The Tales of the Legendary Mimic : Momo

Tracks and Terror

Siri led the way, but it was really her memories that pulled them forward.

With her quiet guidance—and Jane’s steady presence at her side—they began retracing the places where she and Dr. Colosso, now Kran, had once circled each other as an almost-couple. They walked through stretches of the facility and the broken city that were haunted more by ghosts of the past than by anything visibly dangerous.

They stopped where he used to wait for her between shifts, at the cracked bench by the outer corridor window where the sun bled orange through dust. They paused in the narrow alley that once served as their shortcut, where the walls seemed to lean together in a conspiratorial hush. Siri’s voice shook as she pointed out the quiet corners where he’d rambled about theories and futures and impossible dreams in place of confessing feelings he never quite dared to say aloud.

Jane said little during all of this. She didn’t know the old Colosso, didn’t share these memories, but she understood grief. She kept an arm close to Siri’s, offering the warmth of her presence, a hand on her shoulder whenever Siri’s breath hitched too hard. While Siri talked, Jane listened—and held her together by simply being there.

As they moved, Carel trailed a few steps behind and to the side, his gaze far less sentimental. While Siri and Jane drifted through memory, he scanned the ground. A few faint marks on the dust-caked floor caught his eye—barely-there impressions, scuffs where shoe soles had disturbed grime.

They weren’t alone.

He crouched once, fingers hovering over a bootprint wedged between two of their own. The angle, the depth, the direction—every one of them pointed the same way Kran had likely gone.

“Those aren’t ours,” Carel murmured.

No one quite heard him over Siri’s breaking voice. He straightened up, jaw tightening. The further they went, the more of those traces he picked up: disturbed dust along the corridor edge, a smear where someone had slipped or stumbled, subtle shifts that spoke of more than just Kran moving through.

Something—or someone—was following the same path.

A knot of unease coiled tighter and tighter in Carel’s gut. He kept glancing over his shoulder, eyes skimming rooftops, alleys, shadowed doorways, the jagged lines where broken walls met the gray sky. Every time they rounded a corner, he took a second longer than everyone else, scanning. Listening.

He didn’t explain. He didn’t know how. Anything he might say would sound like paranoia, like he was jumpy and seeing patterns in random dust. So instead of voicing the dread building inside him, he just insisted they check their surroundings more often.

“Slow down,” he would say. “Wait. Let me look ahead first.”

Jane rolled her eyes once but said nothing. Tension was already high; if Carel wanted to play scout, she’d let him.

Following the half-invisible trail and the map formed by Siri’s memories, they eventually reached a broken stretch of ground near a collapsed service lane. Piled debris—shattered concrete, rusting metal beams, and old plastic crates—formed a jagged mound along one side. Half-buried beneath the rubble was the round edge of a rusted sewer cap.

Siri stopped, swallowing hard. “He used to disappear down here,” she whispered. “Said it was the fastest route. Said the smell kept people away.”

Jane grimaced at the thought. “Of course it did.”

Together, they cleared enough of the debris to get to the cap. When they pried it open, the air that gushed out reeked of rot, mold, and the kind of deep damp that clung to the lungs. It was like breathing in something that had been dead a long time.

“One at a time,” Jane said, lowering herself onto the iron rungs. “Stay close.”

They climbed down into the stinking hollow space. The world above vanished in a circle of sickly light as the cap swung shut, leaving them with only their handheld lamps. Remnant sewage clung in greasy streaks to the cracked walls. The ground squelched underfoot where muck refused to dry. Every step sent faint, sticky echoes rippling down the tunnel.

The darkness didn’t just feel present—it felt watchful. It twitched around them, alive with the sounds of distant drips, skittering claws, and something else too soft to name.

Jane led the way, her jaw clenched as the stench wrapped around them like a suffocating blanket. Siri stayed close behind her, one hand hovering near the wall for balance. The others followed, their footsteps overlapping into a slow, dragging rhythm.

Something small darted out from a crack in the wall.

A rat shot across Jane’s boot.

She let out an involuntary grunt, jerking back in reflex. Annoyed at herself for the sound, for the moment of fear, she lashed out with a sharp kick. Her boot connected with the creature, sending it slamming into the wall with a sickening thud. It slid down, leaving a dark smear on the stone.

The echo of the impact bounced once, twice.

Then, from the shadows beyond the rat’s broken body, another sound rose—too ragged, too human.

“Stay away from me!”

All of them whipped around, lamps swinging, beams slicing through the black. The light caught something pressed against the far wall, curled in on itself like a cornered animal.

A man.

Filthy. Haggard. Skin gone the color of old paper. His eyes were wide and hollow, pupils blown wide with terror. His clothes clung to him in damp patches, torn and stained with sewage and blood. Every breath looked like it hurt.

“It’s Col,” Siri whispered.

Jane blinked, trying to reconcile the image with the nightmare version they had chased before. No monstrous transformation, no tearing muscles or shifting bones, no visible mutation twisting his features. He was just a man now—just Col—crumpled in the dark, trembling as if the walls themselves were alive and pressing in.

Aboveground, earlier, Carel had stopped.

When they’d first found the sewer entrance and the others started to climb down, he’d lingered at the edge. His eyes kept drifting back toward the alleys they’d crossed to get here, to the rooftops and rusted scaffolding framing the fractured skyline.

“I’ll stand watch,” he said.

Jane, already on edge and impatient with his skittishness, snorted. “You’re kidding, right? We’re going after Col and you’re staying up here?”

He met her gaze, saying nothing at first. For a heartbeat, she thought he might change his mind and follow. Instead, his jaw hardened.

“If something followed us,” he said quietly, “you’ll want someone up top to see it coming.”

Jane heard the words, but all she felt was a sharp flash of disappointment and secondhand shame. It looked like fear dressed up as strategy, and she had no patience for it.

“Fine,” she muttered, turning away. “Stay and ‘watch.’ We’ll do the actual work.”

Carel didn’t answer. As the cap clanged shut above them and darkness swallowed the others, he stood alone in the broken street, every sense strung tight. His eyes tracked each alley mouth, each jagged edge of rooftop, every place a pair of watching eyes could hide.

He could still see the extra footprints in his mind.

Down below, Siri slowly approached Col, heart hammering against her ribs.

“Col…” Her voice broke as she knelt in front of him, the damp seeping into her knees forgotten. “It’s me. It’s Siri. You’re safe now. It’s over.”

Her hand hovered, then gently touched his arm.

Col flinched like she’d burned him. His fingers clawed at his own head, digging through greasy hair as if he could tear something out from beneath his skull.

“It’s not over,” he muttered. The words scraped out of his throat, brittle and raw. “It’s never over. You shouldn’t be here. None of you should be here.”

Jane stayed a short distance back, watching, coiled and ready. If he snapped, if the monster surfaced again, she would move. She had to. The air around them felt like it was made of glass, one wrong note away from shattering.

Siri refused to back off.

“Listen to me,” she said, the words tumbling out between uneven breaths. “Do you remember the lab? The late nights—you’d stay after everyone else left. You’d complain about the coffee, about the ventilation, about the stupid way the doors squeaked, and then you’d start talking about your theories and forget to be annoyed.”

Col’s breathing hitched.

“You promised,” she continued, voice warping around the memory. “Before the extraction mission. You promised we’d fix things, that we’d get through it together. You can’t just throw that away. Not after everything.”

Her memories came in fragments—his tired smile under harsh fluorescent lights, the way he gestured with his hands when he forgot himself, the quiet apologies he offered to no one in particular when experiments went wrong. The way he’d stay just a little longer if she was still there, as if the work was a flimsy excuse.

Each word seemed to chip away at the frozen terror in his eyes. Gradually, his breathing began to slow. The frantic rhythm in his chest eased from a panicked drum to something closer to human again. His hands slid down from his head, fingers loosening as if the pressure inside had receded, even if only by a fraction.

Siri swallowed hard, tearsblurring her vision.

“Col,” she whispered, “come back.”

Some invisible thread finally snapped. She threw her arms around him, pulling him close in a fierce, shaking hug. Her shoulders trembled as she buried her face against his neck, sobbing into his shoulder.

For a heartbeat, he didn’t move.

Then he sagged into the embrace, his body trembling in her arms. His fingers curled weakly into the back of her clothes, clinging as if she were the last solid thing in a world made of shadows.

For that single, fragile moment, there was nothing in the sewer but the sound of her muffled cries and his ragged breathing.

Then he saw it.

Something at the far edge of the tunnel—beyond the reach of their lamps, beyond the curve of light—shifted.

Not a rat. Not the lazy drip of water finding a new path down the wall. Not the ordinary dance of shadow and imagination.

A flicker.

A silhouette, just barely distinct from the darkness around it, moving with a slowness that felt deliberate. Watching. Waiting.

Col’s entire body went rigid in Siri’s arms.

He stared past her shoulder, his gaze locking onto that wrongness at the edge of sight. Every muscle tensed. Every scrap of terror that had started to drain out of him rushed back in, doubled.

He knew that presence.

He knew what it meant.

Without warning, he shoved Siri away from him, almost violently. She stumbled back, nearly slipping on the wet stone.

“Col!” Jane snapped, stepping forward. “What the hell do you think you—”

“Stay away!” he shouted, voice cracking under the weight of panic. “It’s safer if you stay away from me!”

Jane’s temper flared, but she hesitated. This wasn’t the wild aggression from before. This was fear—pure, blinding terror—not of them, but of something else.

Col wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t looking at Siri. His eyes were fixed over their shoulders, locked on the darkness deeper in the sewer.

“Don’t move,” he whispered, more to himself than to them. “Please don’t move.”

The shape in the shadows seemed to shift, stretching along the curve of the tunnel. A faint, oily sensation rolled through the air, like the world itself had just taken a breath.

Col’s breathing turned shallow. He knew that taste in the air. He knew that pressure at the back of his skull. He knew exactly what that presence meant.

Sorra.

She was here. She was coming.

And if he didn’t act—if he didn’t do something, anything—no one standing in that tunnel, no one he cared about, was going to make it out alive.

He pushed himself to his feet, swaying, eyes never leaving the dark.

Aboveground, on the broken street, Carel felt a chill run down his spine as a shadow shifted where there should have been none.

Below, in the sewer, Sorra’s unseen gaze settled on them at last.

And the chapter closed on the thin, electric silence before the first move was made.