The floor went out from under him.
One second Aiden was in front of Iris's office.
The next, the whole corridor folded.
Carpet. Concrete. Glass. Office chairs. Metal framing. Half a ceiling. A screaming woman. The unconscious man from the hall. Everything dropped together in one ugly impossible collapse.
He saw Iris's barricaded door wrench sideways.
He heard her scream his name.
Then the building hit back.
His shoulder smashed into something hard enough to turn his arm numb. A desk clipped the side of his skull. Broken partition glass tore across his cheek. He grabbed for a wall and found air. The fall kept happening in pieces.
Impact.
Slide.
Another impact.
Then black dust swallowed everything and the rest of the building came down on top of him.
For a few seconds he heard nothing except debris settling.
Then pain arrived all at once.
Shoulder.
Ribs.
Left hip.
Legs.
Head.
His mouth filled with grit. Something warm ran into his collar. Blood, probably. Hard to care. Hard to sort one injury from another when his whole body felt like wreckage.
He opened his eyes.
Dark.
Not normal dark. Packed dark. The kind that felt physical.
"Iris."
The word came out shredded.
No answer.
He tried to move and found the limits fast. One arm worked. The other worked badly. His legs were pinned from mid-thigh down under a slab that might as well have been a collapsed highway. Twisted metal dug into one calf. His phone was gone. The air in the pocket tasted like pulverized concrete and old wiring.
"Iris!"
Nothing.
He shouted again because silence was worse.
The sound hit stone and died near him.
Later, voices reached him from somewhere above. People yelling names. Crying. Someone begging for help until the voice broke. None of it got closer.
He listened for Iris until listening became its own form of pain.
Once, after a stretch of silence so long he thought the whole world had emptied out, he heard what might have been a cough.
He said her name until his throat started tearing.
Nothing answered.
Time stopped behaving.
Dust drifted down every time something shifted overhead. Sometimes distant sirens bled through the concrete. Once he heard machinery heavy enough to vibrate the slab over his legs and hope hit him so hard it almost made him stupid.
Then it moved away.
He measured day and night by a crack somewhere above his left shoulder. Sometimes a line of gray seeped through. Then it vanished. Then it came back.
One day.
Another.
By the second night thirst had stopped feeling like thirst. It was just a blade sitting behind every thought. His tongue felt swollen. His lips split whenever he tried to speak. Once he scraped condensation off a bent strip of metal with his thumb and licked it clean. It tasted like rust and dust and almost nothing.
Hunger came later.
It felt meaner.
Not the simple ache of an empty stomach. Something narrower. More focused. Like his body had selected one command and thrown the rest away.
He stopped calling for Iris as often.
Not because he wanted to.
Because every word cost too much water.
On what he thought was the third day, something wet touched the side of his face.
Too thick to be water.
He went still.
For a few seconds there was only the sound of his own breathing.
Then something to his right dragged itself over broken concrete.
The noise was wrong.
Not rescue.
Not human.
He understood two things at once.
Something had come down with the collapse.
And it was hurt badly enough that it had taken this long to reach him.
The second thought did not help.
The smell reached him first.
Rot.
Blood.
That wet mineral stink from the gate.
Then he saw the eyes.
Low to the ground. Pale in the dark. Fixed on him.
The rest came slowly after that: a split torso dragging one side behind it, one foreleg bending wrong every time it tried to pull forward, jaw cracked wide enough that part of the lower bone showed through the flesh. Black blood had dried over half its chest. Every breath rattled.
If it had been healthy, he would have died before recognizing what he was looking at.
Like this, he only had time to understand it clearly.
His hand searched the rubble until his fingers closed around a bent strip of metal.
Too short.
Too thin.
Still better than empty hands.
The creature dragged itself closer.
Aiden waited until it was almost on him.
Then he struck.
The first hit glanced off bone and sent a shock up his wrist. The thing shrieked and snapped at him. Its jaw failed to close right. Black spit hit his sleeve. He stabbed again, lower this time, driving the metal into a torn place under the ribs.
The monster convulsed.
He hit it again.
And again.
There was almost no strength left in the fight. Just a half-crushed body jerking in the dark while Aiden kept ramming metal into meat because stopping meant letting it find one last good angle at his throat.
When it finally collapsed sideways, he still hit it once more.
Only then did he stop.
His hand was shaking too badly to hold the strip straight.
The monster wasn't dead.
Not yet.
Its chest still moved in broken little pulls. Deep inside the split cavity, something dark and wet pulsed under the black blood.
Aiden stared.
The smell changed.
The rot stayed.
Something else rose through it.
Hot.
Fresh.
Immediate.
His mouth flooded with saliva.
He froze.
Hunger slammed into him so hard his vision blurred.
Not starvation.
Not normal need.
This felt like an order being forced down through every nerve in his body.
Eat.
He clenched his jaw until pain flashed up the side of his head.
No.
He had to get out.
He had to find Iris.
He had to keep the last human part of this from sliding any further than it already had.
But his body had already decided what mattered.
His hand moved toward the wound before he fully meant it to.
He stopped with his fingers hovering over the torn flesh.
For one second he thought of stupid clean things.
Hospital forms.
Emergency contact boxes.
Cause of injury.
He almost laughed.
Then the hunger hit again, sharper, and he pushed his hand into the monster's chest.
The heat shocked him.
The texture was worse. Slick membrane. Dense muscle. Internal warmth that had no right to feel this alive inside all that ruin.
His fingers closed around the heart.
It was still beating.
Weak.
Stubborn.
The monster jerked under his hand.
Aiden nearly recoiled.
Nearly.
Then he ripped it free.
The body shuddered once and went still.
He stared at the thing in his palm.
Black blood ran down his wrist. The heart twitched in broken spasms. Nothing about it looked like food. Nothing about this could ever be filed under survival and come back clean on the other side.
He bit into it anyway.
Heat burst over his tongue.
Iron.
Salt.
Then his stomach turned so hard he gagged it halfway back up. He choked. Coughed. Nearly vomited all over himself. Tears burned his eyes. Dust stuck to his lips. There was blood in his teeth and something dead between his molars.
He forced himself to swallow.
Because there was no point becoming this if he died two seconds later.
Because shame only belonged to people who lived long enough to carry it.
He took another bite.
Then another.
He hated himself between each one.
He did not let himself think. If he had thought about what he was doing, even once, he would have broken. And if he broke here, pinned under concrete with a monster's heart in his hands, that would be the end of him.
When the last piece was gone, his body changed direction.
Pain hit first.
Not wound pain.
Inside pain.
Heat tore through his chest and up his spine like something had been forced awake under his skin. Every muscle locked. His vision flashed white, then black, then white again. His heartbeat turned violent.
Throat.
Wrists.
Teeth.
He felt all of it.
His lungs dragged in one breath and failed on the next. He tried again and sucked dust and blood and monster stink so deep it made him convulse.
The trapped weight on his legs changed.
Not lighter.
Just different.
As if his body had begun measuring it another way.
Then hunger came back.
Worse.
The heart had not fed it.
It had introduced him to it.
Something like a scream tore out of him. Or maybe it was smaller than that. Maybe it only felt huge inside his skull.
The dark sharpened.
He could hear dust settling grain by grain.
Water ticking somewhere far above.
Steel cooling inside broken concrete.
Voices overhead.
Human.
Real.
And between one heartbeat and the next, pale text shivered into existence where nothing should have been.
Not whole.
Not readable.
Just fragments trying to survive censorship.
███RT █████████ █████████
Another line dragged itself into place under it.
██R██P████ ███████
The letters smeared. Folded. Broke apart under bands of black before he could force sense out of them.
Then the fever came.
It hit without warning and with no mercy. He felt freezing cold and burning alive at the same time. Tremors ran through him hard enough to rattle his teeth. The strip of metal slipped from his fingers. Blood from somewhere he could no longer locate ran into the corner of his mouth.
His last clear thought wasn't the monster.
It was Iris.
Somewhere above him.
Maybe alive.
Maybe not.
Maybe waking up alone and deciding, with perfect reason, that he had failed her exactly the way the world failed everybody when it mattered.
Then the fever dragged him under.
Somewhere above the rubble, a human voice shouted that they had found another void pocket.