4338.208 · July 27, 2018 AD
Not Worth Claiming
Rose wakes to a wrongness she can't name. Through a crack in the rusted wall, she and Mack watch a man move through the darkness with a girl who can barely stand, whose only word is "please." He carries a device that tears reality open — colours that shouldn't exist, a doorway to somewhere that isn't anywhere. Before he steps through, he turns and looks directly at Rose. Not with surprise. Not with concern. With the calm certainty of something that has already decided she doesn't matter.
Rose is jolted awake by a silence that has weight. Mack is already rigid beside her. Through a gap in the corrugated iron, they watch a man in a long coat move through the pre-dawn scrub, dragging a stumbling girl whose only sound is a single whispered "please." He stops at the building wall, draws a small dark device from his coat, and tears a rectangle of impossible light into existence — colours that clash and spark, a doorway to somewhere fundamentally other. The girl slumps unresponsive while the man scans the landscape. His gaze finds Rose through the crack with no searching, holds her for ten terrible seconds, then releases her — not because he can't reach her but because she isn't worth claiming. He steps through and vanishes. His arm returns once, drags the girl after him, and the portal closes as though it never existed. The world returns to normal. But Rose carries something new in her bones: the knowledge that she has been seen, catalogued, and dismissed by something that wears a human face but has forgotten how to mean it.
