The seconds stretch. Something about this liminal space plays with Min's perception of time, of distance, of her own body. There's no up or down here. The air is at once thin and soupy, and it enfolds her like a suffocating blanket. With every breath, she tastes the blown capacitor stench of iodine and burning plastic.

Min straightens her back, resisting the urge to slump down in her seat. She's been in class for hours now, but her encounter in the Dead Empty has left her with a lingering sense of unease. Call on someone else, she thinks to herself. Please.

Min's composure cracks, and her eyes snap open. A young woman hangs in the emptiness before her, drifting on an invisible sea. The woman's smiling face is crowned by a billowing cloud of shoulder-length platinum blonde hair.

A sudden roar washes over the assembled masses. Distant points of light, far beyond the city limits, have begun to gutter out. The Blackout, spilling toward them in a rolling tide.

Rising to her feet, Min gazes out at the fallen city and takes in its bloody skyline. A terrible keening sound fills her ears, and some deep part of her recognizes it instantly. Screaming. A warbling, cacophonous blend of innumerable distant screams.

A deluge of shimmering, viscous liquid beats down onto the Gleam's darkened streets. The alleyways run thick with it, and when the stricken city's emergency lights flare red, it shines like a river of blood.

His eyes are gone, too, Min realizes with a shudder. Not harvested—eaten. Something beneath the waterline must've taken them. She forces her legs to pump faster, sloshing through the roiling fluid as swiftly as she's able.

A sudden movement draws Min's eye. It's the body of an old woman, probably in her seventies, half swallowed by the congealing muck. Her torso bucks and shudders as something tugs at it…

Frigid air blasts down from above, frosting Min's effluent-soaked hair with iridescent rime. The hill she's climbing has taken her high up above the flooding, but her footing is still treacherous. She digs her hard-soled shoes into the icy slush at an angle, desperate for better traction.

Min lies in a crumpled heap just inside the MetroClave's foyer, her hands clasped over her ears. The gunshots died down ten minutes ago, but there are still sounds coming from outside—horrible sounds, screams and snarls and the dripping-wet rrrrip of teeth shearing through living meat.

The images come faster and faster, memories of death and pain and the bleeding sky, of Misprints and monsters and her interminable march through a dying world.