Author's Preface
The slip-thwhack of his feet hitting the concrete slowly ceased, the sound deepening into a dull, heavy thud. His limbs felt brand new-but in a way that was cumbersome and strange, as if the air itself had suddenly grown thick.
He moved toward the blockage of twisted metal, but he was no longer a shadow passing through. He was a weight. Each step he took left a faint, watery stain on the sun-bleached concrete-the last of his fluid self weeping through his new, porous skin. When he reached the first vehicle, a rusted husk of a van, he reached out to climb. His hands were still slippery, coated in that same thin, translucent moisture. He struggled to find a grip, his fingers sliding uselessly against the flaking paint and jagged chrome. He had to wedge his body into the gaps, scrambling with a frantic, clumsy effort, his brand-new muscles straining against the unfamiliar pull of gravity.
He had left his brother to die in that concrete box, watching him slowly fade into the same featureless puddle Hunter 6 had once expected for himself. The betrayal sat heavy in his new chest, a cold knot he didn't know how to untie.
He searched the wreckage for the female ape, his heart-that strange, thudding engine-stuttering when he finally found her. She was slumped in a heap, her body small and discarded against the debris. Next to her, the rustle of an object-perhaps a loose page from her journal or a scrap of fabric-fluttered in the wind, the only thing moving in the sudden, terrible silence. The chug of a human vehicle broke the stillness, the mechanical roar hitting his new ears like an alarm in the silent world. It was a violent, ugly sound, and he fled instinctively, ducking into the shadows of the twisted metal husks to watch.
Another ape stopped beside the girl.
From his hiding place, Hunter 6 watched as the male hauled her up. The movement was rough a heaving of dead weight and for a moment, he felt a flicker of that cold, alien calculation: she was broken. She was scrap. He expected her to remain limp, a discarded vessel left to the dust but as the male ape hauled her into the vehicle, her eyes opened.
It was only for a heartbeat-a brief, clouded flicker-but it was enough. It was a signal that life still coursed through her, stubborn and hot. She wasn't a puddle; she was still whole. He watched the door slam, the vehicle's engine straining as it began to pull away, leaving him behind with nothing but the fading watery stains of his own footsteps.As the vehicle's tail-lights bled into the distance, the moisture on his skin finally stopped weeping. The air, which had felt thick as water, suddenly grew cold the first time he had ever truly felt a temperature as a threat rather than a data point.
The change hit his core like a physical blow.
His internal structure, once a seamless flow of adaptive mercury, began to crystallize into something rigid and permanent. The brand new feeling in his limbs sharpened into the ache of joints and the pull of tendons. He felt the sudden, terrifying density of bone-calcium and marrow forming in the dark of his own mass, anchoring him to the concrete. He looked down at his hands. They weren't slippery anymore. The moisture had dried, leaving behind a surface that was textured, lined with fingerprints, and-for the first time-capable of feeling the abrasive bite of the wind.
He wasn't Hunter 6 anymore. The Pool was a million miles away, and the brother he had left in the box was a ghost of a different life. He was a singular, heavy, and finite thing and as the last of his liquid self hardened into meat and pulse, he felt a new sensation rising in the back of his throat. It wasn't a signal or a frequency.
It was a gasp. His first breath of ash-filled air.
The wind didn't just blow; it scraped. To Hunter 6, the air felt like invisible sandpaper, pulling heat from his brand-new skin and sending a jagged, electrical shiver down the length of his calcified spine. Every nerve ending was a raw wire, firing signals of cold and vulnerability that his mind didn't yet know how to process. He looked down at his chest-pale, rising and falling with the rhythmic, frantic labor of breathing-and felt a deep sense of loathing. He was a singular, finite point in a vast, dying landscape. He moved past the perimeter of the station, his footsteps no longer silent glides but heavy, rhythmic thuds against the grit-covered tarmac. The sound was a betrayal, a mechanical announcement of his presence that made him want to shrink into the shadows.
Under the glowing canopy of the EG On The Move, he watched them-his former brethren. They flowed over the pumps and the roof of the Greggs like iridescent oil, their mallard-hued limbs clicking with a predatory, hive-minded logic. They were looking for apes, their faces tilting in unison as they tasted the sulfurous air for the scent of sweat or fear.
Hunter 6 stayed in the darkness of the bypass, hidden behind a rusted road sign. He watched a brother slide across the bonnet of the abandoned silver hatchback, its fluid form momentarily reflecting the frozen price of petrol. For a heartbeat, the entity paused, its frequency brushing against Hunter 6's new ears like a distant, distorted radio station. It was a call he could no longer answer-a language he had forgotten the moment his blood began to beat. He wasn't part of the tide anymore. He was a stone in the current, watching the world he helped destroy through eyes that now knew the terror of being seen.