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There. A break in the flow. She followed it with her eyes, mapping the way the currents bent and converged. Like channels. Like—
A path.
“Now,” she said sharply.
Julen yanked his leg backward. For a split second, nothing happened. But then the glass surged the other way.
His leg tore free with a cracking sound, and he scrambled back, dragging himself across the surface just as the space he’d been standing in collapsed inward, distorting violently before smoothing again.
“Move!” Maia snapped.
She grabbed his sleeve and pulled, dragging him sideways, following the thinner, slower-moving lines she’d tracked a second before. Behind them, the creature shifted again. This time it was closer.
The pressure spiked so hard Maia’s vision blurred. “Don’t stop,” she said, breath shaking now. “It’s pulling everything straight in. Don’t fight it, just don’t go where it’s strongest.”
“That’s not a direction, Maia!”
“It is if you watch it!”
She shoved him forward as the glass dipped beneath her own foot this time, her stomach lurching as the surface softened, but it held. Barely.
Julen caught her arm, hauling her upright. They moved together now, uneven, half-running, half-sliding; cutting across the invisible currents rather than against them.
Curiously, the creature didn’t chase them. But she realised it didn’t need to. The world bent towards it. She tried not to look at it again. She couldn’t afford to.
“Left,” she said suddenly, pulling Julen with her.
“What, why—”
“Just move!”
They staggered across another shifting seam just as the ground behind them dipped sharply, the glass folding inward in a silent, unnatural collapse. They were past it. The pressure didn’t vanish, but it did lessen. Enough to breathe and think, anyway.
Maia slowed first, her legs shaking as she came to a stop. Julen stumbled beside her, catching himself with both hands against the ground. For a long moment, they didn’t talk to one another.
Behind them, the surface settled and the creature stood where they had been moments before. It was still, watching them. Or perhaps it was not watching at all. This thing wanted nothing in particular. It simply existed, and the glass and the Fracture existed around it. Then, slowly, impossibly, it sank back beneath the glass.
Gone.
Julen pulled himself upright, but when he put weight on his leg he winced. The glass had left something behind. Not a wound exactly, but a coldness that went deeper than skin. He didn’t mention it. Neither did she.
Instead he let out a broken laugh, as if the world had come apart and nobody told them. “What,” he said hoarsely, “was that?”
Maia shook her head, still staring at the place it had disappeared.
“Something that lives in the glass,” she replied. “Something that feeds on something else, not on us.” She paused. “I don’t think it even noticed we were people.”
Julen wiped his face with the back of his hand, and his laugh turned nervous. “It nearly pulled me inside out.”
“I know. And yet you survived another glass creature. Who’d have thought it?”
She made herself look ahead as they both walked forward instinctively, both too afraid to look behind them.
The glass thinned beneath their feet, stone returning slowly. Maia’s legs still shook. Once, glancing down, she saw her reflection in the glass move slightly after she did.
The ground changed again. It didn’t shift as much anymore, bringing more stability, as though whatever force had shaped that space had been left behind.
Maia noted the terrain ahead, the glass giving way to stone. It wasn’t a natural shape in the earth, rather it looked like it had been cut.
