Chapter 10: Worry Not

Apricot twisted beneath her blankets. Midnight lay silent, but whispers crept through the plaster, soft and damp and patient, threading along the walls and flickering in time with the red blink of her alarm.

Something else breathed in the room. The air felt boxed in, the corners swollen with shadow. When she dared a glance, she caught the impression of figures crouched just beyond sight.

A cold tug brushed her sheets. She squeezed her eyes shut, but sleep, when it finally came, dragged her into a city that could not exist. An abyss yawned beneath her, revealing streets of impossible geometry. Stairways plunged into voids. Doors opened onto nothing. Towers hung inverted against a burning sky, and shapes moved in those alleys, unseen but watching, whispering to something hidden in the dark.

Apricot woke with the terrible sense that the veil between that world and hers was paper-thin, already tearing.

~

Morning chased away the night but not the dread. A full week had passed since the alley, since the reaper, since everything. Her ankle still ached if she moved wrong. The bruises along her ribs had faded to a sickly yellow she kept hidden under layers.

She drifted into the university lecture hall bleary-eyed, her thoughts snagging on half-remembered whispers. Class dragged in a blur. Slides flickered past. Notes smeared together. When the lecture ended, she began packing up until Miss Akagi’s crisp voice cut through the thinning crowd.

“Apricot. Stay after class, please.”

Students streamed out, leaving the hall hollow and echoing. She remained at her desk, hands clenched on her bag.

Miss Akagi stood rigid at the podium, harsh lights gleaming off her glasses. She held Apricot’s printed article between two fingers.

“You were assigned to report the news,” she said, “not become it.”

Silence stretched.

“Breaking into a crime scene for a story is a serious offense. I should expel you on the spot.” She let the words settle. “But the Ministry left your punishment to me, fortunately for you. If anything like this happens again, you’ll lose your state-issued license before you can blink. Journalism will be over for you.”

Apricot exhaled. “Yes, ma’am. I understand.”

Miss Akagi studied her a moment longer, then lifted the article. “For a junior journalist, it’s impressive work. Leaving it as a class assignment would be a waste.” She folded the pages once. “I have contacts at a weekly independent paper. Not the Uchellian Times. Your piece isn’t fit for state media, but a reputable journal outside the Ministry’s reach. If you’re willing to sell it, I can put it in front of them.”

Apricot’s eyes widened. A real publication. Her first. “Yes. Absolutely.”

“Good.” Miss Akagi handed the paper back. “Keep it up. Provided you attend class on time and avoid further incriminating fieldwork.”

~

That afternoon, she met her friends at Big Tower.

Blue Ash’s tallest skyscraper speared into the clouds, its mirrored walls catching the last of the daylight and throwing it back as cold silver. More arcology than office building, it housed corporate headquarters, government ministries, residential blocks. Most of the city lived in its shadow, whether it wanted to or not. A giant holoscreen near the entrance showed a smiling minister mid-announcement, his voice drowned by traffic.

The Tower felt less like a building than an eye.

Inside, they filed into the Sky Elevator, the massive glass lift famed for its panoramic ascent. Packed in with tourists, they rose smoothly along the Tower’s outer shell. The city unfurled beneath them in widening layers of neon and concrete. Apricot’s ears popped as they climbed.

Usually the view thrilled her. Today she lingered at the back while her friends chattered, her gaze drifting over the metropolis stretching to the horizon. Highways glowed like veins. Skyscrapers jutted like steel cliffs. Alleys drowned in permanent dusk. Her thoughts slid to the spaces beneath the neon, the places where daylight never truly reached. She imagined movement down there, shapes slipping between shadows as if the city itself had gone feral.

She only noticed she’d been chewing her nails when a sharp sting shot through her fingertip. Gnawed to the quick. She dropped her hands. Get a grip.

She turned toward her friends for something solid.

Solenne stood nearby, tucked under Arjun’s arm as they watched the city fall away beneath them. She was small enough that Apricot sometimes forgot she was a police officer. Honey-brown hair pinned up in twin buns, loose strands framing a face that was all soft angles and wide green eyes. She wore a cobalt sleeveless hoodie with white stripes, a crossbody bag slung over one shoulder. There was something doll-like about her, a quality that made strangers underestimate her. Apricot had seen the iron underneath. Solenne didn’t bend.

Arjun was her opposite in nearly every way. Tall, sharp-jawed, his wild dark hair shot through with streaks of red and green that caught the elevator’s shifting light. Wire-framed glasses sat on a face that might have been handsome if it weren’t so watchful. A long dark coat hung open over a turtleneck, and a small emerald earring glinted at his left ear. He’d come to Blue Ash from Stezyl, the hardline state behind Arslana’s iron curtain. He rarely spoke of it, but Apricot knew from Solenne’s quiet hints that he’d survived violence most people here couldn’t imagine. Now he kept an easy manner around them, though a shadow always lingered behind his eyes.

Blue Ash was meant to be a refuge for people like him.

Machi pressed her face to the glass, pointing out something far below. Apricot tried to anchor herself in their warmth, but the effort of performing normalcy was exhausting, like pressing against a door that kept trying to swing open onto darkness.

They stepped out into the Tower’s mid-level concourse, a wide, bright sprawl of shops and food courts and milling crowds. Machi found a boutique cinema tucked off the main corridor, a retro theater running cult classics on a semi-3D projector. She insisted.

Apricot sat in the dark, trying to keep her heartbeat steady. On the curved screen, a man crept down a shadowed alley, each footstep echoing through the surround speakers. The projector made the alley seem to stretch into the room itself. She clutched her popcorn box and watched the frame, waiting for whatever was hiding in the dark.

The man called out to a figure at the edge of the lamplight. Relief in his voice. Then his relief choked off. The figure’s grin was too wide, too rigid. Its eyes wriggled like pale worms. The mouth stretched far beyond human shape, unhinged, and something slick and rope-like shot forward and latched onto the man’s face.

Machi screamed. The sound tore through the theater, setting off a chain reaction of startled shrieks. Apricot jolted upright, heart hammering, and for one terrible instant the fiction and her memory collapsed into a single image — a creature lunging from the dark, inhuman and hungry.

Then the screen cut to black, and the moment passed. Machi clamped a hand over her mouth, her face glowing pink in the flickering light, mortified. Apricot exhaled and squeezed her friend’s hand. The outburst grounded her. Reminded her this was packaged fear, safe and bounded. Not like the kind that followed her home.

When the credits rolled, they filed back into the concourse. Machi tried to hustle ahead before anyone could tease her, but Arjun was already grinning. Machi swatted his arm and pulled Solenne toward an arcade tucked between a noodle stand and a gadget kiosk. Arjun followed, still smirking.

Apricot watched them go.

Solenne lingered. Her gaze settled on Apricot. “You look tired.”

“I’m fine.”

Solenne didn’t push. She steered them to a bench near the concourse railing, away from the noise. Below, the atrium dropped thirty floors to a marble lobby the size of a city block. The hum of the Tower surrounded them, ventilation and distant announcements and the low electric pulse of a building that never slept.

Solenne lowered her voice. “Something’s seriously wrong out there, Apri. This morning’s briefing included a case I can’t get out of my head.” Her composure slipped. “A pop singer was attacked backstage. By her own fans.”

Apricot went still. “Attacked how?”

“They chewed off her face.”

The concourse noise seemed to drain away.

“She didn’t survive,” Solenne continued. “The attackers were teenagers. Completely feral when we arrived. It took four officers to restrain a fifteen-year-old girl. They growl. They bite. Like animals.” She stared at the railing. “The brass has theories. Between us, some of the officers think it’s a bioweapon. Arslana’s been caught experimenting with nasty stuff before. With the war…”

She let the implication hang.

Apricot’s mind raced. A bioweapon turning teenagers into something feral sounded like conspiracy-board paranoia. But after the alley, after the phantom, nothing felt impossible anymore.

Then, from somewhere behind her, a low voice murmured directly into her ear.

“Someone chews your face off…”

Apricot spun on the bench. No one was there. The nearest people were a family fifteen feet away, the parents absorbed in a map kiosk, the children tugging at a railing.

She scanned the concourse. The gap beneath a shuttered storefront. The shadow pooling behind a pillar. Nothing moved. But the air near her felt wrong, faintly warmer, carrying a pressure like breath held too long.

“Apri?” Solenne leaned forward. “You okay?”

Apricot gripped the edge of the bench. “Yeah. Thought I heard something.”

Solenne watched her for a beat too long. Then she said, carefully, “You might want to change your route home for a while.”

“My route home?”

“If you’re walking or taking the train alone, especially near the university or the old district, take a different way. Or call me or Arjun. We’ll drive you.”

Apricot tried to smile. “You’re making it sound like I’ve got a stalker.”

Solenne didn’t smile back. “There were a lot of calls to the station last week. People reported sightings. Apparitions, maybe.” She paused. “And some bodies turned up in the same areas.”

Bodies. Nausea pressed against the base of Apricot’s throat. She thought of the scorched smears on the pavement where the phantom had died. Had there been others? Other encounters that ended differently?

Solenne touched her arm. “If you need anything, anything at all, call us. Even in the middle of the night.”

Apricot nodded. She couldn’t speak.

Across the concourse, Machi and Arjun emerged from the arcade, Machi flushed with some small victory. They were talking, gesturing, alive in the easy way people are when they don’t know what’s circling them.

Apricot’s gaze drifted past them, toward the far end of the concourse where the corridor narrowed into a service hallway. In the shadow there, just past the edge of the overhead lights, something stood. Tall. Still. A silhouette that didn’t belong to the architecture.

She blinked. The shape remained. Too thin, too angular. Long trailing points hung from its head like wilted fabric, and a ruffled collar flared at the neck. One hand was raised, fingers splayed — each one impossibly long, tapering to sharp tips. The beaked face was tilted, watching her with the patience of something that had nowhere else to be.

Her breath stopped. The reaper’s silhouette held its position in the corridor shadow, motionless, as shoppers and families moved past without a single head turning. No one saw it. No one felt it.

Only her.

He was watching. Not approaching. Not threatening. Just present, the way a handler watches an asset from across a crowded room.

Machi and Arjun reached the bench. When Apricot looked back, the corridor was empty.

She stood, gathering her bag with hands that felt like someone else’s. “It’s getting late. I should head home.”

Solenne’s concern sharpened. “Are you sure? We can leave with you.”

“I’m fine. Just tired.” She forced the words out evenly. “Class in the morning.”

Arjun offered to drive her. She waved him off, said her train stop was close, said she’d text when she got home. Said all the things a person says when they need to leave before they fall apart.

Outside, the afternoon had turned gray.

~

Home answered with familiar creaking floorboards and the faint scent of her mom’s lilac air freshener. Her father’s voice murmured somewhere upstairs, tuned to a late news feed. No one asked about her day. She climbed the steps toward her room, shut the door, and leaned against it.

Safe. For now.

She crossed to the desk and opened her laptop. The screen blinked awake, casting a cold blue glow across her face.

Her fingers moved through news feeds, forums, and the deeper corners of the net where real information sometimes slipped through. Public sites offered a sanitized blurb about the singer’s “unfortunate death,” pinned on a drug incident among fans. No mention of torn flesh. No cannibal frenzy.

She dug deeper. Citizen-journalist hubs. Less-moderated boards.

A forum thread titled “Backstage Incident?” vanished the moment she clicked it. She refreshed. It reappeared, then disappeared again. Another site returned a stark CONTENT REMOVED banner. Even older archives showed clean gaps where posts should have been.

The internet was being scrubbed in real time.

Censorship bots. Someone high up did not want these pieces connected. Each vanishing link sharpened the cold anger in her chest.

She leaned back and rubbed her eyes. Fine.

Her phone buzzed.

Bonni.

Hey girl, wanna meet up at the park? I found something I need to show you.

Apricot checked the time. Past ten. The thought of going back into the night tightened her stomach.

It’s pretty late, Bon. Sure it can’t wait until morning?

The reply came almost instantly.

I know it’s late. I would’ve come to your place, but I’m stuck on this side of town. Train’s out. Please? It’s important.

She stared at the screen. Then she typed: All right. Twenty minutes.

She pulled on a hoodie, grabbed the stun-gun keychain her father insisted she carry, and slipped downstairs. A sleepy murmur from her parents’ room. Her dad snored.

She stepped into the night and locked the door behind her.

~

The walk was bad. Her neighborhood offered nothing like downtown’s crowds and neon. Just patchy streetlights and the occasional glow from living-room windows. She kept her hands buried in her pockets, flinching at sounds — a cricket, wind through hedges, an echo she couldn’t identify as anything but her own pulse.

A child’s bike abandoned on a lawn looked, at first glance, like someone crouching.

She walked faster.

The park emerged from the darkness, a patch of green behind a low iron fence. The gate hung open. A lone streetlamp stretched the playground equipment’s shadows across the grass.

Bonni sat exactly where she’d said, on a bench beneath a harsh white lamp, a magazine open on her lap.

“Bonni,” Apricot called softly.

Bonni looked up and smiled. “You came.” Then her expression shifted as she took in Apricot’s face. “Oh, Apri. You look rough.”

“Playgrounds at night.” Apricot sank onto the bench. “Instant nightmare fuel.”

Bonni nodded and smoothed the magazine on her lap. “I wouldn’t have called you out here if it wasn’t important.” She paused, choosing her words. “Remember what I told you at the café? About those cops who came in after the shooting?”

Apricot remembered. The two officers. Bonni leaning across the counter, whispering: She wasn’t supposed to die. Like the woman who’d torn through a police squad wasn’t just a criminal. Like someone had wanted her alive.

“You told me I was reading too many horror novels,” Bonni said, without accusation. “And maybe I am. But I kept thinking about it. What those cops said. The way one of them looked when he said it, Apri. He was scared. Not angry-scared. Confused-scared. Like whatever happened that night didn’t fit anything he’d been trained for.” She lowered her voice. “They unloaded on that woman and she kept getting back up. One of them called her a witch. Not joking. He meant it.”

She tapped the magazine. “So I started looking. And I found this.”

Apricot could now read the cover: Eerie Truths Monthly. She lifted an eyebrow. The occult tabloid was infamous for grainy photos and wild claims.

Bonni caught the look. “I know how it seems. Just look.” She flipped to a bookmarked page.

The spread was filled with murky photos and dramatic captions. “Here,” Bonni said, pointing to a low-resolution image — a dark blur leaping between buildings, so poor it could have been a smudge. “Obviously fake.”

She slid her finger to the next image, larger and far sharper.

“But this one came from a high-resolution security camera.”

Apricot leaned closer. Crisp black-and-white. A city skyline at night, office windows glowing. And there, suspended midair against the light, hung a silhouette. Human-shaped but wrong. Long trailing points drooped from its head, and its fingers splayed wide, each one elongated into sharp, claw-like tips. A ruffled collar fanned at the throat. It looked like a jester cut from shadow.

Her lungs locked.

Bonni pressed on, taking Apricot’s silence for fascination. “The article calls him Claw Fingers.” She tapped the headline: CLAW-FINGERS: URBAN LEGEND OR THREAT? “They say he’s been sighted all over the city for months. The first mention was two months ago, then reports started piling up. People always describe the hat, this beaked mask, and the long fingers. That’s where the name comes from.”

Apricot’s mouth had fallen open. She forced it shut. Seeing him in a published photo felt less like confirmation and more like a sentence.

“What does it say about him?” she managed.

Her eyes skimmed the dramatic text. Words leapt out.

“Pact.”

“Servitude.”

“Power in exchange for loyalty.”

Bonni flipped the page to an illustration of a towering figure looming over a kneeling person. “Apparently he offers people deals. Classic devil’s-bargain stuff.” She tapped a sidebar. “And look, they’re linking him to those murders in the Ikijoji Street area. People found slaughtered in alleys. No motive.”

Ikijoji. Solenne’s words about bodies snapped into place.

“I might have heard something,” Apricot murmured.

Bonni nodded. “Eerie Truths is all over it. They think the victims made deals, or refused them. It’s unclear.” She exhaled. “I know it’s speculative, but with everything happening lately…”

Apricot stood too fast, nearly knocking the magazine from Bonni’s hands.

“Stop.”

Bonni flinched.

Apricot was trembling. She could feel it in her hands, her jaw, behind her eyes. Bonni’s wide, worried face twisted guilt into her gut. Bonni wasn’t trying to frighten her. She’d been trying to help.

“Bonni, you have to stop reading this stuff.” She gestured at the magazine. “It’s feeding your imagination. Devil bargains. Witches. Listen to what you’re saying.”

Bonni’s face fell. She slowly closed the magazine. “Apri, I thought you—”

“I can’t deal with this.” The words came out jagged. “I walk near Ikijoji almost every night. I have classes, work. I’m barely sleeping. I’m trying to stay sane and I can’t keep jumping at shadows.” Her voice wavered. She wrapped her arms around herself. “This past week has already been too much.”

She choked on the rest.

Silence. A lone car whispered along a distant road. The streetlamp hummed.

Bonni rose slowly. “Apri… I’m sorry.” She set a hand on Apricot’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just thought you’d want to know.”

The anger drained away, leaving fatigue and a dull ache. Apricot closed her eyes. “No. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped.” She exhaled. “It’s just a lot.” She opened her eyes and managed a faint smile. “You know I appreciate you, Bonbon.”

Bonni’s mouth curved at the old nickname. “It’s okay.” She drew Apricot into a gentle hug, and Apricot held on.

When they separated, Bonni glanced around the empty park. “We should go. It’s stupid late.”

They gathered their things and headed for the gate. At the park entrance, beneath the washed-out streetlights, Bonni pulled her into one last hug.

“Text me when you get home. And try to sleep.”

“You too. No more monster magazines.”

They split at the gate, Bonni heading down one side of the quiet street, Apricot taking the opposite path toward home.

The night felt breathless. Apricot wrapped her arms around herself as she walked. Bonni had given her answers, just not the kind that eased anything. The security photo hung behind her eyes — that silhouette frozen midair, the drooping hat, the splayed claws, sharp against the city lights.

The tabloid called him Claw Fingers. Apricot knew what he really was.

And somewhere in the dark, she was certain, he knew she was thinking about him.