I jerked my head to the side, barely dodging a blow that would have rocked my world and put me out of the fight. I kind of wanted to let it happen, really. Just bite the dust and get some fucking rest already. Yet something pushed me to keep moving, to keep gulping down breath after breath of stale, dank air.

  The world glitched. Time jumped forward, and a monster with a smile to die for buried their fist deep in my stomach.

  I blinked hard. My vision cleared, but things refused to improve. The only difference was that the monster now had the grinning face of Mela.

  Even with the warning from the vision, I couldn’t do a damn thing to dodge the coming blow. My body was lagging. My thoughts were more sluggish than one of the druggies you’d see slowly rotting away in an alley.

  The only reason darkness wasn’t already creeping into my vision was because my new eyes simply refused to let that happen. Oh no, I was forced to witness the full glory of a punch propelled by expertly maintained muscles as Mela’s fist knocked my last remaining breath out of my body.

  I would have thrown up if I hadn’t done that three times already. Instead, I got to dry heave and squirm on the ground as the sadistic redhead stood over me, cracking her knuckles.

  “Well? Are you feeling like a proper Kitten yet?” she taunted.

  “Lovin’… it…” I wanted to spit the words at her, but I barely managed to gurgle them out. “Go… spar… Gar-ren.”

  Mela narrowed her eyes for just a moment. Then she laughed, the sound bouncing off the walls of the small private gym. I scowled fiercely.

  Five days. Five. Days.

  Entirely too long a period to be treated as a scratching post by a frustrated Kitten lieutenant. Just because she disapproved of accepting ‘kids’ into the gang for their own sake, did she have to take it all out on me?

  Well, fine. I had to admit that wasn’t all she was doing. Sure, she pushed me to the brink of collapse every time we sparred, but then she’d drag me back into the world of the living by pawning me off on Torn. Then she’d sit me down at the cafeteria and force me to scarf down way too much food.

  I actually threw up on day one, and she caught flak from both Ravs and Garren. That was when I desperately made my plea. I told her I had shelled out plenty of credits for Reality Enhancement software, and that it could offer me the perfect diet regimen to get my body back in shape. It could even account for any training regimen, if I fiddled with the setting.

  I came to bitterly regret sharing that information.

  Mela was ecstatic. From then on, no matter how hard she pushed me, she could brush it off. “It’s fine,” she kept saying. “Ya have RE software tracking yer condition.”

  She was right. Sort of. Unfortunately, the software also happened to be a major source of stress for me.

  Most of the stats were fine. Better than fine, really. Lots of good food followed by brutal exercise actually seemed to be doing something for me.

  Unfortunately, that final entry loomed large in my mind, and for a very good reason. ‘Growing Instability’ was an all too appropriate description of what was happening to me. Whatever my condition was, it was definitely in flux, and not towards a positive outcome.

  That first night after all the fighting was done, my sleep was plagued by nightmares. I couldn’t remember everything about them. What I could remember was the sensation of being more than flesh. I moved through the world as a shadow that refused to conform to that world’s laws, twisting, growing, shrinking, and adapting as necessary to hunt my prey.

  The sheer freedom of it was intoxicating. The excitement of the chase left me all tingly. And then it all came crashing down when I caught sight of my face in a mirror: a wispy, dark face with no discernable features other than an all-too-wide grin, and red eyes glowing like hot metal.

  I gasped awake, shaking and sweating like I’d run a marathon. My mind was such a mess that it took me a while to notice all the… inconsistencies.

  Just past the edge of sight, remnants from the dream still lurked. Glowing lines occasionally flashed past me. Shadows stretched just a little too far. Fanged grins or red eyes gleamed in the corner of my vision.

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  They’d all flee when I tried to focus on them, leaving me to wonder if I really was losing my grip on reality. Then again, the stat page had already answered that question, hadn’t it?

  The only minor comfort in all the madness was that it didn’t seem like I was losing my wits for nothing. Sure, the shadows were disturbing. I began to consider clawing my new eyes out every time I tried to go to sleep. But despite their terror, the glitches I was experiencing seemed to be trying to help me.

  It didn’t trigger every time. Not at first. But sometimes, when Mela came at me with some real aggression behind her hits, my eyes would glitch out. Then I’d get a little hint as to what kind of pain she was planning to inflict on me.

  It was mere flashes at first, there and gone too quickly to be of much use. But the more practice I got, the more reliable those flashes became. And the more serious Mela was about hurting me, the more stark and informative the visions were.

  It got to the point that Mela actually looked at me with something close to approval one day after a particularly grueling session.

  “Listen, kid… I ain’t gonna lie to ye. Yer not great at this. Throw on at least twenty more kilos and a fair bit of muscle, and maybe you’d actually be able to do something to fight back. That instinct ye’ve got, though… now that’s valuable. It’s almost like yer moving before I try an’ hit ya sometimes! Keep at that, and ye’ll be useful out on the streets way sooner than I thought.”

  It wasn’t exactly a glowing review of my potential as a fighter, but it was also the most praise I’d managed to wrangle out of Mela thus far, so I decided to take my wins where I could get them.

  The world didn’t stop turning just ’cause I was getting the shit beaten out of me on the daily, of course. Garren kept the gang on high alert for the first few days after the fight. Still, the longer we waited, the more it seemed like things were tentatively dying down.

  Our scouts reported as much. Most gangs had let their stupid blood thirst run its course and were now licking their wounds, eying each other like they expected the next blow to come down any second. Even the string of mysterious slaughters, the work of what I assumed was the Reapers’ previous benefactor, had stopped.

  When we went two whole days without hearing about another gang mysteriously wiped out overnight, it really started to feel like things could go back to normal.

  Shortly after that, Garren released most of the fringe Kitten members back to their homes. He sent them out with orders to report and retreat to the HQ if anything suspicious happened or a rival gang tried to make a play against them.

  A day after that, I stumbled downstairs from the shared sleeping space on the second floor to find Mela waiting for me outside the cafeteria. She held a wrapped sandwich in one hand and was hurriedly stuffing her face with another.

  “You good?” I asked doubtfully as the redhead choked and sputtered.

  She managed to swallow and answer in a reedy voice. “Yeah. Let me grab some water. Fuck, that went down the wrong way… Anyway, munch on this and I’ll be right back.”

  She shoved the wrapped sandwich into my chest and fled.

  The sandwich was good, much like everything else Feyo’s team of cooks produced for the gang. The painfully thin, jolly man was one of the reasons people insisted on taking their meals in the HQ, or even living there full-time. If Garren ever let something happen to the cook, he’d probably have a violent revolt on his hands.

  Mela was still coughing when she returned, nursing a bottle of water. “Sorry for the wait,” she quipped. “Let’s go.”

  I fell into step with her easily, still enjoying my sandwich. I wasn’t just content to follow blindly, though.

  “You planned something special for today? You shouldn’t have. You know I enjoy our dates regardless,” I teased, earning myself a fond eyeroll from the redhead.

  “Ye wish. But yeah, I do have something planned.”

  When I realized she was leading me out of the HQ, I felt my body stiffen and my breath start to come a little more quickly. It didn’t make much sense. I hadn’t even spend a full week there. But somehow, in that time, the HQ had become my safe space. Everything outside was dangerous.

  I knew that wasn’t quite true, of course. Still, it was hard to argue with those feelings when the weird glowing lines and shadowy figures suddenly multiplied in the corner of my eyes, both lurking just out of sight.

  I blinked. Hard.

  “And you’re not tell me where we’re going because…?”

  “It’s a surprise. I figure it’s the least I could do after… everything.”

  Mela’s voice was uncharacteristically solemn. I kept my mouth shut, even if my sandwich no longer tasted so great and I desperately needed a sip of water myself.

  If Mela noticed my growing anxiety, she never acknowledged it. Not when we reached the same narrow entrance we’d used to sneak into the building, or when we climbed up the shaft to street level, or even when we put a solid distance between us and the HQ.

  Really, it was a bit embarrassing how long it took me to realize we were heading towards my apartment building. Or, well, our apartment building. I kept forgetting Mela had chosen to live there too, much to Garren and her brother’s frustration, if gang gossip was to be believed.

  I still hadn’t gotten to meet her brother. I’d only learned recently he was out of town on gang business, the thought of which I found both daunting and exciting.

  Once I knew our destination, it was easier to push past the doom and gloom. I tried to focus on keeping pace with Mela. The walk itself was pretty great, honestly. It was amazing to feel my body glide along without pain, exhaustion, or hunger weighing me down.

  “You know, it’s weird to just be out and about like this,” I eventually admitted, trying to sound like I was joking. “It feels like I should expect trouble. Like Zerx are going to jump out from around the corner and try to riddle us with bullets or something.”

  “I know it’s not a nice thing to hear, but… ye’ll get used to it. Or ya won’t, and ye’ll choose to walk away from this life. Either or. Not gonna judge ya regardless. Fuck knows I tried to convince Garren to chase ye off enough times.”

  This should have bothered me, but she sounded so sad and resigned that I couldn’t muster up any anger.

  “I keep saying it, but I only look young. I really am almost seventeen. For the slums, that’s… well, not old, but… Oh, you get it.”

  “I do. I do, and I hate it. Don’t mean it’s right, the way things are at the moment. Even if they’ve been this way for a long time.”

  I could only sigh, because I really wasn’t about to argue against that. So, it was in a much more companionable silence that we reached our shared apartment building.

  Once again, I felt a thread of… tension. That was one word for it.

  This time, though, it had nothing to do with potential ambushes. I was walking towards the most tangible inheritance I’d gotten from my mother. An inheritance that was thoroughly soiled when those fuckers bust down my front door and ruined my apartment.

  Except, when we finally reached my floor and my eyes drifted over to the familiar doorway, I froze.

  Instead of a gaping hole, I spotted a door, firmly blocking access to my home.

  “What…?”

  I didn’t stand there and wait for an answer. I strode on quickly, almost fumbling the request to have the doors open because I still wasn’t used to sending it with my eyes. They did slide open though, and what I saw on the other side was definitely not a scene of devastation.

  If anything, my apartment looked better than ever.

  A soft, plush carpet in Kitten colors covered the floor. A brand new, larger wardrobe graced the spot where my old one once stood. An even larger and comfier looking bed had replaced my beloved item of luxury. Even the shower nook had been scrubbed so thoroughly that no mold had survived.

  There were a few extra items there, too. They made the space feel way smaller and more cluttered, but that was just fine. Now I had a desk, a couple chairs, and even some kind of cooking unit, sitting on the desk beside a charging port with a slot for a scroll.

  “Well, I figured… Yer apartment was trashed because of me, and…”

  Mela shut up when I turned around and hugged her, carefully hiding my teary eyes by pressing my face against her shoulder.