It came from the tunnels.

Not the voice – that has gone quiet after its final statement – but the silence. It swallowed the campfires, the portable lanterns and the lovingly arranged flashlights, and the people around them went utterly noiseless. In a way, that made it easy to track, the same way you'd track a black hole – not as an object, but as an absence. Without light or sound, it was impossible to tell what was happening to the men and women beyond the event horizon.

Leo had no intention of finding out.

“Changed your mind about leaving yet?” he asked, helping Leonida Ivanovna stand up.

His words sounded simultaneously too loud and too quiet after the sundering voice.

As he turned around to prop Nikolai Yuryevich under the elbow, the elderly physicist rushed into her tent with the cry of 'my notes!' instead of doing the smart thing and running for the stairs.

Leo swore.

“She's right,” croaked the historian. “Everything we have gathered, from radiation measurements to dried feces samples, is in that tent. We can't just leave our research data here. It would set us back weeks!”

“You'll die if you don't!” Leo waved his hands wildly in frustration, gesturing toward the panicking crowds starting to fill the stairs and toward the encroaching silence. “Would that set you back?”

“We need the records,” the old historian repeated stubbornly.

Leo growled, pushing him toward the stairs.

For Chrissake...

“Go! I'll pick up your notebooks!”

Nikolai Yuryevich hesitated a second more, but, perhaps sensing the young man's desire to bodily haul him away, obeyed in a staggered trot, favoring his right leg.

Leo shot a longing look at the escape route and ducked under the tent flap.

He was met with a scene of controlled chaos. Journals, dismantled technology, glass and plastic containers covered both folding tables, and colorful Post-It Notes bloomed across every vertical surface. Leonida Ivanovna stood in the middle of it all, methodically piling sample after sample into her portmanteau, creating something of a mobile laboratory. Everything was carefully arranged, color-coded and wrapped in pieces of cloth and foam to avoid breakage if jostled.

Leo took one look at the humongous monstrosity and upended it in a single move.

“What are you -” the old woman started in shocked horror.

“Only take what you can carry while running,” he spoke right over her. “A small bag, a few journals. You have twenty seconds, then you're leaving, even if I have to carry you myself.”

Even that was generous. The station was long, and silence paused briefly after each person it swallowed, but Leo still felt nervous making assumptions about something like that.

“You can't -”

“Eighteen. Seventeen. Sixteen.”

Realizing that he was not joking, Leonida Ivanovna moved like a woman a third her age. Books and containers flew, pages were mercilessly ripped out, devices for testing and analysis haphazardly shoved into a handbag. For his part, Leo picked up the medicine he brought for the pair.

Who knew when he'd find another intact pharmacy.

“Ready?” it was a rhetorical question as he didn't intend to wait either way. “After you, then.”

Leonida Ivanovna shot him a look as she passed.

Then they were out of the relative peace of the tent and submerged in the mayhem outside.

It felt like being dropped into a mountain river. The press of bodies, the rush, the feeling of drowning. In the few seconds that passed after leaving the tent, Leo was nearly knocked to the ground no less than three times – and the current would have swiftly left him trampled and, if not dead, then easy pickings for silence. Gritting his teeth and muscling his way through the panicking crowd, Leo picked up Leonida Ivanovna, placing her on his back and feeling those frail bones clutch onto his shoulders with a death grip. The old physicist knew the dangers no less than he.

Bizarrely, a number of people were moving in the opposite direction. Some did so from the start, crossing all the way from the other end of the station, others seemed to stop their charge to the exit with little rhyme or reason and do a 180, adding chaos and confusion to a situation that was already chaotic and confusing.

“Hang on,” Leo growled, bull-rushing his way up.

The stairs were the tricky part. Discerning individual steps was impossible from within the crowd, forcing him to guess at where to place his feet, and the constant jostling certainly didn't help. People were screaming in his ear, afraid, angry, panicking, and the feeling was infectious.

Leo had to stop half-way when he realized that he nearly stepped on a kid, knocked down and trampled. The boy was young, maybe not even thirteen, skinny, dark-haired, wide-eyed, in denim jacket and jeans that were torn less artistically and more from sheer wear. Judging by the angle of his arm, he had a broken bone, but the boy wasn't crying, or doing anything really. His skin was clammy and pale, his breathing rapid and irregular.

“He's in shock,” Leonida Ivanovna shouted in Leo's ear. “We need to get him help!”

“I know!” he grunted, trying to pick up the kid, but two people were too much for him. He simply couldn't stand back up.

Leo was never particularly strong. He part-timed as an IT guy, for Chrissake!

Turning around, he grabbed at the closest man rushing by. It was a big guy, tall and strong, a construction worker, perhaps, or a firefighter. The kind that could carry a skinny kid like this with no trouble.

The big guy growled, trying to shake him off.

“Snap out of it!” Leo yelled, but it was pointless. The other guy was lashed forward by panic, by sheer herd instinct, and simply didn't hear him.

With a growl of his own, Leo swung his fist, impacting the big man's face. His hand hurt, enough that he suspected he hurt himself more than he did the burly guy, but it got his attention.

“Take him!” Leo enunciated clearly, pushing the kid into the man's arms. It was a rough, crude pass, and it jostled the boy's broken arm. The ensuing cry of pain seemed to bring the older man to his senses more than anything else.

He nodded firmly, hugging the kid to his chest, and moved toward the exit with new resolve.

Leo attempted to follow him – except, just as he was standing up, somebody jostled him from the side. He attempted to place his foot back, to regain balance, but on uneven ground and with extra weight on his back, he found himself in free-fall before he knew what was happening.

Desperately twisting mid-air to avoid crushing Leonida Ivanovna, he smashed into the concrete stairs with elbows and knees, sending pulses of pain rushing through the entire body. The impact was hard enough to knock the air out of his lungs, and he slid almost all the way down the staircase before entirely coming to. Fortunately, his many delays resulted in him being near the tail end of the crowd, and instead of being trampled to death, he only received a few accidental kicks to the ribs and limbs.

Less fortunately, he could no longer feel bony fingers digging into his biceps. The fall dislodged his passenger from his back.

“Leonida Ivanovna?” he called out. “Leonida Ivanovna!”

There was no answer.

He climbed up to all fours, scouring the area with renewed urgency. The errant physicist lay unmoving at the foot of the stairs, unconscious or injured. Teetering, he managed to pull himself back to his feet, shaking his head to get rid of the insistent ringing in his ears, and shot a look at the wider station – inadvertently peering deep into the heart of silence, every bit as close as he feared.

He saw nothing.

And the nothing saw him.

They came at the birth of the universe. Witness Us. Slipping between then and now, crawling from the place beyond places. Witness Us. Altar to the profane, unseen and unseeing; ever crumbling, yet never diminishing. Witness Us. Bound, bound and bound, endless. Witness Us. Never born, never named. Witness Us. Ever-end, yet never-part of this world.

“Leo! I need your help here!”

Witness Us.

Name Us.

Call Us.

“Leo! Snap out of it!”

We'll Be Waiting.

“Leo!”

Something hit him in the side, hard enough to knock him sideways, ripping his gaze away from the grasp of never-named, never-born, never-part...

Leo shook his head, coming to, and blinked at Nikolai Yuryevich, who'd apparently just rammed into him.

“Didn't I tell you to go?” he asked dazedly.

Something warm and salty was dripping from his nose. His eyes saw flashes of color that wasn't there, like after looking at the sun, if the sun was a dark and wretched thing, and his throat hurt as though he'd just been screaming. Except it wasn't screaming, he knew somehow. It was a... hum. That wasn't the right word – there wasn't a right word – but it was the closest one that fit. Leo found it difficult to describe what it was except in negatives and contradictions, in what it wasn't. It wasn't low, and it wasn't high. It wasn't loud. It wasn't sound. The hum did not create noise, it crafted a single perfect, peculiar frequency that quieted, muffled, suffocated the noises around it. An anti-noise, for lack of a better term. Anti-sound. Even now he could feel it, a living thing at the base of his throat, ready to rise the very moment he called for it.

Waiting.

“Since when do I listen to your orders?” Nikolai Yuryevich huffed. “What happened? One moment you were trying to get to my wife – who you dropped – the next, you ignore her completely and start moving toward that black thing over there.”

Leo shook his head again, trying to make sense of the last few seconds. He failed, his mind protecting itself, shying away from things man was not meant to know.

“Don't look at it,” he said hoarsely. “If you look...”

He couldn't find the words.

Nikolai Yuryevich nodded seriously nonetheless.

“You need to get my wife out of here, young man. I can't do it myself.”

Leo nodded back, retreating to the woman's body. Leonida Ivanovna was not a heavy woman by any means, all wispy hair and frail bones hidden beneath loose clothing, but it was still over 50 kg, and her being unconscious didn't help.

He took nearly a dozen steps before realizing that his footsteps were the only ones he heard.

“Nikolai Yuryevich? We need to go.”

“You do, yes,” the old man nodded without moving a centimeter.

“You -”

“We both know I can't outrun this thing,” the bespectacled historian did not let him speak. “Not with my bad leg. And you can't carry both of us.”

Leo felt a lump in his throat.

“You had to come back because I got myself trapped,” he said hollowly.

Nikolai Yuryevich huffed.

“If it wasn't for you, my fool of a wife would never have had a chance to get away in time. Now, go!” he waved his hand through the air impatiently. “Let an old man serve his country one last time and see if I can't give this thing indigestion!”

His eyes stinging, Leo saluted Nikolai Yuryevich and turned around, running toward the stairs as the elderly historian stayed behind, reversing their positions from just a few minutes ago.

As he reached the swinging doors, he heard the old man's last words, in a language that was not Russian nor any spoken in this world, but instantly understood by Leo.

“So beautiful...”

Then there was only silence.

***

Without a flashlight and his arms occupied by a precious load, Leo still crossed the dark tunnels faster than ever before. Every noise was welcome, even the tap-tap-tapping of possibly feral rats. No sound was as terrifying as their sheer absence.

He crashed through the doors of glass and steel the same way he did on the way here, making his shoulder flare with half-forgotten aches. The station's surviving inhabitants, those who did not run madly into the wild beyond, gathered in a small, frightened group a few houses down the road. They were a pitiful gathering, maybe thirty people out of over three hundred, torn between their fear of the thing below and the things roaming outside.

Leo never thought he'd say this, but he preferred the outside.

“Is this everyone?” he asked tiredly, accepting various affirmative noises in response.

Aunt Nadya was not among them, he noted absently. Neither was...

“Where's Alina?” he asked, suddenly alert.

The survivors shared glances. Those weren't looks of ignorance – Alina was not the kind of girl who could be ignored – but of discomfort, hesitance. Finally, a familiar big guy stepped forward. Without the artificial lighting, he looked vaguely Tatar, with darker skin and high cheekbones. In his right arm he cradled the dark-haired boy that he saved.

Leo was selfishly glad that, out of all the people, they were the ones who survived. It made his actions seem a little less meaningless.

“She was sitting right beside the tunnel entrance,” the big guy said quietly. His voice held a subtle eastern cadence, giving fluidity to the cut-off and unsympathetic Russian syllables. “I'm sorry.”

Right where silence came from.

For some reason, that hit him the hardest. He felt suddenly, irrationally angry.

“Fuck!” he yelled kicking the wall of a nearby kiosk. Magazine covers mocked him with their carefree smiles, their inane celebrity gossip and product placement. Everything that didn't matter anymore. He closed his eyes, turned around and leaned on the wall, sliding down to the ground. “Fuck.”

As though drawn by his actions, silence spilled out of the metro entrance like an overripe melon. It was different here, under the light of the sun. Slower, more sluggish and uncertain.

Unseeing, Leo remembered, never-part of this world.

Not until named, at least.

Then silence twitched in his direction, and he hurriedly cut that line of thought.

Without a tether, lacking a point of reference, it... not faded away, for it already was an absence, but it no longer kept the world from fading back in. Slowly, Nothing became nothing, which, in turn, became something.

Leo let out a breath he didn't know he was holding.

“Is it over?” somebody asked uncertainly, voicing that unstated hope.

“Even if that... that, left, we can't go back,” a more cynical survivor replied. “Our home is gone.”

“So are all our supplies.”

“And Katya. I saw that stuff eat her.”

“Ira? Irochka, are you here?”

“Sasha! Sasha!”

The gathering was quickly descending into a pandemonium, and Leo was having absolutely none of it.

“Everybody, shut UP!” he barked. “Your wailing is going to attract attention. Any number of predators hunt by sound.”

That certainly doused their enthusiasm.

“But what about Ira?” a sandy-haired middle-aged man asked at a more respectable volume. Judging by a meticulously maintained suit, he was somebody who took pride in their appearance, but like everybody else here, the lack of tools and shortage of water left him greasy and with a week-long beard. “She escaped the station, I know it, but she's not here!”

“I can't stop you from searching for her,” Leo admitted frankly. “But remember: by shouting, you endanger everybody else around here. Including Ira herself.”

The blond man shot a hopeful look at his neighbors, but they only pulled their eyes away, unwilling to follow him into the wilderness of the once familiar city.

“But what do we do now?” somebody else wanted to know.

Leo surveyed the group – lost, confused, frightened – and sighed.

“I know where you can find the nearest shelter,” he shifted his grip on Leonida Ivanovna. “But first, does anybody know how to make a stretcher?”

***

Leo had guided lone stragglers before, people who hid in their homes for as long as it was possible, like himself, and others, who parted ways with their original groups for some reason, like Alina.

He quickly found out that shepherding a crew of thirty was a different beast entirely.

For one thing, the survivors maintained a constant background murmur, with at least two people feeling the urge to share their thoughts with their neighbors at any given time. Apparently, the fact that T-rexes didn't come pouring out of side-streets at the first word was a sign that Leo was exaggerating the danger. Fifteen minutes into the trip, and he was already regretting every decision in his life that brought him to this point.

For another, the journey ended up being much longer and more circuitous than Leo was comfortable with. The survivors rushed toward any rustle, real or imaginary, like goddamn lemmings, hoping to find their loved ones. Detour after detour, to the point he somehow kept finding them further and further away from their destination each time he stopped to get his bearings.

“Do you hear that?” the blond man spoke loudly, trying to attract his attention.

Leo gritted his teeth, following the same advice his mother gave when he was being bullied at school. Ignore them, and they will get bored and go away.

It worked about as well now as it did then.

“Somebody's calling for help!” the blond man outright yelled in his ear.

“There's nobody there!” Leo finally snapped back. “The same as the last eight times!”

“No, I can actually hear something,” a plump woman spoke up, wiping off sweat.

Leo paused. If it was just the troublemaker, he could have dismissed him. As it was...

Leo listened.

“...e-e-e...” came the faint whisper on the wind. A familiar whisper.

He paled.

Did they really deviate so far from the path?

“It's nothing,” he proclaimed abruptly. “You're hearing things.”

But that simply stirred up the hornet's nest.

“I heard it, too!”

“And me!”

“I heard something before you started talking.”

“Maybe it's Ira!” the blond man insisted. “She may need our help!”

“Wait!” Leo thrust out his arm, blocking the path. “That way lies the border!”

The man brushed past him without a single word. A number of other people followed after him, some sympathetic, some hoping to find their own lost friends and family, some simply going with the flow. Herd instinct at it's finest.

“We can't just leave them,” the Tatar said quietly.

“I know,” Leo groaned.

Even if it was the last place he ever wanted to visit again.

“What's so bad about the border, though?” one of the men carrying Leonida Ivanovna's stretcher wondered. Like Leo, he was young, in his early twenties, thin, pale and brown-haired. His face was narrower though, sharper than Leo's round one, inherited from his rural grandparents. “What happens if you go past it?”

Leo opened his mouth.

“...me-e-e-e...” drifted on the wind.

Leo closed his mouth, shaking his head.

“You'll see,” he only said.

The first group did not get far. Even if they lived in this area for generations, the past two weeks have rendered the place almost unrecognizable. Roads were carved up by numerous claw tracks, and signs torn down, as though in the wake of a tornado, stone was slowly crumbling and glass tinted all shades of green from some unseen residue in the air. Nature was reclaiming its territory with speed that was wholly unnatural; buildings that were occupied yesterday looked as though they were abandoned decades ago. Some of the greenery waned and died, but other seemed to thrive, climbing up the walls, blooming with vivid reds, yellows and purples.

Leo made sure to take the long way around those. Experience – of the second-hand variety, thankfully – taught him that bright colors were dangerous. More harmless ones merely had thorns, but others released poisonous vapors or even had symbiotic organisms, camouflaging amidst the explosion of color to feed upon people lured in by the pretty flowers. He was pretty sure that one bush was actually growing from an exposed human ribcage.

“...ll-ll me-e-e-e...”

The urban vista ended abruptly, as though someone just took a chunk of Moscow and placed it in some alien jungle. There was a sharp, definitive line where steel and concrete gave way to wood and vines without any kind of an in-between. In a number of places, buildings on the border have actually been sliced clean through, leaving apartments open to the elements.

In the middle of the cut-off road stood a human figure, seemingly frozen midstep.

“Hey, man,” one of the braver survivors called out before Leo could stop them. “Have you seen anybody pass by here?”

The figure startled violently and took a half-step to the side, turning to face the speaker. A short, involuntary movement.

He left behind what could have been mistaken for afterimages at a first glance – if afterimages were as solid and clear-cut as their originator. For just a few seconds he looked like a nauseating cadaver of flesh, limbs and organs superimposed over each other. Like several dozen still shots – all fully self-aware and cognizant of each other.

Then reality seemed to catch up to them. Skin stretched out to accommodate a larger mass, becoming gossamer and translucent; every muscle pulled, strained and tore in a never-ceasing agony; bones grew fragile and pencil-thin, splintering at the slightest of motions.

“...i-i-illl me-e-e-e...” the cadaver croaked, lurching toward them in an ungainly manner, a dozen involuntary motions for each intended one. Skin split, releasing countless rivulets of blood, and the attempt at speech left it hacking out pieces of lungs, but the figure still tried to wobble in their direction.

The speaker staggered back from the cadaver, pale and mute. Somebody threw up.

Then worse.

Somebody recognized him.

“Kirill?” the blond man breathed out in horror.

“Ki-i-i-llll me-e-e...” the figure choked in their faces.

A moment later it flickered, space and time reset, returning Kirill to a just figure in the middle of the road. His mind remained unaffected though – and he leaped toward them again, shattering into a hundred still shots. It was not enough to reach them, however, and so the man tried again.

And again.

And again.

“Ki-i-illll me-e-e-e...”

Leo took in a shuddering breath, turning around.

“You asked what happens when you cross the border,” he said with a forced calm. “This happens. This is what awaits those brave enough – or foolish enough – to stroll into the unknown. Still feel like bumbling around? Be my guest.”

He walked past the survivors.

“I'm done, though. I'm going straight to the shelter. No breaks, no detours. If any of you feel like coming with me, now's the time to do so.”

He walked away from the anomalous border, from a friend he couldn't help and from survivors of the metro shelter, and he did not look back to see if any followed.

***

The nearest shelter was set up in a church. Because people always wanted somebody to deliver them from harm, because a church was a natural community center and because churches were one thing that Moscow had in abundance, Patriarchate marking its territory.

The black-clad priest met them at the gate and, taking a single look at their slumped figures and downcast faces, let them pass without a word.

Truthfully, Leo did not remember much about the rest of the night. There were questions, there were introductions, and several members of the congregation, ones with homes nearby, volunteered to bring in extra duvets and bedcovers. Leo, though?

It was a really, really long day.

The moment he found a spare pillow, Leo and his consciousness promptly parted ways.