09 Jul The Hungry Sea

Part I

The air in Miami didn’t sit right on Raul Mercado’s skin. It wasn’t just the heat—he’d dealt with that during those strange, sweaty Pittsburgh summers when the air hung like wet laundry—but something else felt off. But despite his best efforts, he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

He tried not to overthink it; that wasn’t his style. Raul was an IT guy—logic-driven and compartmentalized. He believed in code, networks, and clean, repeatable systems. But lately, since the move, even his own thoughts had begun to fray at the edges. He attributed it to stress.

His new coworker, Jacob—loud, tanned, and brimming with Miami enthusiasm—told him that he needed to get out of his head and into the water.

“Scuba, bro,” he’d said. “Nothing clears the mind like two hours below the surface. Just you, your breath, and the sea. You’ll come back a brand new man. Trust me.”

Raul had smiled politely the first time he heard that, unsure if Jacob was serious. However, Jacob insisted, even sending him links to the best-rated training center in South Beach. After several long weeks at his new job, Raul found himself repeatedly looking at the website, drawn in by images of glowing coral reefs and weightless divers gliding through azure light like ghosts.

The certification class began two weeks later.

Indoor pool sessions were simple and predictable. Raul excelled. He listened, followed the rules, practiced buddy breathing with a partner named Toby, and earned praise from their instructor, a grizzled former Coast Guard diver named Leonard Hartley.

Leonard had the look of a man who belonged to the sea: pockmarked skin, a salt-rubbed voice, and sun-bleached eyebrows. He carried himself like nothing surprised him anymore, and Raul appreciated that about him.

“You’re solid,” Leonard said after their second pool dive. “You have a good head on your shoulders. No panic. Most folks hyperventilate the first time they take their mask off underwater. Not you.”

Raul nodded. “I like knowing the rules; it makes it easier to follow them.”

Leonard chuckled. “Just don’t expect the ocean to abide by any.”

* * * * * *

Emily wasn’t thrilled.

She sat on their small apartment couch, arms tucked in, her expression drawn tight with worry as Raul packed his dive bag the night before the open-water certification.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “You’ve never been interested in diving before. Why now?”

Raul zipped up his fins. “I just want to try something new, something outside of screens. I’ve been glued to a monitor for a decade, Em.”

“I know. But can’t it be hiking or… I don’t know, kayaking? You read those articles, too. Shark attacks, rogue currents, nitrogen narcosis—what if something goes wrong?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, smiling as he leaned over to kiss her forehead. “I’m not even going into the deep ocean, just a training site off the coast. Controlled environment. Leonard’s been doing this for thirty years.”

Her eyes didn’t soften. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

“I promise.”

* * * * * *

The training site changed at the last minute. Raul had just arrived at the dock the next morning, sun barely up and wetsuit half-zipped, when Leonard announced the riptide warning. The original location, a marine preserve with excellent visibility, was now too risky.

“We’re heading to an old alcove,” Leonard told the group of four students, including Raul and Toby. “It used to be a site for certification dives back in the nineties. We haven’t taken folks there in years, but it should hold.”

Toby raised a hand. “Why did they stop using it?”

Leonard shrugged. “Construction nearby disrupted the sandbars. Visibility can be poor some days, but it’s calm today. You’ll be fine.”

They loaded onto a small dive boat and motored out across flat water, the sun turning the surface into a mirror. Raul sat beside Leonard, clutching his mask and fins. Something about the switch unsettled him, but he pushed the thought down.

By the time they reached the alcove, the sea looked like polished obsidian. There were no waves or breeze, just an unsettling stillness.

Leonard handed out tanks and weight belts. “We’re doing a seventy-foot descent, maximum. You stay with your buddy, watch your depth, and monitor your air. Don’t poke around in any crevices. Got it?”

Raul nodded, trying to ignore the knot forming in his stomach. He went through the final checks: BCD inflated, regulator clear, pressure steady.

Then they dropped.

* * * * * *

The descent felt like falling into silence.

At first, the water held a bluish tint, murky with sediment. Visibility was maybe fifteen feet. Toby swam beside Raul, giving him an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Raul returned the gesture, but his mind was elsewhere.

There was something wrong with the current. It wasn’t strong, but it pulled inconsistently in pulses, as if the water didn’t know what it wanted to do. Raul adjusted his breathing, checked his gauges, and tried to focus on the exercise: controlled descent, mask removal, and simulated buddy ascent.

Then Toby pointed. Off to the left, obscured by the slope of the seafloor, sat something large—too angular to be coral and too jagged to be a rock outcrop. It looked like the shattered remains of a fishing vessel, with a torn hull and a slanted cabin.

Leonard swam toward it, cautious but curious. The rest of the group followed.

Raul felt the shift immediately as they got closer. The water began to ripple in irregular stutters, like a corrupted video feed. The edges of the wreck shimmered unnaturally. The deeper they went, the more the color drained from the world around them. Sound vanished completely.

Leonard stopped and signaled for everyone to halt.

Raul hung in place, heart thudding against the interior of his wetsuit.

Toby ignored the warning. He reached forward, hand outstretched, fingertips brushing the surface of the distorted water surrounding the wreck.

The moment his skin made contact, his hand disappeared, simply gone. Cut off so cleanly, there wasn’t even blood at first.

Then came the vaporization.

Toby’s arm, shoulder, and entire side liquefied in an instant. His regulator flew from his mouth as his torso twisted and buckled under an unseen force. The water exploded with red fog and chunks of matter.

Raul recoiled, kicking back in horror.

The field began expanding, moving in slow pulses, rippling outward in concentric rings. One of the other students—a woman named Lena—was caught mid-kick. Her legs vanished. Then her hips, her torso, and, lastly, her screaming visage. Then there was nothing.

Leonard turned, struggling to swim, but the force had already taken his feet. Raul reached him, grabbed him under the arms, and pulled hard.

They ascended in panicked silence, Leonard screaming into his regulator as what remained of his legs flailed uselessly behind him. Raul felt the field brush against his hand for a second. It glitched around him, stuttering, and passed by without causing any damage. He didn’t stop to wonder why.

They broke the surface, gasping, Raul inflating Leonard’s BCD to keep him afloat.

The dive boat crew was already shouting and throwing ropes, preparing to haul them aboard.

Blood clouded the sea behind them. But the field had stopped pulsing. It collapsed in on itself, leaving only the half-visible wreckage in the depths.

Raul sat beside Leonard on the deck, trembling, soaked, and silent, trying not to look at the blood streaking across the floor.

He remembered Emily’s voice from the night before.

Promise me you’ll be careful.

He had promised.

But there had been no way to prepare for this.

Part II

Leonard was taken away before Raul could ask a single question. The Coast Guard boat arrived just five minutes after they surfaced. The dive boat’s captain had radioed for help the moment the first scream pierced the water, and someone must have answered faster than anyone expected. Two armed men in blue-gray fatigues hauled Leonard onto a stretcher, and Raul tried to follow, but they blocked his path.

“He’s going to Mercy General,” one of them said. “You’ll be contacted soon.”

Then they were gone, leaving only a trail of churned salt water in their wake.

The crew informed Raul that they could not risk staying. Everyone else had left, and they wanted to avoid lingering near whatever they had witnessed. Raul didn’t argue; he sat quietly on the way back to the marina, his hands trembling uncontrollably, with his cold wetsuit pressing against his skin and the heavy gear bag resting in his lap.

* * * * * *

The shower back home didn’t help. He scrubbed his skin until it ached, but the faint scent of seawater still clung to his hair. Emily knocked once, then stepped in, carrying a towel and a change of clothes. She didn’t say anything; she only looked at him, her face pale.

“I’m okay,” Raul muttered.

She didn’t seem convinced.

“Where’s your dive bag?” she asked.

“It’s in the car.”

She hesitated before responding. “Should we… I mean, is it evidence now? You said people died.”

“They didn’t die, Em.” He met her eyes, and for a moment, something sharp surfaced in his voice. “They disappeared. It was like they were deleted.”

Her mouth opened and then closed. She placed the towel on the bathroom sink and walked out.

* * * * * *

Raul didn’t sleep that night. Even with the windows locked and the bedroom door shut, the sound of the ocean filled his head.

In the morning, he called the hospital.

“Yes, I’m looking for a Leonard Hartley,” he said. “He was brought in last night. Critical condition.”

A pause followed. Then the receptionist returned with a pleasant, flat voice. “I’m sorry, sir. We don’t have any patient by that name.”

Raul frowned. “Are you sure? The Coast Guard brought him in—”

“I understand, but we have no record of anyone by that name in our system.”

He hung up and tried again, this time calling another hospital across town, and received the same reply: there were no records or transfers, and no further explanation.

It was as if Leonard never existed.

* * * * * *

The news reported the incident two days later, in a single paragraph, buried halfway down a page about boating safety in the Miami Herald.

Raul read it twice, just to be sure he hadn’t imagined it: “A scuba training dive near Key Biscayne was cut short after a tragic accident claimed the lives of two students. Officials suspect malfunctioning regulators. The diving instructor remains in stable condition and is not accepting visitors.”

There were no names, no mention of the field, and no wreckage. The instructor wasn’t even identified.

A fresh pulse of dread rose in Raul’s chest. “Stable condition” felt like a lie, as did the number of people involved. There had been four students, not two.

Two were dead, two were missing, and one appeared half-vaporized.

He returned to the marina later that afternoon, hoping to find the boat’s captain or someone else from the crew. However, the dock was quiet. The usual charter companies were running sightseeing tours and fishing trips, and no one knew what he was talking about when he asked.

He tried calling Jacob, the coworker who had pushed him into diving in the first place, but Jacob didn’t answer. His texts went unread.

By evening, Raul felt as if someone had scraped his entire life clean of the incident, as if it had occurred in a parallel version of Miami that no longer intersected with this one.

* * * * * *

He met Celia at a Cuban café in Little Havana the next day. She was one of the few people Raul had connected with since moving. They bonded over bad coffee at work and exchanged sarcastic commentary during IT meetings. He trusted her enough to share something. Not everything, just enough.

They sat outside under a fraying red umbrella, the sound of street music floating somewhere down the block.

“Just tell me this,” Celia said, leaning forward. “Was it an animal? Like a shark?”

“No, it wasn’t anything alive. Not like that.”

She raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

He stared down at the foam in his cup before saying, “It was like… imagine a part of the water started glitching. It felt as if reality couldn’t load properly, and then it began deleting people.”

Celia blinked in surprise. Raul allowed the silence to stretch.

Finally, she shook her head. “You’re serious.”

“I’ve been trying to forget it since it happened, but the world won’t let me.”

He glanced toward the curb. A black SUV sat parked half a block down, facing their direction. He had seen it earlier. There was no parking ticket on the dash and no company logos, just a dark vehicle with windows tinted too heavily for street legality. He noticed a shape moving behind the driver’s glass, then it stilled again.

“Okay,” Celia said, noticing the shift in his expression. “What’s going on, Raul?”

He looked down and spotted a folded note beneath his coffee cup. He hadn’t seen it before.

He pulled it out with stiff fingers. ”You need to stop talking,” it read. “We’ll be in touch.”

Celia leaned in to read it. “What the hell is that?”

“I think it’s a warning.”

Celia, now clearly nervous, attempted to steady her nerves. “Do you want to leave?”

Raul nodded.

They walked in silence to her car. Raul didn’t say a word during the entire ride home.

* * * * * *

That night, he received a text from an unlisted number. It contained only GPS coordinates leading to a harbor park near the coast, which was closed after dark, according to city ordinances.

Ten minutes passed without any further messages. Then a second message arrived: “Midnight. Come alone.”

Emily read the screen over his shoulder. “No,” she said immediately. “You are not going to that.”

“I just want to know what they want.”

“You already know what they want,” she chided. “You just told Celia someone left you a threat at a coffee shop.”

“It wasn’t exactly a threat.”

“Raul.” She grabbed his arm. “Do you think this ends with a conversation in the park? These people are watching you. They know where you live. Do you want them to know you’re willing to show up wherever they tell you?”

He didn’t answer.

They argued quietly for almost an hour, their voices hushed and the blinds closed. Raul didn’t realize how late it had gotten until the clock hit 12:10 AM.

He never sent a reply. He didn’t go.

The phone rang at 12:16. Unknown number.

He let it ring.

A second call came in at 12:18. A third at 12:19.

He decided to block the number.

It rang again from a different number at 12:21.

Then again. And again.

Raul threw the phone onto the bed.

It was then that he heard the knock at the door and froze.

Emily was already walking down the hall to the bedroom, still muttering about ignoring the calls. She hadn’t heard it.

Another knock sounded, slower this time and heavier.

He crept to the door and looked through the peephole. A man in black stood motionless outside, dressed in some kind of armored suit. He looked tactical, with night vision goggles strapped to his forehead, and his face was hidden behind a balaclava.

The man didn’t move.

Raul backed away from the door.

Then he heard Emily scream.

He ran.

The bedroom door was open, and one of the windows was smashed. Emily was on the bed with her hands raised, while a second man stood beside her, holding something in his hand—Raul couldn’t tell what it was. A weapon? A device? It glinted beneath the hallway light.

“Stop!” Raul shouted.

The masked man looked up. “This is not a negotiation, Mr. Mercado,” he said, his voice low and rough but calm. “You’re coming with us. I will not ask you again.”

“What do you want?” Raul pleaded.

“You already know.”

Emily sobbed quietly.

“You’ll be returned,” the man said to her. “We’re not here for you.”

He turned to Raul. “Move.”

Raul didn’t have a choice. He walked out of the apartment with the men, casting one last glance back at Emily’s tear-streaked face before the door closed behind him.

* * * * * *

They transported him to a dark, isolated corner of the same harbor park he’d been told to meet them at previously.

There were no sirens or lights, only the sound of water slapping against the concrete, the tide higher than it should have been.

Raul stood beside the SUV, arms folded against the cold, as one of the men pulled a small projector from his bag.

Footage played against the wall of the nearby abandoned pier building, showing the wreck Raul had seen underwater, but this time in full clarity. The field glowed purple, pulsing in rhythm, while drone footage circled at a safe distance. Beyond the wreck, something shimmered beneath the sand—a shape that didn’t quite fit.

“We thought it was a cloaking device,” one of the men said. “A prototype submarine, maybe from a foreign nation. But we’ve seen enough now to know better.”

“What is it then?” Raul asked.

The man didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Your hand touched the field. It phased and didn’t consume you. That has never happened before.”

Raul stared at the projected image. “What happened to Leonard?”

A long silence followed. Then the man replied, “He continued to degrade, even after extraction. It was a slow process—molecular unraveling, like time folding in on itself.”

Raul wanted to throw up.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“We believe the anomaly can be disrupted from the inside. We need someone who can breach it and survive long enough to do so.”

“And if I say no?”

The man’s grim expression said it all. Without another word, he handed Raul a black duffel bag.

Inside, he found a reinforced dive suit, a set of sealed devices, and a laminated card with instructions for deploying and activating what appeared to be explosives.

Raul stared at the ocean and swallowed hard. Something about it looked wrong again.

Part III

Raul wasn’t given time to think. The briefing, if it could be called that, lasted only twelve minutes. He was told what to wear, what to carry, and where to go. The duffel bag contained two air tanks, both fitted with carbon-fiber casings. The backup was for redundancy, they explained. His regular BCD was replaced with something closer to a pressure-rated harness, interwoven with wires and reinforced seams. The dive computer on his wrist bore no brand.

The devices, now confirmed to be explosives, came in soft pouches, three in total. Each was shaped like a flask, warm to the touch and faintly humming.

“These will detonate ten minutes after deployment,” the agent said. “Once you arm one, the timer begins. Don’t arm all three at once unless you’d prefer to die.”

Raul said nothing. He sat in the back of the unmarked vehicle as they drove south along the coastline. The windows were tinted, and the night air was dense with salt and a strange, chemical tang. The sky had gone moonless, and the wind felt stale. The driver didn’t speak, nor did the agent riding shotgun. No names had been offered, and Raul didn’t inquire. He understood now that this wasn’t about explanations or even about fixing the problem. He was a variable they hadn’t accounted for—an unexpected boon, an opportunity. They believed he was immune, and as a result, he was little more than a guinea pig.

No, he thought. Worse.

He was bait. The sacrificial lamb.

* * * * * *

The boat wasn’t a boat. It had no lights and no markings. It had just a matte black shell with a rear platform and a closed helm. Raul stepped aboard and received a tablet already streaming footage from a submersible drone. The wreck—or whatever it was—looked different. Gone were the splintered beams and rusted steel. In their place stood a gleaming surface resembling dark glass, its geometry constantly shifting. It didn’t morph but shuffled, as if it couldn’t decide what shape it should take.

It pulsed audibly in the drone’s feed—a distant thrum, low and persistent. The field around it now spanned nearly a hundred feet across, no longer a tight dome but a sprawling veil that blurred everything beneath it. Fish wouldn’t go near it, seaweed recoiled, and even the sand had collapsed in rings, the sediment transformed into something almost gelatinous.

“You’ll go in alone,” the agent said, checking the straps on Raul’s harness. “No comms once you’re inside. No GPS. The drone won’t follow; it tried earlier and shorted out before contact.”

“What happens if I don’t come back?” Raul asked. The man didn’t answer. He handed Raul his mask and walked away.

* * * * * *

The water was warm—too warm. Even through his gloves, Raul felt it clinging to him in an uncomfortable way, the temperature reminiscent of breath rather than seawater. He followed the descent path marked on his heads-up display. As he descended, the surface dimmed above, swallowed by silt and failing moonlight. Every sound retreated. There was no engine noise, and no hum from the boat, just the mechanical whisper of his regulator.

At forty feet, his dive computer flickered. At fifty-five, his secondary tank emitted a brief static pop in his earpiece. He reached back to adjust the valve, but the signal cut off again. At seventy feet, the field shimmered just below, pulsing in the water like heat above pavement. Raul hovered a few feet above it, waiting for something—some instinct or sign, but there was none.

He descended—and his world disappeared.

Raul didn’t feel himself pass through the field, not physically. One second, he was drifting; the next, he found himself nowhere at all. Light restructured itself, and unidentifiable shapes moved about. He kicked once, then again, and found resistance, as though he was still in liquid but not in water. The pressure wasn’t directional; it pressed from within as much as it did from without.

When his vision stabilized, he realized he was inside a structure. The walls weren’t solid; they folded and unfurled like blooming tissue, pulsating with veins of green and violet light. Ahead of him, containment chambers hovered in staggered spirals, impossible angles stacked as far as he could see. Inside the chambers were remains: a diver’s boot suspended in amber-colored fluid, a crushed regulator, bits of flesh and hair, and bones that looked human but weren’t aligned correctly.

He moved forward. Each chamber reflected part of him—distorted, duplicated, and layered—as he passed. His limbs shimmered in the glass, his own body refracted into copies that didn’t move with him.

The field had been a gateway.

This place was a vault, a lab.

A trap.

* * * * * *

He reached the first central node—if it could be called that. A mass of overlapping coils drifted in midair, pulsating with energy, thin filaments extending toward the walls. He withdrew the first explosive and peeled back the magnetic clasp. A red light blinked once, then twice, then held steady. Armed. He tucked it into the folds of the nearest structure and swam on, careful not to touch the surfaces.

The second device went in faster. He lodged it into a gap between two chambers, the glow from the bodies inside casting a faint halo around him. The third proved harder. Something in the space shifted, and the lighting dimmed.

The pulses changed as pressure built. A presence filled the vault, and he realized he wasn’t alone anymore. His vision rippled, and his thoughts fractured. A memory that wasn’t his surfaced: a tide of matter pouring through a breach, leading to the loss of an entire coastline. He imagined a small girl playing on the beach, reduced to particles mid-laugh. And behind it all was an unsettling sense of curiosity, devoid of rage or cruelty, like a biologist studying something in a petri dish.

Raul grabbed the final explosive and shoved it into the exposed joint between two columns. As he fumbled with the arming mechanism, his hands felt foreign, as if his bones had forgotten how to connect with muscle. The field around him thickened, a palpable presence pressing in. He managed to slap the timer panel, and the red light began to blink. Seven minutes.

He turned and began to swim toward the place he had entered, uncertain if it still existed. Nothing looked familiar. The walls seemed to reorient, and the chambers pivoted to block his route. The architecture was alive and aware, and it wanted to study him. He kicked hard, ignoring the sharp pain in his ankle as the pressure grew worse. Static filled the edges of his mask, and his breathing became erratic.

A sudden current, warm and unpredictable, caught his shoulder and spun him backward. Something brushed against his foot, but he couldn’t bring himself to look; he didn’t want to know. Suddenly, he broke through the boundary and was promptly ejected back into cold water—real water. The ocean.

Night surrounded him, and the sea swelled in low, unpredictable waves. His dive computer was dead, and his backup tank was leaking, leaving him feeling as if the surface were miles away. He kicked harder. Though the vault had expelled him, it had not sealed. And now, something else was seeping through.

When his head broke the surface, he saw no boat, only foam, a churned froth where the vessel had floated. There was no debris, and there were no lights, just a profound sense of absence. Whatever had followed him had consumed the boat he had arrived on entirely. Desperate, he turned and swam toward the distant shoreline, toward signs of civilization, where streetlights and marina lights glimmered.

To his horror, the water behind him brightened. The field expanded silently, radiantly, and at an unstoppable pace. It arched across the ocean, consuming everything in its path—fish, seaweed, rock. He passed a dock where night fishermen stood, their lines cast and unaware of the danger approaching. He shouted, but they didn’t turn. He screamed louder, his voice breaking with the salt filling his throat, yet still received no response. Then, one of them glanced his way, but by then it was far too late.

The field reached the dock and obliterated it, erasing it without hesitation. In a moment, it was gone, and the sea rolled in to fill the void.

Raul swam harder, and behind him, the glow intensified. Finally, he felt it: a tremor, dull at first, but then sharper. The charges detonated, causing the water to buckle inward. Something collapsed, and then came the roar. The field caved inward in a massive spiral, drawing everything around it toward a central point—ocean, air, light—creating a maelstrom of absence.

Raul was flung sideways by the vacuum, hitting something—perhaps sand—and tumbling onto the shore. He lost his mask and one of his fins, crawling up the wet beach as the surge tugged at his heels. Glancing back, he saw that a crater had formed. The sea poured into it endlessly, while the sky flickered with static and sirens howled in the distance. The last thing Raul perceived before blacking out was a wall of water rising ominously behind the marina.

Part IV

The pain came first, blunt and shapeless, blooming somewhere near the base of his spine and radiating upward. Raul opened his eyes to a ceiling lit by dull fluorescents. The edges of his vision pulsed out of sync with his heartbeat, and his mouth felt as if it had been packed with cotton. He instinctively reached up and touched a plastic tube fastened beneath his nose and along his cheek.

He couldn’t speak. His arms moved sluggishly, encased in molded foam. A soft, rhythmic tone beeped to his right. He turned his head slowly and stiffly, and saw the monitor tracking his vitals.

He was in a hospital, he realized. He was alive.

The first thing he noticed was that the room had no windows, and a chill was in the air. Then he noticed the silence. There was no chatter in the halls, no footfalls, and no nurses at the desk. The building might have been abandoned if not for the lights.

His shoulder burned, and his left leg refused to shift. He drifted again.

* * * * * *

The second time he woke, someone was in the room—a man in his late thirties, perhaps older, with a military posture and a face that seemed to resist recognition. He sat beside the bed, holding a clipboard that he never glanced at. Raul blinked at him, trying to speak. The man leaned forward, nodded once, and began to speak in a clipped, neutral tone.

“You were recovered on the shoreline after the event,” he said. “You sustained multiple contusions, fractures, mild oxygen deprivation, two cracked ribs, a torn ligament, and internal bruising. Your dive suit was nearly torn in half. We still don’t know how you managed to avoid being pulled in with the rest of it.”

Raul struggled to respond, but the feeding tube blocked him.

The man continued. “The detonation registered on multiple seismic instruments; we’ve labeled it a localized tectonic release for now. Civilian casualties were minimal. The wave hit an hour before dawn.”

He hesitated, and something unreadable crossed his face. “You caused more damage than we anticipated. The field collapsed. Whatever that structure was, it’s gone, at least for now.”

Raul stared at him, unblinking.

“Rest,” the man said as he stood. “We’ll need you again.”  Then, he was gone.

* * * * * *

The third time Raul woke, the lights were flickering. This was not a brief flicker but a steady strobe, as if the power were cycling faster than the system could handle. Emergency backups hummed to life, the fluorescents giving way to red strips along the floor. The monitor beside him dimmed and then restarted, while the vents rattled with the effort to maintain circulation.

He reached up again, this time more slowly, and pulled at the tube near his mouth. His fingers felt numb, and the adhesive tore at his skin as he removed it, but he didn’t stop until it was completely out. He breathed through his mouth, shallowly and dryly, and waited.

Then Raul saw it—a thought that was not his own. Something reached into him, across the gap where meaning existed. It didn’t speak in words, but in concepts, filling his head with color, shape, and image, each fragment dissolving into the next before it could settle. He saw the sea floor, fractured and bare, with bodies suspended mid-collapse, and a sky without stars bending down toward a hole that breathed. He saw cities not just erased but rewritten, patterns repeating across time. Structures rose in reverse as if they were constructed by memory.

Then he received the thought: You ruptured the boundary. There are consequences.

Raul recoiled as far as his injuries allowed. The pressure in his skull built, as though whatever had entered desired to inhabit him. He slammed his head backward into the pillow, forcing air out of his lungs, and in that moment, it released him.

The room returned. Red lights buzzed faintly overhead, and the emergency generator droned below his feet.

He could move, not well, but enough. He turned his body slowly, swinging his uninjured leg toward the floor. The bones in his back lit up in protest as he continued. He braced against the rail and eased himself into a seated position. He hadn’t imagined it; something had touched him—a being, some intelligence, that had breached whatever border separated its realm from his, and it wasn’t finished.

The nurse arrived thirty minutes later, apologizing for the delay caused by power issues. She explained that coastal flooding had knocked out half the grid. He nodded along, saying little, and then asked for his phone. She hesitated before leaving without answering.

Raul sat alone again, watching the machines count down his recovery. When he finally got a mirror five hours later, he saw that his bloodshot eyes bore the marks of burst capillaries, and one retina had turned slightly gray near the pupil. There was a bruise that shouldn’t exist, but he asked no questions, and they gave no answers.

By the third day, he was able to walk with assistance. Emily hadn’t visited, and he wasn’t sure if anyone had informed her of his whereabouts. He tried asking the attending doctor, but the man only smiled and said he’d “make some calls.” No calls came.

His meals arrived on time, and his sheets were changed, but no one spoke more than a few words at a time. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the field expanding, feeding, and learning. He remembered what the presence had shown him.

Raul had done something permanent, though he wasn’t sure what that meant. But the sky had changed when he woke, and the sea had become quieter.

On the fifth night, the message came in a vision, behind his eyes, while he blinked. He saw a tower of bone rising from the ocean, a sphere with a mirrored surface reflecting his terrified face, endlessly replicated. The shoreline was covered in glass, the sand melted by intense heat. Then he received a message: “Retaliatory breach initiated.” There was no explanation, and no chance to respond.

Raul sat upright in the darkness, his chest tight. Outside, the wind had stopped, and the ocean, miles away, had fallen silent once more.

Deep below the waves, the field shifted again.

Part V

The staff didn’t pay much attention to the strange occurrences at first. The halls were still operating under generator power, and the emergency systems had become part of the routine, characterized by low light, reduced services, and minimal communication. So, when the security monitors lost their live feed, it went unnoticed. When the wireless nurse call system went dead, the floor nurses assumed the batteries had simply failed. By the time anyone reached the roof and looked out toward the shoreline, it was too late to do anything.

From Raul’s bed, facing a narrow window slit angled toward the bay, he could already see the difference. It began with a distortion, a shimmer along the horizon that was faintly visible in the pre-dawn haze. There was no glow or sound, only a change in the way the world was arranged, a gentle line folding downward. Then came the pulse, rippling outward from beneath the sea’s surface, steady and consistent, moving in expanding rings that shifted the texture of the sky. The sand beneath it vanished entirely, a hole wider than any crater now replacing part of the ocean floor.

Raul leaned forward in bed as the light from outside dimmed gradually, a veil of impossible scale obscuring the sun. The field had returned, larger than before, and it was moving inland.

Footsteps echoed in the hallway. Raul turned toward the door as two orderlies rushed past without glancing inside. A voice called out something unintelligible, muffled through the walls, whatever was said lost beneath the sudden hum that filled the building. Every light flickered before the power went out again. This time, it did not come back on. The emergency backup lighting sputtered, cycling once and then twice, finally settling into a dim red haze. The world outside, once visible through the nearby window, went black.

Raul pushed himself upright, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. His joints screamed in protest, with his left one barely holding up. He braced against the wall and stood. Every muscle in his back clenched while the bandages tugged at his swollen skin, but he moved anyway. The hallway beyond his room was empty.

An overturned gurney rested near the corner with sheets twisted across the floor. A tray of surgical tools lay scattered beside it. He moved toward the window at the end of the corridor. The view from the eighth floor showed only a sliver of the coastline, but it was enough. The field had reached the edge of the city, the air behind it rippling unnaturally. Palm trees dissolved at its edge, first the fronds, then the trunks, and finally the roots. Whole cars disappeared with a faint shimmer, as if being unrendered. The pavement dissolved under its touch, and buildings warped as they collapsed, crushed inward from every angle simultaneously.

Raul heard a scream down the stairwell that cut short. He didn’t move toward it. Instead, he turned back into the hallway and limped past the abandoned nurse’s station. Monitors were frozen on static, one of them still displaying a feed from an internal camera that no longer existed. The hallway previously under observation had already been consumed.

He made it to the elevator bay, where he found the shaft door hanging slightly ajar. Inside, the car was stuck halfway up and dark. He turned away. A flicker at the corner of his eye caught his attention; at first, he thought it was light bouncing off glass. But the reflection in the monitor didn’t match the hallway; instead, it showed movement, and he realized with horror that what he was witnessing were the death throes of distant lights, now visible as what remained of the hospital to the south disintegrated.

Realizing there was nowhere left to go, he returned to his room. Outside, the approaching veil drew closer. From his bed, he could now see its edge clearly. It wasn’t a single, solid line; it fluctuated and bent, swallowing objects, devouring space. Boats in the marina folded out of view. Piers splintered into pieces as their foundations were undone. A man running along the seawall tripped and vanished before hitting the ground, his legs dissolving before the rest of him followed.

The field reached the first row of beachfront hotels and paused, just long enough for Raul to wonder if it was aware of him. Then it surged. The buildings vanished as if carved out by an unseen tool, taking with them partitions, furniture, and guests, leaving nothing behind but an ever-expanding crater.

And then the water came.

It arrived all at once, a wall of water crashing into the absence, filling the wound, and then falling back repeatedly as it too was consumed, creating a relentless feedback loop.

Raul clutched the edge of the bed and watched helplessly.

The lights in his room dimmed to a single red bulb near the door. A low tone played from the speaker above his bed, a long, flat frequency that made his teeth ache. Behind his eyes, strange thoughts returned. He sensed the impression of a structure far too large for any map, straining the limits of his human imagination. And, at the forefront of his mind, he heard the familiar voice:

“The boundary is no more. Now the correction begins.”

Images flooded in again: the shoreline erased, people turned to ash, and then nothing at all. Beyond it all, an entity of incomprehensible dimensions lingered, watching and waiting.

Raul closed his eyes. He didn’t pray or call for help. What would be the point? he wondered. He simply watched as the field reached the wall of his hospital room.

When it arrived, soundlessly, he experienced no pain or heat. Instead, he felt the last thread tying him to the world that had once been his as it unraveled.

It touched brick, rebar, and plaster, the materials vanishing in layers. The drywall cracked, disintegrated, and floated into the air, reduced to dust, then was pulled apart grain by grain until there was nothing left. A section of the ceiling folded downward and vanished mid-collapse. The bed beneath him melted from the feet upward. The sheets curled, lifted, and evaporated.

He looked down to find the floor beneath his toes no longer existed. And he fell, weightless, surrounded by an increasingly endless chasm.

He watched in terror as the hospital wing dropped away in segments, room by room, hallway by hallway. Stairwells uncoiled into atoms. Metal fixtures shimmered out of sync, then blinked into absence. A ceiling tile above his head popped once, then flattened and disappeared.

Everything around him—objects, any remaining people, and finally, the air itself—ceased to exist.

Then he exhaled, a sharp rattle escaping his lungs.

He tried to draw breath again, but discovered he couldn’t. The air. The air was gone.

He clutched at his throat as instinct kicked in, but his fingers found nothing to fight.

The veins in his neck pulsed once. His mouth hung open, straining, as the last of the hospital disassembled into flecks around him, revealing the remains of the surrounding city, fallen prey to a similar dissolution. A cacophony of sirens and cut-off screams filled what remained of the distant air. That, too, would be stilled momentarily.

The sky above had gone blank.

The sea behind him was gone.

And still, he remained, his body immune to the field. His lungs, however, were not, aching for oxygen that no longer existed.

And as his vision swam, gasping for relief that would not come, and his limbs went limp, one final thought passed quietly through his mind:

What happens next?

As the question lingered, Raul cast one last glance at the remains of the earth, dissolving in the distance—

And closed his eyes.