There hadn’t been any warning sign, turn back or quarantine, outside the city limits. Of course not – they wanted hapless people like her to wander in. The only signs were neon, buzzing blue and magenta signal fires for motels and all-night diners, theatres and warm company in the cold nights.

She had checked into one of those motels with only her rote, usual sense of professional caution. Fake name, small-talking her way through a fake reason for being there, sidling around to the questions that might actually point her to what she’d come looking for. Ignoring the metronome-steady tic in the smile and right eye of the woman at the front desk, because who wouldn’t have? Only assholes pointed out the glitches in other people’s bodies, tics and rashes in total strangers.

But now, she stood in front of a mirror eaten black by tarnish at the edges, bare to the waist against a backdrop of dingy rust-brown motel room, wondering whether a real asshole would have had a better chance of making it out of that city. The black lines spidering up her veins from left hip to right breast, cupping it in a varicose web, hadn’t been there when she’d dressed by rote that morning. Neither had the subtle tic starting in the hand she used to trace them, or the dull, whisperish drone in the back of her head, which seemed to time the twitch with its glottal stops.

A glitch like that was made to spread. To be spread. And if she didn’t want to be its next willing host, welcoming hapless wanderers into the city or, worse, taking it back where she had come from, she was going to have to find a way to burn it out, and fast.