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The Q train smelled like burnt rubber and someone's leftover Chinese food. Kai Lin kept his back against the door, trauma bag wedged between his boots, and tried not to look at the guy two seats down who'd been coughing into his sleeve for the past ten minutes.
Another twelve-hour shift. Another ride home where he couldn't sit because if he sat, he'd sleep, and if he slept, he'd miss his stop and wake up in Coney Island with his phone dead and his landlord's text about last month's rent still glowing on the lock screen.
The train lurched. Kai's hand shot out, grabbed the pole. His ribs ached where that last lift had gone wrong. The guy on the stretcher had been two-fifty, easy, and his partner Danny had been on the other end going "I got it, I got it" right up until he didn't.
Kai rolled his shoulder. Felt the pull. Nothing torn. Just another thing that would hurt worse tomorrow.
The lights flickered.
No one looked up. This was the Q. The lights always flickered.
Then the woman across from him made a sound. Soft. Wet. Like she was trying to swallow a cough and couldn't.
Kai looked.
She was young. Maybe his age. Twenty-six, twenty-seven. Dark hair pulled back, business casual, the kind of clothes that said she worked somewhere with a dress code but not a budget. Her hand was pressed to her side. Her fingers were red.
No one else was looking. Of course they weren't. This was New York. You didn't look unless someone screamed, and even then you thought about it first.
Kai moved.
He was next to her before he'd decided to be next to her, bag already open, gloves coming out of his pocket. Muscle memory. The kind you can't turn off even when you're off the clock and so tired your teeth ache.
"Hey." His voice came out steadier than he felt. "I'm a paramedic. Can you tell me what happened?"
She looked at him. Her eyes were wrong. Not the color. The color was fine. Brown, dark, normal. But the shape was wrong. Too wide. The pupils too big, like she'd been staring into a bright light and they hadn't adjusted back.
"I—" She swallowed. "I can't—"
Her hand dropped.
The blood wasn't red.
It was silver. Bright, metallic, catching the fluorescent light like liquid chrome. It ran between her fingers and dripped onto the orange plastic seat and Kai's brain did what it always did when something didn't make sense. It skipped past the question and went straight to the answer it needed.
Bleeding. Arterial, maybe. Pressure. Airway. Breathing.
"Okay." He got his hand over hers, pressed. The fabric under his palm was torn. Not cut. Torn. Like something with claws. "Stay with me. What's your name?"
She didn't answer. Her head tilted back. Her lips moved but nothing came out.
The train lurched again. Harder this time. The lights went out.
Someone swore. A phone flashlight came on. Then another. The coughing guy was standing now, trying to see.
Kai kept pressure on the wound. His other hand went to her neck, found the pulse. Fast. Thready. Bad.
"Call 911," he said. Loud enough to carry. "Tell them we need a bus at the next stop. Trauma."
No one moved.
"Now."
A woman near the front pulled out her phone. Started dialing.
The train shuddered. A sound like metal tearing. The floor tilted and Kai's shoulder hit the pole and the woman slid sideways into him. He caught her. Her weight was nothing. Too light. Like she was hollow.
Then the air changed.
It got cold. Not winter cold. Not subway-door-open cold. Cold like a freezer. Cold like the walk-in at the hospital morgue where they'd made him go once to ID a DOA whose face had been too messed up for the family.
The windows exploded.
Not shattered. Exploded. Outward. Glass and steel and something else, something that glowed blue-white and tasted like ozone, like lightning, like the moment before you touch a doorknob and get shocked.
Kai's ears popped. The woman in his arms screamed. It wasn't a human sound.
He looked up.
The train was splitting open. Not the doors. The walls. A line of light, bright enough to hurt, cutting through the ceiling like someone was dragging a welding torch through sheet metal. The edges curled. The metal glowed red, then white, then something past white that didn't have a name.
People were screaming now. Running toward the front car. The doors weren't open. They were piling up, shoving, and Kai couldn't move because he had a patient and if he let go she'd bleed out.
The light widened.
Something came through.
Kai didn't see it all at once. He saw pieces. A hand. Too many fingers. A face that wasn't a face. Eyes that glowed the same blue-white as the tear in the train.
It reached for the woman.
Kai didn't think. He pulled her back, put himself between her and the thing, and his hand went to his belt for the knife he didn't carry anymore because you couldn't bring a blade into the hospital and he'd stopped carrying it two years ago after a guy in the ER had tried to take it off him.
His fingers touched his ribs instead.
Something under his skin moved.
Not his ribs. Not bone. Something else. Something that had always been there but he'd never noticed because it was part of him the way his heartbeat was part of him. You didn't notice it until it changed.
It changed.
Heat. Not painful. Not yet. Just heat, spreading from his chest down his arm, into his hand, and when he shoved the thing back his palm hit something solid and the air around his hand exploded.
The thing screamed. It pulled back. The light flared and Kai couldn't see, couldn't breathe, and the woman's weight was gone.
She was being pulled through the tear.
He grabbed her wrist. Held on. The light was everywhere now, inside his eyes, inside his head, and he could feel the train tipping, falling, the world outside the windows wrong, not tunnel, not track, just light and cold and the sound of something breaking that was too big to be glass.
He didn't let go.
The light swallowed him.
Kai hit stone.
Not tile. Not subway platform. Stone. Cold, rough, old. The kind of stone that made you think of castles and tombs and places people didn't go anymore.
He rolled onto his side. His ribs screamed. His bag was gone. His gloves were gone. His phone was in his pocket but the screen was black and it wouldn't turn on.
The woman was next to him. Still breathing. Still bleeding silver.
He pressed his bare hand to her side. The blood was warm. That was good. That meant circulation. That meant time.
He looked up.
The sky was wrong.
Two moons. One white, one red. Both too big. Both too close. The stars between them weren't stars. They moved. Slow, drifting, like jellyfish in deep water.
Behind him, something groaned.
Kai turned.
The Q train was stuck in a wall. Not through it. In it. The front half was buried in stone and brick and something that looked like metal but bent wrong, like it was growing instead of built. The back half hung in the air, tilted, dripping sparks and fluid and pieces of safety glass.
No one else had made it through.
Just him. Just her.
The woman's hand closed on his wrist. Her grip was strong. Too strong.
"You shouldn't have followed," she whispered.
Her eyes were still wrong. But now he could see why. The pupils weren't round. They were cracked. Like someone had taken a hammer to glass and stopped just before it shattered.
"You shouldn't have pulled me back," she said.
Kai opened his mouth. Couldn't find the words. Settled for the only one that mattered.
"Why?"
She smiled. Blood on her teeth. Silver and red.
"Because now they know you're here."