  "Check and see what's happening at the clinic. Now." Pablo resisted his own urge to send the phone into orbit.

  Silence. Then Delta's voice went flat and hard in a way Pablo had rarely heard.

  "Well, that’s not good."

  "What is it?"

  "There's a full crime scene unit at the veterinary clinic. Police vehicles, forensic technicians, and evidence markers. I count six officers and four civilian support staff. They're documenting everything—the damaged rear door, the claw marks on the doorframe, the mysterious ring of melted asphalt in the parking lot where Warren was singing Johnny Cash."

  Pablo's blood ran cold. Beside him, Sasha had gone still as a statue.

  "Scrubbing back through available footage now," Delta continued, his voice clinical. "Traffic cameras, nearby business surveillance, satellite passes. Murphy went almost directly to the clinic after your group returned to the clinic to retrieve Paladin Eden’s vehicle, along with Sam and Rowan’s. She arrived at approximately 2:28 AM, well before local law enforcement. She spent thirty-seven minutes documenting the scene with her personal phone and a digital camera before calling it in anonymously from a burner phone purchased at a gas station convenience store."

  "She's building a case," Pablo said. "Evidence that something impossible happened, documented by official sources, so it's not just her word."

  "The footage shows her photographing tire tracks, shoe prints, and what appears to be a blood sample she collected from the doorframe." Delta's tone had shifted from defensive to grim. "She's thorough. And patient. And considerably more competent than I initially assessed."

  "Wake up the team," Pablo said. "Everyone. Now."

  "Already initiating contact protocols—"

  A sudden pounding on the wall made both of them jump. Eden's voice came through, muffled but urgent: "Guys! I think we messed up! How did Murphy find us at Denny's?"

  Sasha was already moving, throwing off the covers and reaching for her jeans. "Same page, Eden!" she shouted back. "Get dressed!"

  Pablo was on his feet too, his mind racing through contingencies. The trackers they could handle. The clinic crime scene was a problem, but not unsolvable—strange damage to a building wasn't proof of anything supernatural. But Murphy was smarter than they'd given her credit for, more determined, and now she had official documentation of a crime scene. Sure, the perpetrators were dungeon monsters created by a vast alien system, and even if they hadn’t been a tad out of her jurisdiction, all the monsters were dead now.

  How many mistakes have we already made? He wondered as he pulled on his clothes. How many breadcrumbs did we leave without even knowing it?

  "Delta," he said, heading for the door. "Tell me, Warren answered already?"

  "Warren has been successfully roused. He was at your shared domicile. Zoe is also awake and...expressing significant displeasure at being roused, but she's alert."

  “We’ll be at the Quester house in under twenty. And Delta?"

  "Yes, Talon Lead?" Delta had the good sense—for once—to sound sheepish.

  "When this is over, you and I are going to have a very long conversation about operational security and the appropriate allocation of your attention during critical surveillance periods."

  "I look forward to it with the enthusiasm of a condemned prisoner awaiting execution," Delta said dryly. "In the meantime, I've already begun spoofing the GPS trackers. As far as Agent Murphy's monitoring equipment is concerned, none of your vehicles will move an inch."

  ***

  Sam lay in his bed staring at the stained ceiling, sheets tangled around his legs, skin slick with cold sweat. Every muscle in his body ached with exhaustion. His eyes burned. His head felt stuffed with cotton and broken glass. He'd been awake for—how long now? He'd lost track somewhere between the nightmare at the clinic and the surreal hours at Denny's, watching people he barely knew discuss aliens and magic powers and FBI agents like it was all perfectly normal.

  It's not real, he told himself for the hundredth time. You're having a breakdown. A psychotic break. You'll wake up in the hospital, and they'll explain everything.

  But the yellow eyes staring back at him from the bathroom mirror had been real. The square pupils that contracted in the light like a goat's—those had been real too. And the bone-white blades that had erupted from his forearms when he'd attacked that...that thing...

  Sam squeezed his eyes shut and tried to will himself toward unconsciousness.

  The whispers started almost immediately.

  They came from everywhere and nowhere—soft, sibilant sounds that seemed to originate from inside his own skull. Words in a language he didn't recognize, syllables that wriggled past his comprehension. He couldn't remember when they’d started exactly. They'd been so quiet at first that by the time he'd noticed them, they'd already become background noise. Like tinnitus. Like the hum of a refrigerator, you only notice it when it stops.

  Then snippets of comprehensible words emerged from the roiling babble.

  ...integration protocols incomplete...

  ...substrate adaptation in progress...

  ...consumption required for cellular...

  Sam's eyes snapped open. The whispers retreated, fading to a barely perceptible hiss at the edge of his awareness. His heart was hammering again, pulse throbbing in his temples.

  A soft blue glow flickered at the corner of his vision.

  He turned his head, and there it was—a translucent screen floating in the air beside his bed, filled with text and symbols he couldn't quite read. The same kind of screen he'd seen in the dungeon, the one the others had called a Status Screen. But this one was different from theirs. The edges flickered and warped. The text seemed to shift and crawl whenever he tried to focus on it. And there was something else wrong with it, something he couldn't quite identify—an incongruous color, maybe, or symbols that didn't match what the others had described.

  Sam blinked, and the screen vanished. He lay there for a long moment, breathing hard, staring at the empty space where it had been. He closed his eyes again, desperate for even a few minutes of unconsciousness.

  The whispers returned. Louder this time.

  ...morphological restructuring at 34%...

  ...aetheric saturation exceeds baseline parameters...

  ...FEED...

  Sam sat bolt upright, gasping. The blue screen flashed into existence again—closer now, almost touching his face—and he caught a glimpse of something before it flickered away. Numbers changing. A progress bar filling. Words that might have been TRANSFORMATION IN PROGRESS before it all dissolved into static.

  "Fuck this," he muttered, throwing off the covers.

  His legs shook as he stood. The room spun for a moment, and he had to grab the wall to steady himself. When had he last eaten? The others had bought him a massive breakfast at Denny's, but his stomach felt hollow, cavernous, like he hadn't eaten in days. It was an unfortunately familiar feeling from his childhood, the gnawing that kept him from focusing in class and got him into fights with his peers.

  Sam staggered toward the bathroom, one hand trailing along the wall for support. He needed something to help him sleep. Melatonin, cold medicine, anything.

  The bathroom light was harsh and fluorescent, and Sam flinched away from his own reflection. He couldn't look at those eyes. Not yet. Maybe not ever. He fumbled through the medicine cabinet—expired ibuprofen, a mostly empty tube of toothpaste, dental floss he'd bought with good intentions and never opened—but nothing to make him sleep. He'd meant to buy more. He'd meant to do a lot of things. Somehow, none of them had gotten done.

  Sam slammed his clenched fist into the bathroom counter. The formica surface cracked under the impact. His stomach gurgled loudly, an almost painful cramping that made him double over for a moment.

  Maybe if I just eat something, he thought dimly. Maybe then I can sleep.

  He shuffled out of the bathroom and into the main room of his tiny apartment.

  The state of the place hit him like it belonged to someone else. Empty bottles and cans everywhere—beer, energy drinks, soda. Dirty plates crusted with the remains of meals he could barely remember eating. Fast-food wrappers, pizza boxes, and takeout containers piled on every surface. The mess had accumulated so gradually that he'd stopped seeing it, but now, in the gray pre-dawn light filtering through his blinds, it looked like the aftermath of a siege.

  When did I let it get this bad?

  He couldn't remember. The last few weeks had been a blur and that was before...the world had turned upside-down. He'd called in sick to work more times than he could count. Stopped answering texts. Stopped leaving the apartment except to buy more food.

  Something's wrong with me, he thought. The realization felt distant, muffled, like it was happening to someone else. Something's been wrong for a while.

  The whispers hummed in incomprehensible agreement.

  Sam made his way to the kitchen—really just a corner of the main room with a small fridge and a two-burner electric stove. His stomach cramped again, harder this time, and he pressed a hand against his abdomen with a grimace. Maybe if he ate something, the hunger would settle enough to let him sleep.

  …FEED…

  He opened the fridge. The interior light flickered once before steadying, illuminating nearly empty shelves. He'd cleaned it out over the past few days without really noticing. A bottle of ketchup. A jar of pickles. Some mustard and soy sauce packets. And there, on the middle shelf, a pound of ground beef in its plastic-wrapped styrofoam tray. He'd bought it...yesterday? The day before? Planning to cook something real for once.

  Sam pulled out the ground beef and set it on the small counter. He turned to the stove, found a frying pan in the sink—clean enough—and set it on the burner. Clicked the dial to medium-high. His hands were shaking as he unwrapped the meat. The cellophane crinkled loudly in the quiet apartment. The beef was cold against his fingers, slightly tacky with moisture, marbled pink and red.

  Just breathe, he told himself. Eat. Sleep. Deal with the rest tomorrow.

  But his hands wouldn't stop trembling, and even with his eyes open, the whispers were getting louder. The blue screen kept flickering at the edge of his vision, and his stomach was screaming at him—a hunger so intense it felt like a living thing was trying to claw its way out.

  Without really thinking about it, Sam pinched off a small piece of the raw ground beef and popped it into his mouth. It hit his tongue, and something shifted inside him.

  The taste was—he didn't have words for it. Not good, exactly. Not bad either. Just necessary. Essential. Like water after days in a desert. Like air after suffocating. His body responded before his mind could catch up, a surge of relief so intense it made his knees weak.

  Yes, the whispers sang. Yes, yes, yes...

  ...consumption initiated...

  ...FEED...

  Sam grabbed another piece. Larger this time. Shoved it into his mouth and barely chewed before swallowing. The raw meat slid down his throat, cold and dense, and his stomach seized around it with something that felt almost like gratitude.

  This is wrong, some distant part of his brain insisted. This is sick. You're eating raw meat. You could get E. coli. You could—

  A handful this time, followed by another. The voices in his head were singing now, a discordant chorus of approval and demand. The blue screen blazed at the corner of his vision, brighter than before, and he could almost read it now—numbers climbing, percentages shifting, something that might have been a progress bar filling toward completion.

  Sam couldn't stop.

  He ate by the fistful, red fluid running down his chin and dripping onto his shirt. The meat disappeared faster than seemed possible—half the package gone, then three-quarters, then all of it, and Sam was scraping the styrofoam tray with his fingers, desperate to get every last morsel.

  When it was empty, he stood there for a long moment, panting, staring at his hands. His stomach twisted—not with hunger this time, but with something else. Something moving. Something that had been waiting, building, preparing for this moment. Sam looked down at his arms and saw his skin ripple.

  "No," he whispered. "No, no, no—"

  The itch started everywhere at once. Under his skin, inside his muscles, deep in his bones. Like insects crawling through his flesh, like his whole body was trying to turn itself inside out. Sam scratched at his forearms and felt something push back from beneath the surface.

  Agony crashed through Sam. He screamed—or tried to. The sound that came out was wrong, layered with harmonics that no human throat should produce. He collapsed to the kitchen floor, knocking the frying pan off the stove as he fell. It clattered somewhere behind him, but he couldn't process it, couldn't process anything except the pain.

  His skin was moving. Bulging. Things writhed beneath the surface like worms in soil.

  The whispers weren't whispers anymore. They were a roar, a cacophony of voices all speaking at once, drowning out his thoughts, his screams, his very sense of self. And beneath them, deeper than sound, he felt something vast and cold and pleased—like a hand closing around his heart, like a presence settling into the spaces behind his eyes.

  ...ADAPTATION ACCELERATING...

  ...MORPHOLOGICAL CASCADE INITIATED...

  ...SUBSTRATE INTEGRATION: 67%...

  The blue screen blazed in his vision, no longer flickering, finally stable. However, Sam still couldn't focus on it. Couldn't focus on anything except the torture of his body becoming something else, something other, as the voices swallowed him whole and the kitchen floor rushed up to meet his face.