The town exhaled. A long, slow, wet sound echoed through the empty streets, rattling windowpanes and bending the air itself. The buildings groaned, stretching like something waking from a deep sleep, their wooden beams shifting, their walls inhaling the silence that had settled over Black Hollow like a burial shroud.

  Lea stepped back.

  Her breath came sharp, fast, uneven. She knew something was coming. She had known from the moment they stepped out of the Market and saw the sky peeled raw. But knowing didn't stop the fear from curling up her spine, didn't stop the ice-cold grip of realization as the shadows behind them moved. Sandra saw it first. The shape unfolding from the alleyway, the slow, deliberate crunch of boots against the cobblestones. Her fingers dug into Lea's sleeve. "Lea," she whispered. "Behind us." Lea turned.

  Maddox emerged from the dark behind them, his body still reshaping itself into something that barely resembled a man. His limbs were too long, his spine arching at an unnatural angle, and the skin around his mouth peeled back too far, exposing teeth that no longer fit inside a human jaw. And his eyes were Still green. Still sharp. But emptied of everything he had been. He wasn't Maddox anymore. He was hungry.

  Lea moved to step forward, to say something and Maddox lunged. It was too fast, too sudden. One moment, he was standing, the next his claws—not fingers, not hands anymore—sliced through Lea's throat. Sandra screamed. Loud and Broken.

  Blood spattered the stones. Lea stumbled, clutching her throat, her fingers wet and shaking, red spilling through them like sand through a broken hourglass. Her knees hit the ground hard, her breath gurgling, gasping, choking. Maddox didn't stop.

  He fell on her like a starving animal, ripping, tearing, devouring. Flesh peeled from bone, his mouth working over her skin, his jaw unhinging wider, wider until it split at the corners. His body trembled as he fed, consuming more than just meat. Taking something deeper.

  Sandra stood frozen, every nerve in her body screaming at her to move, to run, to do anything but stand here and watch Lea die. But the only thing that moved was Gemini. She laughed. Loud and sharp, delighted. Her hands clapped together, like a child watching a carnival performance.

  "Yes, yes, yes," she cheered, her voice ringing through the empty town. "That's it, Maddox. Eat, eat, eat! Faster now, don't waste a drop!" Sandra's body finally reacted. She ran. She turned on her heel and sprinted, her legs barely keeping up with the blind, desperate command to get away, to survive.

  She didn't know where she was going. Didn't think about it. Her mind was a blur of images—Lea gurgling, struggling, clawing at the cobblestones. Maddox tearing, swallowing, moaning with pleasure. Gemini laughing, watching, enjoying every second. The town shifted around her.

  The streets stretched and twisted, new roads forming, old ones vanishing. Houses leaned toward her, their windows like open mouths, their doors swinging wide as if inviting her in. Run inside, little bird. Run and see what's waiting. But she didn't stop. She didn't take the bait. She ran home.

  Their childhood house stood at the end of the road, untouched, waiting. The door was slightly ajar, the same way they had left it. But the inside was wrong. She knew that. She didn't care. She barreled through the doorway, slamming the door behind her, her breath ragged and uneven, her heart hammering against her ribs like it was trying to break free of her chest. Silence. Then—laughter. Not Lea's nor Maddox's.

  Gemini's voice drifted in through the cracks in the door. Sweet, amused, triumphant. "Oh, Sandra," she sang. "You can't run from home." The floorboards beneath Sandra's feet shuddered. And in the walls, Something sighed.

  Sandra had thought, in those first breathless moments after Lea had been torn apart after the streets had warped beneath her feet after the town had reshaped itself into something unfamiliar and impossible, that this was it—the end of change, the final form of whatever horror Black Hollow had been waiting to become. But she had been wrong.

  It was still changing. Still growing. Still feeding.

  At first, the differences had been subtle, creeping in at the edges of her awareness, slithering into the town's bones so slowly that, had she not been watching so closely, she might have missed them. The air was thicker now, warmer, damp in a way that felt unnatural as if the entire town had been pulled underground and left to fester in the Market's breath.

  The houses had begun to move.

  Not all at once. Not in obvious, violent shifts. But in the little things.

  The days stretched, long and breathless, unraveling like a thread pulled too tight, yet never snapping, only stretching further into something that no longer resembled time as Sandra had once understood it. The sun never rose properly. It hovered at the horizon in an eternal dusk, a smothered glow that never burned away the deep, blood-colored stain in the sky. The nights were worse.

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  Sandra didn't sleep anymore. Not really. She would drift into something close to unconsciousness, curled in the corner of what used to be her home, her body pressed against the floorboards that smelled of old dust and memories she no longer wanted to claim. But even then, she never truly rested, because the house breathed around her.

  It sighed in the dark, wood groaning like ribs shifting, like lungs inhaling. The walls were too warm beneath her fingertips as if something inside them was alive, something she could almost feel moving if she pressed her palm flat against the wallpaper. And the worst part? She wasn't sure it had ever been any different. She stayed inside. At first, it was fear. Maddox was out there. Or what was left of him? And Gemini was worse.

  But as the days stretched on, as the town continued to shift in ways that made her feel like she was standing inside a mouth that was slowly closing, she realized something else. The town didn't want her to leave.

  The first time she had tried, she had only made it as far as the front steps before the silence had pressed in too thick, too absolute, too expectant. She had stood there, bare feet against the wood, staring at the street that was no longer the street she had once walked as a child, no longer the familiar path leading to the old general store, to the schoolhouse, to the church. It was something else now. Something wider.

  The spaces between the buildings stretched unnaturally like the town had been pulled apart at the seams and then stitched back together by hands that didn't quite remember where everything was supposed to go. The cobblestones no longer fit together neatly; they had cracked, split, and shifted out of place. And in those cracks, things moved. Small things. Soft things. Things that whispered when she wasn't looking directly at them.

  She had turned back before she even realized she was moving, her feet carrying her back inside, back to the space that should have been safe, even though she knew, deep in her ribs, that nowhere was safe anymore. She didn't try again. Instead, she watched. From the windows. From the doorway.

  From behind curtains. She watched the town. And the town watched back. The first thing she noticed was the rhythm. At first, she thought it was her breathing—too fast, too shallow, refusing to settle even when she forced herself to be still. But it wasn't her. It was the town.

  The houses shifted, just slightly, as if inhaling. The trees along the edge of the road swayed in a wind she could not feel. The fog that curled along the ground pulsed, thick and syrupy, dragging along the cobblestones like a tide pulling out to sea. It was alive.

  She didn't want to think about it. But then, one evening, when the red-stained sky had settled into its dim, heavy dusk, she saw her. Standing in the street. Barefoot. Smiling. Sandra's breath had stopped.

  She hadn't seen Gemini since that night and hadn't dared to imagine what she was doing, what she had planned, what she had become. But now, as she stood there, bathed in the town's slow, pulsing breath, Sandra knew. Gemini had always belonged here. The Market had never taken her.

  It had followed her. It had waited for her. And now? Now it was hers. Sandra pressed her trembling fingers against the windowpane, staring at the girl who had once been her sister. Who was still her sister? Gemini tilted her head as if sensing the gaze as if feeling the weight of Sandra's horror pressing against the glass.

  Then, slowly, lazily, she lifted a hand. And waved. Sandra flinched. Because the town moved with her. The houses shivered. The streets sighed. The church bell let out a single, rattling gasp of a chime. Gemini had become something else.

  And Sandra realized, with a slow, creeping dread that settled into the marrow of her bones, that she wasn't just watching the town change. She was watching Gemini rule it. And the worst part? She wasn't sure Black Hollow had ever truly belonged to them in the first place.

  Maybe it had always belonged to her.

  Sandra hadn't dared to go near it. But she knew. She felt it. The way its doors had creaked open wider every night, the way its bell had stopped ringing like a warning and started humming like a call.

  The town was alive. And Sandra understood now. The Market had never been a place.

  It had never been contained within those tunnels, those narrow, suffocating pathways of iron and stone, filled with cages and whispers and waiting things. The Market had always been something bigger. Something vast. Something that spread.

  Something that only needed a crack to slip through, a single doorway left open, a single heartbeat of hesitation—and then it could grow. And Gemini had been the crack.

  Sandra watched her from the window, the girl who had once been her sister, the girl who had walked through the Market without fear, who had spoken its language without hesitation, who had offered it something no one else could: herself. And now it had her. Now it was using her. Or maybe she was using it.

  Sandra couldn't tell the difference anymore.

  Gemini moved through the streets like a queen surveying her kingdom, bare feet against the cobblestones that no longer followed the same paths, her fingers trailing along doorframes that seemed to lean toward her touch, eager, hungry. The people of Black Hollow were gone, but the town was not empty. Things were filling it now.

  Almost human shapes. Shadows that moved even when there was no light. They gathered at the edges of the roads, stood in the dark corners where buildings had twisted into impossible angles, perched on rooftops that stretched a little too high, their heads tilted at unnatural angles, their fingers too long, too thin, too expectant. Watching. Waiting.

  Sandra had seen one up close.

  She had been standing at the edge of her house, staring at the school, trying to remember what it had once felt like to sit inside it, to write on the chalkboard, to press her fingers into the worn wood of the desks. And then she had felt it—a breath.

  Not behind her. Beneath her.

  She had looked down. And there, in the crack between the porch steps, something had been looking back. Not an eye, not exactly.

  Something round. Something hollow. Something that blinked sideways instead of up and down. Sandra had stumbled back, gasping, heart slamming against her ribs, but the moment her feet left the step—it was gone. Like it had never been there at all. Like it had been waiting to see if she would step closer. Sandra knew what the Market was now. It was not a place.

  It was a hunger. And now, Black Hollow was its mouth.

  ———

  The first time Sandra found the symbols, she thought they had always been there.

  Faint carvings in the wooden beams of her childhood home, etched into the floorboards beneath the dust, scratched into the doorframes so small they looked like nothing more than accidental notches. They were easy to overlook—too easy. But the longer she stared at them, the more they shifted, stretched, rearranged themselves in ways that should have been impossible.

  And then, the longer she looked, the more she saw them everywhere. Not just in the house. In the streets. On the buildings. Beneath the windowsills of empty homes.

  Some were old, the wood rotting around the carved lines as if they had been there since before the town was built. Others were fresh. Still sharp, still bleeding into the surface like open wounds. Still waiting.

  She found herself tracing them when she wasn't thinking, her fingers hovering just above the markings, not quite touching them, afraid that if she did, they might move beneath her skin. Might spread.

  The Market had not come to Black Hollow on its own.