Chapter Text
Christine had awoken to the sound of her own choking. She clawed at the headset wrapped around her head and forced her dry eyes to snap open, adjusting to the dark room. Her body convulsed frantically against the carpeted floor as something thick and rotten clogged the back of her throat. Dust filled her mouth with the taste of stagnant air. Her lungs seized, desperately trying to drag in oxygen that never arrived.
She curled onto her side, hacking sharply. She was certain she spat up something that was lodged in her throat but it was too dark to tell what. A flickering fluorescent light buzzed weakly overhead somewhere down the hall, strobing pale yellow through rows of abandoned cubicles. The office smelled wet, like rain trapped inside walls for years.
She kept dragging air into herself in harsh, panicked pulls, her chest rising and falling too quickly as she tried to force her body back into something familiar. In, out. In, out. Every breath felt stranger than the last, mechanical and unnecessary, like she was acting out a function her body had already forgotten.
Then, without really meaning to, Christine stopped, and the room went terribly still.
No inhale followed, no pressure built behind her ribs, no instinct screamed at her to breathe again. Her lungs sat silent inside her chest, useless and obedient, making no demand for air at all. Her body did not need air anymore.
Panic tore through her and her hands flew to her throat as she shot upright. She sucked in hard, desperate to prove herself wrong, desperate to feel her lungs catch and burn and ache the way they were supposed to. But nothing happened.
She scrambled backward across the floor until her back slammed into a desk. Papers scattered around her feet. A moldy coffee mug tipped over beside her hand.
Why wasn’t she breathing? Why didn't she need to breathe—?
The office around her slowly sharpened into focus as the panic continued scrambling uselessly through her body. Computer monitors sat dead and dust-covered across nearby desks, ceiling tiles sagged with water damage, half-open blinds revealed darkness outside the windows. The headset was still sitting nearby, cracked neatly down the middle.
She glanced down at her hands, thin and frail. She did not recognize them at all. “No,” she whispered immediately, voice brittle and weak. “No no no no—” Her voice sounded far too dry, like sound dragged across sandpaper.
Christine shoved herself to her feet too quickly and nearly collapsed again, her legs buckling beneath her. Pins and needles stabbed through numb muscles as she staggered toward the nearest reflective surface she could find, a tinted window pane.
At first she didn’t recognize herself. The woman staring back looked… dead. Skin pale with gray undertones beneath the faint fluorescent lighting, lips colorless, eyes sunken and shadowed like bruises. Her pupils looked massive, it was uncanny.
Christine touched trembling fingers to her own face and flinched when she felt how cold she was. “Oh—y god…” Her voice cracked.
Then her gaze dropped lower to her chest, still not rising or falling. She stared at herself for several seconds before pressing shaky fingers against the side of her neck, nothing pulsed beneath the skin. Her heartbeat was gone.
Christine stumbled backward with a strangled noise, slamming into a cubicle divider hard enough to rattle it sideways, her thoughts spiraling over each other.
Was she dead? Had she died in the circus? Had she never escaped at all?
The fluorescent light overhead flickered again before something moved out of the corner of her eye. Christine snapped her head toward the far end of the office. She could hear faint noises of tiny claws scraping softly somewhere in the dark.
A strange feeling entered her body, something she had never felt before. Her muscles locked and her stomach twisted. Pain bloomed inside her with such sudden intensity that she doubled over against the desk, clutching at herself instinctively. She had never felt so hungry in her whole life.
An unknown warm scent filled her nose and her mouth watered instantly and Christine gagged at the sensation. Another scraping sound echoed from beneath one of the cubicles, and a raccoon emerged slowly from the darkness. It was rather thin and mangy, probably surviving off of trash around the building.
The animal froze the second it saw her. Christine froze too.
She could smell it from where she stood. It was ridiculous to her how incredibly strong its scent was, and how it didn't smell like anything she had remembered smelling before. It smelled almost metallic, like rusted copper, but also slightly sweet.
Involuntarily, she found her body moving towards it before she caught herself. The raccoon hissed immediately, arching its back. Christine stumbled backwards in horror. She wondered what she had planned to do with it.
All of a sudden, she felt her teeth hurt. God, her whole mouth was aching.
A sharp pressure throbbed along her gums as the hunger inside her twisted harder and harder. The room reeked now, every scent layered thickly on top of the next. Rot, mold, dust. But beneath all of it was the one smell she couldn’t escape. Sharp and rancid enough to cut straight through her thoughts and blur the edges of her vision.
The raccoon.
Her eyes snapped toward it again just as it bolted for the hallway and time seemed to warp around her. She watched the creature scramble away while her own body followed after it in slow, delayed motion, as though she were moving underwater. One second she stood near the desks, the next her hands slammed aggressively against the hallway floor where she’d intercepted the animal.
The raccoon shrieked in her grasp, its body twisting violently as its claws raked against her arms. Christine screamed with it. The sound tore out of her raw and panicked, she couldn’t believe she was holding a feral animal like this but the stench pouring off of it was unbearable, so overpowering it felt like it was splitting her skull apart.
Then pain exploded through her jaw and she choked on a gasp as something sharp shifted painfully behind her lips, forcing its way into place. Her tongue darted instinctively across her teeth, and froze. Her canines had changed. They were longer now, needle-sharp, like a wild animal.
In her stupor, the raccoon sank its teeth into her hand hard enough to rip flesh open, causing fresh blood to hit the air.
Everything after that blurred together.
Thrashing limbs, the copper taste flooding her mouth, heat curling low in her stomach as warm blood slid down her throat. Christine didn’t realize what she was doing until the animal finally went limp in her hands. Silence filled the hallway, her breathing still hadn’t returned to occupy it.
Christine slowly lifted her head. Blood covered her hands and dripped down her chin. Warmth spread gradually through her body for the first time since waking up. Her frozen fingers softened, color faintly returned to her vision.
Christine stared at the corpse she just made in horror.
Then, she heaved, gagging and forcing something— anything to come out.
But nothing did.
The first thing Christine learned after escaping the circus was that pretending to be alive was exhausting. The second thing she learned was that people rarely looked closely enough to notice.
Five months after waking in the abandoned office building, Christine had perfected the performance. She remembered to blink during conversations and she timed her breathing whenever someone looked at her for too long. She forced herself to swallow coffee she couldn’t taste because coworkers found untouched drinks strange. Every so often, she would subtly roll her shoulders or flex her fingers before the stiffness settled in again and people started asking if she felt okay.
She never truly understood how this happened to her or how it was even possible at all. But as someone who was trapped in a virtual reality headset for years going on adventures planned out by a pair of sadistic AI dentures, normal standards for reality had lost most of their meaning.
Christine sat motionless at her tiny kitchen table while the microwave clock blinked 2:14 AM in pale green numbers across the apartment. Rain tapped softly against the window above the sink. A plastic container of raw liver sat open in front of her. Cow blood from the butcher shop down the street stained the edges of the container dark red. The smell no longer disgusted her.
Slowly, Christine lifted the container to her mouth. The blood inside was cold. Prepackaged animal blood always was. It carried none of the warmth her body craved. It was thin comfort at best, something to dull her senses.
In the five months since waking up like this, there had been few moments when cold blood hadn’t been enough. Moments when the hunger had hollowed her out so completely that thought became slippery and distant, and she found herself deep in wooded areas after dark, crouched low beneath the trees with dirt under her nails and something small struggling in her hands.
Rodents, usually. Small animals. Living things unlucky enough to cross her path when she was too far gone to stop herself.
Every time, she came back to herself afterward with blood on her mouth and horror crashing in behind it. She would sob until her throat hurt, shaking over whatever was left, disgusted by herself and terrified by the relief spreading through her body anyway.
The container in her hands was the third one she had forced down that day, the first two had done almost nothing. Still, she drank. For a few seconds after each swallow, there had been the faintest flicker of relief, a weak thread of warmth spreading through her chest before vanishing so quickly she almost wondered if she had imagined it. The hollow ache sitting low in her stomach, deeper than hunger had any right to go. It was never enough anymore. Christine set the container down carefully, hands trembling.
At first animal blood had helped. It restored enough strength to keep her moving, speaking, functioning. She could pass as human when fed recently enough.
But lately, her body had begun deteriorating again. The skin beneath her eyes darkened permanently no matter how much she drank. Her fingers stiffened during cold weather until she could barely bend them, her vision blurred at random, sunlight now burning her skin within minutes.
But the worst part was the noise. Heartbeats became impossible to ignore. At first they came faintly, soft throbs buried beneath conversation and traffic. Then they sharpened, strengthened. Soon she could hear them everywhere.
In crowded subway cars, across office cubicles, passing strangers on the sidewalk. The rhythmic pumping of blood, the slick shifting of organs, breath rattling through lungs. Human bodies humming with wet mechanical life all around her. It never stopped.
Sometimes she caught herself staring too long at people’s throats. Sometimes she imagined sinking her teeth into them before immediately spiraling in horror afterward. Whatever her body had become, animal blood was no longer enough to sustain it. Her body knew it. She knew it.
But the thought of hurting someone made nausea curl sickly through her stomach. She would rather starve.
The apartment around her was silent except for the rain outside and the soft hum of her refrigerator. Christine’s gaze drifted toward the laptop sitting open across the table. A blog page glowed dimly across the screen:
THEAMAZINGDIGITALCIRCUSFOUND.NET
The name was stupid and desperate, but she hadn’t known what else to do. There were dozens of posts by now, all made herself. Long rambling entries written late at night, descriptions of the circus, details only circus members would know, frantic pleas asking if anyone else was out there, etc..
Sometimes she would spiral and simply use the blog to vent out her situation. When she got really hungry, when she felt alone. She'd post photos with edgy captions. Maybe as a cry for help. Or maybe as a scream into the void that she knew no one would hear.
Sometimes she reread them and cringed at how insane she sounded. But every time she considered deleting the blog, terror stopped her. Because what if someone was searching? What if one of them escaped too? What if she was alone because they thought nobody else made it out?
So she kept posting. And nobody ever replied.
Christine stared blankly at the screen. One of her latest posts sat unfinished in the draft section:
'I think I'm dying.'
She hadn’t posted that one yet. Her fingers hovered weakly over the keyboard. What was she even supposed to say? 'Hello former digital prisoners. I require human blood to survive now.' The thought almost made her laugh. She wondered if this was the condition the others would be in if they had made it out too. How would they handle it? Do they know the cure? Is there even a cure?
With a sigh, she slowly lowered the laptop shut, darkness swallowed the room immediately. Christine sat there motionless for several minutes.
Suddenly alert, she heard a heartbeat pulsing faintly through the apartment wall beside her.
Her neighbor.
Her mouth watered instantly. Christine jerked upright so forcefully the chair screeched against the floor. “Fuck.” The word came out sharp and panicked.
The heartbeat next door continued steadily, oblivious. Christine stumbled backward until her spine struck the kitchen counter, hard enough to rattle the utensils in the drawer behind her. This was getting worse. If she lost control around someone—
Shaking her head, she grabbed her coat immediately and headed for the door. Rain would help, cold air usually dulled the hunger a little.
Christine stumbled through the rain with her hood pulled low over her face. She didn't intend to walk into this alley, but she was already here. One hand pressed hard against the brick wall beside her as she forced herself to stay upright behind the butcher shop, her legs barely obeying her anymore.
Every step sent tremors up through her bones. Her knees kept threatening to fold. The rain soaked through her hood and plastered cold fabric to colder skin. She really should have stayed home. She should have locked herself in the bathroom, chained herself to the radiator, done something, anything to contain herself.
But the hunger had gotten too loud. It lived under her skin now, crawling through her veins, scraping along the inside of her throat, whispering through her teeth. It yearned for blood. And not animal blood, not anymore. Animal blood was a wet match trying to light a frozen body. It sparked for a second, gave her enough warmth to stand, to speak, to pretend. Then it vanished, leaving her worse than before.
Her body wanted human blood. Christine gagged at the thought and nearly collapsed beside the dumpster. Rain dripped from the metal lid above her. The butcher shop had closed hours ago, but the alley still smelled like meat. Old coagulated blood, fat and rot. Plastic bags slick with runoff.
The smell should have made her sick. Instead, she clawed at the dumpster lid with shaking hands and dragged it open. The first breath of odor hit her like heat, making Christine release a broken sound in the back of her throat. There were trash bags inside, torn paper, spoiled packaging, bones wrapped in butcher paper. Something dark had leaked through one of the bags and pooled along the bottom of the dumpster. She hated herself before she even reached for it.
Hauling it out of the dumpster and planting it on the alley floor, her fingers tore through plastic. The bag split open with a wet rip. Scraps spilled out onto the pavement at her feet. Red-stained paper, clots of fat and a slab of something organ-dark and slick from the trash.
Christine dropped to her knees, the rain striking her back. She stared at the scraps in front of her, trembling like a leaf, hands barely looked like her own.
'Please don’t make me do this.'
Her body moved anyway. She snatched up a piece of raw meat and pressed it to her mouth, cold blood smearing across her lips. She sucked at it desperately, teeth scraping through tissue, trying to find warmth that had already gone. It tasted dead and empty. Like chewing through a memory of food instead of food itself.
Still, she swallowed. Again. And again.
Her stomach clenched. Her throat burned. A low, miserable sound escaped her. Tossing the drained flesh aside, she dug deeper into the trash, searching for anything fresher, anything wetter, anything that might quiet the thing inside her before it made her do something worse. Her nails scraped against bone. Her sleeve dragged through blood. Rainwater thinned everything into pink rivers around her knees.
She was crying, maybe. She couldn’t tell anymore. Her body didn’t always make tears unless she had fed recently enough.
She had just begun to lower her mouth toward another slab of meat when she heard it: A footstep.
Christine’s head jerked up. Another soft step splashed through rainwater. Turning her head just enough to glance over her shoulder, she saw a man standing at the mouth of the alley.
Tall, lean, half-shadowed by the dim yellow light over the butcher shop’s back door. His hood was down despite the rain, hair damp around his face. He held himself very still, as if he had just walked in on a wild animal and understood too late that turning around might make it chase him.
Christine stared at him. He stared back. For several seconds, neither of them moved.
Then his gaze dropped to the butcher scraps scattered around her. To her hands. To her mouth. Christine’s stomach hollowed with terror.
She scrambled backward so fast her spine slammed into the dumpster. The man flinched slightly, reaching his hands out as if to set a barrier between them. His eyes lifted back to her face. Christine could hear his heartbeat. Beneath the rain, beneath the hum of the city, beneath the distant sound of cars sliding over wet pavement. The sound slammed through her skull—and straight to her stomach.
Christine clamped a hand over her mouth and shook her head. “N-no!” she yelped, but she didn’t know who she was talking to. Him, herself, the hunger.
The man took one careful step forward. “Hey, chill out” he said softly. Christine recoiled.
His voice was… oddly familiar. Low and cautious. Not unkind, but that meant nothing. Kind people called hospitals. Kind people called police. Kind people locked things like her away because they were scared and called it help.
“Stay back,” she rasped.
The man stopped. His eyes flicked over her face with a strange, searching intensity. Like he was trying to identify her. Christine’s pulse did not exist, but panic still managed to move through her body as if it did.
He had seen too much. He was going to hurt her. Or worse—she was going to hurt him.“Please,” Christine whispered, pressing herself harder against the dumpster. “Please don’t.”
The man’s expression changed. Something in it softened. He took another step and Christine bared her teeth without meaning to. The man froze.
Hunger surged vivaciously through her, answering the sound of his blood like it had been waiting for permission. Her vision blurred at the edges, the alley light smearing gold across the rain. His throat became too visible. His wrists showcasing the warmth beneath his skin.
Christine dug her nails into her own palms hard enough to tear skin. “Run, g-get out of here,” she forced out. The man did not run.
His face twisted slightly before he stuttered out, “Who are you? What's your name?” he asked.
Christine went utterly still, the rain seemed to vanish.
She knew that voice.
For one infeasible second the alley was not an alley anymore. It was bright colors, checkered floors and 2D skies with a cocky and cruel laugh echoing around it. She stared at him dumbfounded, unable to speak.
Christine’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. The man stepped closer, his heartbeat still hammering in her head. The world tilted, her body was reaching its limit. Christine tried to move away, struggling to stand, her limbs barely answered. The hunger and fear and shock all folded into each other until she couldn’t tell which one was making her shake.
The man’s face blurred. He was saying something now, but she couldn’t hear it. She felt her knees buckle before the last thing Christine saw was the stranger lunging toward her with both hands out, like he meant to catch her before she hit the ground.
Then her vision went black.