The first time the sky flickered, everyone blamed the power company.It happened at 2:17 a.m., when Lagos should have been wrapped in thick coastal darkness. Instead, aminous grid stretching from horizon to horizon—lines of pale blue light intersecting at perfect right angles, as if the heavens were tiled in glass.Then it was gone.By morning, the city had already decided it was a glitch. A viral marketing stunt. A mass hallucination caused by heat and generator fumes.But Amara Okoye knew better.She had been on the balcony of her twelfth-floor apartment in Yaba when it happened, sketchbook balanced on her knees. She wasn’t looking up when the grid appeared. She was looking down—at the narrow alley between buildings, at the stray dogs picking through refuse, at the old man who sold roasted corn long after midnight.When the sky flickered, the alley didn’t go dark.It brightened.The shadows peeled back from the walls like wet fabric. The cracked concrete shimmered. And in the center of the alley, where broken bottles usually glittered in the moonlight, something rose.Not from the ground.From the space between.The air split open like a seam being unpicked. A vertical tear, no wider than a doorway, shimmered with the same pale blue light as the sky-grid. Inside it, she saw not another alley, not another street—but a corridor stretching endlessly in both directions. Its walls were made of shifting symbols, angular and alive, sliding over each other like schools of silver fish.A figure stood inside that corridor.It was shaped like a person but wrong in the details, as if assembled from memory by someone who had only heard of humans secondhand. Its limbs were too long, joints bending at delicate, unsettling angles. Its skin reflected the symbols on the walls, flickering with unreadable script.It turned its head.And looked directly at her.Amara dropped her pencil.The grid vanished. The tear snapped shut. The alley returned to its normal gloom, complete with the faint smell of smoke and brine.But the old man with the roasted corn was gone.The next morning, the news reported thirty-seven disappearances across the city. No signs of struggle. No CCTV footage. Just people who had been there—and then hadn’t.The commentators spoke with forced calm. The governor promised investigations. Religious leaders offered explanations that ranged from the wrath of angels to the mischief of devils.Amara said nothing.Instead, she drew.She sketched the corridor from memory—the shifting symbols, the impossible perspective, the figure with its elongated limbs. Each time her pencil moved, the graphite felt warmer than it should. Each line seemed to settle into the page as if it had been waiting there.On the third night, the sky flickered again.This time, half the city was watching.Phones were raised. Live streams began. The grid bloomed across the darkness like frost on glass.And all across Lagos, in alleys and under bridges and between high-rise buildings, the seams opened.The tears appeared soundlessly, vertical rifts glowing with cold light. From them stepped the figures—dozens at first, then hundreds. They did not run. They did not attack. They simply walked, movements fluid and deliberate, as though exploring a museum after hours.People screamed. Some tried to touch them.That was the mistake.Where skin met flickering light, reality bent. The air folded inward, swallowing both the human and the figure in a blink of distortion. The space snapped back empty.Amara watched from her balcony again, heart pounding. The alley below her split open once more. The corridor waited, infinite and humming.The same figure stepped through.Up close, she could see more detail. The symbols on its surface were not random. They resembled letters—but from no alphabet she knew. They rearranged themselves constantly, as if rewriting the being’s skin.It tilted its head.Then it spoke.The voice did not come from a mouth. It resonated directly in her skull, layered and echoing, like multiple whispers stacked together.“You see us.”Amara’s throat tightened. “Yes.”“Few do.”She swallowed. “What are you?”The symbols pulsed brighter.“We are the Negative Space. The architecture between moments. Your world was built adjacent to ours.”The corridor behind it shimmered. She saw glimpses of other cities—skylines that resembled Tokyo, New York, Cairo—but warped, stretched vertically into impossible geometries.“You’re taking people,” she said.“We're correcting overlap.”“By erasing them?”The figure’s head angled further, almost curious.“Not erasing. Reassigning.”Below, sirens wailed. A helicopter’s spotlight cut across rooftops, lightening other tears in the fabric of the night.“Why can I see you?”she demanded.The being extended a hand.Symbols flowed from its fingers like liquid light, hovering inches from above