"Drop them? I can't just put them back, Putri, they're combusting!" Thiago yelled, his voice cracking as a fresh wave of blinding pain tore through his temples. "Every step I take is a brick of my own childhood being fed into an engine!""Then stop walking!" Putri shouted back, her fingers locking tighter around his heavy winter coat, straining every muscle in her arms to keep his dissolving form from slipping entirely through the translucent crystal tiles. "If you take another step, you won't even remember our mother's face!""If I don't walk, we stay here and become part of the floor!" Thiago gasped, pointing frantically ahead where the architecture splintered into a colossal, dizzying labyrinth of floating glass shards. Each jagged pane of glass didn't reflect their current horrifying reality; instead, each shard flickered with warm, golden light, displaying vivid, alternate timelines of their ordinary suburban life. "Look at them! Look at the glass!"Putri dragged her gaze away fr

 "Watch your step or you'll snag your jacket on a stray voltage thread," Hermes muttered, tossing the crude, bone-handled sewing needle aside after it punched a jagged, smoking hole through the static wall. "You call this a sanctuary?" Putri demanded, yanking Thiago through the tear in the fabric before his dissolving knee could slip entirely into the void. She slammed her shoulder against the stiff, bristling static television snow, sealing the breach. "It smells like ozone and burning hair, Hermes." "Beats freezing in the crystal plane or getting digested by the First Lie's Heart, doesn't it?" Hermes replied, flopping unceremoniously onto a patch of coarse, gray felt that served as the floor of the hollowed-out pocket. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a crushed cigarette that refused to stay lit, and jammed it between his lips anyway. "Besides, luxury is entirely subjective once you've lived through three regional c

 "Keep moving, Putri! Don't look at the white noise!" Thiago shouted, his boots slamming down hard against the cold, jagged metal of the suspension bridge. "I'm not looking at it, I'm trying not to fall off into eternity!" Putri yelled back, her fingers locked around his belt loop as the entire structure violently shuddered beneath them. An endless abyss of crackling, blinding television static churned below the rusted railroad tracks, hissing like a million angry serpents. Every time the white noise surged, the iron rails groaned, threatening to snap into rusted dust. "The bridge isn't stabilizing!" Thiago gasped, his chest heaving as a wave of dizziness hit him. "It's waiting for something! It won't let us cross on momentum alone!" "Then what does it want?" Putri demanded, ducking as a stray arc of static electricity snapped through the air just inches above her head. "A password? A to

 "Get up, Putri. We can’t stop here," Thiago panted, his knees sliding across the greasy, rain-slicked asphalt of the alley. Putri blinked against the stinging neon glare, shivering in the damp midnight air. Her chest felt entirely hollow, a cold draft whistling through ribs where a fierce, protective memory had lived just moments ago. "My coat," she muttered, staring blankly at her empty hands. "I had a coat with deep pockets. Where did it go?" "You traded it to the ledger," Thiago said, hauling her up by the elbow with a strength he didn't know he still possessed. "You gave up the memory of loneliness so we could cross. Come on." "Did I?" Putri frowned, her brow furrowing as she tried to recall the transaction, only to find a slippery gray fog where her past used to anchor her. "It feels like someone else's life. Thiago, where are we?" "Home. Or a bad joke pretending to be home."

 "Hold still," Thiago muttered, his hand glowing with a harsh, flickering violet light as he lunged forward, grabbing the twitching, gear-studded snout of the metallic hound. "Thiago, it’s about to take your fingers off!" Putri shrieked, yanking him backward by his collar just as the scrubber’s rusted mandible snapped shut with a deafening crunch, missing his thumb by a fraction of a millimeter. "I don't need to fight it, I need to rewrite it," Thiago panted, ignoring the stinging laceration across his palm where the creature's oil had burned his skin. He slammed his glowing palm directly against the amber photoreceptor, pressing his authority into the beast's chaotic firmware. "Change designation: asset. Clear previous command loop." The dog-sized horror let out an ear-piercing screech of tearing metal and synthetic wet tissue, its amber eye flashing violently from yellow to a steady, obedient b