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Chapter Text

Evan clasped his shaking hands together between his knees, his back pressed against a brick wall in an unfamiliar alley in an unfamiliar city. He didn’t know when he’d sat down, but he had, because he could see the man’s body at a straighter angle now, sprawled on the asphalt five feet away. Between them lay a knife, dark with blood. 

Sacred is the blood spilled for the succor of our chosen, something whispered to him. He could feel it rippling through him, unraveling itself like a snake slowly shifting out of its slumbering coil. The air around him went colder, and it cooled the panicked sweat at his temples enough to make him shiver, even on a warm Spring evening. The sound of traffic nearby died away to almost nothing, and the ambient light from the street was swallowed as a liquid darkness began to spread itself away from Evan, spilling towards the body of the man who had attacked him. 

Evan shouldn’t have been somewhere so isolated, but he’d gotten lost. He didn’t know New York; he didn’t know what places you shouldn’t be at night. He didn’t know what this man thought he could have gotten from a guy who looked just as ragged as he did, but Evan had found himself against a wall with a hand around his throat just the same. And he’d acted. Quickly. Silently. Unthinking. He always kept the knife in easy reach. 

The shadows spread around the body and began to roil beneath it, like boiling tar. Sacred is the flesh sacrificed for our strength , the voices whispered again. They were a choir, a harmony. They were sibilant and soft. As Evan watched, the man’s corpse began to sink into the darkness around and beneath it. The shadows bubbled, and with every second, less of the man was visible, as though the asphalt was swallowing him. His glassy eyes stared up at the sliver of sky visible past the buildings on either side of the alley. No stars there, Evan knew, though he didn’t look away from the inevitable sink. He watched as inch by inch the man he’d killed was consumed by his shadow, until it was only the tip of his nose and the toes of his boots that were visible. And then those were gone, as well. 

When the shadows drew themselves back towards Evan, he tried to fight it. His legs were still shaking too badly to stand, so he couldn’t run, but he tried to put up a mental barrier, an imagined force field that would block the darkness from returning to him full and sated with the murder he’d committed. The voices laughed, deep and resonant, as his shadows seeped back through him, back through his clothes and his skin, into his body, ignoring his will, and so he felt that satiation, too. The hollow ache of his stomach that had been haunting him for days was replaced with a fullness that made him nauseous. He pressed a hand against his mouth to keep himself from being sick. He didn’t want to know what would come out if he threw up now.

The limited ambient light of the alley returned with the withdrawal of Evan’s shadow, and the blade of the knife on the ground in front of him gleamed red-black. He could hear the cars out on the street again, angry drivers laying on horns at the nearby intersection, hypnotic bass beats vibrating through stereo systems, one warning whoop of a police siren. This last startled him enough to pick up the knife. He glanced around and spotted a few trash bins, one of which had a newspaper draped carelessly over its lip. He wiped the blade and his hands on its rain-wet pages and shoved it further down beneath the other trash, disappearing the red smears into the rest of the refuse. He put the knife back into his pocket. Nothing left. No evidence. No consequences. 

Evan stood at the center of the alley and stared out at the night-bright, living, moving street just a few yards away. The dread in him filled every gap, every empty space, every bit of his soul that had atrophied in the twenty-two years he’d spent fighting his own mind. He didn’t want this. He’d never wanted this. 

But if someone didn’t stop him, he was afraid he was going to do much worse.

- - - - - -

“I don’t know, man. Not more stressed than usual?” Pete pulled another couple of books to the front of their shelf, facing them into a neat line with the rest of the Young Adult Science Fiction section. Someone had dropped off a bunch of Animorphs books this week, and every millennial who’d come into the shop the last few days had beelined for them like they could smell them from the front door. This section had been a mess all day, and it was satisfying to finally neaten it up with the Closed sign flipped. 

At the front register, Zee was counting the till, somehow managing to both do math and hold a conversation, something that Pete respected but would never understand. They made a note on a scrap of receipt paper and called back through the store, “Are your roommates keeping you up, then? Lots of loud, weird sex?”

Pete smirked, kneeling down to pull forward the last two rows of books in the section. “It isn’t anything anybody else is doing keeping me awake. I’m just…awake.” With the last of the books lined up at the edge of the shelf, he dragged himself back up to his feet and put his hands on his hips, looking down at them. 

That wasn’t all of it, of course. But Zee wasn’t awakened to the Unsleeping City, and Pete couldn’t exactly give them the whole truth. He sighed, letting his body hang bonelessly over his locked legs for a moment. His back popped satisfyingly, but it didn’t help the little headache that had been hovering at the very back of his head for the last week or so. Three or four hours a night of sleep — dreamless sleep — was getting to him. His brain felt like it was trying to work through a layer of thick fog. His reaction times were bad. He’d almost been hit by a car on the walk to work today, saved at the last second by a man at the crosswalk who had grabbed the back of his shirt and given him a couple of choice words about paying a-goddamn-ttention to where he was going. That had been embarrassing, for sure. 

But there was also the magic issue. His veins and hands buzzed uncomfortably, like they were filled with a static charge. It felt like it was right at the surface. Pete hadn’t felt like this since he was first chosen by Nod, like he had only nominal control over whatever magic wanted to happen at any given moment. It felt like any particularly exciting or insistent thought could result in some real Dream nonsense leaking out into the waking world around him. He was keeping a lid on it so far, but it was tough, and getting tougher the less he slept. 

When he straightened back up from his little stretch, Zee was looking at him with some real concern in their eyes. They frowned. “You really do look exhausted. I know you say it isn’t anxiety, but still, do you think it might be good to talk to someone?”

Pete thought of Dr. Lugash, and shrugged. “Maybe. I can try to get an appointment with my guy.” If he isn’t too busy pulling bullets out of gangsters , he added silently. 

Zee nodded, then their face lit up with a sudden realization. “Oh! Hey. My friend was telling me about this new thing — it’s an online psych service that uses AI to give you advice and talk you through your issues. I can get the name for you if you want.”

Pete’s eyebrows drew together. “Like, a psychologist uses AI to figure out the best kind of treatment to give you?”

Zee shook their head, back to counting the bills in their drawer. “No, it skips the middle man. Apparently they trained the AI on thousands of case studies and dissertations and books and the DSM-5 and then did a ton of testing with real people, and it worked better than actual human counselors in a lot of ways. It’s got less of a margin of error, or something. And it’s way cheaper. I think it has like a month free trial, too.” 

“Huh,” Pete said, slowly. He already thought that AI was pretty creepy, to be honest, but a bunch of people pouring their problems into a machine and getting medical advice out of it sounded — well, not good. He vaguely wondered what Kingston would think of it. “I don’t know. I really like my guy. But if you think of the name, feel free to send it to me.”

Zee nodded. “Can do.” They looked up at the clock, ticking half past the hour. “We’re basically done, I think. You’re going right home to bed when you leave, right?” There was a very clear command in that question.

Pete shook his head, trying for a lopsided, apologetic, I’m-okay-I-promise smile. “I’ve got a couple of hours volunteering at Helping Hands tonight. But I’ll go to bed right after. And I’m off tomorrow. Maybe I’ll stay in bed all day.”

Zee looked unconvinced, but smiled regardless. “I doubt it. But I hope you let yourself rest. You’ve been going there a lot. You don’t have to be everything for everyone all the time, you know?”

Pete shook his head, but he didn’t say anything. He felt the embarrassment of hearing those words directed at him crawl up his back, and busied himself with straightening up Young Adult Fantasy next. 

He wasn’t going to Helping Hands lately because of a feeling of civic responsibility or whatever. That was a good byproduct of helping out there, and he knew that Ricky was always stoked to have him there, even if he was too busy with the baby to be there himself — but Pete didn’t think that Ricky would understand if he ever tried to tell him why he was there so much these days. He thought Sophia might understand. Busy hands. Busy mind. The busier he kept himself doing something useful, the less likely he was to go looking for old contacts, for benzos, for surefire relief from the disconnect he was feeling from his body and from Nod. Not dreaming was making it harder and harder to keep himself on the right path. The more he worked, the more he distracted himself, the more meetings he attended, the less time he would have to think about the relief that might come from a few easy pills. 

He moved on to the next section of shelves and continued trying not to think about it. 

After turning the key in the locks outside of Uncommon Knowledge, Pete bent down and wrapped Zee in a tight good-night hug. Zee lingered a little longer than usual, holding him there in the sodium street lights for a beat, before finally letting go and smiling up at him. He watched them roll down the ramp and off toward their bus stop, then stop to ask to pet someone’s dog as its owner walked by them. Pete smiled, then turned in the opposite direction and started to make his way towards Brooklyn and the shelter.

It was, as always, chaos. 

It was a busy night at the soup kitchen, and getting his assignment was a whirlwind of barked orders and on-the-fly instructions. Ricky was sort of a seat-of-his-pants organizer at the best of times, but in the last year he’d had to take more and more time away from actually being hands-on. At first it was just to help Esther with Alejandra, but as time kept moving and Esther started getting back into her work at Gramercy, it became sort of clear to anyone with eyes that Ricky was made from the ground up to be a dad before anything else. He still did what he could to make sure that the place kept the lights on and was fulfilling its mission, but a lot of it was done via phone calls while he was bouncing a one-year-old in his arms, occasionally stopping mid-thought to coo at her. It was adorable, but it wasn’t really what was needed.

Thank God for the Helping Hands director, Tasha Keen. Everything that moved smoothly in that place was because of her, her efficiency, her kindness, and her no-nonsense approach to doling out work to volunteers. Sometimes it felt more like boot camp than community outreach, but Pete found that he sort of liked the structure of it. He always knew what he should be doing there at any given moment. Tasha would tell him to serve on the food line, or set out new linens in the shelter spaces, or wash and sanitize the plates and cutlery after a mealtime, and he would do it, with a “yes, ma’am” and a total lack of needing to make any decisions himself. It was nice to just be part of a functioning machine sometimes. Especially one that was made to help people. 

Of course, serving was always the most intense of the tasks he was given. The dining room got very loud most of the time, with people talking and laughing, some shouting (though that was quickly checked in on by other volunteers most of the time). That was where the chaos lived. Familiar faces and unfamiliar faces, taking the food he doled out for them, thanking him or saying nothing or stopping to joke around with him, and people running back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room with fresh trays of whatever the meal was that night, replacing cooling dishes with hot ones, shouting back about what was running out. He knew that as the Vox Phantasma, he should have thrived in that kind of cacophony. But sometimes, like tonight, he just wanted to be able to zone out and become a cog in the helpful machine, where everything made sense and nothing weird happened. That definitely wasn’t happening tonight. 

Especially when the new guy with the long hair came down the line with a tray. 

Pete knew he’d never seen him before. Not just because he was unfamiliar, but because he would have remembered the immediate panic alarms going off in his head on spotting him. Pete would guess the guy was in his early twenties, tall but slouching, wearing a coat that was too big for him in the shoulders and too heavy for the weather. His dark hair was drawn back into a messy bun that looked like it was seconds from struggling out of its rubber band prison. But it was something else about him that pushed all of the breath out of Pete’s lungs as he watched him slide his tray down closer. 

It was like the opposite of what it felt like to be around Ricky, or even Cody. It was stifling. It made the air feel too thick to breathe. Pete’s hands started to shake, and he dropped his serving spoon into the roasted potatoes he’d been tasked with handing out. It made a loud clattering sound against the metal pan, and some of the other servers in the lineup jumped, looking over at him curiously. He quickly picked it back up again, feeling an embarrassed blush spreading over his face, but his fingers felt nerveless when they closed around the handle. He didn’t look up, just kept spooning potatoes into bowls and putting them on the serving rack in front of him. He could feel the man coming closer, and he had the insane superstitious impulse to hold his breath, like he was about to drive past a graveyard and he didn’t want to invite in any tag-alongs. 

The aura stopped directly in front of him. He watched his own hands, FANT and ASMA starting to fade from his knuckles after a few years of minimal tattoo upkeep. He tried so hard to make them stop shaking. His breath was coming a little harder, and seemed to carry less oxygen when it came at all. What’s going on ? 

The aura, the presence, wasn’t moving. One long second, two long seconds, and the pure social awkwardness of a holdup in the line forced Pete’s eyes up to meet the eyes of the young man with the dark hair. 

Those eyes widened when they met Pete’s.Pete saw something move there, a flicker of black, then it was gone. The guy took in a little surprised breath, and then he cringed, face screwing up with a terrified kind of embarrassment, eyes darting away. He swallowed, and Pete watched him try to school his expression back into something more normal. He glanced back up at Pete, gave him a weak half-smile, took a bowl of potatoes, and moved down the line. 

In his wake, the aura faded, and the alarms in Pete’s head quieted down. 

What the hell was that?

Pete watched the guy from his potato post for the rest of the meal, barely attempting to keep up the banter he usually liked to settle into with the center’s regular clientele. Luckily, people didn’t seem very chatty tonight. Most of them moved along without saying anything at all.

Pete didn’t see the guy say a single word to anyone. No one else tried to sit at his table, though there were four empty chairs and it was a crowded night. He sat with his back to the wall and kept looking up and around before going back to his food. He ate slowly, methodically. From this far away, Pete couldn’t feel that heavy darkness dragging at him, and he was grateful for that, but he knew it was still there, because he could see how differently that part of the room was acting. People kept to themselves, held their bodies protectively over their trays, and ate quickly so that they could leave quickly. The tables near the guy filled and emptied a few times before he finally stood himself, picked up a tote bag that was more stitching than fabric, and went out of the dining room toward the sleeping areas. Pete was relieved to see him go. He felt something in his chest finally unclench. 

Later, while he was scrubbing trays in the industrial kitchen under the buzzing fluorescent lights, he thought about next steps for this particular weirdness. Things had gotten complicated lately. It was hard to bring an Unsleeping City problem to Kingston, Esther and Sophia anymore. He felt guilty calling them away from their families to deal with something dangerous. Or worse, calling them away on a wild goose chase that ended up just being him getting spooked by a dude with a bad vibe. It seemed stupid to make a big deal out of something he wasn’t even sure was a problem. Maybe sometimes people just Felt Bad. 

The guy wasn’t a native New Yorker, Pete knew. Pete could always tell when someone was born and raised in the city. He could read it like words written on their skin, in their movements, the look in their eyes. He could tell when someone had been seeped in the umbral arcana for long enough to let it become a part of them. This guy didn’t have that, but he did have something. There was something that lingered on him, sort of like the arcana, but it felt more…forced. It didn’t feel like a current he was used to swimming in; it was more like a tsunami he was trying to ride on a boogie board. Uncontrollable, tenuous, and not his.  

So maybe he would have to bring this to the group. He could ask Cody about it first; he was in easy reach anyway, finally in his own room instead of sharing with Josh, and something about this guy reminded Pete of that first time he ran into Cody after he’d sold his soul to Bazathrax. 

He was still considering how to bring it up as he was dropping the lid back on down on a trash bin in the shelter’s back alley. When he turned to head back up the half-flight of stairs to the back door, the light above it flickered out, and he heard a pained, panicked cry, followed by a rumble like thunder coming from the side alley. 

Pete was tuned in immediately. The unpleasant buzz at his fingertips focused itself into raw magical potential, ready for a purpose. The veil of slow-moving fog in his head parted, at least for the moment, and he could hear the steady rhythm of his heart in his chest. Whatever this was, it sounded big, and Pete could feel magic pouring in waves from where he’d heard the rumbling. He sprinted in that direction, briefly tripping over some forgotten trash before staggering back into a run. He skidded into the alley, already focusing his mind on windowpane frost, snow days, sledding, and any pure, cold dream he could concentrate into a spray of ice from his lifted hands—

But the spell died on his lips. 

Before him, consuming the alley from wall to wall, was a mass of wild, undulating shadow. It reached like grasping hands up the brick on both sides, and from the ground it seemed to amass itself into thick, liquid shapes that rose and stretched and pulled apart like the wax inside of a lava lamp. It had a paradoxical glow to it, a shimmering silvery unlight that cast the shadows darker and swallowed the world around it in perfect, incomprehensible black. 

And on his knees at the middle of that circle of living darkness was the long-haired man from the soup kitchen line. One side of his head was matted with blood, and Pete could see rivulets of it dripping off of his chin and hitting the shadow-cast ground, which drank it in with a greedy hiss for each drop. 

When the man looked up and saw Pete, even with his irises and whites blown out black and his skin crawling with sickly gray veins, Pete could see the terror on his face. He wasn’t doing this. This was happening to him. Pete stepped forward, raising his hands again to cast, but the man cried out before he could try. 

“STOP!” His voice seemed to almost die in the distance between them, tinny and wavering like it was coming through a tin can and string. “PLEASE!”

As much as he didn’t want to, Pete stopped.

- - - - - - -

This shelter was simpler than a lot of the other ones that Evan had tried in the cities he’d moved through before. There was just one form, with each question carefully explained by a counselor sitting next to him. His counselor was kind. She smiled and shook his hand when he was directed to her, and she even started out sitting pretty close to him at the table. Her chair did shift away little by little as they talked through prior residency and length of stay and income expectations. He didn’t think he said anything strange. He kept the worst things to himself, and just gave the facts as he understood them, as pleasantly as possible: homeless since he was fourteen, came into the city a week ago, sleeping on benches for the last few nights, no disability or assistance income. The only weird thing about it, he guessed, was that the way he delivered the information was strangely cheerful for someone in his situation. But he was genuinely happy he’d found this place. He wanted so, so badly for them to let him stay for a little while. 

When the entrance interview was over, she was sitting about a foot further away from him than she had been at the start, and Evan could see the ripples of gooseflesh standing out on her dark skin. The smile she gave him when she stood up to take his form to the shelter manager didn’t quite make it all the way to her eyes, but he just smiled back. And hoped. And hoped. 

On paper, Evan was a perfectly acceptable case for the shelter to help with. As long as he didn’t have to speak to the manager, as long as they didn’t get a chance to see that there was something wrong with him, he thought he might stand a chance of staying for at least a few nights. 

When the counselor came back, there was a well-hidden tension at the corners of her mouth and eyes that told Evan everything he needed to know. She’d tried to convince the manager to turn him away, but it hadn’t worked. The relief that flooded through him was incredible. Hot food. A bed. He knew he’d be able to stay until there were enough complaints about him that they had to ask him to leave. 

She led him to an upper bunk in a room with about six sets of bunk beds, and she handed him some fresh sheets, a blanket, and a towel. She gave him a little schedule that explained when meals were served and what services were offered. She did her job really admirably, actually, given that she flinched every time her hands came in close proximity to his. 

He put the linens on the bed, but kept his belongings with him. He’d lost enough coats and shoes and socks over the years that he knew it was worth the encumbrance to be sure that he still had what he needed. He would probably sleep in his coat, but that was fine. It was warm and familiar and worth keeping safe from being stolen. He might even try to find new clothes while he was here, while he had the chance. The idea made him feel even lighter, and he almost floated out of the sleeping area, heading towards the first real food he’d had in days. 

The potato guy was going to be a problem. 

Evan didn’t clock it until he was already standing in front of him. His defences were lowered; that was his fault. He’d gotten too comfortable too fast. The second he set eyes on this person, though, Evan felt rooted into the ground. The guy was young, maybe a little older than Evan, with short brown hair and tattoos on his hands, and eyes rimmed with dark, sleepless circles. There was something around him, though. The air that touched him seemed to shimmer and warp into patterns, like a constantly morphing magic eye puzzle. There was color to it, too, like the iridescence of a soap bubble. It made it hard to look at him, and what made it worse was the feeling . Evan didn’t understand. Looking at him felt like looking through the bars of a prison cell. It made Evan’s stomach drop, and panic started to pour in, but he didn’t know why or where it was coming from.

Then the man finally looked up and met his eyes, and everything in his mind went silent except for one clear, loud thought:

Kill this one.

Evan heard himself gasp. The usual choir, the usual cacophony, was gone; it was just one voice, rumbling and low, and the power in it made the hair on the back of Evan’s neck stand on end. Realizing he was openly, silently staring at someone in a soup kitchen line, he tried to cover it. He gave the man a weak, apologetic smile, took a bowl of the potatoes he was serving, and moved down the line. 

He tried to keep calm on the outside. He’d had a lot of practice doing that. The voices rarely waited until he was alone to speak to him and to each other. He didn’t get a warning before the whispering started, hissed syllables curling up from the back of his mind, pushing into position to make themselves known. Sometimes they would come mid-conversation, when he was speaking to someone else, and he would have to concentrate even more intently on whatever the other person was saying to understand them over the noise in his head. 

He knew that the voices weren’t real, and that he was suffering from something psychological, probably schizophrenia, though he wasn’t sure. He’d spent a day in a library when he was younger reading about auditory and visual hallucinations and paranoia. Not everything fit together exactly right, but it was the closest he could come to something that felt like an explanation, and he’d grasped on to it like a lifeline. This was the thing that was wrong with him. This was what made him strange and offputting to other people. There was a reason. He wasn’t sure how much of what had happened to him in his life had been real or imagined, but he knew that parts of it were definitely impossible. Slaughtered animals in butcher shop windows didn’t offer information about God and Satan killing each other. Birds didn’t bleed from their eyes. Shadows didn’t swallow corpses. Evan didn’t know what was actually happening when he saw those things, but he knew that what he was looking at wasn’t real. 

The one thing Evan had always been able to cling to was that the voices had never told him to do anything. They would whisper horrible things to him, things about hopelessness and rot and ruin, and they would tell him that he was chosen, that he was special — but they never gave him orders. Except now they had. Now one had, and it was one he’d never heard before. 

He ate his dinner slowly. He didn’t taste it. The act was purely mechanical. He stared down at his plate and at the fake wood grain of the tabletop and considered his options. 

First, he should definitely leave tomorrow. No matter how nice this place was, if that person volunteered here often, then it wasn’t safe for Evan to be here more than one night. After that first step, it got harder. He could sign himself into a hospital. He knew what voluntary admission was. If he was honest with them about what he heard and saw, they would keep him away from other people, maybe figure out the right combination of medications to make the voices stop. He probably wouldn’t be able to keep taking the pills after he was released, but he’d at least know that it was possible to make them stop. Or he could self-medicate. He’d navigated his way around enough street dealers in his life to know how to find someone, and he thought some might be willing to pay in product for moving product at first. He didn’t want to sell drugs, but he didn’t have the money to just buy them. He could experiment to see what kept him sedated enough to not be a risk to anyone. 

These were plans. These were things he could do. These were—

It ends soon, the deep, clear voice said. It seemed to speak from the very center of his head.  Our long banishment. This world will grind itself to dust under our auspices. Kill him. 

Evan’s body went completely still. His hands were flat on the table, eyes still down, and now he could feel that strange radiating aura from all the way across the room. It sank into him, like a bloodhound taking a scent before being set loose. 

He stood up. He took his bag and put away his tray. He didn’t look in the direction of the servers as he crossed to the dining room’s swinging doors and headed for the bunks. 

Sitting on his bed, he took the knife out of his pocket and put it at the very bottom of his tote bag, then shoved the whole thing down to the end of the bed. He took the laces out of one of his sneakers and made a tight loop around his left wrist, then tied the other end to one of the metal railing bars behind his pillow in a makeshift handcuff. It was flimsy, but it might wake him up if he tried to sleepwalk. With one hand pinned to the top of the bed, he couldn’t reach the knife at the bottom with the other. He lay like that, with his left arm bent behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. 

The other voices had found their way back in, after all. Blood is the oil of the Great Engine , they whispered. The Great Engine crushes hope between its gears, between its teeth. Blood is the price of peace.

Evan closed his eyes. He tried to get a song stuck in his head. Nothing would stay with him for more than a fleeting couple of notes before the next round of gibberish ran it out. 

A dream is no island, they whispered. There will be nowhere to hide away. There will be no cage to keep us. The land is vast, and it calls for us.

Then, the deep voice: Kill him . 

“No,” Evan said out loud. 

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to the voices. He must have been young. He did remember that he used to beg them to be quiet. He used to sit up at night in the dark in one foster home or another and beg for them to stop and let him sleep. They wouldn’t, of course. They would keep making their circular nonsense arguments until the sun rose, sometimes for days at a time, until Evan couldn’t take it anymore and he would break something, or hurt someone, or hurt himself. 

The big voice in the center of his head: Kill the dreamer. Fulfill your role. Then you may rest.

“No,” Evan said again. He grimaced. He could feel his fingernails digging into the palm of his right hand, squeezed so tightly into a fist that it flared with pain. “Go. Away.”

It wasn’t real. But it felt real. He could feel the slick uncoiling of that physical darkness through his chest, down his arms, in his throat. He gripped the metal rail behind his head with his restrained left hand. He pressed his eyelids together so hard that he could see colors bloom there. His breath was starting to hitch with panic, his heart racing. 

Your struggle is a useless affectation, the low voice said, slow, amused. Then, curling up at the corners with the sound of a smile, I am an inevitability . 

Evan felt the strength get pulled out of him. The air was ripped out of his lungs, all of the tension in his muscles loosened, and there was a freefall sensation inside of his own head, like a dream about falling. He gasped, and his eyes flew open. The room was dark. He knew he’d kept the light on, but he could only see the shapes of beds and other peoples’ belongings looming in the shadows, and as he watched he could see the darkness move like a current through and between it all. He watched it snake through the rails of his bunk and weave itself into the gap between his coat and his body. It touched everything. 

The voices in his head raised up in a hellish choir of screaming.

With nerveless fingers, he scrambled at his left wrist, inexpertly pulling at the knot he’d made to keep himself in place. He could feel his throat tightening and closing, his heart thumping there at the base of it, physically painful. The more he pulled, the tighter the knot became. He eventually resorted to using his teeth, chewing at the dirty, frayed material of his shoelace, grinding it between his canines until enough of the threads were severed that he could rip his wrist free from the binding. He launched himself over the side of the bed, barely landing on his feet, and ran to the door. 

In the hallway, the overhead fluorescents blinded him, but he kept moving. He walked briskly, hands swinging at his sides, head down. If he passed anyone, he didn’t notice. There was a red EXIT sign at the end of the hall, and he crashed through it into the alley, tripping over his laceless shoe, scrambling to his feet and running for a few more yards before his legs gave out again and he went sprawling onto his face on the asphalt. 

The screams were joined by low laughter. The voices in his head didn’t have lungs, so why should they ever have to stop screaming? He gasped again, pulling in a lungful of dust that made him choke. He tried to use the wall to crawl up onto his knees and ended up half-upright with his forehead against the brick. 

He had never felt pain like this before. The pressure inside of his head was impossible. It pushed at his eyeballs and his sinuses and the bones of his face. The screams and laughter were getting louder, and under it, cutting through the mass of sound, was the low voice. You know what you are for. 

Evan dragged his hands up the wall, feeling them a thousand miles away and heavy as lead. He propped them up at the height of his shoulders and pushed himself about a foot away. He paused there, considering how much control he had of his muscles, how much distance he might need. 

Then he smashed the side of his head as hard as he could against the brick wall. 

The roaring inside of him changed. The needling shrieks became something else, a howl of indignation. Evan felt anger explode into his mind, but it didn’t belong to him. The shadows pushed out from all sides of him, throwing him into the center of the alley. He rolled and tried to get to his knees again. His head pounded, and he could feel blood dripping down the side of his face. He was going to pass out. That had been the goal, but the rest of it was a surprise. He could feel that surprise separate from the foreign anger, which pulsed and redoubled with the howls of the other voices. 

How dare you! the low voice screamed. How dare you, how dare you mar my vessel, how dare you try to take what belongs to the Great Engine—

The shadows were thick around him, rising with a liquid heaviness. He needed to pass out now, before whatever happened next. 

He heard someone running, coming closer. 

A form skidded around the corner into the side alley, and Evan watched as the young man he had been told to murder stared open-mouthed for a moment. Then he raised his hands and took a step closer. 

Evan’s heart dropped. “STOP!” His voice was thick in his throat, but he made it as loud as he could. “PLEASE!”

The man hesitated, but he didn’t run. Instead, Evan watched him close his eyes. Impossibly, inexplicably, the air above his open palm began to ripple and shift, and soft-focus globules of blue and purple light began to chase each other there. After a moment, they resolved themselves into a tea pot, a cup, and a saucer, still glowing. He opened his eyes and grabbed the pot by the handle in one hand and the cup and saucer in the other and poured. Viscous light flowed out from the spout, shimmering blue and pink and green. It threw its colorful reflection up into the man’s face as he raised it to take a sip. Immediately, the rest of his body began to glow, too. 

When he started to walk forward, Evan tried to warn him again to stay away — but the shadows shriveled as he crossed into them. They burned at the edges and shrank back. The screaming in Evan’s head felt like it was coming from further away the closer the man came to him, and every step sent more shadow scattering back behind Evan. 

When he was standing directly above Evan, Evan managed to raise his pounding head up to meet his eyes, and the man smiled. “Hey,” he said. “Sorry if this is really weird.”

Then he knelt and poured the rest of the tea into Evan’s mouth. 

The shrieking was panicked, but it was distant, and then it was silent. Evan felt the shadows splinter and break like glass around him, falling in tiny shards onto the asphalt. The light ran down his throat and into his stomach and hummed there, a fuzzy, radiating feeling that made his limbs tingle. The light over the back door of the shelter a few yards away blinked back on, and the spectral tea pot, cup and saucer winked out of existence. 

The alley was silent for a moment while Evan tried to process what had happened. As he tried, he felt the wave of unconsciousness cresting. He attempted to mumble something. “Thnk—”

He pitched forward, and the last thing he felt was the man’s arms catching him around the shoulders. 

Chapter Text

Pete didn’t think about texting Kingston until he was literally at the front door of his building. 

He probably should have done it when he was on the train, crawling through the city up to Harlem. He’d been a little distracted focusing on making it look like the unconscious stranger next to him had just had too much to drink instead of being knocked out by horrible shadow magic. After messing up his already messed-up hair and adding some minor illusions of soft snoring, the average New Yorker wouldn’t give them a second glance. 

With the strange, oppressive aura dispelled, Pete had actually been able to get a look at his new friend. He looked exhausted. He looked small in a way that Pete didn’t really understand, given that he was a good head taller than Pete. Something about him, even unconscious, seemed to fold in on itself. His shoes were worn out, and the edges of his coat were frayed. It was missing buttons. He was too pale and too thin, with eyes that sank back into dark circles that seemed almost gouged out of his face — but he had long, delicate eyelashes, which fluttered in the passing light of each station. 

Pete was, by nature, protective. Being Vox Phantasma had only broadened that tendency to people other than himself. This guy needed help. It was obvious just from looking at him, and even more obvious given the extremely magical danger in which Pete had just intervened. The uncomfortable pressure of those dripping, grasping shadows no longer lingered around him, but Pete could still feel the potential for them, like a chair that’s only been left for a little while. They would draw back in, because something about this person made them belong there. And Pete was going to figure out how to help. 

So now, having completely forgotten to do so before, Pete struggled to get his phone out of his pocket while balancing the unconscious stranger on Kingston’s stoop, and called. 

The lights in Kingston’s apartment were off, but on the third ring, Pete saw them turn on at the exact moment Kingston answered. “This better be a threat to the city.” It was a tired grumble, quiet so that he wouldn’t wake Liz or Langston. 

“I mean, yeah, probably,” Pete said, shifting the stranger and almost staggering off of the narrow stoop. “Can you let me in? And help me carry a guy up the stairs?”

There was a long beat of silence on the other end of the line. Finally, Kingston said, “Give me a minute.”

When they managed to maneuver the unconscious man onto Kingston’s couch, Kingston immediately started checking him over. Pete smiled nervously at Liz, who was leaning against the doorjamb of the bedroom, giving him an unimpressed look. “What hour do you call this, Pete?” she asked. 

Pete shrugged, his nervous smile faltering a little. “I’m sorry. This was the only place I could think of to bring him.”

They were both speaking very quietly. Liz was dangling a baby monitor from one curled finger, her arms crossed over her chest. She was in a long maroon robe, with her hair wrapped neatly into a patterned scarf. He’d never seen her out of very professional or at least presentable clothes. It made him weirdly happy to see her like this, comfortable, even if she was annoyed at him. 

“You still working on that grant application?” Liz asked, raising an eyebrow. “You know it’s gonna be due soon.” 

Pete nodded quickly. “Yeah. Definitely. Thanks for helping me with it. I should get it to you to look over, uh, soon.”

Liz just looked at him, eyebrow still raised, and Pete felt the back of his neck starting to heat up. He cleared his throat and turned around to try and look busy helping Kingston. 

Kingston was sitting on the coffee table, leaning over the guy they’d dragged in, doing the usual normal medical things — checking his pulse, checking his breathing. He handed Pete a small penlight and looked closely at the wound on the side of the guy’s head, touching it gently with his gloved hands. It looked nasty. Pete winced and looked away when Kingston began to probe a little further. The guy didn’t move. Out like a light. 

That’s ironic , Pete thought vaguely, eyes moving over the various books and knickknacks on Kingston’s living room shelves, trying to look anywhere but at the mess on the side of the stranger’s head while also keeping the penlight steady. 

Kingston grunted, then sat back. He stripped the gloves off and dropped them into a small trash can he’d pulled up next to them. “You said he could see you using magic?” he asked. 

Pete nodded. He clicked the penlight off and handed it back to Kingston. “It seemed like it. He looked surprised, though.”

“He saw the shadows, too?”

“Yeah.” Pete fidgeted where he was standing, hands in his pockets. “He didn’t seem surprised about those.”

Kingston nodded and hummed thoughtfully. “So he’s been inducted into the Unsleeping City, but hasn’t seen your kind of magic before. Just whatever did this.” He gestured loosely at the prone body in front of him. 

“Yeah. And he feels — weird.” Pete felt himself blush when Kingston just stared at him in confusion. “Like, when he’s awake. He feels… I don’t know, man. It feels heavy and kind of bad. I don’t know if it’s still there, because I think I dispelled whatever was happening to him, but it was like the opposite of being around Ricky.”

Kingston’s eyebrows knit together for a moment while he considered. “Well,” he said, finally, “Let’s wake him up and see.”

Kingston turned to the stranger and placed his hands gently over his chest. Pete watched the familiar golden light of Kingston’s healing magic work its way through the body, flowing from his chest towards his head and his feet. Slowly, the matted blood above his ear began to retreat, and the skin there knit itself back together. When the light faded, the guy looked almost peaceful. 

That lasted for about five seconds, before his eyes flew open and he regarded Kingston and Pete standing over him with quick, wild glances. He sat up and tried to launch himself away from them, but was stopped by the back of the couch. Instead, he put his arms up over his face, as if to block incoming blows. 

“Woah, woah,” Kingston said gently but firmly. Pete had backed up a good five feet in surprise, but Kingston just stood there with his hands up. “Hey. Nobody here’s gonna hurt you. You’re safe. My name is Kingston Brown, I’m a nurse. Pete here brought you to me so I could make sure you were okay.”

The stranger looked through his crossed arms with confusion, first up at Kingston, and then he slid his eyes over to Pete. Pete gave a little wave, and he watched the stranger’s eyes widen in recognition before he quickly looked away, back to Kingston. Whatever he saw there on Kingston’s face made him slowly lower his arms. He stared up, the foggy look on his face starting to harden into genuine, lucid confusion. 

“Where am I?” he asked. His voice was tight and a little rough. 

Kingston put his hands down, too. “Harlem. Pete managed to get you all the way up here.” He looked over his shoulder with a playful smirk. “Don’t know how, though. Kid’s a wimp most of the time.”

Pete frowned dramatically. “Hey, I’ve been working out with Ricky.”

“He been deadlifting you again?”

On the couch, the stranger watched them bicker, eyes flicking back and forth like he was watching a tennis match. He still looked scared. His shoulders were rolled in, and he looked like he was ready to spring out of the window if anything got weird. 

Pete looked at him steadily. “What’s your name?” he asked.

The stranger hesitated. “Evan,” he said finally. “Evan Kelmp.”

Pete watched the hilarity pass over and through Kingston’s face while he kept a good grip on his expression, but Pete absolutely could not handle that. He burst out in a laugh. “Oh my god,” he said, then, seeing Evan’s face, cleared his throat. “No, yeah, definitely. Good name. Hi, Evan, I’m Pete Conlan. This is Kingston Brown,” he gestured to Kingston, “and Liz Herrera,” he pointed at Liz. 

The baby monitor crackled, and a soft crying started up through the speakers. Liz sighed. “And there’s my cue.” She pointed at each of them one at a time. “Do not — speak louder — than a whisper.” Then she turned and went down the hallway, her long robe fluttering behind her. 

Kingston smiled after her, before turning back to Evan again. “Do you remember anything about what happened tonight?”

Evan took a moment, and the events of the evening seemed to flood back into him all at once. His hands gripped his knees, knuckles going white, and he looked down into his lap, away from them. “I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was dull. 

Pete stepped closer, confused. “For what? You were being attacked.”

Color rose high on Evan’s cheeks and down his neck. He stayed quiet. Pete glanced at Kingston, but Kingston was already looking at him. He raised one dark eyebrow. You sure about that? it seemed to ask.

Kingston sat back down on the coffee table across from Evan on the couch. His posture was relaxed and open, but Pete knew the difference between Kingston with his guard down and Kingston trying to play it cool. This was definitely the latter. His shoulders were tense, like he was ready to throw down at any second. 

“Tell me about it,” Kingston said. “If you think it’s too weird for us to understand it, believe me when I tell you I’ve seen it all.”

Evan looked back at Kingston doubtfully. 

Pete added, “We fought the literal Jersey Devil last year. He was smoking a vape and wearing shorts.”

Now Evan looked up over Kingston’s shoulder and blinked at Pete. Pete smiled back, and Evan dropped his eyes again. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure what happened. Those shadows came out of the ground while I was walking in the alley.” He nodded to Pete without looking up. “You showed up about a minute after that. I don’t remember a lot of it.” He touched the side of his head, and when his hand came away clean, he looked surprised. He touched again, carding through the hair there, seeming to look for any tenderness, but stopped after a moment. “I thought I hit my head,” he murmured. 

“You did,” Pete said. “You passed out. Kingston can heal people, so he took care of you.”

Evan looked at the open medical kit at Kingston’s feet, and Kingston shook his head. “I can do it a little faster than that,” he said. “Have you ever seen anything like those shadows before?”

Evan shook his head. “No. I don’t know what they were.”

Pete watched his face, unable to keep himself from tilting his head in mild confusion. He saw the tension draw a little tighter in Kingston’s shoulder blades.

“Hm,” Kingston said. “You seem pretty calm about the whole thing, Evan. I figured maybe something like that had happened to you before.”

Evan’s face flushed. With a little bit of panic crawling back into his expression, he cut his eyes toward the front door of the apartment, obviously making calculations. 

Kingston sat back, hands up again. “Listen, you don’t have to talk about it right now. It’s late. I know I’m tired. Do you guys need a place to sleep tonight?”

Pete’s whole body felt limp the second the offer was given. “Oh my god, do you mind? I’m so fucking tired, man.” 

“Of course,” Kingston said, but he didn’t take his eyes off of Evan. “How about you? You okay to stay here tonight, then tomorrow we can talk?”

Evan hesitated. He looked at the door one more time, and then dragged his eyes back to Kingston. Pete could see the war being waged there: Evan could either stay here in a comfortable apartment with a bunch of people he didn’t know, or he could sleep on the street with a little bit more control over his surroundings. Finally, he nodded. “Thank you,” he said softly. 

Kingston smiled. “Great.” He stood up. “Pete, can you help me get the air mattress out of the closet?”

Down the hall, Kingston opened the closet door, but looked at Pete and said very quietly, “Pete, who did I just invite to stay in this apartment with my wife and child?”

Pete swallowed. It never got less intimidating, looking up at Kingston when he had that expression on his face — open, listening, but waiting to hear the right thing before he made the next move. He could feel his face going red as Kingston’s position really came clear to him for the first time. Pete had brought a complete stranger — someone who Pete had said himself felt unsafe — into Kingston’s home. But this was the only place they could have gone. And Evan seemed fine right now. “It’s okay,” Pete said quickly. “He’s okay. Look, you talked to him. He’s polite, he’s quiet—”

“He’s not telling us everything,” Kingston said. He was maneuvering the air mattress out of the closet. Pete grabbed things out of the way to try and help. 

“Yeah,” Pete said, “yeah, I know. But think about it. We’re strangers. If he just woke up to the Unsleeping City and then got attacked, he’s probably feeling pretty vulnerable. If we prove that he can trust us, then he’ll talk to us.” Pete thought that sounded right. It was what he hoped for, anyway. 

Kingston grunted with a final pull to get the air mattress out of the crowded closet, then reached back in for the pump. “I’m trusting you with this,” he said. “You’re gonna keep an eye on him?”

It was phrased like a question, but the tone of it was an order. Pete nodded rapidly. “Yeah, I got it. I’ll make sure nothing happens. We’ll talk to him tomorrow and see what’s really going on.”

Kingston nodded. There was a finality in it, a dead seriousness that made Pete feel a little queasy, to be honest. He watched Kingston walk back towards the living room and hurried to follow.

Evan insisted that the couch was fine for him, but Pete pretended to pass out on it while the mattress was inflating. He figured the guy hadn’t slept anywhere comfortable for at least a little while, given the state of his clothes and his shoes and the fact that Pete had met him at a homeless shelter. The least Pete could do was let him take the air mattress. He listened as Kingston set it up with sheets, blankets and pillows, and tried to keep himself from smiling and giving the game away when Kingston gently put a blanket over him on the couch and lifted his head to put a pillow under it. He heard Kingston huff a very quiet, thin laugh, though, so he was pretty sure he wasn’t doing a great job pretending to sleep. 

He heard Evan settle in, and heard Kingston’s quiet instructions: where the bathroom was, where the kitchen was, when they normally got up in the morning, a warning about the baby potentially crying. Then Kingston was gone, with the room going dark on the other side of Pete’s eyelids, and a silence settled.

Pete let that silence linger for a while, listening to Evan moving around on the air bed, getting comfortable. When he didn’t hear that shuffling for a minute or two, he finally said, “Hey, Evan.”

A very long beat. Then, softly, “Yes?”

Pete smiled. It reminded him of sleepovers when he was a kid. Whispered conversations in the dark where parents couldn’t hear. Telling secrets to each other. That time between going to bed and falling asleep at a sleepover always felt like it was full of potential for something to happen, and Pete felt that now. So he asked, just as softly, “So, what’s your deal?”

Another very long beat. “What do you mean?”

Pete sat up on his elbow, looking down at Evan a little ways away. He was curled up on his side, the blanket pulled up to his neck, his hair mostly hiding his face. Pete asked again, “What’s your deal, man? Where do you come from? What are you doing in New York?” 

Pete watched Evan shift under the blanket. He didn’t curl in tighter, so Pete took that as a sort of good sign. “Iowa,” Evan said. “And I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I just ended up here, I guess.”

Pete considered this. It didn’t really sound dishonest. Just maybe not very specific. “I’ve never been to Iowa,” he said. “I came here from upstate. Dropped out of school and disappeared for a while.” Pete thought about the family dinner that was on his calendar next month, and it hit him, not for the first time, how different things were now than when he’d first seen his dad floating away into the sky when he was about to use Pete’s deadname. It made him feel a little good, actually. “Things’re better now, though. I’ve got a lot of good people in my life.” He paused. “Hey, you don’t have to answer this, because it’s not my business and I really get it, but — how did you end up needing a place like Helping Hands?”

Evan was quiet for a very long time. Pete was getting more sure by the second that he was either asleep or extremely offended. But then, finally, Evan said, “I ran away from foster care when I was a teenager.” He paused. “I couldn’t really get my feet under me after that, so I just kept moving.”

There was something else there, in that answer. There was something unsaid. Pete almost tried to reach for it on instinct, but pulled himself back. All he got was the barest glimpse of something bad. Fire, maybe. Running. It made his skin break out in goosebumps, and he rubbed his arms absently. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That sounds really hard. I can try to help you, if you want.” It sounded lame the second it came out of his mouth, because it was. How exactly could Pete help when he could barely afford his own rent?

“Thanks,” Evan said. It was thin, like even he was aware that Pete’s offer was weak. “But I’m okay.”

Pete frowned. He put his head back down on the pillow. “I’ll stop bothering you so you can sleep. We can talk tomorrow.”

Evan just hummed a response. Pete could tell that he was drifting away already. He listened as Evan’s breaths slowed and evened out, until he saw that coiled body finally relax in the ambient light through the open window. 

He closed his own eyes, too. Maybe at Kingston’s he could finally get some real sleep, and hopefully make it back to Nod.

He didn’t. 

But Evan did.

Evan stood at an unfamiliar New York street corner. The street signs pointing in either direction were pitted and corroded, so he couldn’t read the names. The place was empty. Shutters were pulled down on every storefront, and there were no cars. Instead, Evan saw thin pipes, copper and brass and stainless steel, snaking and zigzagging through the middle of the road. Whatever ran through them leaked in little puddles at some of the joints, and Evan could see that the asphalt beneath was being slowly eaten away by a dark fluid. 

The pipes, he realized, were also taking up the sidewalk. They came down from the buildings, through the right corner of every window, and met at the sidewalk to converge in the street. It looked almost like the brick and stone and facades of the buildings were covered in some kind of aggressive ivy, but it was the same copper, brass, and steel, twisting and turning and bunched against every side, carrying something down and away. 

Evan knelt at one of the leaking joints, reaching his hand out to try and see what was traveling in the pipes — but he heard a loud sound of metal clattering behind him and stood, spinning. He saw something run around the next corner, and he chased after it. 

It was hard to run on the pipe-tangled sidewalk, but when he turned the corner, he saw that it was a dead end. The pipes here made a 90-degree turn upward and created a wall that stretched up and up, way over the buildings, into the smoggy sky. At the edge of that wall, Evan saw something struggling to get itself through a miniscule gap between the pipes and the brick of a building. 

He approached slowly. The thing was small. It seemed humanoid, but it was all one color — a dull gray. It flailed at the tiny gap, pushing with its little hands to try and bend the pipes away from the wall. It looked back over its shoulder, and Evan could see two dark streaks of tar-black tears flowing down its face from its black eyes. When it saw him, Evan heard its breath catch, and it turned back to struggle harder at the pipes, fruitlessly tugging and pushing against the unmovable metal. 

“Hey,” Evan called. He tried to keep his voice level, tough. He knew from experience that things that looked like children weren’t necessarily children. “Who are you?”

The thing banged both of its fists on the metal and cried out with a strangled, frustrated, terrified noise, leaning its head against the pipes and starting to sob. It slid down to its knees and stayed there as Evan came closer. 

He stayed a little way back. “Who are you?” he tried again. 

The thing turned. It was still on its knees, and it turned its face up to Evan, inky tears dripping off of its chin. It looked so much like a child. Something uncomfortable flipped in Evan’s chest, looking at the amount of absolute misery crushed onto this thing’s face. It looked despondent, and Evan was terrified of the resonance he could feel there, between himself and that hopelessness.

Its eyes moved up, past Evan towards the sky. Slowly, it raised its hand and pointed at something behind and above him. 

Still untrusting, Evan took a few steps to keep the thing in front of him and turned to look up in the direction it pointed. 

In the sky, the smog floated in scummy, greasy clouds that bunched and condensed. There was something else, though. Something vast and dark hung above those clouds, its shadow shifting and reforming as the smog collected beneath it. 

Where the creature pointed, Evan watched a few clouds slowly drift apart to let him see just one, brief glimpse of what hung above the city. 

All he could see were smokestacks and brick. But a low, horrible pressure began to build in his stomach, and he swayed on his feet. Something about this was so familiar. Something about this was his. Something about this was—

He felt a small hand bunch into the fabric of his oversized jeans. He looked down just in time to see the small gray creature staring up at him with an expression he couldn’t understand. 

Then the city opened up beneath him, and he was falling down, down, down. 

He sat up in an empty room, its walls yellowed and crumbling. The floor was covered in a thin, moldering carpet that might have once been beige, but was now a motley of stains and wear. The air smelled laden with old dust, like the smell of a library book that hasn’t been checked out in fifty years. Everything felt thin and strange. 

But Evan stared, mesmerized, into an open closet in the room. Inside, one bent metal wire hanger hung from a warped wooden closet rod. From the bowed center, twisted a few times around the wire, hung a single yellow paper rose. Upside down, it swayed gently from side to side. It was beautiful in a way that Evan couldn’t fully absorb. He was dumbfounded, watching its fragile movement, feeling like he was about to cry. 

In his mind, a voice spoke — a new voice, a soft voice, and despite the words, a voice that sounded like it wanted to help him: 

And even that imaginary , it said slowly, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination.

And then he was falling again.