The baby was crying again.
Lirael Voss pressed her forehead against the antique shop's rain-smeared window, watching the Golden Gate Bridge shudder like a dying dragon. Its suspension cables pulsed with unnatural light—a gangrenous glow that made her molars ache. Across the street, Mrs. Chen's herbal pharmacy bled neon mandalas into the fog, but even their fractal perfection couldn't drown out that sound.
A wail.
A hunger.
A wrongness that chewed at the edges of reality.
"Not my problem," she muttered, turning back to the 17th-century music box on her workbench. Its mother-of-pearl inlay depicted Orpheus descending into hell—appropriate, given how many times her trembling hands had dropped the damn screws today. But as the tuning fork touched the mechanism, the air itself ripped.
CRACK.
The bridge's middle span liquefied. Three hundred cars melted into a silver chrysalis that pulsed to the rhythm of a human heartbeat. Tourists' screams warped into gurgling static as their flesh fused with asphalt. Lirael's breath hitched—not at the horror, but at the pattern emerging from the chaos. The writhing metal mass wasn't random. It was...
"A lullaby." Her throat burned as the realization escaped.
The chrysalis split.
What emerged had too many joints. Glossy steel limbs unfolded like grotesque origami, each knuckle creaking with the timbre of crumpling soda cans. Where a head should be, a cluster of shattered windshields reflected a thousand distorted faces—all weeping gasoline. It crawled on all fours up the bridge's north tower, trailing umbilical cords of barbed wire, and let loose a shriek that shattered every window in Fisherman's Wharf.
"Oh, you dramatic bastard." Lirael snatched her late father's clockwork monocle from its velvet case. The lens flared crimson as she peered through it.
Reality glitched.
The creature's throat revealed a flickering sigil—a spiral of broken piano wire and binary code. Her right hand *itched*, the parasitic void beneath her skin stirring. She'd seen this mark before, etched into the spine of a 14th-century grimoire she'd restored last Tuesday. The client had paid in solid gold teeth.
"Voidspire manifesting through Luxspire's corrosion," she hissed, grabbing a pair of Qing Dynasty calligraphy tweezers. The jade handles grew frigid in her grip. "Fuck your multi-dimensional gentrification."
Sprinting into the street, Lirael dodged a tumbling cable car now spurting black ichor from its bell. The creature turned its windshield-face toward her, warbling a note that liquefied a fleeing cyclist's bones. She lunged, tweezers flashing.
Three truths exploded in her skull:
1. This thing's vocal cords were forged from Azrael's first betrayal.
2. The sigil was both wound and weakness.
3. Her right hand wanted to devour it.
The tweezers pierced the sigil.
Reality inverted.
Suddenly she wasn't standing on asphalt but floating in a cathedral of dying stars. The creature's true form loomed—a colossus of interlocking gears and stillborn angels, its heart a pulsing black sun. The void in her hand *uncoiled*, tendrils of anti-light lashing out to—
SNAP.
She blinked. Back on the bridge. The creature lay motionless, its throat a gaping hole where the sigil had been. Her tweezers dripped liquid shadow. The stench of burnt vanilla and rotting code stung her nostrils.
"Bullseye," she rasped. Then the migraine hit.
Memories not her own flooded her synapses—a boy in chainmail weeping over a crystal dagger, a city where buildings grew like nerve clusters, a whisper: *"The Third Eye opens at Nanjing and..."*
"Void-damn it." She stumbled against a smoldering Prius, blood trickling from her nose. The monocle's gears whirred in panic. "No. Nonono. Not today."
Too late.
Her right palm split open—not flesh, but a singularity. The devoured sigil materialized above it, now reshaped into a key. Before she could react, the key plunged into the bridge's roadbed.
CLANG.
The Golden Gate Bridge detonated into a million brass cogs.
Lirael fell through screaming chronowinds, watching San Francisco fold into itself—Victorian houses mating with server farms, the Transamerica Pyramid birthing quartz fangs. As the Bay churned into liquid mercury, she glimpsed him: a silver-haired figure standing atop Coit Tower, sword raised to split the bleeding sky.
His glacial eyes locked onto hers.
"Thief," the man's voice bypassed her eardrums to etch directly onto her cortex. "**You carry stolen time."
Then the vision shattered.
She awoke in her shop, drenched in sweat. The music box played a twisted rendition of Clair de Lune. Its tiny Orpheus figurine was gone. In its place stood a miniature steel monastery—exact replica of the one from her nightmares.
The wall clock chimed 3:33 AM.
Her reflection in the shop window flickered. Not her face staring back, but a smirking doppelgänger with oil-black eyes.
"Tick-tock, little lockbox," the other Lirael purred through the glass. "He's coming for the gospel in your bones."