The thing on the carpet had stopped moving, but the world outside hadn't.
Somewhere beyond the office windows, tires screamed hard enough to leave a mark in the air. A horn blared without stopping. Farther off, something shattered—glass, maybe more than glass—and a wave of voices rose after it, too many at once to make sense of. From the hallway came a different kind of noise: running footsteps, a door slamming, then another, then a long metallic scrape that made everyone in the room look up without meaning to.
Inside the office, nobody spoke.
The fluorescent lights still hummed overhead. White suppressant powder lay across the carpet like dirty snow. Broken plastic, snapped chair legs, spilled papers, and a dark spread of blood turned the familiar rows of desks into something unrecognizable.
Daniel lay by the doorway where he had fallen.
Kara lay several feet away, one arm bent beneath her, Claire still kneeling beside her with both hands pressed down over a wound that no longer mattered.
Ryan was standing with his back half against a cubicle wall, breathing through his mouth. Julia sat on the floor near the supply station, staring at her hands as if they belonged to someone else. Noah had lowered himself into the nearest chair without seeming to know he'd done it, one hand braced against his ribs. Ethan remained where the fight had left him, the dented metal waste bin still hanging from his fingers.
He put it down carefully.
The sound it made on the carpet was too soft. It should have sounded like more.
Claire kept her hands where they were for another few seconds. Then she stopped.
No one asked.
She looked at Kara's face, then away from it. Her own expression had gone flat in the way people looked when there was too much happening behind it.
Ryan swallowed. "She's gone?"
Claire nodded once.
That was all.
Julia made a sound that could have become a sob if she'd had the breath for it. Instead it broke in the middle and vanished. Noah covered his mouth with one hand and stared at the floor. Ethan looked at Kara and saw, with a kind of sick disbelief, not the body on the carpet but the woman from a few minutes ago—shouting, moving, forcing everyone else to move with her. It didn't line up. His mind kept refusing it and then crashing into it again.
He glanced toward the doorway.
Daniel was still there.
He had not moved either. Of course he hadn't. But some part of Ethan still expected the whole scene to pull backward somehow, to become unreal if he stared at it long enough. Daniel's body blocked part of the entrance. Beyond him, the hallway looked oddly normal: gray carpet, white walls, strip lighting, the corner of the break room sign. The ordinary shape of it made what had happened in front of it worse.
A dull thud sounded from somewhere down the corridor.
Then another.
Ryan flinched hard enough to knock his shoulder against the partition behind him. "Jesus."
Nobody answered.
The office held its breath around them.
They had been six people ten minutes ago. Then five. Now four.
Ethan had never understood how quickly numbers could stop meaning anything. Six coworkers, five coworkers, four survivors. The language changed under pressure. It stripped itself down without asking permission.
He became aware that his shirt sleeve was stiff with drying blood. He didn't know how much of it was Kara's.
Outside, a chorus of shouts rose and broke apart.
Noah was the one who finally looked up, not because he had something to say, Ethan thought, but because silence had become worse than hearing himself breathe. Before he could speak, Ryan beat him to it.
"Okay." Ryan rubbed a shaking hand over his face. "Tell me I'm not the only one seeing those messages."
The sentence landed in the room and stayed there.
Claire looked over first. Julia stopped staring at her hands. Noah let his own hand fall from his mouth. Ethan felt the back of his neck go cold.
Ryan gave a short, ugly laugh that had no humor in it. "The floating ones," he said. "The glowing text. Whatever the hell that was."
"I saw them," Noah said immediately.
Claire nodded once. "So did I."
Julia swallowed before she spoke. "Yeah."
Ryan looked at Ethan. "And you?"
Ethan's stomach tightened.
He kept his eyes on the panel for a moment, just long enough to make sure the word was still there.
"Ethan?" Ryan said.
Ethan looked up. "Clerk."
There was a beat of silence.
Then Ryan laughed.
It burst out of him too fast, too loud, the kind of laugh that came from nerves rather than amusement. Noah turned away with a tired grin, and even Julia let out a faint, disbelieving breath. Claire shut her eyes for a second and rubbed a hand over her forehead.
"A clerk?" Ryan said. "Seriously?"
Noah gave a short huff. "That's incredible."
"End of the world," Ryan said, shaking his head, "and somehow you still end up doing office work."
Nobody laughed for long. The sound faded almost as soon as it started, thin and wrong in the wrecked office, with Daniel by the door and Kara still on the floor.
Ethan said nothing.
He just looked back at the screen.
The word Clerk sat there in plain white text.
Beneath it, a new line had appeared.
WARNING: ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS RESTRICTED
Ethan stared at it.
"Anything else?" Noah asked.
Ethan closed the panel.
"No," he said.