The streets narrowed again, the walls leaning so close I could brush both sides with outstretched hands.
At first, I thought it was only the press of stone that made my chest tight. Then I realized — it was the silence.
Too deep. Too heavy. Not the stillness of emptiness, but the suffocating kind that swallowed everything whole.
My footsteps didn't echo anymore. They didn't make any sound at all.
I froze, heart hammering. I lifted my hand, snapped my fingers. Nothing. The sound died before it left me.
The boy tugged on my sleeve, his mouth opening to ask a question. I clamped my hand over it before he could speak. My eyes burned as I shook my head.
The woman had gone pale. Her blade hovered at her side, her lips pressed thin. She tapped the stone with its edge, sharp and deliberate.
Silence.
She lifted her eyes to mine. Even she looked unsettled. "Don't speak," she mouthed.
We moved forward slowly, our breaths loud only inside our own heads. Every scrape of boot on stone, every brush of fabric — gone.
Then the hiss came.
It didn't fill the air like before. It slipped beneath it, a thread of sound that shouldn't have existed in a place that devoured noise.
Shapes stirred at the edges of the street. Pale figures, stretched too tall, their movements jerky, heads twisting too far. They stepped out of windows, out of doorways, pressing long fingers against the walls as they crept closer.
Only when the boy's foot dislodged a stone did I understand.
The clatter broke the silence.
And the figures moved.
They snapped toward us in unison, limbs bending sharp and fast, bodies jerking in impossible angles. Their hiss swelled, a thousand voices snapping together until the air seemed to shiver.
The woman shoved me hard, forcing me into motion. Her lips formed the word without sound: Run.
And we did.
Every stone that shifted underfoot, every scrape, every mistake — they heard. And they followed, closer, faster, the city itself bending their paths toward us.