My boots pound against wet pavement, each impact sending jolts up my legs. The night air is thick with fog – actual fog or something else, I'm not sure anymore. Streetlights create halos in the mist, and each one seems to contain an eye, watching, following. The darkness behind my left eye throbs in time with my racing pulse.
"Vesper!" Marcus's voice crackles in my earpiece. "What the hell is happening?"
"The symbol," I gasp between breaths. "It's active. Not just a message – a beacon."
"Get somewhere safe. I'm sending–"
The rest of his words dissolve into static. Something is interfering with the signal, something that makes my fillings ache and tastes like metal on my tongue. I rip the earpiece out just as it starts to emit a high-pitched whine that would have ruptured my eardrum.
I know these streets. Three blocks west to the safe house, assuming I can make it. Assuming whatever's following me doesn't–
The fog ahead of me ripples. No, not ripples – folds. Like reality is a piece of paper being creased by invisible hands. I skid to a stop, nearly falling as I change direction. Can't go west. South then, toward the river. Water sometimes interferes with their ability to–
Another fold appears, this time accompanied by a sound like silk tearing. The fog within the fold is different, darker, and through it I catch glimpses of... something. Shapes that don't make sense, geometry that hurts to look at. The Thing from between dimensions is reaching through, using the symbol as an anchor point.
"Shit shit shit." I dart down an alley, mind racing. They've never tried anything like this before. The Church's usual methods are brutally direct – seeding people, ritual sacrifice, the occasional mass shooting to cover up their real activities. This is new. This is evolved.
The alley opens onto a smaller street lined with abandoned storefronts. The fog is thicker here, nearly opaque. Each step feels like wading through cold syrup. My left eye burns so badly I can barely keep it open, and the darkness within it is spreading, sending tendrils of shadow across my field of vision.
A figure appears in the fog ahead. For a moment I think it's human – woman-shaped, wearing what might be a dress. Then it moves, and I realize the dress is part of its flesh, flowing and rippling like ink in water. Where its face should be, there's only smooth, reflective skin.
"Hello, Vesper." The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, and it's one I haven't heard in fifteen years. Mother Superior. But not really her – the Thing is using her voice, pulling it from my memories like a fisherman pulling up nets.
I back away, drawing my knife. Fat lot of good it will do against what's basically a piece of living void, but the weight of it in my hand is comforting. "Nice trick," I say, trying to keep my voice steady. "But we both know you're not her."
The figure tilts its head at an impossible angle. "Are you so sure? The borders between realities grow thin. What is memory? What is flesh? All things flow together in the spaces between spaces."
Another figure appears to my right. This one wears Mother Superior's face like a mask that's melting, features running like wax. "We miss you, child. Miss your touch, your taste. The door you could have been."
"Still can be," says a third figure, materializing behind me. "The Convergence approaches. Reality grows soft, malleable. What was closed can be opened."
I'm surrounded now, a circle of not-quite-Mother-Superiors moving with liquid grace through the fog. The darkness behind my eye pulses, reaching out to them like iron to a magnet. Part of me wants to let it, wants to complete the connection. That's the problem with touching Things from outside – they leave hooks in your psyche, barbs that never quite stop pulling.
"The Church grows desperate," the first figure says. "They seed and seed, seeking another like you. But you were born to this. Born in blood and darkness, touched by us before your first breath. Special. Unique. Ours."
My knife hand trembles. "I was never yours. You just made me think I was."
They laugh in unison, a sound like breaking glass. "Poor child. Still clinging to illusions of free will. Still thinking you can run from what you are."
The fog thickens, solidifies. Tendrils of it wrap around my ankles, cold as deep space. The figures move closer, their forms flowing together like drops of mercury combining.
"The symbol awakens old pathways," they say with one voice now. "Opens doors long sealed. Come home, Vesper. Come home and be what you were meant to be."
The darkness behind my eye explodes outward, and suddenly I can see. See the threads of reality stretching and warping around us. See the vast shapes moving in the spaces between spaces, pressing against the thin membrane of our dimension like fingers pressing against a balloon. See the truth of what stands before me – not Mother Superior at all, but a probe, a pseudopod extended from something vast and ancient and hungry.
And because I can see it, I can fight it.
I grip the knife tighter, channeling power through it. The blade darkens, drinking in light like a black hole. "I know what I am," I growl. "I'm the one who got away. The one who proved you're not infallible. The one who's going to stop you."
The merged figure reaches for me with too-long arms. "Brave words from one who still bears our mark. Shall we show you what truly lies behind that eye of yours?"
Pain lances through my skull as the Thing tries to connect fully, tries to open the pathways that the Church spent seventeen years carving into my brain. But they never understood what they created in me. Never understood that their 'gift' could be turned against them.
I let the darkness flow, not out but in. Let it fill me until my skin feels like it might burst. The figure recoils, its smooth face rippling with what might be surprise.
"You learned," it says. "How... interesting."
"I had good teachers." I slash outward with the knife, tearing through the fog-stuff of its body. The blade leaves trails of absolute darkness in its wake, cuts that don't heal but rather spread, eating away at the figure's substance. "They taught me all about pain. About breaking things down to build them back up. About opening doors."
The figure shrieks in Mother Superior's voice, thrashing as pieces of it dissolve into nothingness. The other shapes try to converge, to merge with it and restore its mass, but I'm ready. I spin, blade extended, darkness pouring off it in waves. Everywhere it touches, reality unravels.
"But here's what they didn't teach me," I pant, slashing and cutting as the things try to surround me again. "Everything has a cost. Every door swings both ways. Every connection goes in two directions."
I drive the knife into the 'ground', which stopped being actual pavement sometime during this fight. Dark energy pulses outward in a circle, and everywhere it touches, the fog tatters and shreds. The figures scream in harmony, their forms beginning to lose cohesion.
"So here's a taste of your own medicine," I snarl. "Here's what it feels like to be unmade."
I push everything I have through the knife, all the fear and pain and rage of seventeen years, all the darkness they put behind my eye. The blade becomes a beacon of anti-light, a tear in reality that pulls instead of pushes. The figures are drawn toward it like debris into a drain, their substance unweaving thread by thread.
"This isn't over," they say with Mother Superior's voice, but it's weak now, fading. "The Convergence comes. The doors will open. Reality will..."
Whatever else it was going to say is lost as the last of its substance is drawn into the void. The fog dissipates like smoke in a strong wind, leaving me standing in a perfectly normal street on a perfectly normal night. My knees give out and I sit down hard on the wet pavement, trembling with exhaustion.
My phone buzzes. Marcus. With shaking fingers, I manage to answer it.
"...the hell?" His voice is tight with worry. "We lost all contact. The cleanup team said you ran out like the devil was chasing you. Are you okay?"
I look at my knife. The blade is still dark, though the effect is fading. More importantly, it's changed. The steel is rippled now, like Damascus patterns but wrong somehow, the swirls forming shapes that seem to move when I'm not looking directly at them.
"No," I say honestly. "I'm really not. We have a problem, Marcus. A big one."
"Where are you? I'll send a car."
I manage to stand, though my legs feel like rubber. "No time. Meet me at HQ. The Church... they're not just trying to replace me anymore. They're trying something new. Something worse."
"Worse how?"
I start walking, forcing one foot in front of the other. The darkness behind my eye has settled into a dull throb, but I can feel it stirring, reaching for something just beyond the edge of perception.
"Because they're not trying to open a door anymore," I say. "They're trying to break down the walls."