It was a dog. A big, rabid mutant dog. My brain chanted the lie with every agonizing step. You tripped. Hit your head. The glow isn't real. The lie was flimsy, pathetic, like a paper umbrella in a hurricane, but it was all I had. It was the only thing that got me out of that stinking alley and back onto the glittering streets. I pulled the shredded sleeve of my jacket down over my arm, my teeth clenched so hard my jaw ached. Normal. Act normal.

  The lobby of Olympus Tower was an ocean of polished marble and cold, silent air. The night-porter, an android named Ben, gave me a polite nod. "A late practice, Miss Nova?"

  "You know the coach," I said, forcing a smile that felt like it was cracking my face. "He thinks sleep is for the weak."

  The elevator ride to the 80th floor was the longest minute of my life. I leaned against the cool glass wall, watching the city lights smear into streaks as we ascended. In the reflection, I was a wreck. My face was pale and slick with sweat, my eyes wide with a terror I couldn't quite contain. And the sleeve of my jacket… a dark, wet patch was already seeping through.

  I got inside the apartment without making a sound. The lights came up to their pre-programmed low glow. Silence. Thank God. My parents were asleep.

  My bathroom was a sanctuary of white tile and chrome fixtures. I locked the door, the click of the bolt echoing like a gunshot in the silence. My hands were shaking so violently I could barely work the zipper on my jacket. I finally peeled the fabric away. The world tilted, and I had to grip the edge of the sink, the cold porcelain biting into my good hand.

  The lie my brain had so carefully constructed shattered into a million pieces.

  The bite mark was a deep, vicious crescent of torn flesh, still sluggishly weeping blood. And it was glowing.

  The sickly, pulsing green light cast an unholy aura onto the pristine white sink. It wasn't a trick of the light. It wasn't a hallucination. It was real.

  A monster is growing inside me.

  My throat went tight. Hospital. I have to go to a hospital. Tell Mom and Dad.

  But the words caught in my throat. What would I even say? "Hey, Mom and Dad, sorry to wake you, but I was just mauled in an alley by a giant, glowing-eyed werewolf thing that I'm pretty sure is connected to the corporate conspiracy you were whispering about last night. Also, my arm is now a nightlight."

  They'd think I was on drugs. They'd commit me. Or worse, they'd believe me, and that would put them in the same crosshairs I was now squarely in.

  No. I couldn't tell them. I couldn't tell anyone. This was my problem. I had to handle it.

  I rummaged through the medicine cabinet with my good hand, pulling out antiseptic wipes and a roll of gauze. My reflection was a stranger—a terrified girl playing dress-up as someone who had their life together. The first wipe on the wound made me hiss, the chemical sting a sharp counterpoint to the deep, throbbing ache. The green light seemed to pulse brighter, angrier, as I cleaned away the blood. The puncture marks were unnervingly deep, some of them edged with a metallic scoring, as if the teeth themselves had been part machine.

  I wrapped the gauze tightly around my forearm, my movements clumsy and rushed. The white bandage immediately snuffed out the glow. Out of sight, out of mind. Another flimsy lie.

  I did a similar, hasty job on the claw marks on my leg, then bundled the blood-soaked jacket and wipes into a sealed disposal bag and shoved it to the very bottom of my hamper. Clean up the evidence. Hide the crime. As if I could hide what was now pumping through my own veins.

  *****

  Walking into the school cafeteria on Thursday was like stepping into an amplifier that had been cranked to eleven. The chaotic din was a physical assault. The clatter of a thousand plastic trays, the screech of two hundred chairs scraping against the floor, the cacophony of hundreds of simultaneous conversations—it all hit me at once, a tidal wave of noise that made me stagger.

  “Whoa, you okay?” Tessa asked, grabbing my elbow to steady me. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  “Just a headache.” I pressed the heels of my palms into my temples, trying to block out the noise. But it wasn't a headache. It was a terrifying clarity.

  I could hear everything. Not just the noise, but the details in the noise. I could hear the fizz of the soda in a can on a table twenty feet away. I could hear the frantic, whispery scratching of a pen on paper from across the room as someone cheated on a pop quiz.

  And I could hear the voices.

  “—I swear, he didn’t even text me back. It’s like I don’t even exist…” a stressed whisper from the freshman section.

  “—if my dad finds out I dinged the hover-coupe, I’m dead. Like, literally, he will disassemble me…” a panicked mutter from the jocks’ table.

  “—she thinks no one knows, but I saw her swapping out her data chip behind the gym…” a venomous, sibilant hiss from two girls in the corner.

  The words overlapped, a flood of secrets and anxieties pouring directly into my brain as if they were being shouted into a microphone. My head spun. The sheer volume of it was overwhelming, a cacophony of petty dramas and secret fears. I felt a flash of anger. Why are you all so loud?

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “Let’s just sit over here,” Cody said, gently guiding me toward an emptier table by the windows. He and Tessa exchanged a worried look over my head.

  I just nodded, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. I sat down and stared at the tabletop, the polished surface reflecting the chaotic lights of the cafeteria. The world was too loud now. There was no more background noise. There was only a roar.

  The next change came during practice. My body felt… different. The exhaustion and muscle aches from the other night were gone, replaced by a restless, buzzing energy. I felt coiled, like a spring wound too tight. Every movement felt bigger, more powerful.

  “Alright, Nova, let’s see the solo pass!” Coach Johnson’s voice echoed in the cavernous gym. “Full extension. I want you to touch the roof!”

  It was a simple routine. A running start, a round-off into a back handspring, finishing with a full-twisting layout. I’d done it a million times. It was as easy as breathing.

  I took a deep breath and started my run. But my legs felt like pistons, devouring the spring-loaded floor. The round-off was too fast, the handspring too powerful. When I launched into the air for the layout, I didn't just go up. I exploded.

  The twist was a blur. The ceiling lights flashed past my eyes. For a split second, I felt a surge of power. It was exhilarating. And then I realized I was way too high.

  Panic flared. I over-flipped, my body cartwheeling past the vertical. I was going to land on my face. Instinct took over. I flailed, kicking out a leg to stabilize myself.

  My sneaker connected with the basketball backboard mounted on the wall.

  There was a sound like a gunshot, a deafening crack of shattering polymer that silenced the entire gym. The clear backboard didn't just crack. It exploded, raining down a shower of plastic shards that glittered like deadly confetti under the harsh gym lights. The heavy steel rim, torn from its moorings, crashed to the floor with a deafening clang.

  I landed on my feet, stumbling from the momentum, but upright. The gym was dead silent. The entire squad, including Tessa and Cody, stared at me, their faces a mixture of shock and disbelief. Coach Johnson’s jaw was slack, his ever-present whistle hanging forgotten from his lips.

  They weren't looking at me like I was their captain. They were looking at me like I was a freak.

  “Great,” I muttered under my breath, my heart hammering against my ribs. “Guess who’ll be blamed for that when the principal finds out?”

  *****

  That night, my dreams changed. They had always been a chaotic jumble of cheer routines and school stress.

  I was running on four legs, the ground a blur beneath powerful paws. The city was a jungle of glass and steel, its neon lights painting my sleek fur in stripes of electric blue and violent pink. The air was a rich tapestry of smells—the ozone tang of a passing mag-train, the greasy allure of a street-side noodle vendor, and beneath it all, the hot, metallic scent of prey.

  I wasn't scared. I was alive. Every sense was on fire. I could feel the wind parting around me, the vibration of the city through the pads of my feet. I could see in the dark, every shadow full of detail and depth.

  And I felt the thrill. The predatory joy of the chase. I wasn’t Nikki Nova, worried about a math test. I was a hunter, and I was hungry.

  I woke up drenched in sweat, heart pounding with a phantom chase. My hands flexed, expecting claws. The dream faded, but the feeling didn't. A dark brief whisper in my head said, That was fun. And the scariest part? It wasn't wrong.

  The rift between me and my friends, which had started as a hairline crack in the cafeteria, widened into a chasm. I was jumpy, irritable, prone to snapping at them for no reason. I’d catch Cody watching me with a confused, hurt expression. Tessa tried to break through my new walls with her bubbly chatter, but my one-word answers and distracted silences pushed her away.

  The final straw came on Saturday. We were supposed to be studying at the library, but I couldn't focus. The quiet rustle of pages turning sounded like a forest fire. The low hum of the library’s servers felt like a drill boring into my skull.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Tessa asked, her voice sharp with frustration. “I’ve been trying to explain this calculus problem for ten minutes.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, rubbing my temples. “I’m just… tired.”

  “You’re always tired, Nikki,” she shot back. “Or you have a headache. Or you’re busy. Ever since the game, you’ve been a total ghost. You shattered a backboard and you won’t even talk about it! What is going on with you?”

  “Nothing is going on.” My voice came out louder than I intended, sharp enough to make a few people at nearby tables look up. “Just drop it, okay?”

  As I spoke, I gestured dismissively with my hand, accidentally knocking my heavy datapad off the table. It tumbled toward the floor.

  “Nikki!” Cody yelped.

  There was no way I could have caught it. It was too fast, too far away. But my hand shot out, a blur of motion. My fingers closed around the datapad an inch from the floor. I froze, my hand still outstretched, the heavy datapad clutched in my fingers. How did I do that?

  Tessa and Cody stared, their eyes wide. They weren't just looking at me with confusion anymore. They were looking at me with a flicker of something else. Fear.

  I pulled my hand away as if burned, pushing the datapad onto the table."Just… lucky, I guess." My voice was a strained whisper.

  The silence that followed was thick and suffocating. The rift was complete. They didn't understand. And I could never, ever tell them why.

  *****

  Later that night, I stood in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom. I unwrapped the gauze from my arm. The wound healed mostly, the skin already knitting itself back together with an unnatural speed. But the bite mark itself remained, a pale, scarred crescent against my skin.

  As I watched, it pulsed with that same, nauseating green light.

  It wasn't just a scar. It was a brand. A claim. A constant, glowing reminder of the alley, of the monster, of the thing that was now curled up and sleeping inside me.

  The terrified girl who had stumbled home a few nights ago was gone. In her place was someone else, someone who could shatter backboards and hunt in her dreams. Someone who was becoming a monster. I stared at my reflection, at the pulsing, unholy light on my arm, and a single, horrifying truth whispered back at me from the mirror.

  The monster was me.