The world is ending outside his window, and he's chained his own door shut to survive it. What he doesn't know is that the thing hunting him was never on the other side of that door.

A father sits down to write a final letter explaining the unthinkable — but every word on the page is being guided by something that isn't finished with him yet.

An invitation-only masquerade, a password whispered through a slot in a door, a stranger in a Zorro mask who already knows too much about her. She thought she knew what she came for.

A live streamer chasing content finds an unlocked storage unit, a cracked mirror, and a tip that turned out to be true. The footage kept changing every time he watched it back — and so did the thing in the glass.

He couldn't decide between six games behind the same glass case. Ten minutes standing still, then an hour he never felt pass. By the time an employee found him, something else in the store had already made the choice for him.

Five of us went down. The hull was a cylinder, not a sphere — cheaper to build that way, worse to hold pressure that way, though nobody said the second part out loud. At 900 meters, the first sound came through the hull. It wasn't the hull that was listening back.