UPDATE: The Buildings Are Hungry and the Plague Can Speak

Besides, he needed to get there quickly because, well. The reports. Marion sounded alarmed on the phone, though she’s always the first one to plaster a veneer of calm onto any situation. By training, of course, but, he thinks, also by disposition. This time though, upset. A hitch in the throat, a shudder of the lungs, maybe, when she said the word “attack.” Some kind of bioweapon used, making animals do weird things. What things? He doesn’t know yet. He’ll have to see. Things are usually not as bad as they sound. And when they’re bad, they’re worse.

His phone vibrates on the dashboard. He glances at the screen, trying not to lose view of the street. It’s a message from Mark and Sloane. His best friends went into the game two days ago. They didn’t have to specify which game—there’s only one that matters. The time’s craze, everyone’s doing it, disappearing into its VR void for weeks, more. Some people go so far as living in it permanently, coming out briefly, ashen-skinned and bleary-eyed, to claim citizenship of a country that only exists in fragments and dreams conjured by spectacled nerds in some basement, funded by a billionaire in his glass tower, even as the game is built around the idea that there’s no freedom under capitalism.

He scoffs at the marketing without meaning to. Employment is bullying, the game logic goes. Paywalls are violence. All the clichés in one download. The developers have been hyping a big upgrade, an experience like no other. Not free, of course, for all their anti-capitalist talk. It’s hard to deliver a revolutionary message when you’re funded by the very corporations whose interests you’re trying to compromise. And yet, people have lapped it up, preordering in the thousands—the game has never been more popular.

Mark and Sloane insisted they’re not like those people. They called it a vacation. Just a break from everything, just a few days. Still timed it so they would be inside during the new release, though—the devs promised it would be seamless, if spectacular. His friends begged him to come along. Vowed to update him whenever anything interesting happened after he said no.

“You’re missing out,” the message says now. “Drinks last night on the beach. Scaling the skeleton of a giant prehistoric beast today. The view is stunning. This is the perfect holiday, mate.” A weird thing to say about a game that purports to be about humanity’s marginal role in the world, about how animals are persons and property is theft. The devs have been called everything from anarchovegan communists to ecoterrorists, though they have claimed none of these labels themselves.

There’s a picture of the view: a vast plane, a broken skyline silhouetted against an orange sunset in the distance. 8-bit aesthetic tugging at their specific nostalgias, so spot-on it’s almost manipulative. “Braving the city tomorrow. Got some workers to save,” the message concludes.

Nate types a response, sends it. “I’m a worker,” it says. “Come save me.” The message fails immediately. Then he remembers; Sloane told him. One-way communication. You can send missives from the world of the game, as many as you want, as often as you want, but you shouldn’t expect a response. It’s like talking to God, or the spirits of those who’ve moved on. They rarely talk back.

He would have liked to go on a holiday, even a fake one, in a fake world. He remembers playing games as a boy, the Enchanted Caverns, a hundred other people crowding in the same room, the building designed like a cave, with its skeletons and monsters, its few treasures. It was never the treasures he was after, though; it was the people. The common goal, the common suspension of disbelief, for a time. Something unspoken binding them together.

But this was before. Now he’s busy. And so responsible. For Brandon, for Connor. For everyone, really. It’s who he is. If he lets loose, even for a day, even for a minute, things fall apart, don’t they? People broke on his watch before. Never again. People? Well. Not just. The only people who matter.

He won’t think of this. Not today, and not on the way to work the day that very work managed to get Marion upset.

Nate swipes away his friends’ message and brings up one of the images Marion sent: an unnaturally large flock of pigeons that blots all sky out of the frame. The image is bright, washed out, as if overexposed. It’s the birds; they glow, luminescent.

He zooms in. Up close, the birds are wrong. Empty eyes, beaks gaping too wide, almost dislocated. Still, the creatures fly, indifferent to their own monstrosity. He zooms out again. Behind the pigeons, barely within the frame, there’s a tear in what little can be seen of the sky. He has no other word for it except a wound. Something that will scar.

What’s he supposed to do with this?

He imagines what the Defence Department Media guys’ job might have looked like in previous decades. Morale-boosting reels and propaganda, black-and-white films of ponderous war machines jerking relentlessly ahead. Soldiers smiling soundlessly at the camera. His predecessors had it easy. Things had been simpler, once. But then, surely every guy thinks that about the one who came before.

Finally, the office building looms finally, in all its brutalist bulk. A hymn to efficiency and to the crushing of human individuality for the sake of things so large they’re measured in epochs, not lifetimes. He parks and takes the stairs. His ankle creaks pleasantly. A poor substitute for a walk to work, this, but it’ll have to do.

The team is already congregated in what they lovingly call “the conflict room.” Lights dimmed, footage playing on the big screen. The video looks like something taken by a bodycam, though it’s a bit too decent for that. Nate has seen enough bodycam videos to know that they never look this perfect. The grain is always a little off, the focus never this crisp. The footage shows a vast industrial building, disused. The camera approaches the building through an alley and then moves up a staircase. There’s a door at the top of the stairs, a heavy wooden one, the kind no one uses anymore, certainly not in a building like this. Something out of a castle.

“Look at this,” Marion says, and the camera turns around for a split second, before moving on. There’s no door anymore. No staircase. Just a wall, far back.

“Was it edited?” Nate asks, but Marion tells him no, it’s raw. The guys checked already.

The camera moves on towards the light at the far end of the space, then emerges onto a terrace. Looks up at the same gloomy day as the photo, but now the birds are making glowing triangles in the sky.

The footage ends. Marion turns up the lights. He squints without meaning to. A headache slowly gathers itself behind his forehead.

“Where’s this?” he asks.

“We’re not sure,” Donald replies. “That’s the thing. We just don’t know.” He pauses. “And they won’t tell us how they got their hands on it,” he adds.

Of course. This apparatus runs on secrets. “But is it real?” Nate asks.

“Yes.”

“The reports said ‘terrorist attack.’” Nate tries to keep his voice cool, though the vagueness of it all is irritating. Just about manages it. “This looks like… I don’t know. Spillage? Some kind of chemical agent that affects these birds.” Breathe in, exhale. “Maybe an accident. If it’s real.”

“There was a message with the footage, too, classified,” Donald says. “So no, not an accident, for sure.”

Nate wants to laugh. “You can’t seriously be buying this,” he says, though he knows it doesn’t actually matter what they believe. This is not an investigative department. They only handle the media.

Okay. Get the basics. “Right,” Nate says. “Who’s behind it?”

Donald looks at his own hands, his intertwined fingers. He only gets like this when he has to say something he doesn’t want to. “It’s domestic,” he finally says.

A stab behind the left eye. Nate pinches the bridge of his nose. “What do they want?” he asks. “Whoever this is.”

Marion shakes her head. “They don’t know yet. They’re looking into it. Everyone is.”

“So they have no clue what’s actually happening, if anything is, but they still want us to spin this.” Spin what? They’re a media department, not magicians. What is this? Some well-done prank, most likely. Or some kind of viral ad campaign for that blasted game.

Right? No, of course not. But a guy can wish.

Marion pulls up the screen to reveal the whiteboard behind it. People managed to come in much earlier than he did, apparently; his walk sacrificed for nothing. A smattering of ideas is already scribbled in blue marker: Drone show. Prank—of course someone’s thought of this already. Nuclear testing. Bioweapons. Military exercise. All ideas that could work, could have worked once upon a time, but won’t, not in this day and age.

“Have news outlets gotten hold of this yet?”

Laticia looks up from her tablet. “There are already some stills on social media networks. The guys are looking into it.” The guys are always looking into something. “We don’t know if they’re leaked from our footage, or if they were generated independently.”

Right. How is he supposed to help manage conflict if he doesn’t even know who’s involved? Mediation needs overview, an understanding of who wants what and why; instead he’s in a car with no windows, hurtling down a road no one around him has ever travelled before. He can’t control this. But he can rally his people. Give them something to do, a sense of purpose. “So we hold on, then. Come up with some narratives. It’s what we do best, isn’t it? I want your proposals in an hour. I’ll be in my office.”

At this, everyone disperses, looking more determined than flustered, which is good, though it’s a bit unnerving to see the same techniques that work on the public also work on people who already know all the tricks.

Nate retreats into his office, rests his head on one hand while fumbling for the painkillers he keeps in the drawer with the other. Marion walks in as he’s swallowing two without water.

“Are you all right?” she asks, closing the door behind her. She presses against it, and her eyes catch the sunlight in a specific way. He feels something. Puts it away, filed under Cold Cases.

“Sure,” he says.

Marion walks in and sits across his desk without being invited. “Truly?” she asks. There’s no more professionalism in her voice now. She’s just a friend. She cares.

“I’m fine,” he says. He leans back in his chair, his fingers rubbing his temples.

“Connor and Brandon doing okay?” she asks. She gestures towards something beyond the windows. For a moment he thinks she means what happened to Brandon (he corrects himself: what that man did to Brandon), even though it’s been years (five already, my god). He wonders if he’s told her about that. But no, of course he wouldn’t have. He barely manages to call it what it was silently, in his own mind: abuse of a minor. Statutory rape.

“With everything going on?” Marion adds, as if prompting him to respond. She reaches across the desk to touch his hand lightly. Looks at him. Suggestively? Maybe. He thinks she’s been flirting with him for a while, but then, he’s never been able to tell for sure, neither with women, nor with men. Connor had to practically throw his half-naked self at him before he finally took the hint.

He pushes his eyebrows together, which makes the pain worse. He forces himself to relax his forehead again. “I don’t think they know.” He looks out at the blank sky, the steel and concrete city below. “Not yet, anyway.” He closes his eyes. “Maybe this whole thing will blow over before they find out.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

No, he doesn’t. He opens his eyes again. He thinks of something poetic about the sky. Something about screens, blank words, the clouds blurring the borders between nations. Perhaps he could tell these things to Marion. Would she understand? But no. He could never. And it would probably be out of character enough to alarm Marion. Would she call security on him? Come quick; something body-snatched the head of department. My boss speaks in tongues.

“Did you need anything?” Nate asks.

Marion is already standing up but, at that, she pauses, looks him in the eyes again. “You don’t think this is like last time,” she says. “Do you?”

He knows what she means, of course. “Last time” is what they call that time when there was no incident, but their department had them conjure one out of thin air, for their own purposes. Spun reality like sugar, made exquisite shapes out of it: an enemy at the gates, terror itself prowling the streets. So you better be vigilant. Even better, let us be vigilant for you. Do you know where your children are? Hand over your phone data, and we’ll tell you, no problem. Yes, biometrics, too. Free of charge.

“No,” he says. “I don’t.” Words. What does he know?

Marion nods and presses her lips together into something that’s not quite a smile. She leaves him alone.

He downloads the footage from the cloud and watches it again. Near the end, there’s a handful of people, a small crowd. What is that called? A cluster. A gaggle. They’re gathered around something on the ground, and they’re looking up, pointing at the triangles in the sky. He can’t see what it is they’re gathered around, and besides, the camera is not looking at it, how could it? Under that sky.

He lets out a long breath. All he wants to do is press his face into his hands forever. His head is killing him. He thinks, maybe, he should cry. That helps sometimes, doesn’t it? All that tension crowding behind the eyes. Maybe he should crumble to the floor and weep, like Connor used to, in Brandon’s bad days. Like Brandon used to, when he thought neither of his fathers was looking. Does he still?

He should have gone with Mark and Sloane into the game. It’s not really a vacation game, but it does seem like a kind of escape. He’s seen gameplay: armed players storming office buildings. They’re meant to release employees stuck there repeating the same motions again and again. Meaningless things, like endlessly photocopying a single document, or slipping envelopes into a hole that deposits them back onto their desks, forever, on a loop. The repetition reduces them to husks, which is why they can’t escape on their own, and so they’re stuck in the belly of the devouring beast that is capitalism, waiting to be digested. A rather crude metaphor, if you ask him. But then, nobody’s coming to his rescue.

His phone buzzes again. Another message from Mark, right on time. “There are children in masks,” the text reads. “Foxes and wolves. They run around the city terrorizing people. If they get you, you lose everything.” Mark doesn’t specify what he means by everything. Another message lights up the screen as soon as he swipes away the first one. “People are getting sick, now,” it says. “It’s probably part of the upgrade. It made everything sharper, somehow. We think maybe it’s a plague, but we’re not sure how you catch it. Not airborne, or we’d already have it.” On the next line: “Sloane says you’d like it here.”

By noon, more footage has come in along with the directive to address it. The new videos are disturbing: carnivorous deer, people dead on the ground. A deserted building. More of the bird triangles in the gloomy sky above. And this time he recognizes the site, which means so will everyone else. It’s on the outskirts of the city, this their city, out in the dead industrial zone where kids go to LARP and parkour. There’s no way to contain this. People will be in the streets within the hour. Hotheads in other departments have already started calling this an “invasion.” There’s talk of declaring a national emergency, imposing a curfew, which he thinks is the worst thing they could do. Curfews and half-truths is how you get riots.

Another message from Mark blinks on his screen. “We’re in deep shit,” it starts, but Nate only skims the rest. Something about that plague, about people disappearing, hearing voices in their hearts. Nate swipes the notification away. No time for games now.

He prepares two statements. One to be circulated internally, urging a conservative approach, and one for the public, urging calm, and assuring everything is under control. A lie, of course; nothing is under control. No one knows what’s happening. The other side, whoever it is, has made no declarations that he knows of. So he just has to make things up. Switch the narrative later, if he has to. If there is a later, his mind supplies, but he ignores it. He thinks of triangles in the sky, glowing birds. Finds the idea comforting.

After twelve hours in the office, he manages to sneak away. Gets home. The painkillers have done their work. His husband has made dinner. Vegan Wellington, red wine. Brandon is joining them, that’s a first. Is there an occasion he has forgotten about? He scans his mental calendar, comes up empty. He washes and then sits at the table opposite Connor.

“You went to a lot of trouble,” Nate says, like some Mad Man from the 1950s, and Connor brushes his hand lightly.

“You work too hard,” his husband says, to match.

Nate cuts into the slice of Wellington on his plate and puts the forked piece in his mouth. He tastes balsamic vinegar and beetroot. Something else earthy that he can’t quite place. “It’s delicious,” he says.

“How’s work?” Connor asks.

Nate glances at Brandon, who’s eating in silence. Notices the glass of red wine in front of him, begins to protest, then thinks better of it. Maybe just this once. Given everything.

“Not now,” Nate whispers, as if his son won’t be able to hear even though he’s sitting right there.

Connor’s mouth twitches, but he tries to sound cheerful as he changes the subject. “So listen, we were thinking we could go away for a couple of days,” he says. “Go on a road trip, see the lakes. If you can get a day or two off work.” Maybe this was always the subject. Maybe this was always what this family dinner was about. A setup. Father and son colluding to ambush him.

Nate sets his fork on the plate, careful not to make too much sound, any sudden movements that could be interpreted as annoyance—or worse, anger. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t think that’s a good idea right now.”

Brandon looks up. “Is this about those weird videos?” He laughs. “I mean, these are obviously just promo for the new game release, right?”

Nate feels himself frown. Perhaps that’s the narrative they should have gone with, if that’s what people already believe. “You know I’m not supposed to talk about work.”

Brandon scoffs. “Come on! I can’t believe the government just fell for it. Usually you guys at least pretend to know what you’re doing.”

Nate bristles at his son lumping him together with “the government.” He is, of course, part of it. But he likes to consider his department somewhat independent. Artistic even. The rebel branch of an arcane institution.

Briefly, he allows himself to remember himself at his son’s age. Fingers blackened with charcoal, his imagination filling sketch pad after sketch pad, mostly with bodies: reclining bodies, bodies bent, bodies standing or entwined. Sometimes, animals: a lion, a horse, a leopard. He could forget everything when he drew. Let go of anything. So he did it often. Why did he need to do so much letting go? He’d have given anything to keep doing it. But art school hadn’t been a realistic choice for him. Media was the next best thing.

“I’m sorry,” Nate says again, arranging his face into something neutral. “There’s just no way for me to go away right now.”

Brandon pushes back his chair. It scrapes against the wooden floor. He gets up and leaves without another word. After a few moments, the door to his room bangs closed.

Connor pushes around the food on his plate. “Well,” he says.

“Sorry. I could have handled this better.”

His husband looks at him. “Handled?”

“You know what I mean.”

“We’re your family. Not a wild beast to be handled.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s work. Things are pretty insane.”

Connor’s expression softens, but only marginally. Nate can tell though. He can always tell. Knows his husband’s face like a language: its inflections, its grammar, its idiolectal quirks. He’s fluent in it.

“How so?” Connor asks. “You’re not talking about those videos, are you? Because Brandon is probably right. Those are obviously fake.”

“You’ve seen them?”

“Sure. Who hasn’t?”

Nate thinks of them. The bright birds. The quiet people below. Shuts his eyes to them.

But his husband and son are right. They must be. The videos are part of the new game release, not real, and they just fell for them like amateurs. Right? Except, is that any better? After all, he and his family of all people know what the virtual can do to the real.

Nate gets up, walks around the table, hugs his husband’s shoulders from behind. “Right,” he says. “Of course.” Connor turns to face him. “But maybe you should pack a bag, just in case. For you and Brandon. Be ready to leave quickly.”

Connor’s face is serious now, though there’s still some disbelief left over in the corners of his mouth. That’s good. That’s better. Better not to lose hope this early. Cling to something, anything.

Connor stands up and embraces him. He kisses his cheek, caresses his short-cropped hair the way he likes it. “And you?” Connor asks.

“I’ll be right behind you. Of course.”

“Okay.” A pause. Then, his husband whispers in his ear before walking away. “You think you’re the dependable one, don’t you?” he asks. “Even though half the time you have no idea what’s going on in your own home.”

Nate doesn’t know what to say to that. There’s nothing to say. His cheeks burn. It’s true, after all. Though he tries, it’s true. Has always been true.

Nate visits the site in the industrial zone with a small team, even though that’s not part of their job description. He made an argument about it being important to the authenticity and integrity of their reporting. People will buy anything if you say it with authority.

The place has been under a microscope ever since it was identified. Forensics, animal behaviourists, soil experts. Probably others whose specialties he doesn’t even know exist.

Marion is there, too, standing closer to him than she has to. He finds her presence comforting and tries not to think about that. There are no birds in the sky, no deer. His face is numb. They walk the perimeter of the warehouse, which is what the building turns out to be. Their footfalls don’t make sound, as if someone turned the world’s volume down. “Do you hear that?” he asks Marion, stomping his foot on the ground.

“No,” she says. She scans the area, the expression on her face alert but calm. “It’s like someone put a silencer on the earth,” she adds, and he thinks that would only be possible if the earth were a firearm, and isn’t that a weird thought to carry around in one’s head?

On the ground under where the triangle had been, there’s a circle with a radius of about ten feet where the ground looks different. The video footage had shown blurry figures moving along its perimeter. They looked like people, except they were flickering, as if they were but projections, disturbed by static or a bad connection. Then the figures fell to the ground and the deer approached, proceeded to devour them. There’s no one here now, and nothing left of those people. A neat kind of carnage.

A wooded area stands just beyond the warehouse. He imagines deer looking back at them from the edge of those woods, muzzles bloodied, eyes indecipherable.

Someone takes samples from the area within the circle. He approaches and pinches the earth there, gloveless. “Don’t,” Marion protests, fishing a pair of gloves out of her backpack.

He does. Rubs the soil between his fingers. It feels chalky. Like flour, or finely ground bone.

Resigned, Marion puts away the gloves she waved in front of his face. “What do you think?” she asks.

He shrugs. Not his area of expertise. Not his department, even. They should be more concerned with the poetics of this thing. He is. His mind supplies surrealist aesthetics: a world flattened and two-dimensional, a dryly lit corner between buildings, overseen by the shadow of a cypress tree. Something out of de Chirico. The circle as a portal, or a place of baptism, a dark precursor. Ideology at work, turning people into food for unheimlich animals.

“Some sort of weapon?” Marion presses.

“Maybe,” Nate says. “Or we’ve been made into unwitting extras to some promo material.”

“What?” Marion asks.

“Nothing.” I do need a vacation, he thinks. A road trip, those lakes. I want a drink. With a bloody umbrella in it.

“There are more reports of animals behaving weirdly,” Marion says, glancing at her phone. “In the city.”

“Weirdly how?”

“Rabid red foxes trying to get into houses. Pikas harassing hikers. Giraffes charging at cars on A5.”

He looks at her, eyebrow raised, he can’t help it. “Giraffes?”

“Zoo escape artists, apparently.” She pauses. “The working theory is that whatever was released into the atmosphere is affecting animals.”

“And humans?”

Marion shrugs. “I feel fine?” Again, not their area of expertise.

“Right,” he says. He can’t shake the feeling that he’s stepped into… something. A painting. Someone’s imagination. Did they all put on their VR headsets back at the office and he just doesn’t remember?

He’s still thinking about de Chirico when they’re asked to leave. The containment team has arrived; that’s how it goes. First the science, then the containing. They speak in jargon, in code, in a secret language consisting entirely of acronyms. Their boots crunch relentlessly across the ground, their white plastic suits glint in the sun. They’re barrelling into action, sweeping the area of its vestiges, like a military operation.

On the way back to the office, the car passes groups of people protesting, demanding clarity, peace, a ceasefire even, though no shots have been fired. He thinks of invisible chemical agents in the air, descending on them, on him, on his husband and son, on everyone, doing their inconspicuous damage, effecting their tiny change. Someone throws a rock at the window he’s leaning against, and he pulls back, startled.

“I’m sorry about that. Are you okay, sir?” the driver asks, and Nate nods. The rock left behind a tiny scuff on the glass, like the footprint of a snowflake. “I’ll take us through a less crowded route.” The vehicle swerves abruptly, and they disappear into the network of alleyways that spiderweb out of the main arteries of the city. His face is still numb. He touches it, feels nothing. Is it his face that can’t feel, or his fingers?

He thinks the person who threw the rock had the head of a fox. He imagines himself walking into the office and announcing he’s solved the mystery, that what’s happening is the game is spilling over into the real world, consuming it. He imagines himself believing it. Would he be laughed off, or believed? He’d be laughed off, even if, deep down, he were believed.

Back at work, there is a meeting he didn’t call for. His team are discussing the soil. “Not our expertise,” he reminds them. The worst thing the Media branch of the Defence Department can do is fall for their own lies. Even when they’re not actually lies.

The guys seem undeterred.

“Carbon-dated to the mid-nineteenth century,” one of them says. “And there’s some other stuff they didn’t expect mixed in.”

“Bones?” Nate asks, the feel of that powder still on his skin, as if embedded in the grooves of his fingertips.

The guy looks at him, eyebrows arched, with something like admiration mixed with suspicion. “How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Unlucky, more like. Yes, bones. But, get this.” The guy pauses for effect. “They could identify some of them.”

“Oh?”

“Yes! There’s a database of historical figures’ DNA, obtained as part of a big research project or other. And it turns out some of the DNA found in that circle belongs to famous people. Artists, musicians, and the like.”

“Like who?”

The guy brings up the list on the screen and reads out the ones he recognizes. “Goya. Blake. Dalí. Woolf. Lovecraft, that racist.”

He spots de Chirico’s among the names, and the feeling of having stepped into someone’s imagination returns. Here are all their artistic influences, he thinks, ground down into fine dust and thrown back into the world.

With this feeling, the headache returns too.

Before he heads home, he gets on the phone with someone from Defence. They tell him to keep delivering a steady stream of reassurances to the public. “It’s all under control, the government is taking care of things, just follow our instructions, etc.,” the person intones, as if that’s all there is to his job. Something a five-year-old could do, and that not even a five-year-old would buy.

“But is it?” Nate asks.

A pause on the other side of the line. “Is it what?”

“Under control.”

The person laughs. “We’ll both pretend you didn’t ask this,” they say and hang up.

He finds Connor sitting at the table with Brandon, drinking tea from mismatched mugs he doesn’t remember having seen before. They look up as he enters. He thinks of the deer, the terrible red, glistening. “What’s this?” Nate asks, “Some kind of secret meeting I wasn’t invited to?” meaning to sound mischievous, playful even, but then his phone vibrates with a message from Mark: “I can’t get hold of Sloane. I’m worried. It’s been days. She went into…”

“You can’t go away with us, fine,” his son says. “But can you at least stop looking at your phone for one second?” He sounds angry, his voice hoarse, as if he’d been shouting, or crying.

Something cold spreads through his torso, starting at the navel. “I’m sorry,” Nate says, his phone already face-down on the table. “It’s just my friends—” Mark and Sloane, he wants to say, but then he’s unsure if Brandon even knows his friends’ names—“something’s wrong—”

Brandon downs his tea in one go and leaves the table before his father can finish his sentence. Connor shakes his head and follows their son.

Nate stays where he is, standing, counting his breaths until the cold feeling dissipates. It only takes a couple of minutes. Then he retreats to the bedroom, sits on the bed without showering, and listens to his husband and son’s hushed voices for a while. When Connor returns, he looks tired, not mad.

“Is he all right?” Nate asks.

Connor nods. He climbs on the bed and they hold each other, without words, until they fall asleep.

But then Nate starts awake again. Checks his phone—not even thirty minutes have passed. There are no more messages from Mark. He imagines the world of their game, the wild vegetation, the broken skyline of the city. The children in their masks.

Careful not to wake Connor, he slips out of bed. The air is chilly on his bare skin. He goes to the window, gazes at the dark expanse outside. There are fires near the city center. The distant sound of sirens. Someone’s already taking care of things.

He puts his fingers on the glass. It feels like nothing. Not even cold. He wishes there were a voice in his heart, like there is in the game, to tell him what to do, who he is. Other things, too; something terrifying or comforting, it doesn’t matter. Anything other than this quiet.

Connor is fast asleep. Nate leaves the room and tiptoes to his son’s bedroom, cracks the door to peek at him. The boy is on his side, his face turned away. Nate can only see the back of his head. He realizes this with some amount of relief, followed by shame. He can’t look at him. Can’t look at his son without shrinking with guilt, with how could you, how did you not. Still, all he wants to do is look at him. That perfection which carries a small, imperfect part of him inside it.

Brandon calls Connor Dad and him Father, like he’s some kind of Victorian figure, distant and severe. Nate doesn’t feel severe, but maybe he is. People are judged by their actions, after all, not their unexpressed inner complexities. Not by the unspoken monologues of their hearts.

Brandon’s abuser was someone the boy met online, playing a game. He doesn’t know what game. Backgammon, maybe, or cards. Nate didn’t ask. Abuser is a word he took a long time to get used to saying, at least in his head—they don’t talk about it out loud. Still, the word does not feel quite right, though he doesn’t know which one would. This is one situation where reaching for the right words seems out of his depth. Instead, he thinks: I should have known he was unhappy. I should have seen the signs. I should have been the kind of father who notices these things. I should have blocked his internet access. I should have taken away his phone. I should have taken him to an island, raised him there. I should have taught him to fish. I should have listened more talked more loved him more I should have—

He wakes on the couch, a blanket arranged on top of him, tucked carefully between his body and the cushions. Connor is speaking with someone in the kitchen. Nate can’t tell who it is, or what they’re talking about.

There’s a message from Mark on his phone. He reads it. It’s the ramblings of a man who is no longer well: “Update: the plague is making everyone, everything, hungry, even the buildings. They’re eating the space around them. I saw one gnaw at the sky, saw people eating clouds. The world is so simple. Do you see? Anything can devour you, so you must adapt. There’s equality only in consumption. You must know your predator and change to meet it. You are what eats you.”

There’s also a message from Marion. People are disappearing, it says. The city is emptying out. The rest are looting the closed shops. There are reports of gangs of masked children running around, breaking into homes, and for a moment he thinks he’s still reading Mark’s message, but no, this is real. This is here. An old man was found tied to a tree. When they asked him who’d done that to him, he said it was a boy with the head of a wolf.

Nate puts down his phone and joins Connor in the kitchen. “Who were you talking to?” he asks.

Connor shrugs. “A friend,” he says. He wonders why he doesn’t specify which friend, then remembers he doesn’t actually know who his husband talks to every day. And Connor has never met Mark and Sloane.

Connor gestures towards his own phone. “Have you seen these?” He holds up the screen. It’s a picture of one of those bird triangles, glowing in the sky. It’s right downtown. The clouds seem pixelated, and the edges of the buildings are blurry, as if they’re fusing together, but, below, he recognizes the exact spots. That’s the pizza place they used to take their son to when he was a kid. That’s the park where he first kissed his husband, his hand cupping the back of his head.

“Some people claim they can see things beyond the clouds, marvellous things,” Connor continues. Is it him, or does his husband sound dreamy? Not terrified or worried, but calm. Almost eager.

Nate takes Connor’s phone and scrolls down. His feed is full of pictures and videos of everything happening, reality breaking down all around them. There’s no containment here. No spinning left to do. Maybe there never was. People are linking the events to the game. At least someone else said it. One asks: “What if this is an invitation? What if it’s better on the other side?”

“Did you pack a bag?” he asks Connor.

“Yes?”

“Get Brandon. We should go.”

It takes a few moments too long for Connor to respond. He puts down his coffee. “Brandon’s not here,” he says finally.

“What? Where is he?”

Connor looks away. “He said he’d go downtown with friends.”

“Downtown? And you let him? There’s going to be a curfew in a couple of hours.”

Connor gives him a look that could cut through glass. “There’s no letting, you know. He’s not a child.”

He is, though. A child. People don’t magically become adults when they turn eighteen. Nate says nothing. Studies the kitchen table. The grain of the wood, the grooves on it. He feels as if he’s never seen this table before. “We’ll go to the office,” he says finally. “Okay? If we’re going downtown, it’s probably one of the safest places to be. We’ll try to find Brandon from there. Then we can all get out of the city.”

Before his husband goes to fetch the bag he packed, he caresses Nate’s cheek.

Something shudders in his chest at the touch. He hadn’t realized how much he needed this morsel of tenderness, how close to shattering he is.

“It will be fine,” Connor says. He’s almost smiling now. “Don’t worry.”

And just like that, just for a moment, magically, he doesn’t.

As they leave together, Nate looks back at the house. And though it has not really changed, though it still looks exactly like his house, he has the strange sensation of unfamiliarity. As if the house has suddenly grown uncanny, or is now a copy of itself. It reminds him of the time he saw an X-ray of his own torso. The alien sacs of his lungs, the shadow of his heart. Things he possessed, things he was, even, but that were not truly his.

They take the back roads to avoid riot police. On the way downtown, there’s another message from Mark. A voice message this time. Nate plays it for Connor. “Something’s happening, man,” Mark’s high-pitched voice says. “We’re lost. I don’t know what to do. There’s this voice in my heart now, whispering all the time of things I don’t understand. Beautiful, terrible things.” The message is interrupted by static, ending with a voice that no longer sounds like Mark’s: “I think I’m sick. I got it, whatever it is. The buildings are hungry, and the plague can speak.”

His heart races again. He avoids Connor’s eyes, afraid of what deranged calm he might find there. He puts on the radio and focuses on the road instead. The show host’s theory about what’s happening is what most people seem to be thinking now: that the terrorist attack and the much-anticipated game release are one and the same. The theory is supported by the fact that some of the game developers have been arrested, though information about their identities or the charges against them is spotty. Fragments of an interview with one of them, purportedly predating the arrests, slip through the radio.

“Technology can save you,” the developer says, voice distorted.

“How can technology save us?” the interviewer asks.

“It shows you where the seams are,” the distorted voice says.

“But is this enough?” the interviewer’s voice asks.

The rest of the interview is lost to static.

“Such facile bullshit,” Nate mumbles as they pass a flaming trash can. There seems to be one every few hundred yards.

“I’m sure that’s not even the real guy,” Connor says, as if that means anything anymore, as if the world is not past authenticity already, as if it hasn’t been so for years.

“You’re probably right,” he says. He turns off the radio.

They pass a handful of running people. They’ve seen groups like them before. They’re holding baseball bats and shovels, though they have yet to see anyone digging. Soon they run into a barricade of sandbags and pavement slabs. They have to continue on foot.

“It’s not far,” he says, and realizes Connor has never been to his office. How can that be true? He’s been sharing his life with his family. But what has he been sharing?

There’s screaming in one of the ransacked shops. He wants to go, see what’s happening, but he knows they need to carry on, get to where they’re going. Connor doesn’t even flinch.

“You’re so calm,” he tells his husband. It’s not an accusation, he doesn’t think. Just an observation.

Connor smiles. “Would you rather I freak out?”

“No,” he says. “Of course not.” They don’t stop walking. “I just… I don’t get how you do it.”

“You were always the one trying to control things, not me,” Connor says. “You thought the solution to what happened to Brandon, what happened to us, was to hold on tighter.” He looks him in the eye without stopping.

“Yes,” Nate says. He has to say yes.

“And I thought the solution was to surrender.” Connor gestures at the world around them. The burning, unravelling world, the rioting world. “People have been looking for an escape for so long. Maybe someone finally figured out how to give them what they want.”

Is this what I want? he wonders. To escape? Find a hole in the sky, sneak through?

But they’ve arrived. He swipes them through the mouth of the building and guides Connor up the stairs.

They run into Marion in the corridor outside his office. She stares at Connor for a few moments, then introduces herself too enthusiastically. She then forgets about his husband and turns all her attention on him.

“Donald was arrested,” she says. “Something about a leak. Now they’re looking for the game designers.”

“They found them,” Nate says. “Or some of them.”

“This is really happening, isn’t it?” Marion asks. “It’s the game. That’s the invasion.”

Yes, he wants to say. Except it’s not really an invasion. Not a spilling or a rupture, but a consuming. We are inside it. It is larger than us. We are within its organism, waiting to be digested.

He nods. Marion looks past him, at the stairs.

“Where are you going to go?” he asks her.

“Home,” she says. “I think? I don’t feel like being here anymore. So I’m going home.” Then she flickers before his eyes. A momentary thing; she’s there one second, then gone, then back again, thin lines bisecting her face, trailing from the tips of her hair.

“Are you all right?” Nate asks, fighting the instinct to take a step back.

“Oh yes,” she says. She sounds cheerful. “Yes, of course. Just coming down with something, I guess.” She touches his shoulder lightly, glances at Connor again. Then she’s gone.

His phone blinks with another message from Mark. Nate plays it for both of them. There’s no reason to exclude Connor anymore. There was never any reason. “I found Sloane,” the message says. “She’s got a horse mask on. I can’t take it off. And she’s sick, like she’s not all there, not all the time. I can’t trust my eyes anymore. I’ve tried logging off, but I can’t. You’re supposed to go to those triangles in the forest and pray to the glowing birds. That’s how you disconnect since the update. I tried, it’s not working. But maybe that doesn’t matter anymore.” He pauses, and in that pause they can hear his ragged breath, like something grinding against metal. There’s a rhythm to it, something electronic in the hiss of it. “The voice is getting louder,” Mark says with his metallic throat.

The message ends. Nate looks at his phone, then switches it off and puts it in his pocket. Something explodes nearby. The building feels alive with a shudder, something breathing, beams cracking. A rumbling, hungry thing that could collapse, devour those within.

“Now what?” Connor asks.

“We should look for Brandon. I’ll go out. You can wait here.”

Connor puts his hand on Nate’s arm.

Nate steps back, takes a second to look at his husband. Connor’s face is blank and beautiful. He’s still calm, not worried. Eager, even; as if they’re waiting for something to begin. Nate finds the feeling infectious.

“I want to see it,” Connor says. “The world. Don’t you?” Connor squeezes his hand. “Let’s go see it,” he says. “Together, from above.”

Nate doesn’t have to say yes.

He leads his husband to the roof. Up the stairs, hundreds of them, until they emerge into the bright air, the triangled, birded sky. Together, holding hands, they walk to the edge of the roof and gaze out at the city. A lot of it is burning, but a lot of it is green, too, so much greener than before. Hundreds of people are in the streets, crowding, looking up at the same things they are. He remembers the Enchanted Caverns of his youth, the common things, the unspoken things. The sound of bending and creaking fills the air. The clouds reach for the ground. Far in the distance, the sea has stopped moving. The world’s colours have slipped into a soft palette, pixelating around the edges.

Down below, they spot someone that looks like their son. He has a mask on: a wildcat, or maybe a maned wolf. He’s running in a pack of children and deer.

Nate wants to get him, to chase after him, but Connor puts his arm on his shoulders and says, “Let him. He’ll be all right. He’s been all right for a while.”

Is that true? Nate has been so worried. So scared, so ashamed. Was he so caught up in his own guilt that he didn’t notice? There’s a lot he could have done differently. Should have. But nothing more that he can do. All he feels anymore is tired.

“I failed to protect him,” he says. “I did that.” Even the guilt is muted, now, like the world.

“Yeah,” Connor replies. “We both did that.” Connor pauses, cups his cheek like they used to when they were first in love. “But he’s fine.”

Something bursts open through the sky right then, a flower of ash and scarred flesh. Next to it, a prismatic bird pins itself, wings open, as if in a display case at some nature museum of the future. The clouds burst, raining .txt files.

Connor gasps. “Can you hear it?” he asks. He clutches his heart, holds his breath, as if to listen to something more clearly. “There’s a voice.”

Nate can’t hear it, no. He wishes he could, even if it means he’ll be consumed. But he’s being consumed anyway, isn’t he? Everything is, the whole world, and has been, for so long. He gazes at the city below, the people coming together. Are they all right? Does it make a difference, if they’re not? There’s no more could-have, should-have. Nothing more to do.

The sky convulses, peristaltic.

He puts his hand on his chest, like Connor did moments ago. His heart is quiet. And, he thinks, it’s easy, so easy, to be eaten. That’s letting go, too, isn’t it?

Why did he ever think letting go was hard?

“Yes,” he says. “I can hear it. I can.”