She found the vendor before they had even cleared the first transit gate.
This was, Caleb reflected, extremely on-brand. He had barely finished adjusting the bag on his shoulder when she materialized at his elbow with two sticks of grilled squid, one already in her mouth, her eyes already on the next stall down the row with the particular focused gleam of a person who had identified a mission objective.
"Try this," she said, or something approximating that, given the squid situation.
"I had breakfast —"
She put the second stick in his hand.
He ate it.
This was how the morning went.
Vendor to vendor, Nana leading the way with the systematic enthusiasm of someone cataloguing a region for future reference, sampling everything — the honey skewers, the sesame balls, the paper-wrapped chestnut things that she couldn't identify but acquired anyway on principle, the soup dumplings from the stall with the long line that she deemed worth it and he deemed optimistic and that were, he had to privately concede, worth it.
Most of what she bought ended up partially in her own mouth and partially extended toward him, the way she had always shared food — not out of generosity exactly but out of the inability to experience something good without immediately wanting the nearest person to experience it too. He accepted everything she offered. He had stopped pretending not to, somewhere around the third stall, when she'd given him the better half of a sesame ball with the absent ease of someone who didn't need to think about it.
She didn't need to think about it.
That was the thing.
"—and then the boat rowing," she was saying, navigating around a family with a stroller while somehow not losing grip on two different food items and his sleeve simultaneously. "They have the ones with the little canopy on them now, near the stone bridge — Mina sent me a picture, the canopy ones are the good ones —"
"You've researched the boats."
"I research everything important."
"You described the claw machine approach as improvisation."
"That was tactical improvisation. Different thing." She turned to look at him without slowing down, walking slightly sideways, the squid stick waving with emphasis. "Gege, are you going to be difficult about the boats?"
"I'm going to be present for the boats," he said, "which is different from not being difficult."
She beamed at him like he'd said yes, which he supposed he had.
The haunted house was her idea.
He should have known from the way she suggested it — with the particular casual bravado of someone who had already decided they were doing this and was framing it as a mutual decision to avoid the appearance of being the one who wanted to go. She had done this since childhood. He had learned to recognize it around age seventeen and had never told her that he had.
"It'll be fun," she said.
"Sure," he said.
It was, objectively, not that scary. He had done actual field work in actual darkness against actual threats that didn't show up on any standard civilian threat assessment. The animatronic figures and the theatrical lighting and the very committed actors in their costumes were — fine. Effective, for the target demographic.
Nana screamed approximately fourteen seconds in and grabbed his arm with both hands and did not let go for the remaining six minutes of the experience.
He did not laugh.
He laughed.
He tried not to, genuinely — pressed his lips together, looked at the ceiling of the haunted house which was draped in some kind of synthetic cobweb material, breathed deliberately through his nose — and lost the battle entirely when she screamed again at a mirror effect that any reasonable analysis would have predicted, and then immediately said *I knew that was going to happen* in a voice that was still two registers above normal.
She hit his arm. He kept laughing. She hit it again and then made the sound she made when she was trying to be annoyed and couldn't quite hold it, and then she was laughing too, and they stumbled out the exit end of the haunted house laughing like idiots, and the family coming in behind them gave them a look, and neither of them cared.
"You laughed," she said.
"I didn't."
"Caleb. Gege. You laughed."
"I experienced mild amusement."
"You laughed so hard you had to hold the wall —"
"The floor was uneven —"
"Gege —"
He was still smiling when they reached the roller coaster queue, which was the longest he'd smiled at anything in recent memory, and he filed this away in the same quiet internal place he filed everything about her, and said nothing about it.
The roller coaster was loud.
This was, technically, its job. Roller coasters were supposed to be loud. But there was loud and then there was Nana on a roller coaster, which was a specific and distinct audio experience that he suspected the engineers had not fully accounted for in the design phase.
She screamed from the first drop.
She screamed through the loop.
She screamed on the straightaway — which, structurally, should not have produced screaming — and he looked at her sideways and she was grinning so wide that the screaming was just overflow, just the sound of someone whose body had run out of ways to express the volume of what it was feeling and had defaulted to noise.
He held the safety bar.
She let go of the safety bar with both hands on the last hill and he looked at her like she had lost her mind, and she laughed so hard she almost couldn't scream, and he grabbed her wrist without thinking, and she grabbed his back, and at the bottom of the last hill she turned to him with her hair completely destroyed and her eyes bright and said: again?
"No," he said.
They went again.
By late afternoon, the light had gone golden and thin, the way winter light did when the sun started dropping before anyone was ready for it. They had done most of the park. Nana had consumed a quantity of food that defied reasonable projection given her size, had won a small prize at the ring toss that she immediately gave to a child who wanted it, and had purchased a matching pair of character keychains from a merchandise stall — one for her, one pressed into his hand with *you have to keep it, Gege, it's a set* — and was now quiet.
The particular quiet of someone who had used up the day's energy in the best possible way.
He felt her weight settle against his back incrementally — the lean, then the real lean, then the full surrender of someone whose body had made the executive decision without consulting their brain.
"Nana."
A small sound. Not words.
"You're falling asleep standing up."
Another sound. Approximately: no I'm not.
He shifted the bag. Crouched slightly. "Come on, then."
She climbed onto his back with the sleepy cooperative ease of someone who had done this before, which she had — he had carried her home from more places than he could count, from childhood onwards, from the market and the park and once from her friend's house at thirteen when she'd fallen asleep watching films and nobody wanted to wake her up. She had always been small against him. Lighter than she looked, which wasn't very heavy to begin with.
Small and warm and her chin on his shoulder and her arms loose around his neck.
He walked.
The festival crowds moved around them. Street lights were starting to come on, the first few vendors lighting their stall lamps against the early dark, and Luna City did what it did best in the evening — layered itself in light and movement and the pleasant noise of people who were, for now, happy.
Her breathing slowed and evened out against his shoulder.
He adjusted his grip on her legs. Kept walking.
*Seven days,* he thought. *Six left now.*
*Be enough.*
.
.
.
.
.
The lab was in the basement level of a residential building that had been converted for private research three years ago, in the kind of district where nobody asked questions about what people were doing in their basement if the rent was paid on time.
It smelled of antiseptic and recycled air and the particular staleness of a space where two people had been living on takeout and necessity for weeks, where sleep had become something that happened between work phases rather than something with its own designated time.
The screens showed cell regeneration data.
They had been showing cell regeneration data for eleven days.
Adrian Zhao stood at the central console with the expression of someone who had been awake for thirty-six hours and had stopped being able to tell. His hands on the interface were steady — they were always steady, the steadiness of someone who had transferred everything he had into the work and had nothing left over for the shaking. His older brother's steadiness. He had always been the one who didn't flinch.
Behind him, at the secondary station, Ryan sat and watched the vitals monitor with both hands wrapped around a mug that had been empty for an hour.
He was twenty-two years old. He looked older.
"The neural response is up four percent," Adrian said. He was not talking to Ryan exactly. He was talking to the data, reporting to it, the way he had for days. "The synaptic bridge is holding. The amygdala stimulation —"
"Is too high," Ryan said. "Adrian. The amygdala reading has been —"
"Compensating for the suppressed frontal —"
"That's not compensation, that's —" Ryan set the mug down. "That's aggression output without the regulation layer. We talked about this. The frontal suppression is —"
"Temporary," Adrian said. Certain. The way he said everything, the certainty that had carried them both through the design phase and the first failed trials and the seven iterations of the serum that hadn't worked. "The neural tissue needs time to integrate. Once the dormant pathways reconnect —"
"Adrian."
"— the cortical function will reassert and the imbalance will —"
"Adrian."
The monitor changed.
They both went still.
It was not a dramatic change. A single line on the vitals screen, the one they had been watching for eleven days, that had been flatlined or near-flat for all of that time — shifted. A small movement. A pattern beginning, uneven and slow, like something trying to remember a rhythm it had forgotten.
Then: a sound.
"Hhhkk....rrhkk...hhh"
From behind the reinforced door at the back of the lab. The room they had been calling the integration chamber for eleven days because calling it what it actually was — the room where their mother's body lay connected to monitors and serum lines — made it harder to work.
A sound.
Low. Wet. Like breathing learning what it was again.
Ryan stood up so fast the chair scraped back against the floor.
Adrian was already at the door.
"Wait —" Ryan said.
Adrian's hand was on the lock. He was smiling. Ryan could see his profile from here — the exhaustion and the hope mixed together in the particular way that hope was most dangerous, when it had nothing left to push against.
"She's breathing," Adrian said. "Ryan. She's breathing."
"We don't know what —"
"She's breathing."
The door opened.
She was lying on the table the way they had positioned her. The same. The connections in place, the lines running, the monitors registering the slow and terrible new pattern of her vitals in real time.
Her fingers moved.
Just the right hand, just the fingers, a small tremoring motion like a signal through water — disrupted, searching, but there. Undeniable. Ryan's throat closed.
Adrian crossed the room in three steps.
"Mama," he said. The word came out stripped of everything — the science, the certainty, the eleven days of data and methodology and compensating for variables. Just: Mama.The way he'd said it when he was eight years old and she came to pick him up from school. "Mama, I'm here. We're here. Can you —"
Her eyes opened.
Ryan stopped breathing.
They had been their mother's eyes. Dark brown, the kind of warm dark that both of them had inherited somewhere in different measure. He had a photograph of her on his phone, from three years ago at the Spring Festival, laughing at something their uncle said, her eyes bright and specific and entirely hers.
These were not those eyes.
They were the same color. The same shape. Everything structurally identical, the same eyes in the same face, and something inside them so fundamentally absent that Ryan's body understood it before his mind did — sent the signal up the brainstem first, the old animal part, the part that existed specifically to recognize when something that looked like a person was not a person anymore.
He took a step back.
"Adrian," he said. His voice came out wrong. "Adrian, come away from —"
She made a sound.
It started as breathing and became something else. A low, wet, grinding sound from somewhere in the throat — not language, not pain exactly, but hunger, if hunger were a sound, if it could bypass everything a person was supposed to be and express itself directly, without interpretation.
Adrian leaned closer.
"What is it?" he said. Soft. Careful, the way you spoke to someone just waking from a long sleep. "What do you need? Can you —"
"ADRIAN —"
She moved.
GRAB—!
Not slowly. Not the tremoring finger movement — this was fast, the fast of something that had been reorganizing itself for eleven days and was now done, the fast of a body that no longer had the cortical brake telling it to be careful, to be gentle, to understand the weight of its own strength and the fragility of the thing it was reaching for.
Her hand closed around his collar.
She pulled him down.
"Ah?!—AAHHH!!"
Her teeth found the junction of his neck and shoulder.
The sound she made when she bit was not human. It was the sound of something that had never been told to be careful, something operating purely on the signal of consume with nothing layered above it, and it did not stop when Adrian made the sound he made — the high, cut-off gasp of someone whose nervous system was flooding with information it didn't have a response built for.
"OH GOD!—"
Ryan was already moving.
He grabbed the pillow from the equipment shelf — the one they'd used to prop the monitoring equipment when they needed to adjust the angle, the one that had no business being the thing between his mother and his brother — and he shoved it against her face, her mouth, the source of the sound, and he pushed,and it took all of him, both hands and his whole body weight, because she was strong in a way their mother had never been strong, in a way that had nothing to do with the woman who had made soup when they were sick and checked their homework and fallen asleep on the sofa watching the evening news.
He got her back.
He got Adrian out.
He got the door closed.
CRKK—CLICK.
His hands were shaking so badly he had to try the lock twice.
On the floor beside him, Adrian was unconscious.
The wound was — Ryan looked at it once and then made himself stop looking and made himself focus, made himself think, because one of them had to. The bite had caught deep at the base of the neck, left side — the skin broken jagged and raw, already darkening at the edges, blood soaking through the collar of Adrian's shirt in a spreading stain that was dark against the white fabric and that Ryan catalogued clinically because the alternative was to feel it.
Alive. He was alive. Breathing, unconscious, pulse present when Ryan pressed two fingers to his wrist.
Alive.
Ryan sat on the floor beside him with his back against the reinforced door, and behind the door the sound continued — that low, grinding, searching sound, his mother's voice doing something with the anatomy of hunger that it was never supposed to do — and he picked up his phone.
His hands were still shaking.
He called the emergency line.
It rang twice.
"Emergency services, state your situation —"
"My brother's been —" Ryan stopped. Started again. Because how did you say this. How did you say any of this. "There's been an injury. A — bite wound. I need emergency medical. The address is —"
He gave the address in a voice he didn't recognize as his own.
Behind the door, his mother moved against it. Just once. Testing. The sound of her hands on the reinforced surface, and then silence, and then the grinding sound again.
Ryan stared at the opposite wall.
The blood on Adrian's collar continued to spread.
And in the spreading silence of the lab — the antiseptic and the recycled air and the emergency line operator asking him to stay calm, stay on the line, help is coming — something else was also spreading, something that had no name yet and no containment protocol, moving through the only vector it needed: one bite, already done, already in the blood, already beginning its slow and patient rearrangement of everything it touched.
They didn't know that yet.
Nobody did.
Across the city — on the other side of the neon and the hover-traffic and the evening crowds — a man carried someone small and sleeping on his back through the last of the festival crowds.
She was warm.
The city lights were coming up around them.
He kept walking, and she kept sleeping, and neither of them knew what was already moving through the streets between the lab and the festival and the amusement park and all the ordinary distances that would, in a few days, stop being distances at all.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.