“Who’s there?” the girl now going by Melody asked, her voice sounding thin against the ringing in her ears.
No one answered.
For one brief moment the building stopped shaking, and the sudden stillness relieved her enough that she actually managed to breathe. They weren’t having some immediate catastrophic collapse. At least not yet. But when she looked down the hallway, she realized the floor felt wrong beneath her feet. One side of the corridor sat slightly lower than the other, just enough that the whole stretch of carpeted floor seemed tilted.
That was worse.
If the building was leaning, then whatever had hit nearby had hit hard.
Melody ran for the stairs.
There was no chance she was trusting the elevator after that. Luckily the hallway had clear signage, the kind rich apartment buildings used to make themselves seem responsible, and bright red EXIT markers glowed above the emergency stairwell door. Other doors were already flying open as students poured into the hall in various states of dress and panic, and when they all started running the same direction she did, Melody felt a small vicious burst of relief.
Good.
She wasn’t crazy.
Or if she was, apparently everyone else in the building had decided to join her.
The voice still lingered in the back of her head.
That was the strangest part.
It didn’t sound like someone talking from a speaker or whispering from around the corner. It felt more like being asked a question in class and suddenly becoming aware of every eye in the room turning toward you. The pressure of expectation was just there, sitting somewhere behind her thoughts.
“Awaken?” Melody muttered while shoving through the stairwell door. “Am I asleep? Dreaming? Is this suddenly some anime world where everyone has dormant magical powers?”
The words came out half breathless, half incredulous, but the answer felt obvious the moment she asked it.
Of course it was.
Of course after dying in a plane crash and waking up as a fictional villainess, the next logical step was the sky splitting open and a mysterious voice offering fantasy superpowers.
“Yes,” she gasped as she started down the stairs with the others. “Yes, I want to awaken.”
The pressure in the back of her head vanished immediately.
Nothing else happened.
No flash of light.
No screen.
No magical girl transformation.
No flaming sword materialized in her hands.
“Status?” Melody asked between breaths as she kept running.
Nothing.
“Inventory?”
Still nothing.
They had started on the thirty-third floor, and descending thirty-three flights of stairs in a crowd of panicked college students was exactly as miserable as it sounded. The stairwell echoed with pounding footsteps, ragged breathing, and the sharp confused noise of too many people trying not to trample each other while absolutely trampling each other anyway.
Someone stepped on the back of Melody’s shoe, nearly yanking it off. She stumbled forward, caught herself on the railing, and almost crashed into the guy in front of her. A hand shot out from behind and grabbed her wrist before she could go down completely.
“You good?” a male voice asked.
Melody turned just enough to see a face behind her, but between the motion, the bad lighting, and the adrenaline rushing through her system, it barely registered before the crowd shoved them apart again.
“Yeah,” she threw back automatically, even though she absolutely was not.
Then she kept moving.
By the time they hit the lower floors, the stairwell felt less like an orderly evacuation and more like a concert crowd after somebody yelled fire. Bodies pressed in from every side, elbows knocked shoulders, and people were yelling at each other to move faster even though there was nowhere to go except with the flow. Somebody farther up was crying. Somebody else was praying. A girl on the landing below kept repeating, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” like maybe if she said it enough times God Himself would come downstairs and fix the situation.
The building held together long enough for them to reach the ground floor.
Melody burst out through the emergency exit with the rest of the crowd and stumbled into an alleyway, where the cold morning air hit her face hard enough to feel almost unreal after the stuffy stairwell. The alley opened into the street, and as the students spilled out onto the sidewalk, they all slowed one by one until the crowd was no longer running.
They were staring.
Melody looked up.
For one impossible second, the sky was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
A vast tear had opened high above the city, stretching across the heavens like cracked glass lit from behind. Blue-white light poured through it in soft streaming ribbons, and thousands of tiny flecks drifted down like glowing snow, sparkling as they fell between the skyscrapers. The entire thing was so luminous and strange that it almost didn’t feel threatening at first. It looked divine. Cosmic. Like the kind of thing painters would spend centuries trying and failing to capture.
Then she realized not everything falling from the sky was light.
Shapes moved among the glowing particles.
Huge shapes.
Something massive dropped between distant buildings and vanished from sight with a crash that made the pavement jump beneath Melody’s feet. Another creature streaked overhead, leathery wings cutting through the morning haze. Its body was long and reptilian, its tail lashing behind it, and for one absurd second Melody’s brain helpfully supplied the word dragon like that was a normal thing to identify in downtown New York.
Farther away, another beast fell hard enough to crush what looked like an entire city bus beneath it. It had a hulking body, curved horns, and a head that reminded Melody of a mammoth stripped down into something leaner, meaner, and made for war rather than survival.
“Great,” Melody breathed, staring up at the sky. “This really is just an anime.”
Around her, the rest of the street began catching up with reality. People screamed. Some ran. Some just stood there frozen, staring upward like their brains had rejected what their eyes were telling them. A car slammed into another at the intersection because the driver had been looking at the sky instead of the road. Horns erupted. Somewhere nearby glass shattered.
Magic was real.
Or maybe monsters were real.
Either way, something had torn a hole in the sky above New York and released things that definitely did not belong on Earth, and unless humanity had been hiding the military-grade wizard division from everybody, they were all probably about to die.
Melody ran.
The streets of Manhattan had become a churning mess of people, stalled vehicles, and panic. She darted around a taxi that had been abandoned in the middle of the road, vaulted over a fallen trash can, and nearly got clipped by a delivery van whose driver decided fleeing blindly counted as a strategy. Ahead, a convenience store already had people rushing in and out of it carrying armfuls of chips, bottled water, cigarettes, and anything else they could grab.
“They’re looting already?” Melody shouted at no one.
Then she answered herself.
“Actually, yeah, fair enough.”
A second later the first building collapsed.
The sound was beyond anything she had ever heard in her old life. It wasn’t just loud. It was colossal, a grinding explosive roar that made the entire city seem to wince. Melody spun just in time to see a plume of dust and broken material erupt down the street as part of a mid-rise office building folded inward. The shockwave of debris blasted through the avenue like a sandstorm, hurling grit into the air hard enough to sting her face.
She ducked behind a parked car and yanked the front of her uniform shirt over her nose and mouth. Dust scraped at her eyes. Tiny bits of debris pattered against the car’s metal frame. For a moment all she could hear was the hiss of settling rubble and distant screaming through the haze.
Then she moved again.
If monsters were landing in the city, she needed something better than school uniform, nice hair, and panic.
Her eyes scanned every storefront she passed. Pharmacy. Café. Boutique. Closed deli. She wanted a pawn shop, a sporting goods store, anywhere that looked like it might sell a knife, a bat, a gun, literally anything. She wasn’t stupid enough to stand in the middle of a monster apocalypse waiting for magical powers to maybe kick in eventually.
Her body carried her over rubble and around stalled traffic with surprising ease. That was one of the only good things about this nightmare. Melody had taken care of herself. Edward noticed it more the longer he ran. Even after sprinting down thirty-three flights of stairs and tearing through city blocks filled with chaos, she still wasn’t gasping the way he would have been in his old body. Her legs felt light, her balance quick, her steps agile in a way that made the whole body feel spring-loaded.
“Okay,” she muttered as she ran. “Credit where it’s due. You were in shape.”
Eventually she reached a cross street that looked almost strangely empty compared with the ones behind her. A few abandoned vehicles sat at awkward angles across the lanes, one with its driver’s door hanging open. Dust drifted lazily through the air, tinted orange now by firelight reflecting from somewhere farther down the avenue. For the first time since leaving the building, Melody couldn’t immediately see anyone.
She slowed.
The quiet felt wrong.
“Did I go the wrong way?” she whispered.
Then she heard it.
The sound was low, mechanical in its depth but still unmistakably animal, like something between the growl of a tiger and the metallic groan of heavy machinery dragging across concrete. It reminded her vaguely of Jurassic Park and Transformers at the same time, which was such a stupid comparison that her brain almost rejected it on principle.
Melody froze.
Then she dropped.
She crouched behind the nearest car so fast that her knees banged painfully against the pavement. Peeking up just enough to look through the window, she saw movement in the dust across the street.
Something big.
Very big.
The drifting orange haze slowly peeled back around a shape moving through the wreckage, and each step came with the sickening crunch of crushed metal. It emerged gradually, like the city itself was too afraid to show it all at once.
The creature stood nearly ten feet tall at the shoulder and moved on four legs with the fluid confidence of a hunting cat. Its face was unmistakably feline, all sharp angles, forward-focused eyes, and twitching ears, but everything else about it looked wrong. Its body was larger and heavier than any natural predator, wrapped in dark armor that hugged its torso and shoulders like it had grown there instead of being forged. A long tail swayed behind it, and every step looked deliberate, controlled, and far too intelligent.
“Armor?” Melody whispered.
The giant cat-beast prowled forward on the other side of the street, its nose lifting as it tasted the air. It moved past one wrecked car and then another, close enough now that Melody could hear the rumbling purr buried beneath its breathing. Around them the city continued screaming in the distance, but here, on this block, the monster felt like the center of the world.
Melody held her breath and flattened herself lower behind the car.
The beast kept moving.
For one hopeful second she thought it might pass.
Then the armor shifted.
Melody’s eyes widened as the dark plating along its sides began unfolding in smooth metallic layers. What she had taken for heavy body armor split apart and spread outward, revealing enormous wings beneath. They were furred closer to the body but finished in bladed metallic feathers along the edges, like someone had designed an angel after only ever hearing about war.
The creature flexed them once.
A violent gust blasted down the street.
Dust exploded away from the monster in all directions, clearing the air so suddenly that Melody had to throw an arm over her face. The wind lifted loose trash, rattled broken glass across the pavement, and nearly pulled her out from behind the car. For a brief terrifying instant she actually felt her feet leave the ground before she slammed back down against the concrete.
When she looked again, the street was clear.
The beast stood fully revealed.
Then, with eerie precision, its wings folded back in on themselves and sealed once more into the armored plating around its torso.
It lifted its head.
Sniffed the air.
And slowly turned toward the car Melody was hiding behind.