The alley smells like rain and rust. A figure crouches in the dark ahead of you, blade catching the thin bleed of a streetlight. You should run. Instead, you feel something close to relief. Decades of dying and waking. Of running from the people who called it a miracle while they held you down. You have stitched yourself back together so many times the process bores you now. But this stranger does not look bored. They look up at you with slow, deliberate calm, and something predatory flickers in their eyes. Maybe, finally, you have found someone who can finish what every knife and fire and desperate prayer never could.