No Way Out

Sera pressed herself into the shadowed corner of the corridor, her breath shallow and controlled. The air reeked of stale sweat, concrete dust, and gun oil—the stench of a place meant to break people down. A storage facility? An old underground checkpoint? It didn’t matter.

What mattered was the three armed men sweeping the floor behind her, methodical and professional. Not random thugs. Not amateurs. They were looking for something specific. Looking for her.

She had miscalculated. Again.

She had only needed thirty seconds to grab the hard drive—just a simple data lift, a ghost through the system. But something had triggered the failsafe, and now the place was locked down tight. Every exit blocked, every corridor narrowing into a dead end. She was running out of space. Running out of time.

Boots crunched against the concrete, moving closer. She could hear the radio chatter now, clipped and efficient.

“Sector clear—hold up, got something on thermal. Might be residual heat. Stay sharp.”

Residual heat. They weren’t guessing. They were tracking her distortions.

Her muscles tensed, instinct demanding movement—run, fight, disappear—but she already knew the outcome of each choice. She couldn’t fight her way out of this. Couldn’t run, not through a sealed-off, reinforced bunker.

But she could go through it and it was the only option left.

Sera reached out, fingertips grazing the cold, unyielding surface of the industrial concrete wall. The texture was rough, uneven, laced with microscopic cracks and the faint, metallic bite of reinforced steel beneath its surface. Solid. Impenetrable. Real. But only to those still bound by the laws of physics.

She inhaled slowly. Relax. Don’t force it.

The shift was almost imperceptible—a breath between states of being. Her body blurred at the edges, her silhouette wavering like the air above asphalt on a hot day. The sensation wasn’t like walking forward. Not exactly. It was falling inward, as if her molecules knew the way before her mind did.

For a split second, the wall swallowed her whole.

Darkness. Pressure. The sensation of being nowhere and everywhere at once.

She could still feel the dampness of the brick, but only as a memory—a whisper of matter against matter, refusing to connect. Her pulse echoed inside her own head, too loud in the nothingness. The heatwave shimmer around her body flickered, its distortion warping the space where she should have been.

And then—release.

The world pulled back into focus, her form unraveling from the wall like strands of fabric being tugged free from a loom. She drifted into the open air on the other side, her boots barely making a sound as she stepped out onto the cracked pavement of an abandoned stairwell.

She exhaled. The ghost of the wall clung to her skin for a moment before the last of it slid away, leaving behind only a faint ripple in the air.

Seamless. Almost.

She flexed her fingers, watching as the tips flickered, the edges of her hands still fraying like an unfinished thought before she forced herself fully solid again. A small delay. Nothing major. But the timing was getting slower. The effort, heavier.

She rolled her shoulders and kept moving, letting the city swallow her whole once more.