Chapter 2: Anything But Ordinary

From the outside, Apricot Signa’s life had returned to normal. She went to class. She went to the gym. She came home and wrote essays at the kitchen table while Jasper played games in the next room and her father read the evening paper with his reading glasses pushed low on his nose. On assignment days, she conducted interviews. Government spokespeople, local musicians, the kind of safe, pre-approved subjects the Ministry liked to see in student portfolios. On weekends, she saw her friends. She laughed at Bonni’s conspiracy theories. She let Machi beat her at trivia. She slept in her own bed, in her own room, in a house that smelled like her mother’s cooking when her mother was home and like dust and silence when she wasn’t.

Several months passed like this. Anyone watching would have seen a young woman settling into the shape of her life.

No one saw the evenings.

~

The abandoned building smelled of mildew and something older. A sweetness underneath the decay that Apricot had learned to recognize. It meant they’d been here. Recently.

Her boots found the debris before her eyes did. Loose plaster crunched underfoot as she crossed the threshold into what had once been an auditorium. Moonlight fell through a collapsed section of roof, painting the wreckage in cold silver. Rows of seats lay overturned, blanketed in dust. On the stage, forgotten props cast shapes that shifted when she looked at them directly.

On top of the ruined grand piano sat a grayscale humanoid. Wings folded against its back. A single horn growing from the front of its skull. It watched her with the stillness of a gargoyle, and she thought that was exactly what it looked like. Something carved from stone and set on a ledge to ward off evil, except the evil was the thing itself.

Apricot’s hand rested on the pistol at her hip. She didn’t draw it yet. Drawing too early was a mistake she’d made in the first weeks, when every shadow had been a threat and every creak a warning. Now she knew the difference. Fear was constant. Information came in specifics: a temperature drop, a wrongness in the geometry of a room, the feeling of being perceived by something that had no eyes.

She felt it now. Perception without a source. Except this time, the source was staring right at her.

“So,” it said. The voice rose from its posture as it straightened, deep and reverberant, filling the auditorium’s hollow shell. Two tones at once, layered and wrong. “We finally meet.”

Apricot drew the pistol. “I’m glad the reports turned out to be true. I can talk to you.”

In the months since she’d started hunting, she had killed twelve of these things. Most couldn’t speak. Most were animals, or something less than animals, driven by instinct and hunger. The ones that could think were worse. Not because they were stronger, but because they understood what they were doing.

The creature snickered. The sound scraped against the auditorium walls. “I am different from the rest of them in many ways. I don’t think that will be of any use to you here.”

It roared.

The sound hit the auditorium like a concussion wave. Dust erupted from every surface. The wooden bleachers nearest the stage burst into fragments, shrapnel spraying outward in a hail of splintered wood. A lighting rig swung loose from the ceiling and crashed into the aisle behind her, glass bulbs popping in a chain of small explosions. Apricot dove sideways but not fast enough. Several pieces of shattered seat caught her left arm, slicing through her sleeve and into the skin beneath. Blood welled immediately, cascading down her forearm in a thin river. The iron smell hit the air.

“You’re fast,” the creature said. “Not fast enough.”

Apricot glanced at the wound. Hot. Wet. Already soaking through her coat. She bared her teeth. “It’s nothing, devil.” She raised the pistol. “Before I kill you, tell me something. Why are you here? Why are any of you here?”

The creature spread its remaining wing and drew itself up to its full height. It was larger than she’d estimated. Much larger. “The hunter of my kin seeks an audience with me,” it said. Something like amusement moved through its voice. “Child, I am a Lord of vengeful spirits. Why should you have the privilege?”

Apricot walked down the center aisle, keeping the pistol trained. “This can go either way. Peaceful or brutal.”

The creature launched itself from the stage. It crossed the distance in a single lunge, claws extended, jaws wide, and the air compressed ahead of it like a pressure front. Apricot twisted sideways and squeezed the trigger. The shot was precise. The silver round hit the creature’s upper arm and the reaction was immediate. The bullet fizzed and burned into its flesh like acid, smoke rising from the entry wound. The creature shrieked, a sound that rattled what was left of the ceiling. “It burns!”

It crashed through two rows of benches, tumbling end over end, its weight splintering the wood into kindling. The impact shook the floor hard enough that Apricot felt it through her boots. It came up grasping its injured arm, crouched low amid the wreckage. Then it did something Apricot had never seen the others do. It seized the wounded limb and tore at it. Deliberately. Its claws ripped into its own flesh, peeling back skin in wet bursts, the muscle beneath stretching and snapping as the tendons gave way. It ripped its own arm off at the shoulder and threw the useless part onto the floor. Blood, black and steaming, poured from the stump in measured beats.

Apricot stared. “That is dedication.”

The creature looked at her. It was surprised by the comment. She could see it, a flicker of something almost human in the way its head tilted.

“We’ve been here a long time,” it said, advancing. Each step left a dark print on the floorboards. “A long wait. Our world came first. It was you who intruded. Now our world and yours must unite. As they merge, everyone will see the true world.”

Apricot raised the pistol to fire again. The creature flicked its remaining arm and an invisible force wrenched the gun from her hand. It spun into the dark. She didn’t hear it land.

It slashed at her with its clawed hand. Apricot stumbled backward and the nails missed her chest by inches. She could feel the displaced air across her sternum. She pulled the baton from her coat, extended it with a snap, and swung hard into the creature’s face.

Contact. The silver coating seared where it struck. A burn appeared, hissing, smoke rising from the wound. The creature staggered. Apricot swung again, aiming for the skull.

It caught the baton.

Its remaining hand closed around the metal rod. Smoke curled from between its fingers as the silver burned into its palm, but it held on. It shuddered, jaw clenched, and tore the baton from her grasp, throwing it into the shadows.

“Even silver can’t save you, girl,” it snarled.

It lunged for her throat, fangs spread wide.

What happened next was not a decision. Apricot had felt it before, in moments of absolute extremity. A heat that began in her chest and traveled outward through her limbs. Not a power she summoned. Not a skill she’d trained. Something that erupted from the place where fear became refusal, where the body decided, without consulting the mind, that it would not die here.

Her hand morphed. There was no other word for it. Purple flame engulfed her fist, searing and immediate, and she punched the creature square in the torso. Her arm passed through its body as if the flesh were paper. She felt the spine shatter against her knuckles. The flame went through its stomach and out the other side.

Apricot wrenched her arm upward.

The creature split. Its upper body came apart, cleaved in half by the arc of her arm and the fire that followed it. Both halves tumbled to the floor in opposite directions. For a moment, the pieces twitched. Then they began to fade, edges dissolving into dark vapor, mass collapsing inward. Within a minute, nothing remained. No corpse. No blood. No shadow of its existence.

Apricot stood in the wreckage, breathing hard through clenched teeth. Her right hand was covered in something dark and rapidly evaporating. The purple light had died the instant the creature fell. Her arm throbbed. Her legs shook.

She looked down at the empty floor. “Not tonight,” she said.

She looked at her hand. The skin was whole. It was always whole afterward, and that was the worst part. The absence of evidence. Each time it happened, the gap between what she knew about herself and what her body was capable of grew wider. She was a journalism student. She was twenty years old. Something inside her was changing, and she could not see what it was becoming.

A sound from the far end of the hall. Slow, deliberate clapping.

Apricot’s head snapped toward it, heart hammering. A figure emerged from the shadows near the front of the stage. Leather jacket. Messy dark hair. A bruise on his cheekbone, not fresh but not fully healed.

“I thought you were a goner,” said a familiar voice. “It’s been a while, reporter girl.”

She stared. The train ride. The alley where he’d spit blood. The camera he’d shoved into her hands.

“Cortez?”

“Yeah, you remembered my name this time.” He jumped off the edge of the stage and crossed the rubble-strewn floor toward her. His eyes moved over the empty space where the creature had been, then back to her hands. “I didn’t take you for a mage, but look at you.” He stopped a few feet away. “You did that all by yourself. Would have never guessed you had it in you.” His tone was blunt, almost cheerful, but his eyes were careful. “I take it you’ve done this before. Experienced enough to bring silver with you, at least.”

“You know about all this?” Apricot said.

“Not really. Probably about as much as you do.” He glanced around the ruined auditorium, then back at her. “Let’s go get something to eat. What do you say?”

Apricot felt an immeasurable confusion. The audacity of this man, standing in the wreckage of a fight that should have killed her, acting as if they were friends. “What, are you crazy?”

Cortez shook his head. “No, I’m hungry. I bet you are too after that.”

As much as she hated to admit it, he was right. She was starving. The adrenaline was draining fast, leaving her hollow and shaking, and the idea of sitting down somewhere warm sounded like the only thing in the world she wanted.

“Alright,” she said. “I guess.”

“I know a place. Private, too.”

~

The diner occupied the ground floor of a building that should have been condemned. Black and white tiled floor, half the tiles cracked or missing. Red and white booth seats with black-topped tables scarred by cigarette burns and knife marks. A counter ran the length of the back wall, its surface stained with decades of coffee rings. Behind it, a cook worked a flat-top grill without looking up. The air was fogged with cigarette smoke and the flat, institutional smell of reheated oil.

It was an alien environment to Apricot. The people who sat around looked like they belonged to a different city than the one she walked through every day. Harder, quieter, arranged in their booths with the particular stillness of people who had come here specifically to not be bothered. A heavy man in a canvas jacket sat alone near the door, nursing something dark in a short glass, his eyes tracking nothing. Two women shared a booth in the corner, speaking in voices too low to carry. A kid who couldn’t have been older than Jasper sat at the counter eating rice with his head down, a bruise on the back of his neck that Apricot made herself stop looking at. No one looked at her torn sleeve or the blood on her coat. Whatever currency this place traded in, discretion was the highest denomination.

“What kind of restaurant is this?” she asked quietly.

“A booth where we can talk and no one cares,” Cortez muttered, his head resting against the cold window. Neon light from outside painted half his face red. “I’m curious. How long have you, you know, been at it?”

Apricot glanced around the room. No one was paying attention. “A few months. Right around the time I met you.” She shrugged. “I’ve picked up a trick or two, but I still don’t understand what’s going on.”

Cortez leaned closer, voice dropping. “So how did you do it? The thing with the fire. Can you tell me how it works?”

Apricot shook her head. “I can only do it when those things get close to me. I don’t know how it works. The first time it happened, I nearly died.” She turned the water glass in her hands. “It kind of clicked after I’d hunted a few of them. I’ve killed twelve. Well. Thirteen tonight.”

Cortez sat back. “You’re pretty tough.” He said it without irony. “So what makes you do it? What keeps you going out at night?”

Apricot raised a hand. “Wait. I have questions of my own first. I want to know how you know about any of this.”

Cortez rolled his eyes. But the gesture was surface. Beneath it, something shifted in his posture. A settling, a resignation, like a man lowering a weight he’d been holding at arm’s length.

“Okay. So this city’s pretty shady. My old man was a cop. SDP. An investigator.” He picked up a fry, studied it, didn’t eat it. “A very smart man. About eighteen months ago, he had this case going on. Internal corruption among the nobles. Kids being kidnapped. Sacrifice rituals around town.” He put the fry down. “He gets called out one day to respond to an emergency. Active shooter at a mall. Dad and his team are dispatched. The shooter got away, but my father took a bullet to the head.”

Apricot was still. “I’m sorry.”

Cortez’s eyes rolled, small and reflexive. “Save it. I’m not done.” He exhaled. “In case something happened to him, he’d told me where he kept his records. Told me to hide them. So when the men in uniform showed up at the door, I already knew. I’d tucked the file under the floorboards. When the department came looking for it, they nearly destroyed our house. They wanted it bad.” He paused. “He told me to burn it. I didn’t.”

Apricot waited.

“I looked through it. Crime scene photos. Little girls.” His voice flattened into something dense and hard. “Butchered. Blood everywhere. Symbols drawn on the floors. Reports of things that weren’t human. Witness statements the department had flagged as psychological disturbance and buried. And it all pointed back to the Okabes.”

The name landed in Apricot’s chest like a stone. Okabe. The same name Chino Tokuma had spoken. The same name buried in sealed records and redacted reports, surfacing again and again like something that refused to stay underground. She kept her face still but her hands tightened around the water glass. If Cortez’s father had been building a case against the Okabes, he’d been walking the same path she was on now. And the path had killed him.

“You still have the file?” she asked.

“Hidden. Not here.” His eyes held hers for a moment, measuring. He wasn’t going to tell her where. Not yet. “The point is, my father was right. He just didn’t live long enough to prove it.”

“After I got some nerve up, I started checking his notes. Locations he’d flagged. Temples, scattered around the city in places you wouldn’t expect.” Cortez picked up the fry again and ate it this time. “I found one. Industrial district. Looked like any other abandoned shrine. No groundskeeper, no visitors. But the whole time I’m walking through it, I’ve got this feeling. Like being watched.”

“Something came out of the shadows,” Apricot said.

Cortez looked at her. “Yeah. Some kind of rat-dog thing. Mouth like half its body. Made of shadows.”

“I saw one too,” Apricot said quietly. “In my kid brother’s room.”

The silence between them changed texture. Cortez’s breathing rasped. “I grabbed the first thing I could find. Silver rod off the wall. Hit it once and it exploded into dust. I ran.” A muscle worked in his jaw. “After that, I started digging. Found out there are people around town who know about this. They don’t organize. Don’t advertise. But they congregate in places like this.” He gestured at the diner. “It’s safe here. People respect each other enough to mind their own business.”

Apricot looked around the room again. The patrons in their careful stillness. A room full of people who had each, in their own way, seen something the official story couldn’t explain.

“So the cover stories,” she said. “The terrorist attacks. The chemical spills.”

“All lies. No bombs, no chemicals. This stuff has been going on for years.” He leaned forward, forearms on the table. “And it keeps getting worse. More sightings. More people going missing. Something’s building. I can feel it.”

Apricot set down her glass. The word building sat in her chest the way Crisis had when she first encountered it in the archives.

“I’ve felt the same way,” she said.

Cortez was quiet for a moment. A light rain began to tap against the window. He stretched his arms over his head, cracking his back, and the gesture was so mundane, so ordinary, that it briefly made the rest of the night feel impossible.

“Hell if I know what to do about it,” he said. He dropped a few crumpled bills on the table and stood. “Keep in touch. After all that, I’m feeling a little uneasy myself.” He pulled on his jacket and paused. “You be careful. Whatever you’re digging into, the people behind it aren’t amateurs. They won’t send a warning. They’ll send a car.” He produced what appeared to be an old train ticket with a number written on the back. The handwriting was rough, the ink smeared. “Encrypted line. You need backup, or you learn something worth sharing, use it. Otherwise, every morning, the train still rolls in. You know where to find me.”

Apricot took the ticket and studied the number. She tucked it into her coat.

“Thank you,” she said. “For this.”

Cortez shrugged. Dismissive, but he didn’t look away. “Don’t make it a thing.”

The bell above the door chimed once, thin and flat. He was gone.

Apricot sat alone in the booth and sipped her water. The diner hummed around her. The other patrons didn’t look up. Rain streaked the window, blurring the neon outside into soft red bands.

After a while, she slid out and stepped into the night. The cold hit immediately, sharp enough to cut through the residual adrenaline. Her right hand ached. Not from injury but from the memory of what it had done. The skin was whole. It was always whole.

She had a notebook. A gun with two rounds. A phone number on the back of a train ticket. It was not enough. It was what she had.

Apricot walked home and did not look back.