Ficorpio
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
The first time I realized something was wrong with this world was during an emergency first-aid training session at work.
The instructor stood at the front of the conference room, pointing at a plastic anatomical model. “Remember this,” he said. “Human blood is blue. It only turns red gradually after it’s exposed to oxygen.”
At first, I honestly thought he was joking.
But then I looked around and saw every single person in the room nodding seriously and taking notes, and I couldn’t help raising my hand.
“Sorry,” I said, “did you misspeak? Blood is red. It’s always red.”
The instructor stared at me.
So did everyone else.
The whole room went quiet, and the way they looked at me made my skin crawl, like I’d just said something obscene. The instructor frowned, flipped open the training manual, and held it up for me to see.
There it was in black and white:
Human blood is blue.
I just sat there, stunned. Then I grabbed my phone and searched it myself, only to find every result saying the exact same thing as the manual.
A coworker, Zoe, tugged lightly at my sleeve when no one was looking. “Are you overworked or something?” she asked under her breath, her expression full of concern. “How do you forget something that basic?”
I had no idea how to answer her.
With all those strange looks still on me, I forced an awkward laugh and muttered that I’d only been kidding.
The second the training ended, I rushed straight into the restroom. Gritting my teeth, I took a safety pin from my bag and jabbed it into the tip of my finger.
Bright red blood welled up at once.
I let out a long, shaky breath.
My memory wasn’t wrong.
I didn’t know why everyone else was acting insane, but this had to be some kind of elaborate prank.
I was about to leave the stall when I heard two coworkers talking outside.
“Nora was hilarious today. I can’t believe she said blood is always red.”
“I know, right? My gums were bleeding earlier. I almost wanted to call her over and let her see for herself.”
I froze, then leaned toward the gap in the stall door and peered out.
One of them was baring her teeth at the mirror, dabbing at the blood in her mouth with a tissue.
Against the white of her teeth, the blood was blue.
And as I watched, it slowly began to turn red.
This was the first time I’d ever truly seen blue blood on a human body.
I clapped a hand over my mouth before I could make a sound.
They weren’t wrong.
And neither was I.
So what, exactly, was wrong here?
I waited a long time after they left. Only when I was sure the restroom was empty did I slip out.
Chapter 2
Chapter 2
As I walked back through the office, everything around me was familiar—and yet so alien it made my skin crawl.
Because I’d realized something.
I was different from them.
I was probably the anomaly.
Not long after I got back to my desk, my direct supervisor, Manager Warren Hayes, called me into his office.
“I heard you haven’t been sleeping well lately. Too much stress?”
I knew what he was referring to, but I didn’t have the courage to admit it.
Some instinct deep inside me kept warning me that being different in this place was not a good thing.
So I brushed it off, gave him a few vague excuses, and once again claimed it had all been a joke. I said I never expected everyone to take me seriously.
Thankfully, Manager Hayes didn’t press. He just smiled along with me and told me to get some rest.
That night, I shut my apartment up tight.
I locked every door and window, drew the curtains, lit a scented candle, and got into bed early.
I wanted all of this to be a dream—just a paranoid fantasy. I wanted to wake up and find everything restored to the tracks I remembered, back inside the world that made sense to me.
But I stayed awake until three in the morning, and the longer I lay there, the more certain I became that there was nothing wrong with me.
So what the hell was going on?
I got out of bed, turned on my laptop, and looked up blood again.
The results were exactly the same as they’d been during the day.
No—not exactly the same.
I found something even more shocking.
The entry for the Empire State Building described it as a landmark in downtown Chicago, completed just before the 2012 Olympics.
I searched for Wall Street, and the image results showed three bizarre towers I had never seen before, labeled “The Financial Pillars.”
I searched for the Hudson River, and the description read: “A river flowing through Philadelphia.”
I slammed the laptop shut and kept drawing deep, shaky breaths.
This was insane.
And at the same time, I finally knew for sure.
This world was absolutely not the one I knew.
But I didn’t make a scene.
When I questioned everything online, I got two replies almost immediately.
You need to see a doctor.
Did you escape from somewhere?
That second comment hit me like a jolt.
If I didn’t belong to this world, then what I was dealing with might be more than simple confusion. If I exposed myself too recklessly, I could be putting myself in real danger.
So I deleted the post at once.
After that, I started pretending.
I did everything I could to make myself look normal.
At the same time, I kept watching—quietly, carefully—paying attention to everything around me.
Luckily, aside from a few pieces of basic common knowledge that didn’t match my memory, I hadn’t found anything that would interfere with daily life. That let me breathe a little easier. Maybe I’d been overreacting.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3
But three days later, the CPR instructor came back to our office.
He handed everyone a test, told us not to talk, and said we should turn it in as soon as we were done. It was supposed to be an evaluation of the training.
At first, I didn’t think much of it.
Then one of the older women in the office, someone who’d been with the company for years, muttered under her breath, “In all the years we’ve done this training, we’ve never had to take a test before.”
A chill ran through me.
This wasn’t for me, was it?
Trying not to draw attention, I sneaked a glance at a coworker’s paper.
Cold sweat broke out across my back.
Her test was full of standard first-aid questions.
Mine wasn’t.
Question one: What color is human blood?
Question two: What color is a newborn baby’s hair?
…
I understood immediately.
They were watching me.
I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but my instincts told me it was nothing good.
I forced my trembling fingers to steady and wrote down blue and white.
When I handed in the paper, the instructor looked at me for a long moment, something unreadable in his eyes, but he said nothing.
I didn’t know whether that meant I’d passed.
What I did know was this:
From now on, every second, I would have to be even more careful.
At lunch the next day, I went with a few coworkers to a newly opened café near the office.
What had happened over the past few days had left me on edge. I’d become hyperaware of the people around me, of every little detail in my surroundings.
So I noticed the man almost immediately.
He was sitting alone at a table diagonally behind us, wearing a gray jacket.
I had a strange sense I’d seen him before—on the subway that morning, maybe.
There was a single lunch special in front of him, but he hadn’t touched it. He just kept looking at his phone.
I picked up my own phone and used the dark screen like a mirror, pretending to check my makeup while watching him.
In less than a minute, he looked up three times.
And every single time, his gaze just happened to skim over me in that carefully casual way people use when they don’t want to look like they’re looking.
I understood at once.
Of course. He was there for me.
I didn’t call him out. I acted as if I hadn’t noticed anything and finished lunch with my coworkers.
That afternoon, after we got back to the office, I made excuses to go down to the convenience store in the lobby a few times to buy random things. Sure enough, every single time, I just happened to run into him again.
When it was finally time to leave work, I stood outside the office building, hesitating.
Should I just grab a cab home and hide?
Should I stick to my normal route and let Mr. Gray Jacket “coincidentally” follow along beside me?
Or should I walk right up to him and ask what the hell he wanted?
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. But underneath the fear, I wanted answers even more. I needed to know what was really going on.
So I made a bold decision.