The scream cut through the apartment walls and Aarav was at his door before he had consciously decided to move.
Sean was already in the corridor, candle in hand, door locked behind him. He looked at Aarav. Aarav looked at him. Neither of them said anything. Rajan and Veer came out behind Aarav and the four of them went down the stairs together.
Rust Street was not empty anymore.
People had come out of every building on the street, tenants and neighbours, some holding candles, some empty handed, standing in the lamplight in various states of half dressed alertness. The North West Borough had fewer lampposts than anywhere else in the city and the ones that existed threw light in small isolated pools with long stretches of dark between them. The candles people carried filled some of the gaps.
Sean stopped a man near the edge of the crowd. "What happened? Did you see anything?"
The man shook his head. "Just heard the scream. Same as everyone."
Someone else nearby said the scream had come from the next street over. The crowd moved in that direction, candles bobbing in the dark.
They turned the corner.
Near the far end of the street a woman was on the ground. She had her knees pulled to her chest and her whole body was shaking. Her face was turned away from whatever was in front of her. Her eyes were open and seeing nothing close.
Sean reached her first and crouched down beside her.
"Ma'am," he said. "Ma'am, can you hear me? What happened? Are you hurt?"
She said nothing. Her mouth moved without producing words. Then slowly she raised one arm and pointed.
They all looked.
---
The young woman was on the ground perhaps ten paces ahead.
Her head was gone. The clothing on her upper body was almost entirely absent, what remained torn and pushed aside. From the base of her neck to her pelvis the skin had been opened in a single continuous line, pulled back on both sides, exposing the cavity beneath. The organs were visible. Most of them. The uterus was missing.
Veer turned away immediately, one hand going to the wall beside him.
Rajan looked for two seconds and then looked at the ground in front of his feet and kept his eyes there.
Aarav's hand came up to cover his mouth.
Very cruel death.
He stood very still and looked at what was in front of him. A young woman. She had been alive this morning. She had woken up, done whatever she did with her days, and then someone had done this to her and left her on a street in the dark.
Why did they took the head and organ from an innocent? What kind of person does this? What are they even doing with them?
He didn't have answers. He filed the questions and kept looking, because looking was the only thing he could do right now.
May God send you to heaven. May you receive justice somewhere, because you clearly didn't receive it here.
He understood that this was the fourth victim. That this had happened on the street behind his building. That whatever was doing this was operating in the North West Borough specifically, among the people who had the least protection and the fewest officers anywhere near them.
Behind him the crowd had gone completely silent.
Sean was still with the shivering woman, one hand on her shoulder, speaking to her quietly. He looked up at the crowd and his voice came out steady and clear.
"Someone needs to go to the nearest police station right now. Go quickly."
Two men separated from the crowd and ran.
---
The police arrived several minutes later. Four officers, moving fast, stopping when they saw the body with the controlled expression of people who had been trained not to react and were using that training now. They began cordoning the area immediately, pushing the crowd back, speaking to each other in low voices.
One of them came to Aarav and the others standing near the shivering woman.
Basic questions. What is your name. Where do you live. Did you see anything before the scream. Did you hear anything unusual earlier this evening.
Aarav gave basic answers. His name was Arlan. He lived on Rust Street, the building at the end. He had heard the scream and come out. He had seen nothing before it.
The officer wrote it down and moved to Sean. Sean gave the same kind of answers. Rajan and Veer the same.
Across the small cordoned area another officer was speaking to the woman from the crowd who had pushed through when she saw the body and immediately made a sound that was not a scream but was close to one. She knew the victim. Her friend. A single mother. The baby was barely three weeks old.
The officer asking her questions paused when he heard that. Then he continued writing.
The other officer told her gently but directly that she would need to take care of the baby for now. The woman nodded, wiping her face, still nodding after she had stopped needing to.
Aarav looked at the covered sheet where the body lay and thought about that baby. Three weeks old, somewhere in a room in this borough, with no idea what had just happened. He wanted to do something about that. He genuinely did. But he was a refugee with stolen clothes and a hay mattress and barely enough Drel to last the week. Right now he needed help as badly as that child did. That thought sat in him uncomfortably and didn't leave.
---
After another few minutes one of the officers addressed the crowd. They were grateful for everyone's cooperation. The area was now being secured. Everyone should return home, lock their doors, and report anything unusual to the nearest station immediately. They would be patrolling the street through the night.
The crowd dispersed slowly.
Two officers lifted the covered body carefully and moved it from the street.
Aarav watched them carry it away. Then he turned and walked back toward Rust Street.
---
Back in the apartment the three of them stood for a moment without saying anything. Then Veer pulled out the clothes they had been wearing since the checkpoint and held them up. The smell said everything. Sweat and dirt and two weeks of hard travel baked into the fabric.
They washed the clothes in the basin, wrung them out, hung them where they could. Then they changed into their inner clothes, half pants and vests, and sat down.
Aarav sat on the edge of his hay mattress. They had cleaned it that morning and it still smelled faintly of it.
"Hey Aarav," Veer said from across the room. "Will we be able to sleep today? I mean won't we have nightmares after seeing that body?"
Aarav looked at him. Veer was sitting on his hay mattress with his knees together and his hands in his lap.
"Yes we will," Aarav said. "Just think of it as a very big operation and you're the doctor."
Veer stared at him.
"Also we are not from this world. So we shouldn't worry about it too much."
"I can do that," Veer said mostly to himself. "Big operation. I'm the doctor."
Rajan said, "We need to sleep early. We have work tomorrow."
"I'm just doing a big operation," Veer began murmuring under his breath, lying back and pulling his blanket up. "I'm just doing a big operation. I'm just doing a big operation."
Aarav watched him for a moment.
Only Veer could turn a murder victim into a coping mechanism within ten minutes.
"I'm going to the toilet," Aarav said. "Then I'll sleep."
"As you wish," Rajan replied.
---
In the toilet Aarav sat and let himself think.
To him this was both expected and unexpected. After everything he had seen of this world, a murder was not surprising. But to happen in his own neighbourhood, on the street directly behind his building, with that specific cruelty, that was something else.
I feel like death is closer to us than the next borough. If we are not cautious death will find us first. We don't even know how to fight properly. Neither of us knows magic. I better tell these two idiots to bring the guns tomorrow. Better to get caught by police for carrying weapons than to get caught by a serial killer without them. We also need to buy some extra clothes and basic furniture. Life is definitely not easy.
He flushed, washed his hands, and came back to the room.
He opened his bag and went through it quietly. Three knives. Some packaged food from back home, biscuits and instant noodles, enough for maybe another week if rationed carefully. Modern clothes that would draw attention everywhere in this city. An umbrella. A few other small things that belonged to a world where they were useful and meant nothing here.
He put the bag down.
He picked up his smartphone and turned the screen on. Still had charge. He checked for signals out of habit.
Nothing. Not a single bar.
He put it back.
Rajan was already lying down on his hay mattress, eyes closed. Veer was still murmuring something about big operations, quieter now, tapering off into sleep.
Aarav lay down on the floor and looked up at the ceiling. Moonlight was coming through the window, falling across the room in a pale uneven rectangle.
Gun tomorrow. No discussion about it.
"I guess we are fucked pretty badly," he said quietly.
He sighed. Then he closed his eyes.
---
He didn't know when he fell asleep.
One moment he was looking at the moonlight on the ceiling, the next he was in some dream entirely.
---
The land was barren. Flat and grey in every direction, the soil dry and deeply cracked, dead trees standing at irregular intervals with their branches stripped bare and twisted at wrong angles. No wind. No sound. Not even the small sounds a quiet place usually has. Just absolute silence pressing in from every direction.
Darkness and thick fog cut visibility down to perhaps thirty paces. Beyond that, nothing but black.
Above him the moon pushed weakly through slow moving clouds, casting pale and interrupted light across the ground. Enough to see by. Not enough to feel safe by.
He looked down at his hands. He could move them. He took a step and felt the dry cracked soil under his foot. He was fully here, whatever here was.
Ahead of him, perhaps a hundred paces away, an old chapel sat in the middle of the dead landscape. Small, stone, with a narrow arched doorway and a low roof so darkened with age it was almost black. No lights inside. No movement. It simply sat there in the silence and the fog as though it had been waiting for a very long time.
He started walking toward it.
---
He got perhaps twenty paces closer before his intuition stopped him cold.
No reason. Just a sudden and complete certainty that he should not go any further.
He stood still and looked at the chapel.
Then he saw the blood.
Coming from the gaps in the door. Thin dark lines of it first, running slowly down the stone step beneath the doorframe and spreading across the cracked ground. Then more. The lines thickened. Widened. The blood moved toward him with a slow and patient steadiness, finding every crack in the dry soil and running into them, spreading outward like fingers.
His body went cold from head to toe shivering.
He tried to wake up. Nothing happened. He tried again, harder. Nothing. He was here and staying here and the blood kept coming, pooling dark and wide at the base of the chapel door.
Then from somewhere inside the chapel something moved.
A sound. Low and wet, like something large shifting its weight against stone. Then silence again. Then the door began to open.
It moved slowly inward and the darkness beyond it was a different thing entirely from the fog around him. Solid almost. The kind of dark that feels occupied.
The murmurs came the moment the gap appeared. The same ones from the Cathedral, shapeless voices pressing in from everywhere at once, filling the space behind his eyes until there was no room for anything else. The blood had reached his feet now. He could feel the coldness of it through his shoes.
The door continued to open.
Before he could see what was inside he woke up.
---
He was on the floor of the apartment. The moonlight through the window was the same pale rectangle as before, completely unchanged, as though no time had passed at all.
Rajan was asleep. Veer was asleep, one arm thrown over his face.
Aarav lay very still and stared at the ceiling and waited for his heart to slow down.
It took a while.