He had tied himself to the chair at nine.
This had seemed, at nine, like the correct decision — the rational decision, the last truly rational decision available to him given the circumstances. He had used the equipment strapping from the storage cabinet, the wide nylon kind they used to secure sensitive equipment during transport, and he had wound it around his wrists and the chair arms and done the knot left-handed because his right arm was the bitten one and he had not wanted to use it more than necessary.
He had the counter-agent analysis open on the screen in front of him.
He could still read it.
That was what he told himself — *I can still read it, I can still process it, I am still Ryan, I am still the person who built this work and I can still finish it* — and for the first twenty minutes this was true, or true enough, the work still accessible, the data columns still meaningful, his hands still his hands even tied to a chair.
Then the fever spiked.
It was not gradual. It went from 39.4, where it had been for hours, to something he could not measure because he had dropped the thermometer, and it went there in under ten minutes, and what came with it was not the headache and weakness of normal fever progression.
What came with it was the sound.
Everything became very loud.
The hum of the laboratory equipment — the fans in the secondary monitor, the circulation system, the faint vibration of the building itself — became individually distinct, layered, pressing. His mother's footsteps in the containment room, which he had been able to tune to background over days of exposure, came forward until they were the loudest thing in the room. Her hands on the glass. The hairline crack extending.
And underneath all of it: a smell.
He had not been able to smell it before. The antiseptic had masked it, or his brain had filtered it, or it had not existed for him before whatever threshold he had just crossed — but now it was there, coming through the ventilation, coming from the city above, *meat,* the smell of living warm bodies and the blood inside them, and his mouth —
*No,* he thought. *No. That is not —*
His hands were already pulling at the straps.
*Stop,* he thought. *Ryan. Stop. You are Ryan. You are sitting in a chair in your laboratory. You built this laboratory. You know what is happening to you and you will not —*
The straps were good nylon. Wide, strong, the kind rated for equipment twice his body weight.
He pulled anyway.
His hands were bleeding before the first strap gave.
He did not feel it.
He did not remember leaving the laboratory.
This was the part that would have terrified him, if the part of him that experienced terror had still been fully operational — not the leaving itself, but the not remembering. The gap. One moment he was at the chair, hands free, standing, and then there was a stretch of nothing, and then he was on a street he recognized but could not immediately name, and the city was dark and loud and full of the smell, and his body was moving with a direction and a purpose that had nothing to do with anything Ryan had ever decided.
He was aware, in the way that a passenger in a moving vehicle was aware — he could see, could register what was around him, could understand it on some level — but the decisions were not his anymore. Something had taken the controls, something that used his legs and his eyes and his hands but was not consulting him about where it was going.
*Stop,* he thought, from somewhere very far away.
His legs did not stop.
The convenient store was on the corner of a mid-district street that he had probably walked past a hundred times. It had the warm yellow light of all convenient stores at midnight, the kind of light that meant
open, ordinary, come in.
Outside, leaning against the wall, a group of four young men doing what people did at midnight outside convenient stores — talking, laughing, someone holding a lighter for someone else's cigarette, the easy loose energy of people who were not worried about anything in particular.
He was forty meters away.
He was aware of them the way he was aware of all the living warmth in the city — as signal, as source, as there in a way that pulled at the thing that had taken his controls with absolute authority.
*Don't,* Ryan thought.
Thirty meters.
*Please. Don't. I am still in here. I am still — please —*
Twenty.
One of them looked up.
The one who looked up was named Park Jihoon, twenty-four years old, engineering student, out late because his exam had finished at seven and he had nowhere in particular to be and his friends had texted.
He saw the man walking toward them and his first thought was: drunk.
The walk was wrong — uneven, listing, the kind of uncoordinated movement that belonged to someone who had consumed more than was advisable and was now experiencing the consequences. The man was young, maybe early twenties, dark circles severe enough to see from here, something off about how he was holding his left arm.
"Hey," Jihoon said, to the others, with a sideways head-tilt toward the approaching man. "Heads up."
His friend Dongsoo squinted. "Is he okay?"
"Doesn't look okay."
The man had slowed down. He was standing about three meters away now, just — standing. Making a sound. Jihoon couldn't quite characterize the sound — low, from the throat, like someone trying to clear it repeatedly, like something was wrong with the swallowing mechanism.
"Hey, man." Jihoon stepped forward, because he had been raised by a mother who said *you don't walk past someone who needs help,* and twenty-four years of that upbringing had made it automatic. "Hey — are you okay? Do you need —"
He got close enough to see the eyes.
He stopped.
Later, trying to explain it to the police officer who interviewed him from a hospital bed, he would say: "I don't know how to describe it. He looked at me and there was nobody there. Like looking at a picture of someone's eyes instead of actual eyes. I stopped because something in my body said stop before my brain did."
He stopped.
He was twenty centimeters too close.
Ryan's hand shot out and grabbed his collar with a grip that had no ceiling, no self-limiting mechanism, and Jihoon made the sound of someone whose body had just informed them that they had made a significant tactical error, and then —
"JIHOON —"
Dongsoo was moving, but Dongsoo was four meters away and Ryan was already pulling Jihoon in, and the teeth —
"hk!— AAAH!"
The scream that came out of Jihoon was the rawest sound any of the others had ever heard from a human throat. Not a shout. Not an exclamation. The sound of pain arriving at a register that didn't have social modulation on it, pure and animal and terrible, and it did not stop, and the reason it did not stop was that Ryan did not stop.
"GET HIM OFF — GET HIM OFF GET HIM —"
Dongsoo grabbed Ryan's shoulders and pulled, and Ryan turned.
Later, Dongsoo would not be able to say exactly what happened next in sequence. The sequence stopped being available to him. What he had instead was fragments: the face turning toward him, the blood on the mouth, the eyes, and then something closing on his forearm and the world going white with pain.
He heard himself screaming.
He heard someone else screaming — Jihoon, still down, still making that sound.
He heard his friend Minjae on the phone: "Ambulance — we need an ambulance, corner of Haerin and mid-district twelve, please, someone is — someone is BITING people, please hurry, there's so much blood, please —"
He heard people from inside the convenient store, from the apartments above, voices and windows and someone shouting *what's happening* and someone else *call the police, call the police RIGHT NOW —*
He did not hear Ryan think *I'm sorry.*
But Ryan thought it.
From very far away, in the part of him that was still Ryan, watching through borrowed eyes, *I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, please, someone stop me, I can't stop —*
His body was not sorry.
His body was busy.
A woman exiting the convenient store with a bag of groceries saw it from the doorway and dropped the bag and the sound of breaking glass from inside it was completely swallowed by the screaming, and she pressed herself back into the door and her hand could not find her phone, could not find anything, and she screamed too because screaming was the only available response to what was happening three meters away from her.
The third friend — the one still standing, the one who had called the ambulance, Minjae — looked at the phone in his hand and looked at Dongsoo on the ground and looked at Ryan and made a decision that was not cowardice but survival, and ran.
He ran and did not look back, and the sounds followed him down the block and around the corner and for the rest of his life.
People were filming.
Someone was filming from the apartment window above. Someone in the convenient store had their phone up. The woman in the doorway was filming without knowing she had started, her body doing it on autopilot, the footage shaking badly because her hands were shaking badly, the sound of it capturing everything.
*What is that,* someone said on one of the videos, in a voice that was trying to be calm.
*What is that, what is that, what is —*
By the time the police arrived, Ryan had moved on.
He left behind a convenient store with a broken bag of groceries in the doorway and two men on the ground with bite wounds — one at the neck, critical; one at the forearm, serious — and a group of witnesses whose accounts, when the officers tried to collect them, all said the same things in different orders:
He came out of nowhere.
He didn't respond when we talked to him.
His eyes were wrong.
He didn't stop.
.
.
.
.
.
Bethesda Hospital, Midnight.
The emergency intake processed the first two patients at 00:34.
By 01:15, there were six.
By 02:40, there were eleven, coming in from three different locations across the mid-district, and the intake coordinator had called the night supervisor, who had called the hospital director, who had called the city health authority, who had used the words *possible coordinated attack* in the first call and *unknown pathogen* in the second.
The bite wounds were consistent.
Not consistent the way wounds from the same weapon were consistent — consistent in their depth, their positioning, their shape,the specific tearing pattern that no blade produced, no animal native to an urban mid-district produced.
Human teeth.
"We have eleven patients," Dr. Yuen said, to the phone, standing in the corridor outside the overflow ward where they had put the most recent arrivals. She had been here since the first call came through. She was not going to leave. "Bite injuries, human, multiple perpetrators or one mobile perpetrator, we're not clear yet. Infection status —" she stopped. "The bloodwork on the first set of patients is coming back anomalous. Same profile as the patient in 4-07. I need an infectious disease specialist here immediately. No, not in the morning. Now."
She ended the call.
She looked through the window of the overflow ward.
Nine of the eleven patients were awake. Three of them were crying — one man, two women, a range of ages, all with the same wound dressing, all processing the same incomprehensible event. One woman was saying, very quietly, over and over: *"He just — he just bit me, I don't understand, I was just walking, he just —"* and a nurse was sitting with her and holding her hand and not saying it's okay because it was not obviously okay and the nurse was smart enough to know this.
One of the other patients — the young man from the convenient store, the neck wound, the critical one — was in surgery.
Two of the remaining patients were not awake.
They were in the particular deep stillness that she had seen in room 4-07. The coma onset that was too fast, too complete, too wrong for the injury alone.
She knew what that meant now.
She did not want to know what it meant, but she knew.
She went back to the nursing station and pulled up the overnight report and began to write the formal notification to the city health authority, the one that would trigger the protocol, the one that used specific language about *potential epidemic risk* and *unknown transmission pathway* and *recommend immediate isolation of all affected individuals and contacts.*
Her hands were steady.
She was glad her hands were steady.
Somewhere in the city, the source of all of this was still moving.
The footage was already online.
Not professionally. Not through any news outlet. Just — online, the way things went online now: someone posted it, someone shared it, the algorithm picked it up because the engagement was high because what was in the footage was something people watched with their hands over their mouths and then watched again.
The comments were mostly variations of: *is this real?* And: *what is wrong with him?* And: *this is staged, this has to be staged, this is not —*
It was not staged.
By three in the morning, the footage had been viewed eighty thousand times.
By four, the police were involved in three separate incidents across the city — not all connected, not officially, the dots not yet drawn between the laboratory and the hospital and the convenient store and the bite on Ryan's arm and the forty-eight-hour clock — but all involving the same pattern.
Someone behaving wrongly.
Someone too strong.
Someone who didn't respond to words.
Someone whose eyes were wrong.
And then, at 04:17 in the morning, in the overflow ward of Bethesda Hospital, one of the two patients in the too-fast coma opened her eyes.
The nurse at the station heard the sound first.
She stood up.
She looked through the ward window.
She called the code.
And in the ward, behind the closed door, the night shift learned what room 4-07 had learned, and what the convenient store witnesses had learned, and what Ryan had learned on the floor of a bathroom in a laboratory building with the lights on:
That there was a thing that used to be a person.
And it was hungry.
And it did not stop.
In SKYHAVEN, the surface monitoring feeds had been showing elevated activity across twelve sectors for the past four hours.
Caleb was not asleep.
He was watching sector twelve through nineteen.
He was calling Luna City.
Nobody was answering.
Not Luna City.
Not anyone.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.