The bus hums that low, hard mechanical sound all old buses learn to make—part resignation, part stubborn forward motion. Johannesburg streams past outside, caught in the golden haze of late afternoon, pretending so hard to be civilized it loops back into surrealism.

  Hedges manicured to corporate perfection, driveways guarded by electric fences and optimism. The city wearing its good behaviour like a cheap suit.

  Aster stares out the window and tries to pretend along with it.

  Maybe if he looks long enough, he can crawl back into that illusion. Let the glass and chrome reflections blur. Be a person-shaped thing again that doesn’t believe there are monsters stitched into the seams of the world.

  For a moment, he lets himself drift. Maybe he overreacted. Maybe this is all just the hangover from too many existential shocks in too short a time. The world outside at least makes sense—or does a decent impression of it.

  His pulse has finally stopped hammering from his little existential seizure outside the house. Sleep deprivation, mild psychosis, post-traumatic something—he can alphabetize the possible reasons later. For now, he has sunlight, motion, and the gentle assurance that the bus driver probably exists. That’s enough reality for one afternoon.

  Then he sees him.

  The breath catches in Aster’s throat before he even realizes why. Not a man. Or not enough of one for his mind to stop screaming. The man—or something arranged roughly in the shape of one—stands on the pavement as the bus slows at an intersection.

  Tall in that way buildings sometimes are when you’re sitting at the wrong distance to feel safe. A duffel coat hangs on him like it’s trying to disguise the fact that it isn’t sure what “body temperature” is supposed to be. Shoulders too narrow. Arms too long. His face is hidden, but something about him snags Aster’s attention like a fishhook in soft flesh, the sharp pull in his chest like an electric arc searing through it.

  The air around the man seems… wrong. Like perspective itself is bending a little to make room for him. People pass, and each one twitches, eyes narrowing, spines stiffening—a shared instinct to avoid looking. They step around him like he’s a bad smell given human form.

  Aster’s pulse jogs past his throat and starts sprinting laps around his brain. There’s no reason. No logic. But something in him—something that isn’t just Aster—responds. Like a buried reflex waking up.

  The man tilts his head. Sniffs the air. A slow inhale as though scenting something on the wind. Once. Twice. Slow, deliberate breaths that drag across Aster’s nerves.

  Recognition.

  Aster feels it land in his bones, pressure-like hands pulling from the inside out.

  Something inside his chest moves. Not metaphorically. Literally moves. A squirming pressure beneath his ribs, like something waking up that had been content to pretend it was dead until now.

  He doubles over, one hand gripping the seat in front of him. A slick, crawling dread worms under his sternum, pressing out, begging to be seen.

  His pulse hammers.

  The world begins to warp at the edges, like wet paint smudged by a careless hand. Colours deepen. Shadows pulse with nauseating breath. The roof of the bus feels lower. The aisle stretches. Nothing around him moves—but everything moves wrong.

  The man’s shadow begins to bleed, literally bleed, tendrils of multi-coloured mist unspooling from his feet with each step, seeping outward, thin and translucent. The light bends through it, fractured like oil on water.

  Each step leaves a ripple of unreality. The mist spreads, dissolving into the air, tasting faintly metallic, like rain over rust.

  Aster can’t look away. He’s transfixed, half horrified, half unwilling to admit what his senses are reporting.

  Not a man, his brain decides, before quickly adding, but let’s not be rude about it.

  The man stops. His head snaps suddenly toward Aster.

  Their eyes meet.

  Aster doesn’t see eyes.

  He sees a signal go off in the architecture of the universe.

  And then it screams.

  The sound isn’t sound. It’s a rupture. A siren peeling open the world like an overripe fruit. Reality shatters, peeling apart as if sanity itself is having a seizure. Buildings flicker like unstable projections. The street warps, the sky tears at its seams as mist pours in through the cracks like floodwater.

  And in the gap between one blink and the next, Aster sees the man for what it is.

  Not a man.

  Skin snaps back as the body tears open into machinery: jaw splitting, metal folding out of flesh, light bursting from sockets. A bloodhound built from scavenged nightmares—steam and circuitry, machine and flesh, lungs screaming like factory sirens.

  And as its call echoes through the collapsing reality, other sirens answer—from the horizon, from every direction—loud, close.

  Aster feels it then, more hooks latching onto him, pulling, lathing into the marrow of his being, dragging.

  “What the fuck,” he whispers, voice shaking somewhere between awe and pants-shitting fear.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  The creature lunges as the bus lurches forward, a rush of impossible height and sinew, claws scraping the bus as it pulls away. Its form, a patchwork of steel and muscle, is left behind in the wake of the engine’s low groan as it changes gear with a belch of exhaust fumes, picking up speed.

  Aster doesn’t look back to see if the thing is still chasing him. Denial requires focus.

  Even while moving, the world remains fractured, impossible geometry opening and closing in his vision like a shuttered eye.

  He presses his palms to his face, eyes clenched, expecting the usual barrage—the snap of talons, the hiss of teeth, the amorphous shapes that normally fill these hallucinations. Ten seconds pass—a lifetime measured in shivering pulses—then twenty. He dares to pry open his eyes.

  Nothing lunges. Nothing shrieks. The bus rolls on, ordinary in its function, yet anything but ordinary in being.

  The interior has dissolved. Metal frames ripple, warp, and seem to have become a living surface. Walls and ceiling churn with textures not meant to exist—grotesque vines curling like the fingers of drowned gods, coral-like fans pulsing gently as though breathing, flowers with petals the width of hands and hues that don’t exist, deep crimsons fading into ultraviolets that should have broken Aster’s eyes. Each colour throbs, humming against the retina with the insistence of a fever.

  Passengers are enclosed in soft, golden shells—part barrier, part shield. Aster can’t begin to guess, but it seems to be a form of protection, refracting the chaos around them into muted light.

  He realizes, with slow, sinking fascination, that he’s covered too. Golden filaments shimmer across his chest, wrapping him in a warm, insulating web.

  “Oh good,” he mutters. “Upgraded to Premium Delusion.”

  This hadn’t been there in the convenience store, hadn’t prevented the screeching horrors from latching onto him before. Now, somehow, the swamp, the city, the reality underneath reality, is visible to him without it immediately devouring his mind this time.

  He corrects himself. Hallucination. Not reality. Probably a brain worm from all the questionable back-alley meat he’s been buying. This is temporary. It’ll wear off.

  He leans back against the warped seat, eyes tracing the movements of the creatures, the flora, the odd fauna, letting the visual onslaught wash over him.

  Maybe it’s brain rot. Maybe it’s revelation. Doesn’t matter—he isn’t paying rent on either.

  The woman across the aisle scrolls on her phone, unaware that barnacles have taken residence on its surface. Tiny, calcified growths project an extra layer atop her screen, feeding her subconscious with messages not written by any human: Validation. Envy. Outrage. Each word vibrates in the barnacle’s own rhythm, a silent song that seems to placate the woman one moment before enraging her the next without registering as sound. She smiles at an ad as the barnacles flash “Consume,” the phone glowing faintly with the shimmer of another reality.

  A man in the rear mutters quietly, half embarrassed, half placid, as a beehive embeds itself halfway into the golden field surrounding him. Aster can see some of the bees inside the man’s field as they drone around him, but they don’t buzz; they mutter—voices, dozens at once, stories and worries overlaid in a continuous hum, drowning one another out like a symphony written by the mad. Aster catches himself thinking that maybe this is literal schizophrenia made manifest—a biological echo of inner chaos externalized for him to see.

  Nah. That would suggest some form of structure or cohesion. No, he’d have to be as mad as a hatter to believe that.

  Not able to do anything but wait, he watches the surrounding chaos as his eye catches an emerald-green serpent slithering from the roof of the bus onto the shoulder of a young woman who’s staring at another woman’s wedding ring a seat over like she’d sell her soul to take her place. The snake starts whispering into her ear as a green fog bleeds from her field like steam, curling upward and outward. A tiny bird-sized moth darts through an open window, seemingly drawn by the strange mist.

  Oblivious to the threat, it flutters too close. The snake strikes, and Aster watches, horrified and fascinated, as it snaps the creature up with delicate precision that makes his stomach twist.

  The panic still scratches at the back of his skull—a steady, needling reminder that none of this is supposed to be real. He’s tripped before—mushrooms, mostly—and once even managed to bluff his way through an entire work shift while the walls melted into polite applause. But this? This isn’t the usual cosmic joke. Keeping composure while emerald snakes whisper secrets that make people bleed green Mist isn’t remotely in the same category as handling a bad trip. That’s like comparing ice cream to hand grenades. And none of his past chemical misadventures have ever felt this solid, this cruelly, vividly real.

  Especially not when he doesn’t even feel the slightest bit intoxicated. Could this really be a hallucination?

  Aster dismisses the thought almost immediately. “Yeah. Definitely should’ve gone to more therapy.”

  Not wanting to entertain an idea that might lead to his own psychosis, he instead lets his eyes wander, getting lost in the moving landscape of layered absurdity unfolding outside the bus window as he tries to ignore the rising panic that this might be his new normal: plants twitching as if breathing, mist curling in lazy spirals over every surface, creatures flickering in and out of perception, the soft hum of golden fields around the oblivious people who inexplicably share this world with these monsters. It’s a carnival of chaos, beautiful and horrifying, and he’s thankfully shielded from it all, golden bubble intact—the only one seeing it fully.

  Then comes the next stop.