The rain thinned to a fine mist by the time Killian reached the last stretch of road before the truck, visibility better now than it had been in hours, which was precisely why he saw it in time.
Movement, thirty feet ahead, wrong in a way his instincts flagged before his conscious mind fully processed why.
He stopped walking.
The shape crouched low near an overturned dumpster, and even from this distance, something about it read differently than every other infected he'd killed over the last two weeks — the posture too controlled, too aware, head tracking his approach with a precision the mindless ones never displayed.
Ziki.
Scanning. A pause, longer than usual. Master, this reading is inconsistent with baseline infected physiology. Elevated internal energy signature. Recommend caution.
"Define inconsistent," Killian murmured, low enough that only the space could hear him.
