BACKGOONS - ENTITY UNKNOWN

The mall went first.

One second there was a shuttered kiosk and a escalator grinding upward. The next, color bled out of everything. The storefronts smeared like wet paint. The floor dropped an inch that wasn't really an inch, and the sound of the mall cut out the way a song cuts out when the signal dies.

Then yellow.

Yellow wallpaper, water-stained, seamed every few feet in patterns that never quite repeated. Ceiling tiles low enough to touch, half of them stained brown at the corners. Fluorescent panels overhead, humming one flat note that never stopped. The carpet was damp and it squelched underfoot, and the air hung thick and warm, smelling of mildew, wet paper, and old glue. No doors. No windows. Just corridors branching into corridors, all of them lit the same dead yellow, all of them empty.

Somewhere far off in that maze, water dripped at a slow, even pace.

Deeper in — past a junction where someone had chalked a faded arrow and the letters A-S-Y-N-C on the wallpaper years ago — something felt the arrival.

Her head lifted.

She had been still for a long time. Crouched in a dead-end room on her haunches, motionless as furniture, black hair pooled on the wet carpet around her. The last ones had been in orange suits and they had run, and running ones were no fun until they tired. That had been weeks ago. Since then, nothing but the hum of the lights and the drip of the water.

Now this. A small pressure through the walls, like a held breath finally let out. Something new had fallen in.

She rose. She stood nearly to the ceiling tiles, and her body was the same black as the space behind the light panels, matte and soft-looking, without a single thread on it. Her breasts hung heavy and bare, dark nipples small against them, and she wore her nakedness like it had never occurred to her to be anything else. Her claws slid back into her fingertips until her hands looked almost human. Almost.

She didn't walk to the wall. She went through it.

The corridor on the other side flickered as she entered it. Two panels ahead of her stuttered, buzzing brighter, then dimmer, then steady again, as if the electricity there had lost its place for a moment. Where she stood, the yellow of the wallpaper seemed to shiver at the edges, colors smearing a half-inch out of true, like a video played on a scratched disc.

She moved low and fast along the wall, silent, the way a cat crosses a room it owns. She stopped at the next corner. Then the next. Her head turned, black eyes ringed in white, and she opened her mouth slightly and drew the air over her tongue.

Mildew. Carpet rot. And underneath it, cutting clean through all of that, a person. Warm skin. Sweat. Something living, and new, and lost.

Her eyes narrowed with something that on a human face would have been a smile.

She followed it to a long hallway and stopped just inside the mouth of it, half-hidden by the corner, and watched. At the far end of the corridor a figure stood in the flat yellow light. Small next to the scale of the walls. Alone. The scent reached her stronger here and she stood breathing it in, patient, letting it tell her things.

She did not rush out. She had learned that lesson many bodies ago. The ones who saw her too fast screamed, and screaming ones ran, and running ones had to be caught, and caught ones fought. That was a mess, and messes healed slowly even down here, and none of it was what she wanted.

What she wanted was for this one to look at her. That was always the first step. Look, then come closer, then stay.

So she waited, and while she waited her scent went ahead of her without her. It drifted down the corridor on the warm dead air. Clean and soft and feminine in a way nothing in these halls had any right to be, a smell like skin fresh from a bath, like someone's old girlfriend's pillow, like a memory of a bedroom in a house that no one could find anymore. It rolled quietly over the mildew and drowned it out.

She counted the flickers of the light above her. One. Two. Three.

Then she stepped out into the hallway, slow, and let herself be seen.

All of her. Seven feet tall and black from crown to sole, soft flesh shifting with each unhurried step, bare hips, bare thighs, bare chest, bare feet. Her hair flowed behind her longer than it should have been, moving without wind, the ends of it dragging along the wallpaper like the hem of a dress. The lights buzzed wrong along the whole stretch of ceiling above her, and the far end of the corridor seemed to bend faintly around her shape, the yellow wallpaper rippling at its edges like heat haze.

She stopped about twenty feet away. Close enough to see clearly. Far enough to leave a gap, a choice, an open corridor behind and beside.

She tilted her head. Slow. Birdlike. Her black eyes were huge and wet-looking, and the white rims of them stood out bright against her face, and they were fixed entirely, completely, on the figure in front of her.

She raised one hand. Black, clawless, soft-looking fingers. She pressed it flat against her own chest, over her heart, and held it there.

Then she beckoned. Just two fingers. A small, slow curl.

Come here.