"When day comes and all these things go away," Zubair answered Alexei’s question.

It somehow qualified as leadership since Zubair technically answered the question better than any manager who had no idea what the answer actually was.

But everyone in the room knew that time went peculiar.

They could count to sixty and understand that a full minute had past, but the minute seemed to stretch and snapped back.

Frogs made pyramids that collapsed under their own living weight.

The smell climbed into sinuses and nested there like a bad tenant.

Lachlan’s arms found the kind of rhythm a body invents when the mind has given up arguing and took a break.

Push, sweep, reset.

The broom handle bit blisters into his palms that healed as fast as they formed. He didn’t notice the miracle until he did, and then he filed it away under ’Later’, with everything else that didn’t fit what he used to know.

Luci settled into a defensive crouch and guarded Sera’s knee like a gate.

He tolerated a single frog on his head with monumental dignity, eye rolled up to glance at it every few seconds like a man checking a ridiculous hat in a mirror.

When a bullfrog tried to take the spot, he growled, offended, as if status somehow mattered.

"Hold still," Sera coaxed, peeling the dignitary from his skull and relocating it to the floor where it immediately attempted to climb Zubair’s boot instead.

Zubair shifted his foot an inch.

The frog missed, hit leather, slid, tried again.

The absurdity of it almost broke Lachlan’s refusal to laugh.

He envied Sera the quick, genuine laugh that escaped her—a bright bubble inside the swamp.

Another wave found the hallway.

Elias lunged, shoulder-checking a side table into the gap, then catching himself with a palm against the wallpaper as the floor skated under him.

He breathed hard through his nose, face a careful flat that fooled no one. "If we survive this, I will never step in a pet store again." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

"Tragic," Lachlan offered, still clearing. "There goes date night."

Sera brushed slime across the thigh of her black Victorian skirt and left her lavender skin clean beneath.

Elias noticed that the toxin that should have blistered sucked into nothing by whatever she was now. His eyes tracked the place, then her hands, then his own. The tiny line between his brows eased.

Not acceptance at something that shouldn’t have been possible so much as an adjustment in his new world.

But the frogs didn’t stop. They didn’t tire. They didn’t learn.

They only arrived, piled, slid, arrived again.

The noise worked itself into bones and lived there like a second pulse. The house answered with little surrender-sounds—nails tasting freedom, a joist whispering tired secrets.

"Enough," Zubair decided, not as command but as measure run out, and shoved the couch a final inch tighter under the window’s broken lip.

He pivoted, read the room in one sweep that touched Sera first and everything else in relation to her, then jerked his chin toward the hall. "We move when it hits."

"When what hits?" Lachlan started, even as his muscles readied.

It was a question that didn’t need to be answered because the second the words were out of Lachlan’s mouth... it hit.

Not the frogs.

Day.

It was like a switch had been thrown by a hand they would never see.

It was dark one beat; the next, a white weight of noon slammed through every surviving pane and seam like someone had rolled the sky right over the roof.

Sound cut mid-croak.

Bodies vanished.

Not collapsed. Not died.

Gone as if they never existed in the first place.

The floor was clean.

The shattered glass dry.

The air empty.

Smell—there for a blink, then not, like a dream that drops out of your mouth between one word and the next.

Silence was so complete it made their ears ring.

Lachlan froze with the broom mid-arc.

Elias had a hand on his own throat like he’d been about to pry a frog off his pulse and needed to update his decisions.

Alexei half-turned toward the hearth, knife still at the ready for a threat that had chosen not to exist anymore.

Zubair didn’t waste the breath to be surprised. "I’m done with this place. Truck. Now."

They moved on nerves and leftover noise.

Luci shook once, violently, sending a memory of slime spattering into sunlight that didn’t catch it.

He bumped Sera’s hip with his head—gratitude, apology, petition for instructions—and trotted for the door with his ridiculous dignity restored.

Sera blinked bright in the glare, glanced down at her clean feet, then at the hole where glass had been. "That was—" She stopped hunting for a word and grinned instead, dazzled and young for one perfect breath. "New."

"Never again," Elias begged the universe, half to himself. He wiped his palms on his shirt, eyes ticking to the window as if the frogs might decide to be real again out of spite.

Lachlan planted the broom in a corner like a spear and followed the others into the white heat.

The yard lay flat and dry. No footprints. No tracks. Nothing

The porch boards looked smug, the way anything looks smug after refusing to hold more than its share.

"Move," Zubair reminded, already opening the driver’s door.

He checked the sightlines out of instinct and something else—the new habit of measuring the world by Sera first and everything else by how fast he could place himself between it and her.

His hand brushed her back as she climbed in. Contact made him breathe easier. It always did.

They piled in fast.

Luci took the back with a groan and flopped his enormous head on the hump between the front seats like a child refusing to sit properly.

His ears twitched at nothing. He sneezed, offended again by ghosts.

Zubair turned the key. The engine caught true. Tires found gravel.

As the farmhouse fell behind, Lachlan looked back once on reflex. Sun flooded the broken window. Nothing moved inside. No slime. No glass on the sill. No proof.

Then, too soft to be real but loud enough to grow skin, a single croak rose out of the ditch a hundred yards down.

Another answered from somewhere far across the field.

Elias flinched as a new trauma inside of him was unlocked. "Please—no."

The road unspooled south, bright and empty.

Zubair pressed the accelerator. Sera leaned her arm along the open window, fingers slicing the noon.

Luci’s tail thumped twice, heavy, as if stamping the moment to keep.

They didn’t talk about frogs.

They didn’t need to.

The memory of wet bodies and glass under pressure rode with them anyway, a second heartbeat tucked beneath the first, waiting for the next night to find a new way to explain itself.