The journey home was stranger than the journey out. The sky was still black, still split by the red veins of rift lightning, but it felt closer now—more insistent. The city thrummed with a kind of suspended panic, not the noise of an active riot but the mutter and pulse of people expecting something far worse. Every streetlamp that still worked cast double shadows. The rift's horizon shimmered, barely contained.
Aiden keyed into the flat, the familiar sticky resistance of the lock and then the faint chemical smell of the lobby. Their building looked no different than before, but the tension in the air was such that even the cockroaches seemed subdued. They climbed to the third floor in silence, Callum glancing at every stairwell window as if the next flicker of light might be the harbinger of invasion.
Aiden let them in and locked the door behind. The leaking ceiling over the kitchen table was still leaking—this time with a lazy, metronomic drip that was almost comforting.
