Jack woke with both hands clenched around nothing and the taste of grave-dirt still in his mouth.
For half a second he did not know which ceiling he was looking at. The cracked plaster above his bed wavered like heat over asphalt. A dark line ran across it from one corner to the light fixture, thin as a pencil mark and wrong in a way that made his stomach drop. Beyond his window, the afternoon sky flashed from blue to smoke-gray and back again.
Someone pounded on his door.
"Jack!"
Lily's voice. Real. Close.
He lurched out of bed, every muscle protesting. The new strength in him was still there, dense and hard-earned, but so was the exhaustion from the tower. When he opened the door, Lily nearly ran into him. Gold flickered beneath the skin of her wrists.
"Three tears in twenty minutes," she said. "Maybe four. Mom's downstairs with the Alvarezes. The power keeps cutting, phones are dead, and something tried to come through the hall mirror."
Jack looked past her toward the landing window. Maple Crescent was there, sunlit and ordinary at first glance. Then the view shivered. For an instant the street became its dead twin—abandoned cars, a blown-out porch, black stains on the pavement. Then it snapped back.
The air in the house felt stretched thin.
He followed Lily downstairs two steps at a time. Elena was in the living room with a first-aid kit open on the coffee table and towels spread across the carpet. Mrs. Alvarez sat on the couch clutching her forearm, blood seeping between her fingers where flying glass had cut her. Her grandson Owen, maybe eight years old, sat pale and trembling beside her with a blanket around his shoulders. Elena looked up the moment Jack entered.
Relief hit her face first. Then urgency covered it.
"Good. Your brother's up," she said to Lily. "Mr. Alvarez and Mr. Kent are trying to get people off the street. Something opened near the Garcias' house. I need you two outside, now. And Jack—"
A sound cut through the room.
Not a scream. A wet, dragging scrape across wood.
All three of them turned toward the front of the house.
The porch shimmered.
Jack had seen small distortions there before. This was not small. A vertical seam hung in the doorway glass like a rip in clear plastic, showing another porch behind it: broken railing, dried blood, a sky the color of old ashes. Fingers appeared first, gray and twitching, then a shoulder shoved through.
Jack grabbed the aluminum bat by the coat rack and was moving before Elena finished saying his name.
He hit the porch at the same moment the first zombie stumbled free. Its head snapped toward him, mouth opening, and he sent a gravity pulse through its chest. The creature flew backward into the hedge hard enough to fold it in half.
A second one crawled through after it.
That was not the thing that chilled him.
The third shape came low and fast, landing on all fours on the porch boards with a sound like someone dropping a bag of tools. It looked like a dog until it raised its head. White bone plating covered its skull and shoulders in ridged layers. One foreleg ended in a hooked spike instead of a paw.
"Jack!" Lily called.
He was already moving.
The spiked foreleg slashed for his stomach. He pivoted on instinct deeper than thought, the motion clean and exact, his body using a stance learned in another life. The blow missed by inches. He brought the bat down two-handed across the creature's plated back. The impact rang up his arms.
The bone did not break.
The hound spun and lunged again. Jack stepped off-line, slid his hands, and drove the bat's end into the softer seam under its jaw. The thing snapped at him anyway, teeth clacking shut beside his wrist.
A spear of gold flashed past his shoulder.
Lily's divine light struck the creature in the ribs and burned a smoking hole through the flesh beneath the armor. It yelped—not like any animal Jack had ever heard—and sprang sideways off the porch.
The two zombies were getting up from the hedge and front walk.
Jack stretched out his free hand. Gravity clamped down on both undead bodies at once, pinning them flat to the concrete. He heard bone pop in one arm. The other kept clawing forward with its face grinding against the path.
The hound came back in a blur.
Jack felt its weight shift an instant before impact. He turned, let it pass, and slashed the bat through empty air.
Black cut the space where the weapon moved.
Gold answered a heartbeat later.
The black-gold line appeared across the creature's chest. Bone plate split open. Not cracked. Split. The thing hit the lawn, rolled twice, and tried to rise on legs that no longer worked. Jack crossed the porch in three steps and brought the glowing edge down once more.
The hound fell apart and stayed down.
Mrs. Alvarez made a small shocked sound behind him. Elena said nothing at all.
Jack turned back to the doorway seam. It was wider now, edges trembling as if something on the other side was trying to pull harder. Through it he could see the dead version of his street, empty except for shapes moving in the distance.
He let the bat hang from one hand and reached out with the other.
The tear felt like pressure under a wound. Gravity found its edges at once. He seized them, pulled inward, and nearly lost his footing. Closing it was nothing like throwing a zombie or shoving open a path. It fought him, the space itself resisting, trying to spring back apart.
"Jack," Lily said, coming up beside him. "Can you do it?"
His teeth clenched. "Yeah. I think so."
He changed the pressure instead of brute-forcing it, folding one side over the other the way a swordsman closed a line after a strike. The seam narrowed to a slit, then to a glowing thread.
It snapped shut with a dry crack.
The porch was just a porch again.
Jack staggered back one step, chest heaving.
Then more screams came from farther down Maple Crescent.
Elena was already on the move, grabbing bandages, antiseptic, the trauma shears from her kit. Jack caught her arm.
"Mom, stay here. Lock the door."
She looked at him like he had said something ridiculous. "There are injured people outside."
"There are things outside."
"Yes," she said. "Which is why you're going, and why I'm coming as far as the injured."
Lily shouldered past them, golden light already gathering in her palms. "And I'm not sitting in the kitchen while the street comes apart."
Jack opened his mouth.
Lily's eyes met his, steady and fierce. "You don't have to do everything alone. Not anymore."
The words landed harder than the fight had.
He swallowed once and nodded. "Fine. Stay behind me. Both of you."
Maple Crescent looked wrong in pieces.
Mrs. Kent's flower beds had become a strip of black marsh for ten feet before turning back into mulch. The air above the Millers' mailbox glittered with floating droplets of seawater that should have fallen and didn't. A section of road ahead had sunk into dead grass and leaning grave markers, like a graveyard had been pressed through the asphalt from underneath.
Mr. Kent was in the middle of the street trying to drag his wife away from a tangle of thorn-vines creeping out of a shimmer by their garage. The vines moved when they felt him, blossoms opening in wet red folds.
Jack ran.
He hit the first vine with a gravity shove that tore it loose from the garage wall. Two more whipped toward him. He cut one in passing with a short black-edged slash, then ducked the next and heard Lily behind him.
"Down!"
He dropped.
A fan of golden darts streaked over his head and nailed the open blossoms one after another. Light raced through the vine network. The whole mass shriveled, blackened, and collapsed into a steaming heap.
Mrs. Kent sobbed once as Elena dropped to her knees beside her. Superficial cuts, Jack saw. Shock worse than the wounds. Lily crouched beside a teenage boy from two houses over whose shin had been laid open by flying debris. She pressed both hands over it. Gold seeped through her fingers. The boy stared, crying without sound, as the bleeding slowed.
"Jack," Mr. Kent said, voice shaking, pointing toward Harrow Road. "Bigger one down there. Opened right over the intersection."
Jack looked past the houses.
Even from here he could see it: a dark vertical wound hanging above the road like a doorway with no frame, fifteen feet high and widening.
"Get everyone to our house," he said. "Basement if you need to. Don't stop for anything."
He and Lily ran for the intersection while Elena stayed long enough to get the Kents moving, then followed at a fast, controlled pace with her kit banging against her hip.
Harrow Road was bedlam.
Two cars had collided trying to swerve around a patch of black water spread over the lane. From that hovering pool, something pale and toothed lunged on a ribbon of muscle, its dead lure swinging in the air. On the far side of the intersection, three figures in bone armor stalked through the crosswalk with white blades grown from their arms. A church van had jumped the curb. Its side door hung open while four people crouched behind it, trapped between the armored dead and the water-creature.
Jack's fear lasted one beat. Training took the next.
He pointed at the water-pocket and increased gravity inside it until the surface imploded. The angler thing slammed to the pavement, flopping and snapping. Lily burned through its skull before it could recover.
Jack was already on the bone knights.
The first swung high. He parried with the bat and felt the line of force travel cleanly through his shoulders and hips instead of jarring him apart. He turned that block into a cut at the creature's knee seam, opening it just enough to ruin the joint. The second knight lunged from the side. He stepped inside its reach and drove the bat's end through its visor slit.
Not enough.
Bone began knitting around the dent.
"Jack!" Lily shouted.
He did not look back. He felt her light instead, warm at his shoulder. He pulled his own divine spark into the next motion and carved a black-gold diagonal through both standing knights. The slash crossed them and the air behind them. Their armor opened like split stone. Neither got up.
The crippled third knight dragged itself forward on one arm, bone growing into a spear from its wrist.
A shotgun boomed from behind Jack.
He turned in surprise. Elena stood in the road with their father's Remington braced against her shoulder, smoke curling from the barrel. The blessed shot Lily had laid into it days earlier was gone now, but at close range it still blew the spear-arm off and knocked the knight sideways.
"Do not lecture me," Elena said, already reloading.
Jack almost laughed, which felt wild and wrong and good.
Then he faced the big tear over the intersection.
It showed too much at once. His ruined neighborhood. The tower's dim stairwell. A smear of graveyard moonlight. For a dizzy second he thought he saw something far deeper than any of those, a darkness without shape pressing at the back of everything. Then the view shifted and two more gray hands clawed through.
He shoved them back with gravity and seized the tear.
This one nearly brought him to his knees.
The pressure behind it was stronger, fed by whatever was unraveling all over town. Cars groaned on their shocks as the air around him distorted. Lily came to his side without speaking and laid one glowing hand between his shoulder blades. She did not close the tear for him. She steadied him while he did it.
Jack remembered the graveyard. Remembered how power worked best when he stopped dividing himself. He set his feet, drew an invisible line through the wound in space, and folded the edges toward it with ruthless precision.
The seam shrank by inches.
Then feet.
Then to nothing.
The snap of it closing rippled down the block. The black water on the road vanished. The dead-gray tint over the houses thinned. The church van rocked once and settled.
Jack bent over with both hands on his knees, vision swimming.
By the time he straightened, Elena was already triaging the people from the van. One man had a gash across his scalp. A little girl had a bone splinter embedded in her calf. Lily knelt and began healing what she could. After a second, Jack crouched beside her and laid his own hand over the girl's leg.
Gold answered him, smaller and rougher than Lily's flow but real.
Together they drew the splinter out, burned away the corruption clinging to it, and closed the torn flesh. The girl stared at them, then at her mother, then burst into tears because children cried safest after danger, not during.
By dusk their house held nine extra people.
Blankets covered the windows. The dining table had become a treatment station. Elena moved among the survivors with the firm calm of someone too busy to be frightened until later. Jack and Lily sealed two more small tears on the street before they could widen, then came back shaky and hollowed out, their reserves scraped low.
For the first time since waking, the neighborhood was quiet.
Not safe. Jack could still feel thin places farther away, scattered through town like pressure points under the skin of the world. He could close what he reached. He could not reach all of it.
Lily sat beside him on the back steps after dark, their shoulders touching. Inside, he could hear murmured voices, running water, Elena telling someone to keep pressure on a bandage.
"It's getting faster," Lily said softly.
Jack looked up. The crack in the sky was gone for the moment, but the stars seemed too sharp, as if night had been cut open somewhere above them.
"Yeah."
"Can you keep sealing them?"
He thought of the bigger tear over Harrow Road and how close it had come to folding him in half from the inside. He thought of the tower, of eleven floors still waiting, of a king on the roof and something worse pressing behind the edges of the world.
"Not forever," he said.
Lily nodded like she had expected that answer. "Then we finish the tower."
Inside, Elena appeared at the screen door. Tired. Proud. Afraid enough now to show it.
"If you're going," she said, "go before you're too exhausted to stand. I've got them here."
Jack rose. So did Lily.
For one moment the three of them stood close in the dim kitchen light, the house full of strangers breathing behind them and the dark town beyond the walls waiting to split again.
Then Elena pulled them both into a hard, quick embrace.
"Come back," she said.
"We will," Jack answered.
Later, lying on the living room floor with the bat beside him and Lily only a few feet away, he listened to the house settle around its new occupants. His body ached. His mind kept seeing the tears in the air and the darkness behind the largest one.
He closed his eyes anyway.
If the town was bleeding from the tower, then the only real bandage waited above him.
Jack let sleep take him like a plunge and reached for the stairwell again.