danger

The neon sign of The Rusty Gear buzzed and flickered, casting intermittent red shadows across Sarah's face as she stumbled out of the bar. Her fourth – or was it fifth? – whiskey sour churned in her stomach, a bitter reminder of an even more bitter evening.

"You don't need another drink, honey," the bartender had said, his weathered face creased with concern.

"What I need," Sarah had slurred, jabbing her finger at the bar top, "is for men to stop being such lying pieces of—" She'd caught herself, years of academic propriety warring with drunken anger. "Just one more. Please."

Now the cool night air did little to clear her head as she weaved down the empty street. The distant hum of the city's atmospheric processors provided an oddly musical backdrop to her unsteady footsteps.

"Emergency at work," she mimicked Lenard's words in a high-pitched voice, then laughed – a harsh, broken sound that echoed off the buildings. "Emergency of getting into some other woman's pants, maybe."

A cat yowled somewhere in the darkness, making her jump. Sarah squinted at her surroundings, finally registering that she'd wandered into one of the old industrial districts. Crumbling warehouses loomed on either side, their windows dark and empty like dead eyes.

"Stupid," she muttered to herself. "Stupid, stupid Sarah. Can't even find your way home right."

The click of her heels against concrete seemed unnaturally loud in the silence. A cold wind whistled through the narrow streets, carrying the metallic tang of approaching rain. The first drops began to fall, creating dark circles on the pavement.

Sarah stopped to adjust her shoe, bracing herself against a graffiti-covered wall. The motion sent the world spinning, and she closed her eyes until the vertigo passed. When she opened them again, something caught her attention – a puddle at her feet that seemed to move wrong, rippling against the wind.

"What the...?"

The surface of the liquid suddenly broke, something silver and sinuous rising like a serpent. Before Sarah could process what she was seeing, it had wrapped around her ankle with impossible speed. The touch was ice-cold and wrong – so fundamentally wrong that her alcohol-addled brain couldn't even process it properly.

She tried to scream, but the sound caught in her throat as more of the substance emerged, crawling up her leg like living mercury. The last coherent thought Sarah had was that the sensation wasn't exactly painful – it was more like being unmade, one cell at a time.

Her scream, when it finally came, was cut short by the silver tide that flowed into her mouth, down her throat, through her veins. The rain continued to fall, washing away any evidence of what had occurred in that dark alley.

---

Three days later, a figure that wore Sarah's face like an ill-fitting mask strode down the pristine streets of the Research District. The morning sun gleamed off the towers of the Institution, but she kept to the shadows, moving with unnatural precision.

A young couple passed by, the woman laughing at something her partner had said. The sound made Sarah's head turn, the movement too smooth, too mechanical. She watched them with unblinking eyes until they disappeared around a corner.

*Analyzing social behaviors... Processing emotional responses... Insufficient data for replication...*

The thoughts weren't exactly words – they were more like pulses of information, alien concepts trying to squeeze themselves into human language. The entity that had been Sarah understood the basic parameters of its mission: separate the subjects designated as "Lenard" and "Eden." Prevent recognition. Prevent remembering. Protecting the singularity.

But direct confrontation would be... inefficient. The armed guards patrolling the Institution's perimeter were evidence of that. Their weapons might not be fatal to her new form, but they would draw unwanted attention. Compromise the mission.

A maintenance drone buzzed overhead, and Sarah's eyes tracked it with machine-like focus. For a fraction of a second, her irises rippled like disturbed water, a flash of liquid metal catching the light before settling back into their human disguise.

"Good morning, Dr. Chen," a passing researcher called out cheerfully.

"Good morning," Sarah responded, her voice a perfect mimicry of its former warmth. But there was something subtly wrong about the way her facial muscles moved, like a puppet being operated by someone who had only read about smiling in a manual.

She turned away from the Institution, her movements too fluid, too precise. A security camera swiveled to follow her progress, its red light blinking steadily. In response, something under Sarah's skin shifted, adjusting its molecular structure to avoid detection.

*Alternative strategies required... Calculating optimal approach... Social manipulation protocols initiated...*

The atmospheric processors overhead released a burst of steam, the white cloud momentarily obscuring Sarah's form. When it cleared, her walk had changed – a carefully calculated stumble introduced into her gait, a programmed imperfection to appear more human.

She passed a reflective window and paused, studying her reflection with clinical detachment. The entity that had absorbed Sarah's memories knew that the woman had once been proud of her appearance. Now it was simply camouflage, a means to an end.

"You okay there, miss?" a street vendor asked as she passed his stall for the third time.

Sarah turned to him, her head moving a fraction of a second before her eyes followed. "Perfect," she said, lips curved in what its databases indicated was a reassuring smile. "Everything is going to be perfect."

The vendor shivered despite the morning warmth, though he couldn't have said exactly why. There was just something about her eyes – something empty and hungry and patient. Something that understood time very differently than humans did.

As Sarah disappeared into the morning crowd, the only sound was the steady drone of the city's machines, their rhythm matching the precise, inhuman calculations happening behind her borrowed eyes. She had time. She would learn. And when the moment was right, she would complete her mission.

After all, she wasn't human anymore. She was something else – something that had been waiting in the dark places beneath the city since before humans had learned to speak. Something that had all the time in the world to get things right.