Chapter 17: PROTECT YOURSELF

The wooden gate swung beneath Apricot’s hand. Beyond it, the suburb lay in a hush. Streetlights stretched skeletal shadows across the pavement, and every one of them made her flinch. Shapes warped between pools of light, needling at her nerves.

“They’re coming to my house now,” she breathed.

Her fingers threaded through her hair, tugging hard enough to sting. The night air cooled her clammy skin. Cool, not cold. That mattered. When the phantoms were near, the world froze and electronics stuttered. Those were her markers, her tripwires in the dark.

Tonight, nothing flickered but her pulse.

She walked the empty block, listening to a silence that felt staged. Porch lights glowed. Curtains hung drawn. A child’s bicycle lay on its side in a driveway, abandoned mid-ride. Yet the quiet made the street feel less like a neighborhood at rest and more like a set someone had dressed and evacuated. The news called the recent horrors terrorist attacks, and people responded the only way they knew how: retreating indoors before sundown, trusting locks to hold back what they couldn’t name.

Apricot wasn’t so sure locks mattered. A phantom had crawled through a second-story window two hours ago. It had gone straight for a twelve-year-old boy. Locks hadn’t slowed it down. Neither had walls.

At the intersection near her house, a convenience store glowed electric blue against the dark. She crossed toward it before she’d decided to. Through the window, she spotted the magazine rack. Front and center on the lower shelf: Eerie Truths Monthly. The thought embarrassed her. She went in anyway.

The transaction took two minutes. The cashier, an elderly man with the papery hands of someone who’d worked too many night shifts, glanced at the cover as he scanned it.

“Will that be all for you, dear?”

“Yeah.” Apricot managed a thin smile. “Weird thing to buy at midnight, I know.”

He shrugged. “I’ve seen stranger.” He slid the magazine into a white plastic bag. “Five Marks.”

She swiped her jade card and took the bag. She was turning toward the door when the air changed. The store had been cool when she entered. Now it pressed against her like a wall, thick and suffocating. Sweat gathered under her collar. She glanced at the ceiling corners, waiting for a flicker, a shadow, anything.

Nothing. No dying electronics, no sudden cold.

But the heat kept building. It sat on her skin like a hand, deliberate and close. The fluorescent tubes above hummed steady. The drink coolers droned. Everything worked. Everything was normal. And yet the temperature was wrong in a way that had nothing to do with a thermostat.

Cold means they’re near. What does heat mean?

The cashier mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Must be the computer overheating again,” he muttered, squinting at the thermostat.

Apricot didn’t answer. She pushed through the door and walked fast, then faster, the heat clinging to her skin like something that had noticed her noticing it. She sprinted the last block home, lungs burning, the bag thumping against her thigh. Up the steps. Key in the lock. Her fingers trembled. On the second attempt, it turned. She slipped inside, slammed the door, and threw both deadbolts.

The house lay silent. Apricot climbed the stairs without turning on the lights, each creak sparking a fresh spike of adrenaline. She eased her bedroom door open. Jasper was still on the floor beside her bed, curled in the blanket she’d tucked around him, breathing slow and even. Still asleep. Still safe. The tension in her shoulders loosened a single notch.

She stepped carefully over him and shut the door behind her.

She crossed to the window. Latched. Locked. She checked the handle twice before she let herself breathe. Outside, the suburb sat perfectly still. The same houses. The same trimmed hedges. Nothing watching from the street. Nothing that she could see.

The gauze on her arm had bled through again. A dark crescent stained the white, pulsing faintly with her heartbeat. She peeled the bandage back, winced at the ragged puncture marks beneath, and pressed it flat. It could wait. Everything could wait except the thing crawling around in her skull.

Apricot stretched out on her bed and opened Eerie Truths Monthly.

The first pages were a carnival of garbage: survival kits stamped with occult symbols, mail-order junk for the paranoid. She flipped past it all, scanning the table of contents with mounting self-contempt, until one title stopped her hand.

“Claw Fingers” Linked to Ikijoji Murders — NEW PHOTOS. P. 42.

Her pulse quickened. She knew that shape. Far too well.

She turned to page 42. A grainy surveillance still filled half the spread: a stretched figure in the dark, fingers impossibly long, caught mid-stride at the edge of a streetlamp’s reach. The image was overexposed and pixelated, but her stomach knotted anyway.

The article listed sightings. The Tsungdung subway crash — he’d been photographed inside the tunnel while crews were still clearing wreckage. The Bokohara antique shop attack — witnesses reported a figure watching from the rooftops. The Ikijoji street murders — multiple people swore they’d seen the same silhouette before and after the killings. Every incident she’d watched on the news. Every headline that had made the city flinch. And at each one, that same gaunt shape, glimpsed and dismissed. Authorities called it mass hysteria. The magazine called it a cover-up.

Apricot stared at the blurred photograph. She thought of the reaper standing over her in the dark, his voice carrying the weight of something ancient and indifferent. He wasn’t just haunting her. He was everywhere. Wherever people died in ways the city couldn’t explain, that shape appeared, watching from the margins. And the officials who claimed to have no answers had been watching too — filing reports, issuing denials, building a wall of silence around the thing that kept showing up in their crime-scene photos.

She flung the magazine across the room. It struck the wall and fell open on the floor.

These people are as lost as I am. The writers behind those headlines had never stood in a dead alley with that figure looming over them. They’d never felt invisible horrors pressing in from every side. They had blurry photos and breathless theories. She had teeth marks in her arm and a brother who flinched at shadows he used to ignore.

She lay back and stared at the ceiling. Fine cracks zigzagged across the plaster in the lamplight.

I can’t fight those things. The reaper had said someone needed to stop the phantoms, as if the task simply belonged to her. As if naming it was enough to make it possible.

She couldn’t even see them until they were already on top of her. The one in Jasper’s room had been visible only because it had chosen to be — a mass of shadow and teeth crouching in the dark, playing at being a dog until it decided to stop pretending. If it had stayed invisible, she would have walked into that room and never walked out.

And the police? She imagined trying to explain. Officer, there are invisible creatures killing people in this city. I know because one broke into my brother’s room and I beat it to death with a baseball bat. They’d call her unstable. They’d put her name in a file. She’d lose her journalism license before she’d earned it.

No one was coming to help. The certainty of it settled over her like cold water. She was alone with a secret that would sound like madness to anyone she told, fighting an enemy no institution acknowledged, in a city that had spent fifty years burying the last time something like this happened.

Her gaze drifted to the magazine on the floor. It had fallen open to a different page. Opposite the Claw Fingers article, a full-page advertisement gleamed under her lamp: a sleek handgun beneath bold lettering.

PROTECT YOURSELF.

Apricot sat up.

A gun. The thought landed with cold, sudden clarity. If she had something real and solid to point at whatever came for her next, she might not feel like prey. She might survive long enough to understand what she was fighting.

The idea was frightening. It was also the only one she had.

~

She didn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, the phantom’s shape reassembled itself in the dark behind her lids — shadow and teeth and red pinprick eyes, lunging from the corner of Jasper’s bedroom. She lay rigid, listening to her brother’s breathing from the floor beside her bed, and waited for dawn.

Morning broke overcast, the light as tired as she felt. She showered, rewrapped her arm with clean gauze from the bathroom cabinet, and pulled on a long-sleeved shirt to hide the bandage. Jasper was still asleep when she left. She didn’t wake him. She didn’t leave a note.

By midmorning, Apricot was riding two subway lines and a bus to the east-side commercial district. On any normal day, she would never have crossed half the city for a purchase like this. But normal had died in Jasper’s bedroom with a baseball bat and a mouthful of broken teeth.

The bus rattled through Okabe’s commercial sprawl, towers and billboards and holographic ads for cybernetic upgrades flickering past the grimy window. Apricot watched without seeing. She was rehearsing. I’d like to buy a pistol. For protection. I’m a journalist. Each version sounded worse than the last. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass and closed her eyes.

Just get through the door. The rest will follow.

She found Bullseye’s after twenty minutes of walking the commercial strip, past pawn shops and noodle stalls and a holographic billboard blinking a Crisis Preparedness PSA she barely registered. The gun shop was a concrete slab of a building, red lettering on the sign, windows plastered with flyers for ammunition and tactical gear. Through the glass, customers browsed with the calm of people shopping for hardware. Apricot stood on the sidewalk, palms slick, stomach knotted. Her bandaged arm ached under her sleeve. She had circled this block twice already, each loop ending with a new excuse not to go inside.

A young woman about her age emerged, nudging the door open with her hip, a shopping bag in each hand. She looked confident. Unbothered. Like this was something normal people did.

Apricot set her jaw. She went in.

The smell hit first: oil, metal, polymer. Firearms lined the walls from floor to ceiling, matte black beneath cold LED bars. Glass cases displayed knives and combat gear. Mannequin torsos modeled bulletproof vests. Pegboards held scopes and silencers and things she couldn’t name, each one neatly labeled with a price tag she had no frame of reference for. The place felt like a shrine to controlled violence.

Apricot flexed her tingling fingers and approached the counter. She was aware of how she must look: a college student in a rumpled shirt, dark circles under her eyes, one arm held slightly closer to her body than the other. She did not look like the confident young woman who’d walked out with two bags of gear. She looked like someone who hadn’t slept.

A young man in a dark green shop uniform set aside a stack of brochures and offered an easy smile. “Hey there. What brings you in today?”

Apricot tapped her fingers on the glass, forcing herself to look casual. “I’d like to buy a pistol.”

His eyebrows lifted. “First-time buyer?”

She nodded.

He bent behind the counter. Metal clinked softly. When he straightened, he held a compact pistol with a polished silver finish. “For a first gun, I’d recommend the Markov C14. Standard issue for civil service. Seven rounds of nine-mil in the magazine, one in the chamber. Lightweight, easy to conceal, gentle recoil.” He turned it so the etched model name caught the light. “Reliable. Low-maintenance. Two-fifty Marks.”

Apricot stared at the warped reflection of her own face in the pistol’s slide. Distorted, pale, hollow-eyed. The weapon looked small in his hand. To her it meant something enormous. Protection. Agency. A way to stop being the thing that ran.

“That works,” she said. Her voice was steadier than she felt. “How much did you say?”

“Two-fifty.” He set it on the glass between them.

Her wallet was out before he finished. She slid jade-green cash cards across the counter. “Done.”

The clerk paused. His smile held, but something behind it recalibrated. “I appreciate the enthusiasm,” he said, gently pushing the cards back. “But there’s a process. Background check. Legal requirement.” He produced a small packet of forms and set them beside the pistol. “Fill these out, we send them in, and once you’re cleared, you come pick it up.”

“How long?”

“About a week. Sometimes longer.”

Apricot’s fingers curled against the glass. A week. A week was enough time to die three times over.

“I can’t wait that long,” she said.

His expression shifted. The friendliness didn’t vanish, but it thinned, revealing something more careful underneath. “That’s the law. No same-day sales.” He studied her. “What’s the rush?”

She hadn’t rehearsed anything for this. “It’s for my own protection,” she said. “I’m a student reporter. I’ve been covering some dangerous topics.”

“A student journalist.” He folded his arms. “Look, I understand wanting to feel safe. But I can’t break the law because you’re worried about a story.”

“You don’t understand.” Her voice strained before she could stop it. “I need that gun today. I’m not writing an article. I just—” Her throat closed. “I’m in danger. I can’t explain it, but I am.”

She heard the tremor in her own voice and watched the clerk’s face change. The professionalism held, but the warmth behind it cooled and resettled into something firmer. Not unkind. Worse than unkind. Careful.

“Miss,” he said, lifting both hands. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you today.” He slid the blank forms back into their folder. “If you’re in immediate danger, the police are your best option.”

Apricot’s fingers pressed white against the counter. “Please. I’ll do the background check. I’ll fill out every form you have. Just — can you start the process? I’ll come back for it.”

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t feel comfortable making this sale.” His voice was not unkind, but it had the flat finality of a door being closed. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

It landed like a slap.

“Ask me to leave?” Apricot whispered. “I’m trying to buy a pistol, not cause trouble.”

“I know.” His voice was quiet, steady, final. “And I’m sorry. But something about this doesn’t sit right.” He stepped back, subtle but unmistakable. “I won’t report this. But I’d suggest you don’t try it at another shop.”

Apricot stood frozen. Fury and humiliation knotted in her throat. She looked at the pistol still sitting on the glass between them, small and silver and useless to her. It was right there. Close enough to touch. All that separated her from it was a form, a week, and a man who had decided her fear was a liability.

She had done everything right. She had come to a legal business, asked a reasonable question, offered to pay. And the system had looked at her desperation and decided it was a warning sign rather than a cry for help. The same system that told citizens to report suspicious activity, to trust the authorities, to follow the process. She had followed the process. The process had shown her the door.

She forced a stiff nod.

“Fine,” she said.

She turned and pushed through the heavy door. The electronic bell chime rattled behind her, sharp and discordant, like a lock snapping shut.