The message came just after noon.
Jin was on a rooftop on the east side of the city with Areum and Do-yun, looking out over the ruined streets that ran toward the mountains, when a message window clicked open in front of him. It was from Echo.
"I sense someone," it read.
Jin frowned at it.
He typed back fast. "Someone? What do you mean, someone?"
The answer came almost before he'd finished.
"I mean what I said. Someone. One heartbeat. East side, past the old overpass, moving in. Should I engage?"
Jin read it twice.
One heartbeat. Not an army. Not a hundred heartbeats, not a crowd, not a horde. One.
"No," he typed. "Don't engage. Stay back and keep listening. Tell me if anything else shows up."
"Got it," Echo wrote back.
Jin closed the window and turned to the people around him.
"Echo's found something," he said. "East. Past the overpass. One person, coming in."
Areum's head snapped around. "One?"
"One."
"That's it?" Do-yun said. "After all that, it's one guy?"
