Sitting in the darkness, huddled around the pain that throbbed at the center. Teeth biting down and drawing blood. There was nothing to do but wait out the waves that kept coming. Trembling and sweating. He clutched at the sheets that clung to him and moaned with the pressure of it. The heat glided through his bones and slid through his muscles, pulling at his very core. Melting away everything he had ever been as his flesh dripped onto the bed.
It didn’t fall cleanly, didn’t splash like water. It clung—thick strands of him stretching and snapping, gluey ribbons that smeared across the linen and tacked his skin to the fabric. He tried to move, to roll away from the damp, but the sheets tugged back, sticky with the liquefied parts of him, and the pull made his stomach lurch. Every shift of muscle tore at something deeper, something that no longer obeyed the map of his body.
The smell came next—iron and salt, but sweet too, nauseatingly sweet, as if the marrow boiling inside him had turned to syrup. He gagged, but what rose in his throat wasn’t bile. It was a thick, ropey thread that he dragged out between his teeth. It clung to his lips and hung, vibrating with his breath before sliding down his chin. He clawed at it, smeared it away, only to find more climbing upward, a steady tide of himself abandoning him.
His fingers felt wrong—too many joints, or not enough. Nails splintered from the heat, peeling away like fruit skins, curling backward as if trying to escape his hands. The bones beneath flexed and shifted, brittle one second and soft the next, folding in ways they were never meant to. He gripped the bedframe to anchor himself, but the wood creaked as his grip tightened past what flesh should allow.
Something inside writhed. Not an organ, not anything he could name. It rolled beneath the skin of his abdomen, dragging lumps and ridges across him like a creature trying to burrow out. He pressed his palm against it, desperate to force it back in, but the flesh caved like wet clay. His hand sank too deep, fingers brushing something slick and alive that twisted against him in greeting.
He screamed then, but even the scream didn’t sound like his. The voice cracked, splintered, fractured into layers that echoed around the small room. One sound, then two, then three—like voices stacked, all shrieking through the same ruined throat.
And still, the waves kept coming.
Grabbing onto the head board, he pulled himself out of the mess that he had become and as suddenly as it all began it was over. He slumped down into the mound of flesh that he had been and struggled to breathe. Everything ached, but even that was subsiding now. Without grace, he flopped onto the floor and let his bare stomach soak in the cold from the tile. He turned over onto his back and sighed.
For a long moment, he lay there, staring at the ceiling, chest rising and falling in ragged jerks. The silence pressed in, broken only by the faint drip of something wet still slipping off the bed. His skin still crawled with phantom heat, but beneath it came a hollow numbness, as though the nerves themselves were retreating deeper into the meat to hide.
He forced himself up. His legs trembled, unsure of their shape, but they bore him. Each step left a smear across the tile, slick footprints he dared not examine too closely. The bathroom door creaked when he pushed it open, and he clung to the frame for balance, dragging himself forward until he faced the mirror.
He stopped.
A stranger stared back. The face was stretched and uneven, shadows pooling in places that should have been smooth. The skin sagged in one cheek, puffed too tight in the other, and his eyes—his eyes were wrong. The whites clouded with thin veins like cracks in porcelain, pupils dilated to an animal’s black pit. For an instant, he thought the reflection moved apart from him, a fraction too slow, as if the thing in the glass had only just learned the choreography of his body.
His lips parted. The reflection’s mouth lagged. He raised a hand. The hand in the glass quivered, then followed.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t dare.
Instead, he wrenched his gaze away and stumbled to the shower. The knobs squealed as he twisted them, water bursting out in a metallic spray. Steam filled the room quickly, clinging to the mirror, erasing the stranger’s face in fog. He stepped in, let the water strike him. It burned at first, searing his tender, half-molten flesh, but then the burn dulled, faded, became nothing at all.
He scrubbed himself with trembling fingers, but it wasn’t like washing. It was peeling. Thin layers of dead skin sloughed away beneath his hands, clogging the drain with curls of pale tissue. He pressed harder, desperate, until raw pink welts rose across his chest and shoulders, and still the grime of himself clung stubbornly. The water swirled dark at his feet.
When at last the spray ran clear, he shut the water off and stood dripping in the steam, empty as a shed husk. He padded back into the room and went to the closet. A suitcase sat slumped in the corner, dust-speckled, forgotten. He unlatched it, hands shaking, and dug through its contents. Clothing—shirts, trousers, even folded socks. All of it smelled faintly of cedar and something older, stale.
He dressed slowly, wincing as the fabric rasped against his raw skin. The collar sat strangely around his throat, as though it were hanging on the wrong neck. The trousers bunched oddly at the knees. He tugged at the sleeves, adjusting, but nothing settled right. It was like dressing a borrowed body.
And when he looked back toward the mirror, half-fogged and streaked with water, the stranger was still there—dressed as he was, watching with the same unblinking hunger.
Stepping out into the night, he looked back one final time at the self he was leaving behind. Nothing more that a pile of gore now. He could no longer recall who that self had been or why they had come here. But that no longer mattered. Holding the past was like grasping shadows. He closed the door and murmured a quiet apology to who ever would find what he left there.
The air outside tasted sharp, tinged with ozone and the faint reek of smog. Towers of glass and steel rose high into the haze, their windows fractured into grids of neon. Screens burned on every corner, advertisements shifting and shimmering with motion: smiling faces, pills promising new skin, augmented organs, new ways to be more than human. Drones whispered overhead like insects, their lenses blinking red as they drifted down the avenues. The city pulsed with energy, but beneath it ran something sickly, a rhythm too fast, too bright, like a heart straining before rupture.
He walked the sidewalk, shoulders hunched, eyes scanning. The people moved in currents—some hurried, wrapped in smart-fabric coats that glowed faintly with circuitry, others loitered at corners where holographic graffiti bled onto the walls, shifting slogans written by machines. None of them looked at him, but he felt their gazes anyway, a prickling under his skin, as if the city itself were watching.
Then he bumped into someone.
The contact was small, incidental—an elbow against his arm—but the effect tore through him like a jolt of current. His vision split, layered images pouring into his mind too fast to separate: a cramped apartment full of screens, the hum of filtration vents, the taste of cheap synth-meat chewed late at night. A name—Marcus. A debt owed. A fear of walking past the checkpoints without the right badge. And over it all, a gnawing suspicion that the city never forgot a face.
It ended as abruptly as it began.
The stranger jerked back, eyes wide, muttering a curse as though he had been burned. He shoved him away, hard enough that he staggered against a lamppost, head spinning, stomach hollow. The man disappeared into the flow of bodies, leaving no trace but the echo of his life lodged inside him.
He clutched at the metal post and tried to breathe. The memories were not his, yet they clung—familiar, intrusive, beating against his own fractured self. He tried to separate them, to remember who he had been, but that name, Marcus, pulsed inside his skull like a beacon. He felt the apartment as though he had lived there, smelled the stale air, knew the crack in the ceiling where the paint peeled.
The hollowness receded. Not gone, never gone, but filled in part by the fragments he had stolen. It was like patching a hole with borrowed flesh: imperfect, jagged, but enough to keep him upright. Enough to make him someone, even if not himself. Marcus.
He staggered forward again into the crowd, the lights painting him in sickly hues. He wondered how many more pieces he would need to take before the hollow finally closed. And if, when that happened, there would be anything left of the thing that had stepped out of that room of gore.
Marcus drifted with the crowd until the bass found him. It rolled through the street like a living thing, a pulse of synthetic thunder rattling the glass and bones alike. Neon spilled from the entrance of the club, hot and liquid, washing across the sidewalk in violent reds and sickly blues. Bodies pressed in and out of the doors, laughing, sweating, glass-eyed with chemicals and exhaustion. The air was thick with perfume, with smoke, with ozone leaking from overloaded circuits.
A bouncer stood by the threshold, broad and glistening under the lights, one arm marked with shifting tattoos that flickered like code. His eyes locked on Marcus.
“You’re not—”
The words never finished. The bouncer’s hand clamped onto Marcus’s chest, and in that instant the world fractured. Marcus fell forward—not onto the ground but into the man himself. The rush came with a tearing sensation, like wet paper ripping, and memories burst open inside him: standing under this same neon every night for years, the ache in his back from long hours, the bitterness of low pay, the hidden shame of wanting desperately to dance with the very people he guarded. Beneath all that, a gnawing fear—fear of losing the job, fear of being small, fear of never belonging.
Marcus did not mean to leave something behind, but he did. Fear surged outward, not his but larger, grotesque, an echoing dread seeded into the bouncer’s marrow. The man’s hand dropped as though burned, and his face slackened into horror. He shuffled backward, muttering nothing, shaking his head, retreating from the doorway like a child who had glimpsed a nightmare in the dark.
No one noticed. The bass was too loud. The crowd too thick.
Marcus stepped inside.
The club swallowed him whole—heat and smoke and sweat condensing into a single choking breath. Lights strobed in bursts, slicing the darkness into jagged fragments. The air vibrated with music, each beat like a hammer to the chest, every drop a surge of blood rushing through veins. The floor moved with bodies, pressed tight, slick, glimmering under the lights.
He pushed through them, and wherever his hands brushed, he felt it again: the collapse, the falling inward, the invasion. A girl’s laughter became his, the cloying taste of cherry liquor stung his tongue. A young man’s panic about an exam clawed at his stomach, even as sweat from another stranger slicked across his palm, carrying with it the memory of a lover’s betrayal. Each contact bled into him, each touch a thread of humanity stitched into the hollow gap beneath his ribs.
They never noticed. Their eyes were closed, their mouths open, drunk on rhythm. He moved among them like a shadow, brushing shoulders, clasping hands, sliding fingers along arms and backs. With each new point of contact, another fragment of life snapped into him. He felt himself swelling with borrowed moments: joy, shame, hunger, ecstasy. The hunger inside him purred, fed, filling, though never satisfied.
The dance floor itself seemed to shift under him. The music dug claws into his spine, bending him into the sway of the crowd. His reflection from the mirror hovered in his memory—the stranger’s eyes, wide and bottomless—and he knew now what they had been. They were not empty. They were hungry.
He caught a woman’s wrist as she twirled past, and the memory of her first kiss lit his lips with someone else’s fire. He pressed his palm against a man’s shoulder and tasted raw grief, a burial, soil in the mouth. He wove through the crowd, devouring them with each brush, consuming scraps until the hollow inside no longer felt like a hole but a labyrinth of borrowed voices, all whispering at once.
His skin tingled where they touched back, their sweat smearing across him, their warmth seeping in. He imagined the floor itself could feel him feeding, that the lights flickered not from faulty wiring but in recognition of what he was doing.
And in the blur of faces, in the cyclone of memory, Marcus realized: the more he gathered, the less of him there was to remember.
