Expiration Day

The crowd had already gathered by the time I turned the corner onto Fales Street.

I almost kept walking. Crowds meant trouble, and trouble was something I had long since learned to step around. But something in the quality of the silence stopped me — not the noise of a fight, not the restless murmur of an accident, but something quieter and worse. The kind of silence people make when they don’t want to look but can’t look away.

I pushed through to the front.

I made it to the front.

And I saw her.

Mrs. Rennik.

She lived two floors below us. I’d seen her yesterday in the stairwell. She’d smiled. Said something about the weather.

Now she was on her knees in the middle of the street, vomiting blood.

Her crystal hung from her neck, dark and lifeless.

“No,” someone whispered behind me. “No, no, no—”

Mrs. Rennik gasped, a wet, choking sound, and looked up. Her eyes were wide, terrified, human.

For about five more seconds.

Then her body convulsed.

I wanted to look away.

I couldn’t.

I stood there and couldn’t move. Couldn’t look away. Part of me knew I should run, should turn with the crowd, should do the sensible thing. But I kept staring.

Because I realized, standing there, that I didn’t actually know much about Mrs. Rennik. Two floors below us for three years, and what did I know? She smiled in the stairwell. Said things about the weather. Had a plant on her windowsill that I’d noticed once.

That was it. That was everything.

She’d existed at the edge of my life the whole time, and I’d never once wondered about hers. Not until she was on her knees in the street becoming something that used to be human.

That’s when people became real to me, apparently. When they were impossible to ignore.

I knew why it happened. Everyone did. Crystals were expensive — the official line was the cost of synthesis, the scarcity of raw materials, the infrastructure required to bond them to a human host. The Crown kept prices high because they had to, because the alternative was shortages, because the system would collapse without regulation. That was what they told us in school. What the broadcasts said. What the government posted on the walls of every Continuance Office in the Ring.

People like Mrs. Rennik fell behind on payments. People like Mrs. Rennik ran out of weeks. That wasn’t cruelty, the official line said. That was economics.

The Crown districts never ran out. I’d never heard of a single person up there dying from expiration. But then, I’d never been up there, and neither had anyone I knew.

There were other theories. Quieter ones, passed around in the depots and the transit cars and the stairwells of Ring buildings like ours. That the crystals weren’t scarce at all. That the Crown kept them expensive on purpose. That whatever they were doing with the Morphs they captured — and they always captured them, never killed them, I’d noticed that even before today — was connected to why a replacement crystal cost more than three months of my wages.

I didn’t know if any of that was true.

I just knew Mrs. Rennik had a plant on her windowsill and had smiled at me yesterday and was now on her knees in the street, and no one had helped her before it came to this.

Her spine arched. Her jaw dislocated with a wet pop.

Bones broke.

Skin tore.

She kept screaming.

The crowd stumbled back. Someone grabbed my arm and tried to pull me away, but I shook them off. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.

Mrs. Rennik’s body collapsed forward onto all fours. Her arms lengthened, joints snapping into new positions. Her face split open, flesh peeling back to reveal rows of teeth that hadn’t been there before.

The screaming stopped.

What was left wasn’t Mrs. Rennik anymore.

It was taller than a person. Hunched. Its skin was gray and slick, like something pulled from deep water. Its eyes were black pits. Its mouth hung open, dripping.

A Morph.

It turned its head slowly, scanning the crowd.

Then it lunged.

People scattered, screaming. I stumbled backward, my heel catching on the curb. Someone ran past me, shoving me aside.

The Morph moved fast, faster than anything that size should move. It grabbed a man by the leg and dragged him down. He screamed. The sound cut off suddenly.

Blood sprayed across the pavement.

Then they arrived.

Four figures in black combat gear, moving in formation. Custodians.

The lead one raised a hand, and a shimmering barrier of light materialized in the air, cutting between the Morph and the crowd.

“Fall back!” he shouted. His voice was calm. Practiced. “Containment protocol in effect.”

The Morph slammed into the barrier. The light cracked but held.

One of the Custodians, a woman with short-cropped hair, stepped forward. Flames erupted from her palms, bright and searing. She hurled a fireball at the Morph, and it shrieked, twisting away.

Another Custodian blurred past, moving so fast I barely saw him. He struck the Morph from the side, but it recovered instantly, lashing out with one clawed arm.

He wasn’t fast enough.

The Morph’s claws tore through his chest.

He hit the ground and didn’t get up.

“Damn it!” The flame-user rushed forward, fire blazing hotter now. The Morph turned toward her, snarling.

A fourth Custodian, broad-shouldered, veins dark along his arms, charged in. His fist connected with the Morph’s skull, and I heard bone crack.

The Morph staggered.

But it didn’t fall.

It recovered, faster than it should have, and raked its claws across the strongman’s leg. He went down hard, blood pooling beneath him.

The flame-user was panting now, her fire flickering. “It’s adapting—”

“Hold position,” the lead Custodian said. He glanced at the last member of the team, a thin man with pale eyes. “Tomas. Now.”

Tomas stepped forward. He didn’t move fast. Didn’t shout.

He just exhaled.

A pale mist rolled from his mouth, spreading across the street like fog. It smelled sweet. Wrong.

The Morph lunged toward him.

Then it slowed.

Its movements became sluggish. Its snarl faded into a low rumble. It took one more step.

And collapsed.

The mist cleared.

The street was silent except for the sound of labored breathing and distant sirens.

The lead Custodian knelt beside the fallen one, the fast one. He checked for a pulse.

Then he stood and shook his head.

No one said anything.

The strongman was being dragged to his feet by the flame-user, his leg bleeding heavily. She pressed a hand against the wound, and he hissed in pain.

The Morph lay unconscious in the middle of the street, its chest rising and falling slowly.

“Containment team en route,” the lead Custodian said into his radio. “One Aberrant subdued. One casualty. Two injured.”

Aberrant.

That’s what they called them officially.

I stared at the unconscious Morph.

At the blood on the pavement.

At the body of the Custodian they were covering with a sheet.

And I thought: Why didn’t they just kill it?

They had the fire-user. They had the strongman. They could have burned it. Crushed it.

Instead, they put it to sleep.

Why?

I don’t remember walking home.

One moment I was standing in the street, staring at the Morph being loaded into a reinforced transport truck.

The next, I was sitting on the couch in our apartment, my hands still shaking.

Uncle Marcus was standing in the kitchen, staring at the television.

The news was already covering it.

“—third incident this month in the Ring district—”

“—Custodian confirmed dead, two others hospitalized—”

“—officials urge citizens to check crystal expiration dates—”

He turned off the screen.

The silence was worse.

“Lane.”

I didn’t look at him.

“Lane, I need you to listen to me.”

I kept staring at my hands.

He sat down beside me. I could feel the weight of him, the exhaustion in the way he moved.

“I saw it,” I said quietly. “Mrs. Rennik. She... I watched her turn.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Her crystal was dead,” I continued. “And then she just... she wasn’t her anymore.”

“I know.”

“They didn’t kill it,” I said. “The Custodians. They could have. But they didn’t.”

“Lane—”

“Why?”

He was quiet for a long moment.

Then he said, “I don’t know.”

I finally looked at him.

He looked older than he had this morning. Tired. Afraid.

“We need to talk,” he said.

I already knew what he was going to say.

“Our crystals,” I said. “We can’t afford replacements.”

He closed his eyes. “No. We can’t.”

The words hung in the air between us.

Four weeks.

Four weeks, and then we’d be just like Mrs. Rennik.

“I’ve been trying,” he said, and his voice cracked. “I’ve been working double shifts. I sold everything I could. But it’s not enough. It’s never enough.”

“I know.”

“The Trials—” He stopped himself. Shook his head. “No. I can’t ask that of you.”

I stared at him.

“The Trials aren’t happening for another year,” I said. “And even if they were—”

“I know.” He looked at me, and I saw the guilt in his eyes. The anger. Not at me. At the system. At the world that made this our only choice. “I’m sorry, Lane. I’m so sorry.”

I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault.

I wanted to tell him we’d figure something out.

But I didn’t.

Because there was nothing to figure out.

We were out of options.

He pulled me into a hug, and I let him. He smelled like oil and exhaustion and desperation.

When he finally let go, he stood and walked to his room without another word.

I sat alone in the dark.

Slowly, I reached up and touched my crystal. Still warm. Still glowing. Still dying.

I thought about Mrs. Rennik. About the way she'd smiled at me yesterday in the stairwell. I'd smiled back, said something about the weather, and kept walking. I hadn't asked how she was. Hadn't noticed her crystal was dim. Hadn't thought about her at all until she was on her knees in the street, becoming something that used to be human.

That was the thing about me. I noticed people when they became useful or when they became a problem. Not before.

Uncle Marcus would say that wasn't true. He'd say I was practical, not cold. That survival required focus.

But Marcus said a lot of things to make me feel better about myself.

I pressed my fingers against my crystal and stared at the dark.

Four weeks.

I told myself I was doing this for him. That everything — the depot, the double shifts, the way I never let myself think too far ahead — was for Marcus. Because he needed me.

But sitting here in the quiet, with no one watching, I could admit the other thing.

I was also just afraid to die.

And I wasn't sure which one mattered more.