Lance wasn't standing.
There was no standing.
There were no limbs, no breath, no up.
He existed only in the suggestion of shape. A pressure behind glass, a hum behind a wall. His awareness floated, fragmented—memories coming like headlights in fog. Muffled. Bent. Too slow.
But it wasn't death.
It was before something. A holding pattern for consciousness not yet born.
The sound came first.
Not words.
Meaning.
A rhythm of absence. The sensation of a breath held for too long by a mouth that had forgotten how to exhale.
Then came the copies.
He was looking at himself.
Not mirrors. Not even reflections.
Just... him. In iterations. In rewinds. In distortions.
One Lance sat on his apartment floor, talking to Dario. But the dog blinked sideways and disappeared mid-tail wag.
Another Lance stood in the milk aisle of the grocery store, frozen, except his eyes twitched back and forth like they knew someone else was watching.
One laughed. One screamed. One vomited ink.
All of them wrong.
Each moved like a broken marionette, out of time with the scene they were in, like their audio and video tracks had desynced.
Lance—the real one, or whatever version floated now—tried to reach out.
But his thoughts bled.
He couldn't remember where his hands should be.
He felt a question rise in him, not spoken, but felt:
"When did you stop being only you?"
The moment it arrived, he remembered.
Not a moment in time.
But a moment in texture.
The cold breath near the milk fridge.
The shelf humming slightly off-beat.
The tiny crack in the jug seal.
The flicker of the security mirror overhead.
The stare he thought he imagined.
The infection hadn't been a dramatic possession or a villain's whisper.
It had been small.
Innocuous.
Patient.
A concept that made a home inside a man too tired to notice his mind had made room.
A shape was forming in the void now.
Not a figure.
A hole.
The absence of Lance.
Where something else might grow.
And yet it didn't want to speak. It didn't need to. It wanted only one thing:
To finish.
Not him.
But what it had started.
His thoughts frayed at the edges, losing their cohesion like old film burning through the projector.
And then—
Something grabbed him.
A weight. A pull.
Not a void this time, but force.
Reality.
Hands.
Lance's eyes shot open.
Dani was dragging him backward by his collar, Dario barking furiously at his side.
Blood poured from his nose. His lips were pale. His fingers twitched.
She was shouting something, but her voice was muffled, like it was underwater and behind glass.
The rift groaned again.
The walls were melting.
And the cow-thing was growing faces.
Not new ones.
His.
The rift buckled.
The wall behind them grew mouths — dozens of them — all shaped like Lance's own. They didn't scream. They whispered things he hadn't said yet.
Dani didn't flinch.
She dragged Lance's limp form by the collar with one hand and reached into her bag with the other.
Not a backpack.
Not military gear.
A lunchbox.
Bright yellow. Cartoon dinosaur on the front.
She popped it open like a mechanic cracking a toolbox, revealing stacked trays of impossible nonsense:
A compass that spun in three dimensions.
A fingerbone wrapped in copper wire, softly humming.
A jar labeled "Do Not Open Unless You Absolutely Have To (You Probably Do, Idiot)"
And a folded compartment that clicked outward into a triangular spring-trap covered in teeth.
She snatched a small red capsule from the corner and slammed it into Lance's chest like an EpiPen.
He jerked. Coughed. Blinked wildly.
Then screamed.
"WHAT IS—WHERE AM—THERE'S A WALL WITH MY FACE ON IT—"
"Later!" she snapped. "Scream on the way!"
With her free hand, she whipped out a sleek metal briefcase, cracked it open mid-run, and slammed her palm into a glyph on the lid.
BOOM.
A burst of adhesive sigils blasted forward like buckshot — sticky golden runes that struck the melting floor, the cow's advancing bulk, the mouths on the walls. Everywhere they hit, the world shuddered — not with pain, but like it was being remembered wrong. The space flinched away from them, like the reality itself was allergic.
The cow-thing roared, its head bending backward, then forward, jaw flexing sideways into something wider than its neck should allow.
"Come on," Dani growled.
She reached into the lunchbox again and yanked out a mason jar filled with a twitching black slug curled around a dead matchstick.
"Shake and launch," she muttered. "Shake and launch."
She gave it two hard shakes. The slug squealed like an air leak.
Then she tossed the jar at the wall to their left — where space had begun folding inward like origami trying to choke them. The slug hit, shattered—
—and immediately began devouring the air.
Not oxygen. Not matter.
The concept of space.
The hallway reasserted itself in a jolt of cracked tile and fluorescent lights, like a dream finally remembering it was a building.
Lance, still gasping, still holding Dario like a lifeline, stared at her with wide, terrified eyes.
"W-Who the hell are you?!"
"Dani," she said, almost grinning. "And you're the milk guy."
The cow bellowed again. Its voices—Lance's voices—chanted in chorus now.
"YOU NEVER ASKED.
YOU NEVER SAID.
YOU NEVER WANTED THIS."
Reality caved inward behind them as Dani pulled Lance through a door that hadn't been there a second ago, slammed it shut—
And all went still.
Pitch black.
Then:
Drip.
Drip.
Somewhere deep in the silence, something ticked softly, like a grandfather clock with a slow pulse.
They weren't safe.
Just... somewhere else.