After another second spent gazing at the iconic monument that he’d always openly joked about hating, but now felt rather sorry for, his head snapped up to seek another element of Cinn’s red city that had always intrigued him. Sure enough, he found the disturbing fractured moon Cinn had described. For a moment, he stared at it—the artist in him itching to capture the strange, unsettling sight.
Forcing himself to walk on, he understood why the Beksinski paintings in his old bedroom had reminded Cinn so much of here. This place dripped with surrealism.Oozedwith it. Julien half expected to melt into the ground as he travelled, or turn the corner to find a giant skull with spider demons crawling out of it.
An almighty crashing sound in the distance had his head snapping up. Colossal plumes of dark smoke billowed across the skyline.
Then, the ground began to shake.
Heart thumping, adrenaline surging, Julien turned in the opposite direction and ran.
Footsteps pounding on the volatile surface, Julien pushed his body to the absolute limit, forcing his muscles to carry him faster and faster, until his thighs ached and begged for mercy. His chest tightened painfully as he struggled to inhale.
He pressed on, regardless. He’d always been the master of his own body—the years of intense physical training during his youth had proved that to him.
Why did it feel like he was running out of time?
One wrong step away from the world crumbling around him?
A hair’s breadth away from death?
Something prickled down his spine. An icy prickle. There was an umbraphage behind him.Closebehind him. Julien was certain of it.
Not glancing behind him even for a millisecond, he continued to press his body into the punishing pace. He tuned everything out—thegrowing hiss of his pursuer, the agony in his legs, and the sound of his blood rushing through his ears—to focus only on his next step.
A tiny blur of dark flitted across his vision, zipping left, then right. A… collection ofshadowmotes?He’d never seen them before. It was bizarre to sight them but notfeelthem the way he felt all the others. Regardless, he stretched out his arm to them, as if he were a child chasing a butterfly. He followed them down a narrow Parisian street, which opened into the wide thoroughfare of Champs-Élysées. A giant double-decker tour bus, red ivy invading every smashed window, brushed up against him as he sprinted towards the Arc de Triomphe, the motes a pace or two ahead of him. The arch’s once majestic facade was now marred by mighty cracks, chunks of stone missing from its structure.
A sudden thought consumed him: the knowledge that hehadto reach the arch at any cost.
And so he continued, using his last reserves of energy to catapult himself down the ruined avenue, debris and ivy threatening to trip him at every step. Finally, he was there, in the deep shadow of the monument. Reaching his predetermined destination, he turned to face the umbraphage.
It wasn’t there.
After a moment of blinking through shock and confusion, the ground disappeared from under him. There wasn’t a prelude, neither a tremor nor shake, but the cobblestone beneath him fell away, sending him plummeting into an abyss.
Then he was freefalling downwards, white shirt billowing out around him like a parachute.
He should, of course, be terrified—the scientific part of his brain told him he was about to break every bone in his body. Conversely, he felt little to nothing as he plunged downwards.
A handful of seconds, a minute, longer? Time became irrelevant as cool air whipped his cheeks.
Initially a speck in the distance, the bottom became steadily larger as it filled his vision with dark brown hues. When Julien reached the ground, his chest hit the firm surface with a tremendous thud, but he did not experience the agonisingly rib-shattering, body-destroying impact that he should have.
Dusting himself off, his eyes slowly adjusted to the extremely dim light, his murky brown surroundings eventually somewhat revealing themselves to him.
An expansive cavern of sorts, rocky walls circling him on all sides. His unsteady panting echoed off the walls, his lungs still feeling the effects of being pushed to their limits above.
And there he was.
A mere handful of metres away.
A gasp escaped Julien, loud in the silence of the cave, and his hand flew to his mouth before he urged his body forward to close the distance between himself and Cinn.
Encased horizontally in a rib-like cage made of black. The texture and glossy shine of it reminded him of an umbraphage’s inky tendrils. Indeed, as he stepped closer, the bars of Cinn’s jail writhed with life. Through the gaps, his body was just visible. Naked, laying on his back on a slab of grey stone. Very much as still as the body that Julien currently cradled in his arms, back in the hospital, a place that felt aeons away.
There was something attached to Cinn’s skin, severalsomethings, all across the side of him. The more he looked, the more he saw—a row of tiny wormlike creatures wiggling fluidly, stretching from his neck to his feet. As if sensing Julien’s presence, one lifted a head, turned to Julien and hissed, revealing rows of miniscule sharp teeth before it burrowed into Cinn’s side again.
Julien stepped even closer towards the cage.What the fuck are they doing to you?
His hand reached out to hover an inch from one black curve.
