She leaned back in her chair and tapped the edge of her desk. A small ache had developed on a bone in her wrist from where it had rested on the desk, and, although they didn’t hurt quite yet, she knew the tendons further in would be making their complaints known as the day progressed.
But—it was over.
She’d done it.
The music swelled as she pulled the headphones off, turning into a sound miniature of its song as she lay them at an angle on the desk. Tinny and distant, it served to underscore the quiet ambiance of the room. She massaged her wrist as she listened to it, head cocked back against her chair.
Then, with a heavy breath and a creak of movement, she got up.
All-nighters made her restless. Even with the raw, dry feeling welled up around her eyeballs, it’d be closer to ten before she’d feel any inclination to sleep. The hells knew she’d done enough of them to test that theory. Grabbing her purse from where it had migrated to the bunk, she paused as she picked up her netlink, then glanced down and took stock of her clothes.
Still in work uniform. That, combined with the bloodshot eyes and day-old exhaustion on her face, could only serve in her favor with Yamaguchi. And she might as well drop it off in-person. He'd like that.
Leaning forward, she typed in the few keystrokes that would transfer the finished file back to her netlink, felt its buzz as it accepted, then dropped it into her purse, grabbed her jacket, and turned for the door.
Below the upper levels, Tianjin bottomed out in a vague, inverted hive-like shape. At one point, she suspected the corridors had flexed into curves to reflect that design—points in the metalwork seemed to reference that in some places—but time and industry had overwritten much of the original work. Most of it was private now, companies buying up or being allowed to lease entire subsections, some of which stretched across multiple levels, to create their offices, as well as dorms like the one she lived in. Easy access to employees, little if any commute time wasted, and a potential to recuperate their costs when people shopped in the subsection’s stores and used the subsection’s banking or postage systems. Some places, she knew, had gained enough momentum with their inner workings as to have a closed economy within their walls.
Luckily, that wasn’t her.
The job she gunned for filled a small, semi-independent slot in the station’s workings. A mid-sized engineering firm, they had contracts with both public and private corporations, providing various repairs, maintenance, and builds.
She’d always liked circuits. And she’d always loved the chance to get behind Tianjin’s walls and see what really made her work.
Besides, her mother had been an engineer, as had both grandparents. Seemed only fitting she’d continue the family tradition.
Dropping a few steps down from the narrow hall that led to her room, she entered a slightly less narrow hall. Doors lined the walls at even intervals. Due to some half-assed attempts at power conservation, the section featured a permanent night cycle, which meant the tube lights on the ceiling never came on. Apart from the glow of the door panels, the section’s illumination came from the baseboards, where thin strips of long-lasting LEDs put a mercurial, gloomy cast on the floor.
Enough to find their way, not quite enough to see by. And heavens knew if the ceiling lights even worked anymore. She doubted the circuits and ballasts had been replaced at any time in the last decade.
But it didn’t matter. They were what they were. And the dorm did sit near one of the area’s larger markets, which gave it an up over some of the others.
Strokes of graffiti rose up on the left wall as she walked. Two painted eyes, bulbous and gaping, turned into the snarling muzzle of a wolf as she drew closer. Several of them ran along the wall, their profiles loping toward the exit. Put there last year by a quiet art student who’d lived further in, they’d become a sensation of her section, something that set them apart from the other, equally cramped and dismal blocks of dorms.
As she reached the second wolf, stretched into a full run as if it were racing for the entrance, the hallway lightened. The exit rocked into view around the corner, the electric glow from the next wider, more-traveled corridor shining on the worn metal of the dorm’s entranceway. Already, the sound in her hall had changed, moving from the close, echo-y quiet of the cramped dorm halls to a more open quality. A subtle change, unnoticeable later in the cycle when everyone was awake and moving, but now, in the prelude to the cycle’s ‘dawn,’ with little more than the background ambiance of the station’s latent workings, it made her pick up her feet and walk faster toward the light.
But, just before she passed the last wolf, its figure bunched into a stumbling snarl at some invisible opponent outside, a scream ripped through the air.
She stopped and turned, the hollow, sleepless feeling in her veins jolting with adrenaline. The sound hadn’t lasted long, and the dorm’s metal walls had muffled it into a censored, tinny distortion, but, in the quietude of the morning, it had cut through her senses like a knife.
A distant thump followed, followed by another, smaller noise that made the skin prickle on the backs of her hands.
Then, nothing.
She stood for several more seconds, breath caught in her throat, listening hard.
But, if anything more sounded, she didn’t hear it.
After a few more seconds, she turned away.
Too many people in a tight space. Not the first time she’d heard weird, creepy things go down in here, nor would it be the last. Given the odd, interconnected ventilation systems in here, it was surprising she didn’t hear more.
More than twelve auto-vendors shone from the walls in the hallway outside the dorm entrance, along with a couple of loose chairs, a folding table, and the worn, smudged scars of a lot of people coming through the corridor. The cleaning bots came down daily, but it’d take about triple that to keep up with the amount of people who lived here. They also tended to miss things, only employing a cursory clean to the place. A line of cigarette butts clung to the edge where the floor met the wall, accompanied by a line of dirt that turned the floor black in places. A couple empty beer packs stood by the legs of one of the chairs, placed in a neat line.
She ignored the auto-vendors, zipped up the rest of her jacket—not from any cold, but from habit—and struck out for the auto-mart four corridors away.
It didn’t have anything the auto-vendors didn’t, but she liked it better. Nicer facade, and the place felt more public than the area around her dorm. Open to a greater variety of people, even if none would be there this early, and it sat on one of the main arteries in this area, part of the route she took to work. Usually, she didn’t have time to stop for anything but, sometimes, when she came off shift, she’d take ten or fifteen minutes to stop and enjoy the mart’s small, stiff chair, legs crossed as she sipped a coffee and watched the people walk by.
No people now, but the quiet was enough.
She input her selection and flattened her card against the reader, taking it away when it beeped. A second later, the machine pushed her heated drink forward and unlocked the receiving door. She grabbed it, cracked open the pull-top, and sat.
After a few seconds, she relaxed.
It was over. Finally.
Two years of bone-weary work, done. All she had to do was deliver the files. Hell, she didn’t even have to do that. She could just send them from her netlink now and save the walk, but she wanted to. Something about hand-delivering them just seemed so perfect to her.
Of course, that could be sleep-deprivation kicking in. She was known to do strange things.
Maybe she should just send it.
Tilting a little to rifle through her bag, she pulled out her netlink and brought up its screen. Then she frowned. A new message had popped up ten minutes ago, right about when she’d left her dorm.
You awake?
She leaned her elbow on the table and thumbed up the keyboard.
Yeah. Just finished the project. Got another hour before work wakes up. You want to talk?
Networks acted quickly here. Everyone had their account on the public network, with varying levels of service. One of the benefits of her internship had been access to the second-best service tier. Likely a consequence of the union’s involvement. It wouldn’t do for workers to be stuffed into a crawlspace, looking at electrical panels and wiring without a network.
The ‘message read’ status popped up under the message. She waited, sipping her coffee.
After a minute, he still hadn’t replied.
Well, screw you, too.
She almost snorted at the thought. Here she was, thin on sleep, feeling rage-y at the not-quite boyfriend she was thinking about marrying. Hell, she wasn’t even serious about the guy. If it weren’t for the immigration stuff…
Blowing out a breath, she leaned her head back. The base of the netlink clicked as she put it on the table, and its screen flickered in her peripheral vision.
Then something else gave a heavy flicker farther up the hallway. Caught off-guard, she reeled her head back into position so fast she felt the tendons strain.
A tube light down the corridor had something wrong with its ballast. Either that, or its circuits and bulb were going. Every few seconds it would flicker, like clockwork. Normally, with people around to cover for the disturbance, she wouldn’t have given it a second glance.
But now, with the place so empty she could hear the damn thing buzz?
Yeah, a little creepy. But why had she just noticed it now? Wouldn't it have been flickering before? She'd jerked a little too hard for a simple broken light. Had something else caught her attention?
She stared, the coffee can in her hand paused midway to her mouth. The broken light illuminated the corner where the main hallway turned away but, like most of the large paths in the station, a smaller route opened up through a threshold at the end, its open doorway facing her with a pitch-black, rectangular maw. She hadn’t paid it any attention before, but now the darkness seemed to draw her eye. As if something were moving in there, just beyond sight.
Gods. What the hells am I doing? I need sleep.
She almost laughed at herself, and made to put down her can, but the stiffness in her body kept her staring a few seconds longer.
Before she could make herself look away, something detached itself from the darkness, stepped over the threshold, and entered the hallway.
Her blood ran cold.
It could have been human. If she squinted her eyes and tried really hard, she could play it off as human—but some inner instinct screamed at her mind to freeze, to not look away, to never take her eyes off it even as terror rose like bile in her stomach. Too tall for a human, and too skinny, it looked more like the legends of things she’d heard of on the net—a spirit, or Shade, or Night-Watcher. Blacker than black. Darker. Like a glimpse of naked space outside one of the viewports, except completely lacking in stars and given a horrible, terrifying, depth-less form. No, worse than that. Space at least was familiar. This was...
She kept staring, frozen, as it paused just beside the doorway, its thin figure helpfully silhouetted against the wall for her to see its elongated arms swing forward from its body and the sickening way its head lolled on. The top of it nearly brushed the ceiling.
A projection. It’s got to be a projection.
But who would do one? Why project here, on the side of some eighth-section ward wall, when no one was around? None of her friends had that kind of humor, and it'd be way too much effort to program it, even for a test run—besides, she’d seen enough of those projections to be able to recognize one. Whatever this was, it was different.
But definitely not real.
Monsters didn’t exist. Right?
Well, this one’s sure doing a good job of convincing me it’s real. She hadn’t taken her eyes off it, or moved, since it had appeared. It hadn’t moved either, really. Only a half meter to the left, where it had stopped to apparently examine itself. Its too-thin arms bent like sticks as it brought its hands up, and its too-big head tilted forward at such an angle it looked like a rag doll. Parts of it appeared to blur as she watched, like the way she'd seen one of the military's stealth units camouflage itself during a demonstration. The rest of her senses were screaming at her about the oddness of it—about the monstrosity—but that familiarity allowed a part of her mind to detach from the panic and start working at the puzzle.
If it was military, then what was it—and what was it doing here? Fallon's mightiest were housed on the second-highest levels. Did they have some kind of weird camo gear they'd decided to test in Tianjin's bowels? If so, it was clear that their equipment had bugged out. And that they might be lost. Did they need help?
But, just as she was going to call out, the thing’s entire body seemed to shiver, as if a vibration broke over its feet and went straight up its legs and torso to its head.
That’s no soldier.
As if called by the thought, its head shifted. In the next instant, it was looking right at her.
She felt the second its gaze hit hers. Her breath stoppered in her throat, and a thin, static-y ringing sound rose in her ears. Ice flooded her veins, followed by a surge of adrenaline that shuddered across her heart. Her entire body tensed, ready to fight or run.
She’d throw the coffee first. The decision came to her in a kind of calm, abstract way, not quite a thought but a whisper in her mind, telling her what to do. If it came any closer, she'd throw the coffee, grab her bag and netlink, and run. Most emergency switches had been disconnected in this sector due to vandals, but one still worked a few hallways over. She could run that far, at least.
And people would be waking up soon, right? She'd run into someone.
The Shadow moved then, just a single arm flicking out as if swatting a fly—but it cut through her thoughts like a guillotine. Her throat trembled as she swallowed, and she realized that her hand trembled as well. She tightened her grip on the can, not daring to look away.
Down the hall, the Shadow returned her stare, also not moving. Its edges rippled, as if it were part mist or flame, bleeding into the air.
Then it turned its shoulder, walked to the side, and disappeared beyond the corner where her corridor ended and the next began.
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