Jade’s right eye burned white before the room finished flooding.
Water ran across the broken tile in thin black sheets, carrying bandage wrappers, pencil shavings, and blood from the cot row. The shelter gym had stopped pretending to be a gym hours ago. Tables made walls. Bleachers made beds. Children hid where storage bins had been dragged into a half circle.
Waddell stood near the shower doors with an empty rifle and a knife in his other hand.
Kieran held a gold bandage around one arm and kept three children behind her with her body.
Tyree knelt beside the cracked command map, one hand on the bone charm at his throat.
Jade saw all of them at once, and that was the problem.
The white fire behind her eye turned people into lines. Waddell became iron gray pressure. Kieran burned gold at the shoulder. Tyree held a red coal shape against his chest. Every wounded person glowed around the injury. Every dead body under a sheet answered too easily when her sight passed over it.
Jade forced her gaze down to the water.
"Nobody touches the covered bodies unless I say otherwise," she said.
Waddell looked back at her from the shower doors.
"Nobody was planning to touch them until you said it like that," Waddell said.
"Then I improved the plan before it became necessary."
The shower doors bent outward and pushed water across the tile.
The thing behind them had been human enough to use a handle once. Now one hooked arm scraped through the gap, black water running from its elbow. The skin around the shoulder split and sealed in the same motion, as if the body kept forgetting what shape humans used for pain.
Kieran pulled the children farther behind her with one working arm.
"Jade, your eye is doing the white thing again," Kieran said.
"I noticed because half the room became a murder diagram," Jade said.
Tyree’s charm sparked against his throat in short red bursts.
"Something is pulling from the other side of you," he said.
Jade already knew before the charm finished sparking.
The pull sat behind her eye and shaped itself like Ty’s name. It came through bone, receiver teeth, and a black knot that felt nothing like Earth. The line wanted her because she remembered the face, the body, the voice, and the difference between Ty and anything wearing him badly.
The line wanted her as proof because she remembered too much.
Jade tightened both hands around the pistol to keep herself grounded.
The pistol was empty and ordinary enough to help.
That mattered less than having something ordinary in her grip.
"Waddell, count ammunition out loud so everyone hears the same truth," she said.
"That will make everyone feel worse before it helps," Waddell said.
"It will make everyone know the truth at the same speed."
Waddell checked the rifle, then the sidearm at his belt.
"Rifle empty. Sidearm has two rounds. Kieran has fire and one working arm. Tyree has the charm until it cracks. You have an empty pistol and bad ideas."
"Good. Clear inventory beats hope when hope starts lying," Jade said.
The shower doors burst and slammed into the wet tile.
The creature came through on four limbs, then unfolded two more from under its ribs. A torn hospital jacket clung to its back. Small white stones had been sewn into the lining, each one marked with a symbol Jade recognized from breach reports.
Beacon stones meant its purpose went past killing randomly.
It had come to find a door through someone alive.
The white fire in Jade’s eye flared, and the receiver line answered.
For a breath, she saw teeth around the edge of the gym. Not real teeth. Not in the walls. Receiver teeth, far away, trying to decide if she belonged inside Ty’s rank. The black knot behind them twisted, and somewhere past it, a stolen face dragged part of Ty’s name through ash.
Jade’s stomach turned as the stolen face dragged closer.
"It found me through him and through whatever still knows his face," she said.
Waddell raised the sidearm without taking his eyes off the creature.
"Through who, and how bad is that answer?" Waddell asked.
"Ty, which makes the answer bad enough to move now," Jade said.
Nobody had time to answer before the creature moved.
The creature lunged at the cot row with all six limbs.
Kieran threw gold fire across the floor. The line wrapped one ankle and held for two steps before black water smoked through it. Tyree’s charm fired red sparks into the creature’s shoulder. The sparks sank under the jacket and made the beacon stones flash.
The creature changed direction and came for Jade.
Waddell fired once from beside the shower doors.
The bullet struck the creature’s chest and disappeared into wet black muscle. The impact slowed it by one step. Jade used the step. She grabbed a metal chair from the water and jammed it under the creature’s reaching hook.
The hook crushed the chair and twisted the legs together.
Jade let go before the metal folded around her wrist.
The white eye offered her the dead bodies again.
They were close. They were easy. Dead hands would rise if she let the command pass through the gym. They would grab the creature, slow it, buy her seconds with bodies that had already paid every price they owned.
Jade bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.
"Stay down and make me earn every inch alone," she said.
The covered bodies stayed down under their wet sheets.
That cost her more than the empty gun.
The receiver line pulled harder, angry at the refusal. It wanted the cleanest proof, and grief had always looked clean to things that never had to live after using it.
Jade stepped sideways through water up to her ankle.
The creature followed her eye across the room.
Of course it did, because doors always learned to look back.
"It is tracking the white, so stop watching my face," she said.
Tyree dragged the command map out of the water and snapped the metal compass from one corner.
"Then make the white look somewhere else before it marks you," he said.
Jade caught the compass when he threw it.
The cheap point sat cold in her palm.
Waddell fired the second round and hit one beacon stone. The stone cracked. The creature convulsed and slammed one hooked arm into the bleachers. Children screamed behind Kieran, and Kieran used the scream like timing, throwing gold fire into another stone while the creature turned.
Jade moved under the arm while her right eye showed too much.
Her left eye showed the body, so she trusted the left.
The compass point drove into the lowest beacon stone.
The stone broke, and the creature buckled as black water poured from its jacket seams.
The white fire in Jade’s right eye surged through the broken stone and found the receiver line again. The gym bent at the edges. For one breath, she saw the bridge. Ty stood over a black mouth with sickles crossed, surrounded by people she half knew from reports and half knew from the way they bled for him.
He looked wrong and real in the same breath.
Jade reached before sense could stop her hand.
The receiver teeth opened wider around the bridge vision.
Ty flinched on the other side of the line.
Jade pulled her hand back and turned the reach into a strike.
The compass tore sideways through the beacon stitch.
The creature screamed into the water and drove one hook down.
Waddell grabbed a broken table leg and drove it into the creature’s jaw hinge. Kieran wrapped gold fire around the hooked arm. Tyree’s charm cracked down its center and spat red dust into the water. The dust caught on the beacon stones and burned dull red.
Jade shoved the empty pistol into the creature’s split mouth and used it as a bar.
"Push now before the stones remember their shape," she said.
Waddell pushed while Kieran pulled the hooked arm sideways.
Tyree broke the charm fully in his fist.
The beacon stones failed together under red dust and pressure.
The creature collapsed into the flood, heavy enough to send water over Jade’s knees. Its hooked arm twitched once against the tile, then lay still. The black water kept leaking from it, but the thing inside the jacket stopped choosing directions.
The white eye kept burning after the body stopped moving.
That was worse than the creature standing back up.
Jade staggered away from the body and caught herself on the command table. The right half of her sight had gone white. The left half showed Waddell moving toward her, Kieran pulling the children back, Tyree staring at the broken charm in his hand.
The receiver line pulled again, and this time it carried Ty’s pain.
Jade saw bone, black heat, a corrupted braid, and a stolen face folding through ash. She saw the face turn toward her from somewhere it should never have reached.
Ty’s old mouth shaped words inside the white burn.
The words told her to hide well before the face arrived.
Jade slammed her palm over her burning eye.
The line still saw through her fingers and scraped behind the bone.
Waddell reached for her shoulder without blocking her sight.
"Jade, tell me what you need before this gets worse," Waddell said.
She wanted to say Ty more than anything else.
That answer would feed the line before she could stop it.
She made herself look at the room. Children. Wounded. Water. Broken doors. Dead covered bodies that had stayed still because she had ordered them to stay still.
"Move everyone below ground before the white line finds a route," Jade said.
Waddell hesitated only once before he understood the order.
"Everyone includes the covered dead and every person breathing?" Waddell asked.
"Everyone breathing, and everyone covered. We take the dead too."
Kieran heard that and nodded with her jaw tight.
"The white is still looking through your hand," Kieran said.
Jade kept her palm over her eye and felt the line scrape against the pressure of her hand.
"Then we hide well enough to make it work for every inch," Jade said.
Above the ruined shower doors, the speakers crackled without power.
Ty’s old voice came through soft, amused, and nowhere near alive enough to own itself.
"Good answer, Jade, and still too late to close everything," the voice said.