The hum was loudest in the morning.
Abigail lay on a bare mattress in a room that smelled like mildew and gun oil and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until colors bloomed behind her lids — purple, green, the afterimage of pressure against optic nerves. Ordinary colors. Human colors. Not gold. She held them there and counted her breathing the way Arthur had taught her in the prison years, when control was the only weapon she had and losing it meant something worse than death.
In through the nose. Four counts. Hold for seven. Out through the mouth. Eight counts.
The corruption didn't care about counting.
It moved through her like a second circulatory system, warm and persistent, threading through her veins with a patience that had nothing to do with time. She could feel it in her chest — not pain but presence, a humming density that sat behind her sternum like a fist made of light. When she breathed in, the hum intensified. When she breathed out, it retreated to the edges of her awareness but never left. Never left. That was the part they didn't understand, the part she couldn't explain to Haatim or Arthur or anyone. The corruption wasn't an illness you recovered from between episodes. It was a resident. It lived in her the way her heartbeat lived in her, and every hour it got a little more comfortable.
She dropped her hands from her eyes and stared at the ceiling. The water stain above her head looked like a map of somewhere she'd never been. The golden glow from her eyes cast faint shadows on the plaster, turning the ordinary stain into something luminous and strange.
The glow didn't dim anymore. Not even when she slept.
She knew because Haatim had told her, sitting on the edge of this same mattress two nights ago with his glasses off and his notebook closed — the only time she'd ever seen the notebook closed — and his face doing the thing it did when he was trying to be honest without being clinical. "You glow," he'd said. "When you sleep. And you — you speak. Not words exactly. Sounds."
She'd asked what kind of sounds. He'd described them carefully, precisely, the way he described everything, and the precision had been the kindest thing about it. He didn't say they were frightening. He didn't say they made his Gift recoil. He described them as syllables in a language he couldn't identify, and she heard the rest in the pause between his sentences.
A language that made his Gift flinch.
She was speaking demonic in her sleep and she didn't remember any of it.
***
The skin on her forearms itched. She'd been scratching without realizing it — an unconscious gesture that had become habit over the past week, nails dragging along the inside of her wrists and forearms in slow circuits. The skin underneath was different now. Not gold, not yet, but wrong. Faintly luminous in certain light, like the phosphorescence of something decaying. The veins beneath the surface were more visible than they should have been, darker, tracing paths that looked less like circulatory anatomy and more like roots spreading through soil.
She pulled her sleeve down and clenched her fists.
The centipede feeling came next. That was her private name for it — the sensation of something with too many legs crawling through the vessels just beneath her skin, moving from her wrists up through her forearms and into her shoulders and chest. Not painful. Intimate. The corruption exploring its host with the leisurely thoroughness of something that had already won and was simply taking inventory.
She could feel the demons approaching before anyone else detected them. That was new. The beacon — she'd heard Emma use the word, had understood it with the flat clarity of someone being told the name of the disease that was killing them — worked in both directions. She broadcast, and in return she received. A prickling under her skin like static electricity. A pressure behind her eyes that had nothing to do with headaches. Two hundred meters out, maybe three hundred. Coming closer. She could count them if she concentrated. The lesser ones were faint signatures, the spiritual equivalent of a candle flame. The mid-tier one from last night had been brighter — a bonfire in the dark, drawing the candles to it even as it was drawn to her.
The knowledge sat in her chest like a second heartbeat. They were coming for her, specifically, and there was nothing she could do about it except exist and be dangerous and wait.
She sat up on the mattress. The room spun briefly — not dizziness but a perceptual shift, the corruption adjusting to the change in position with a half-second delay that made the walls seem to breathe. She waited for it to pass. It passed. She stood.
In the bathroom, she ran cold water and splashed it on her face. The mirror above the sink was cracked — everything in every safe house was cracked or stained or held together with tape — and in its fragmented surface she saw herself in pieces. Dark hair that needed washing. Cheekbones sharper than they'd been a month ago. Skin pale from weeks of moving between windowless rooms. And the eyes.
The golden eyes looked back at her from every fragment of the mirror. Steady, luminous, wrong. She'd stopped thinking of them as her eyes somewhere around the time they stopped changing back. They were the corruption's eyes, installed in her face like windows into something she didn't want to see.
She leaned closer to the mirror. Opened her mouth. Checked her teeth.
The left canine was loose. She pressed her tongue against it and felt it shift — not the wobble of a tooth loosened by impact but the give of something being gently pushed out from underneath. Like a baby tooth making way for something new. She pressed harder. The tooth came free with a soft, wet sound and sat on her tongue like a pebble.
She spat it into the sink. It lay in the basin, white and ordinary. No blood. No pain. Just a tooth that her body had decided it didn't need anymore.
She turned the faucet on and washed it down the drain. She didn't tell anyone. She'd stopped telling anyone about the small surrenders — the luminous skin, the sounds in her sleep, the centipede feeling, and now the teeth. Each one was a data point in a progression she could map as clearly as Haatim mapped his engagement frequencies. The destination was the same. The only variable was time.
***
Arthur found her in the back room they'd converted into a training space. Converted was generous — they'd pushed a mattress and two folding chairs against the wall and spread a tarp on the floor to muffle the sound of boots on hardwood. The space was barely ten feet square. It was enough.
She was running through combat drills when he appeared in the doorway. Not supernatural combat. Physical. The blessed knife work that Dominick had taught the team, adapted by Arthur into something leaner and more defensive — economy of movement, controlled distance, the philosophy of fighting that kept you alive rather than made you impressive. She liked the drills because they were mechanical. Stance, step, strike, reset. Muscles and bone and the physics of leverage. The corruption had no opinion about footwork.
Except that it did.
She moved faster than she should have. The realization had been gradual — over weeks, the drills that used to challenge her had become effortless, and the effortlessness was not improvement. It was the corruption feeding her body capabilities that didn't belong to her. She'd caught herself moving before she'd consciously decided to move, her arm completing a strike pattern while her brain was still processing the opening. The speed was beautiful and terrifying. Like driving a car whose engine someone had replaced without telling you.
Three days ago she'd snapped a training dummy's arm off. Not a practice dummy — a folding chair they'd been using as a stand-in. Metal. She'd struck it during a drill and the arm had sheared clean off at the joint, the metal twisted like aluminum foil. She'd stood there holding the broken piece, her hand aching with an echo that wasn't pain but power — a tremor of golden energy that vibrated through her bones and whispered that this was barely anything. That she could do so much more.
She'd put the piece down and gone back to the drill. Slower.
Arthur watched her from the doorway. He didn't speak for a long time, which was Arthur — the silence that said more than most people's paragraphs. His eyes tracked her movements with the evaluation she'd grown up under, the assessment that had been her entire childhood: measuring threat, calculating trajectory, determining how much time remained before the thing he feared became the thing that was.
She stopped mid-drill. "You're staring."
"I'm watching," he said. Correction. Precision. Arthur's love language was precision.
"You're measuring."
He didn't deny it. He came into the room and sat on the folding chair that still had both arms. His body moved stiffly — the Hell damage, the years, the accumulated cost of a life spent between threats and the people behind him. He looked older than he was. He looked the way monuments look — worn by weather into something essential.
"I need to ask you something," he said. "And I need you to answer honestly."
She clenched her fists. The golden glow pulsed once — a slow throb that matched her heartbeat. "Ask."
"The episodes. When you lose time. Are they getting worse?"
She could have lied. The instinct was there — the same instinct that had kept her from telling anyone about the tooth, about the luminous skin, about the sounds in her sleep. The protective silence that masqueraded as strength but was really just fear of seeing her own trajectory reflected in someone else's face.
"Yes," she said.
Arthur nodded. His expression didn't change, which meant he'd already known and had needed her to say it. The assessment face. But worse than the assessment face — underneath it, barely visible, the thing she'd learned to recognize over sixteen years of being his daughter. Not calculation. Fear. Not for himself. Arthur Vangeest had never been afraid for himself. For her. The deep, parental terror of watching your child approach a cliff and knowing that your arms aren't long enough.
"The glow doesn't dim anymore," she said. She kept her voice flat. Clinical. Abigail's defense mechanism was the same as Haatim's but crueler — she turned herself into data to avoid feeling the data. "I can feel the demons coming before anyone detects them. I whisper in my sleep in a language that makes Haatim's Gift flinch. I'm stronger than I should be and faster than I should be and yesterday I scratched my arm and the skin underneath was luminous." She paused. "Also I lost a tooth this morning. It just fell out. No blood."
Arthur's hands were in his lap. They trembled once and then went still. The tremor was the earthquake and the stillness was the aftershock, and both of them pretended not to notice.
"How long?" she asked. The question she'd been carrying for weeks, compressed into two words that weighed more than the safe house.
He didn't answer. That was the answer.
***
They trained together for an hour. Physical combat, no power. The discipline helped in the way that physical exhaustion always helped — it narrowed the world to the body, to the ache in her shoulders and the burn in her thighs and the specific, ordinary pain of muscles worked to failure. The corruption hummed underneath it all but the training gave her something to put on top of the hum. A layer of human effort between herself and the thing that wanted her.
Arthur corrected her stance twice. Adjusted her grip once. Said three sentences in sixty minutes, each one a complete lesson compressed into the fewest possible words. "Shoulder dropped." "Elbow tighter." "Breathe."
She loved him so much it was a physical ache, separate from the corruption, entirely her own.
When they finished, she sat on the tarp and drank water from a canteen that tasted like metal and plastic. The golden glow from her eyes reflected off the water's surface, turning the ordinary canteen into something luminous.
"I'm not going to let it win," she said.
Arthur stood by the door. His face was the still face, the monument face, the face that showed nothing because showing something would be an admission that the something existed. But his eyes — his human, grey, ungolden eyes — were wet.
"I know," he said.
He left. She sat on the tarp in the training room and pressed her palms flat against the floor and felt the centipede crawl beneath her skin and the hum in her chest and the place where the tooth had been, smooth and empty, and she told herself that she was still Abigail. That the golden eyes were something done to her, not something she was. That the girl who'd been terrified and brave at seven years old in a ritual chamber was still in here, underneath the glow and the hum and the teeth.
The corruption whispered that she was wrong.
She clenched her fists and the golden light flared and the whisper faded to a murmur and the murmur faded to a hum and the hum was always there. Always.
***
Dominick found her in the kitchen at noon, staring at a bowl of instant oatmeal she'd made and not eaten. The oatmeal had gone cold. She was watching the golden light from her eyes play across the surface of the food, turning the grey lumps into something that looked almost precious.
"You going to eat that or just goldplate it?" he said.
She snorted. The sound surprised her — she hadn't laughed in days. Dominick had that effect. He was the only person on the team who didn't treat her like she was dying. Maybe because he was the only one who didn't have an emotional stake in her survival — no parental love, no romantic attachment, just the practical assessment of a combat specialist who valued functionality. Or maybe because he was simply the kind of man who refused to treat anyone like glass, because glass was fragile and fragile people didn't survive.
"At least the golden eyes are distinctive," she said. The joke was old, recycled, the kind of humor you leaned on when the new material was too dark to speak aloud.
Dominick didn't laugh. He snorted once — a brief, dismissive exhalation through his nose that conveyed amusement and acknowledgment and the refusal to make a bigger deal of it than it deserved — and went back to cleaning his combat knife. The blade was already clean. He was cleaning it because his hands needed something to do, the same way her hands needed to scratch at the luminous skin. Everyone had their maintenance rituals.
The blessed knife was a brutal thing — short, weighted for close work, the blade discolored with residue from things that didn't bleed red. There was demon blood still crusted in the guard from the second engagement, and Dominick worked at it with a cloth and a precision that bordered on meditative. His forearm was freshly bandaged. The cut from protecting Petrillo. He caught her looking at it and shrugged. "Just a scratch."
He said it the way he said everything — grounded, practical, without the burden of subtext. Just a scratch. Not a metaphor for mortality or the cost of the war or the slow erosion of bodies that couldn't heal as fast as they were being hurt. Just a scratch. The honesty of it was a mercy she didn't know how to name.
"Dominick," she said.
He looked up from the blade. His face was open, patient, the face of a man who had time even when nobody had time.
"Thank you for not being careful with me."
He considered this for a moment. Then he set down the knife and the cloth and looked at her with the full, direct attention that he usually reserved for combat assessment. "You're the most dangerous person I've ever met," he said. "People who are careful around you are doing it for themselves, not for you."
She didn't have an answer for that. She ate the cold oatmeal instead. It tasted like paste and comfort and the particular kindness of being seen as what you were — dangerous and dying and still, despite everything, a person eating breakfast.
The hum in her chest was constant. The beacon broadcast its signal. Somewhere in the city, lesser demons were turning toward her like compasses finding north.
She finished the oatmeal. Washed the bowl. The routine of it was a small rebellion against the extraordinary horror of her existence. Wash the bowl. Dry it. Put it back in the cabinet of a safe house she'd leave before tomorrow. Ordinary gestures in the diminishing country of the ordinary.
The corruption pulsed. She clenched her fists. The golden light in the room dimmed by a fraction — not because the corruption weakened but because she pushed it back, muscle against tide, the smallest victory in the smallest war that mattered more than the big one.
Still here, she thought. Still me.
The hum disagreed but the hum could wait.
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