There was a figure huddled in the recessed doorway of a boarded-up electronics store. Small. Filthy. A pile of rags that might have been pink once.
“Titan, let’s go,” I hissed, stepping forward to physically drag him if I had to. Survival meant momentum. You stop, you die. You stop, you feel. And I was done feeling.
But Titan did something that stopped the air in my lungs. He didn’t just resist; he pulled. He dragged me, his claws clicking frantically on the concrete, straight toward the bundle of rags.
“No! Titan, no!”
He ignored me. He closed the distance and sat down directly in front of the homeless kid, his nose inches from a matted head of hair that smelled of street grime and sickness.
The child looked up.
The world didn’t just tilt; it disintegrated.
Those eyes.
I stopped breathing. The neon sign above us flickered, casting a sickly blue light over the scene, but I saw them clearly. Gray-blue. The color of the Atlantic in winter. The color of a storm rolling in over the desert.
I knew those eyes. I saw them every time I closed my own. I saw them in the nightmares that woke me screaming, drenched in sweat, reaching for a phantom rifle.
