"Let me out."

"No."

"Let me out."

"No."

"Let me out."

"No. Do you ever shut up?" Smith groaned, sipping from a tall drive thru coffee cup.

"I do not!" Gray replied, voice thick with false exuberance even as their eyes fought to close. "Unfortunately for you. Though you could be rid of me if you let me out! Think about it. Clear solution here."

Celia, who was half asleep and slumped against the cell's bars, reached towards Gray and grabbed their hand reassuringly. Gray looked down at her in concern. Celia should've left them. It wasn't going to be safe for the next little while, and while Gray didn't care much about their own fate, it terrified them to know that they could end up watching Celia get hurt because of them.

Smith rolled his eyes. "My shift ends at twelve. I've got like five minutes left. I'll be rid of you then." He took another long sip. Steam curled through the air, a baby snake writhing and twisting. Gray blinked, and the snake vanished. "And then you'll go to jail, and everyone will be rid of you, and we can all live happily ever after!"

Those words must have hit Celia harder than they hit Gray, because she stood up and jabbed a finger towards Smith. "I don't care who you are, you do not get to speak to my spouse that way—"

"Whatever." Smith watched as a pair of officers trickled into the station. He looked over at Gray. "Was it worth it?"

Gray pursed their lips, then glanced up at Celia, who was still glaring at him. "Almost. If Ceelie left, it'd be worth it. But like this? No."

"Sucks," Smith replied, disdain seeping into the word.

Gray wanted to say more, but then they saw the analog clock hanging on the wall. They watched the longest hand tick second by second, dread mounting. Celia grabbed their hand again. They squeezed it once.

They say sometimes that silence can be deafening. Normally Gray would argue that this is incorrect, an oxymoron—"How can silence be deafening? It's the absence of noise!"—but they understood it in that police station, how the silence was heavy, cloaking, oppressive, hanging heavily over every one of them, silently forbidding speech, and it was so quiet Gray wondered if indeed they had gone deaf.

The moment didn't feel particularly special when every hand on the clock aligned at twelve. Gray's entire body was braced for an attack, shoulders pulled back, eyes sharp. But nothing happened.

"And that's the end of my shift!" Smith said brightly. He looked back at Gray and grinned cruelly. "Well, there's your end of the world. Guess now I'll be on my—"

Gray felt the change. Just a gentle twinge in the pit of their stomach. A soft thing.

The first scream rose up near the front of the precinct—one of the two officers who'd come in just a few minutes ago, presumably to relieve Smith from his post. The darkness was a crawling, scraping thing that slid through the room. Gray couldn't see a thing, but they knew if they could they'd see that officer neatly bisected, sliced right down the middle as though they'd always existed that way.

"Hide, Ceelie," they whispered, volume barely above an exhale.

Celia tried to find their eyes through the darkness, but she couldn't. Gray heard a faint clattering and could only hope she would heed their advice.

"Brett? Hey, Brett?" The other officer, then, clearly panicking. Gray could imagine it, how his heart would race, how his breath would become heaving and labored, all the attention he was drawing to himself with every frantic word that tumbled from his mouth.

"Come on, man, come on, say something, come on, are you okay? Say something, please, where are you, what's—"

Two screams. The first was loud and crass, a sharp outburst of disgust that rattled around the room, splitting that silence in a way that felt more illegal than anything Gray had done to land themself in a cell before. The second was something much more chilling, something that raised the hairs on Gray's skin—the sort of terror that follows a realization that not only is your death going to be inevitably soon, but it will be excruciating painful and horrifically brutal, and there's absolutely nothing to be done about it. That second scream was followed by a wet, slippery sound like a boot being pried from where it had sunk into sticky mud, then two heavy muffled thumps. The whole precinct smelled like blood, that thick scent of iron that carried a dreadful weight to it.

A whimper from behind them—there had been other prisoners in this cell with Gray, right? When that poor soul was cut down, they didn't scream. They sighed, almost in relief, and their body fell softly. They heard a faint ring of metal this time, with the murderer so close. Something splattered onto Gray's clothes. They shivered. A small hand curled around their forearm, and Gray nearly shouted—which would have doomed them—but managed to hold it in.

Gray knew what the next part would be. Not from experience—this had never happened before. Not to them. Their certainty came from the research they'd done, the studies they'd performed. Still, nothing could prepare them for the clicking once it started, a strange sort of ticking chirping whirring noise as though a clock had picked apart a songbird and stolen its voice for itself. The pace was dreadfully slow and erratic. A feather brushed along Gray's shoulder. They squeezed their eyes shut. Even with the viscous pool of darkness encasing the precinct, they didn't want to risk seeing anything.

And evidently that was the right move, because two others—someone else in the cell, and another one of the cops—couldn't hide their terror, and swiftly met their fates. Gray trembled. The small hand on their arm gripped them like a lifeline. They could only hope that none of the deceased were Celia. Though none of the screams had sounded familiar, the fear remained nonetheless.

All they could do was wait.

And so they did.

Second by crawling second, Gray waited in darkness. One more cut in half. More clicking. Another dead. The clicking persisted. The unfamiliar hand had nearly cut off their circulation, it felt like. Finally the clicking faded away, slowly, slowly, one last echoing chirp after a good thirty seconds of utter silence.

The harshly fluorescent precinct lights flickered back on.

Gray looked down. The boy from earlier—Leo, wasn't it?—was the one who'd latched onto them, and he looked up at them now, eyes wide and watery, dark brown curls plastered to his face with someone else's blood.

Gray raised a finger to their lips in a shushing motion, then carefully pried his fingers from their arm. They could feel him watching in stunned silence as they paced across the cell floor. They were the only two in the cell who'd made it, then, and Gray examined each cleanly sliced body. The blood pooled hot and thick and left behind overlapping footprints as Gray made their round. Each corpse's skin looked as though it had just... split. Neat and tidy, like sharp scissors through crisp paper. From what Gray could observe without directly touching the bodies, any organs or bones or muscles seemed to be cut in a similar matter. There was a surprising lack of violence to the bodies. It looked almost natural, as though this was simply how things were meant to be.

"Extraordinary," Gray murmured, the softest of whispers.

The moment even the slightest of sounds passed their lips, Leo turned to them in horror.

But, as Gray had suspected would be the case, nothing happened.

They stood up from where they had been kneeling to observe one of the corpses. The fabric on the knees of their pants was soaked. Gray looked through the bars of the cell—there was Celia, curled up under a desk, unharmed but visibly terrified, and there was Smith near the exit, still holding his cup of coffee, eyes wide, face as pale and shiny and white as the precint's tiled floor.

"We can talk now," Gray called out, remarkably casual. They'd never seen a dead body before. Never borne witness to this level of slaughter or brutality. But they'd predicted it, and so as the reality had come to pass, they'd found themself exceptionally grounded. "They've cleared out of this area. Initial purge. They're done with us. For the time being. Now, Officer. Since my "end of the world" has indeed come to pass. If you could please let us out?"

Smith stared at them, mouth falling open as if to speak, but it seemed he couldn't.

Celia crawled out from under the desk. She took a moment to compose herself, chest rattling with a slow, ragged breath. She wiped the specks of blood from her face and smoothed out her skirt. Then she approached Smith and held out her hand. Wordlessly, Smith set the keys in her open palm. Celia strode over to the cell and had it open in under a minute.

Gray rushed out the moment the door was opened, throwing their arms around Celia. "Are you okay, love? How are you feeling? I'm so sorry we were here for this, but I promise we'll make it out alright—"

"I'm fine," Celia replied, voice shaky. "I'm fine. I just need a moment to..." she smiled tremulously, meeting Gray's eyes. "Seems like you were right. About. All of this."

With the pad of their thumb, Gray scrubbed a small speck of blood from where it had landed just above Celia's eyebrow. "Seems so, yes. Will you be—will you be okay?"

Celia managed a laugh. "We'll see. Right now I just need to know what our next move is. You have a plan, I take it?"

"I do." Gray kissed Celia quickly, then pulled away and started pacing back and forth. "I do. First, we need to—"

"Leave! We need to leave." Smith's voice cut Gray off, borderline hysterical. "Holy... what the fuck was that?"

"We can't leave," Gray replied, smooth and matter-of-fact. "The city won't let us."

"What do you mean, 'the city won't let us?' Wasn't leaving this place your whole thing?"

"Different once the clock hits midnight." Gray shrugged. "We should leave the precinct, though. See who we can help."

"Can I stay with you?"

Everyone turned to look at Leo, who'd curled up in the corner of the cell.

"Ah, shit. You're still here, kid?" Smith asked quietly.

"You didn't notice?" Celia scolded. "What kind of cop are you? Oh, my god. Of course you can stay with us, Leo." Her tone switched from harsh to gentle in a split second. "You'll be okay. It's just twenty four hours. Gray knows what they're doing."

"But is my family okay?" Leo asked. "What's happening outside?"

"Same thing that happened in here. No way to know about your family. Sorry. Now, we should probably get moving." Gray grabbed Celia's hand, then glanced back at Smith and Leo. "You guys can come if you want."

"I'm sorry—what?"

"Well, I'm going to keep us alive," Gray said matter-of-factly. They beamed. "I know my way around this world. I'd have liked to be gone for this part, but we'll be just fine. Now, there's a lot I need to do, so I can't really waste much time talking." They took Celia's hand on one side and grabbed Leo's arm on the other. "Now, if you'll excuse me."

"I—" Smith blinked, eyeing them warily. "Where are you going?"

Gray fixed him with a smile. "Why, I'm off to save the world, of course!"