They ran until they couldn't.
Eight blocks had seemed like a number when Xavier said it — concrete, achievable, the kind of distance that had a beginning and an end. Eight blocks had not accounted for the street being impassable at the third block, the crowd compression at the fourth, the cluster of infected moving through the pedestrian underpass that forced them back and up and sideways through a route Xavier was calculating in real time, his blade out, clearing the path in the brutal efficient way of someone who had stopped thinking about what he was clearing and was only thinking about what was ahead.
Nana ran.
One shoe.
She had stopped noticing it somewhere around the second block — her body had moved the sensation to a background register and overwritten it with the more pressing information of *move, keep moving, do not fall, hold his hand, move* — but now, stopped, breathing, the rooftop concrete under her bare foot was very cold and very real and she noticed.
She noticed a lot of things, standing on the rooftop of a building three blocks from Xavier's apartment that they had reached through a fire escape that he'd pulled down with one hand while she watched the street below and counted the shapes moving through it.
She noticed her hands were shaking and would not stop.
She noticed the city.
Luna City spread out below them in the morning — the neon off now, the city in daylight, the ordinary familiar skyline that she had looked at from a hundred angles, from the river and the amusement park and her bedroom window and the Association rooftop. She knew this skyline. She had grown up underneath it.
It was the same skyline.
Everything under it was wrong.
The streets she could see from here were — chaos was the word, but chaos implied randomness, and this was not random, this was a system that had been running correctly and was now running incorrectly, still with its own logic, still organized by the laws of what the infected were and what they wanted, just a logic that had nothing to do with the city that had been here yesterday. The cars had stopped moving or were stopped at wrong angles. The crowds were gone or were infected, and telling the difference from this height was not always possible. The sounds came up in layers — the car alarms, the distant gunshots, the screaming, and underneath it all the collective hungry sound that she was going to hear in her sleep for a very long time.
She did not look at Xavier's sword.
She was not going to look at Xavier's sword.
She had been not-looking at it since the train, where she had also not-looked at what happened when he used it, because she had been looking at him instead — at his face, at the steadiness of it, at the way he was always already between her and the next thing before she knew the next thing was coming. She had been looking at him instead of the blade and she was going to continue to do that for as long as possible.
Driip..Dripp...
The blade was coated in blood.
She was not going to look at it.
"Nana."
His voice. She turned.
He was looking at her. He had pushed his hair back with his free hand — the other still held the blade, point down, his arm at his side. His jacket had something on the sleeve that she was also not looking at. His eyes were doing the field-assessment thing, moving over her quickly, checking — and she knew, from weeks of working with him, that he was running the injury inventory. Head, neck, arms, hands. His gaze stopped at her bare foot.
His jaw tightened.
"I'm fine," she said, before he could say anything. Her voice came out wrong — thinner than she intended, with a shake in it that she couldn't smooth out. "I'm fine. It's just — the shoe is on the train."
"Okay," he said.
"I'm —"
"Okay," he said again, and he said it in the same way he said look at me on the train — not dismissively, not minimizing, but with the weight of *I have received the information and we're moving forward together.*
Shhk....klik.
He sheathed the blade.
He crossed to her.
He took her hands in both of his.
Her hands were shaking so badly she could feel it against his — the continuous tremor, the thing her body was doing without her permission, the physical report on everything that had happened in the last forty minutes. He held them. Didn't try to stop the shaking, didn't squeeze too hard, just — held. His hands were warm and steady and she focused on that, the warmth and the steadiness, and breathed.
"We're going to get to the apartment," he said. "Three blocks. I know the route. We're going to barricade the door and wait."
"Wait for what?" she said.
He was quiet for a moment.
"Rescue," he said. "The Association will mobilize. SKYHAVEN will send response. This is — they'll respond. Someone will respond."
She looked at the city below.
"Caleb," she said.
The word came out small. Smaller than she intended.
"He'll know," Xavier said. "SKYHAVEN monitors the surface feeds. He'll know something is wrong."
"He has duty," she said. "If this is — if the whole city is —" she stopped. "He's Flight Colonel. He doesn't get to just come down because I'm —"
"He'll find a way," Xavier said.
She looked at him. He said it like a fact, like something he had checked and confirmed, and she didn't know why that helped — it shouldn't have helped, he didn't know Caleb, he didn't know anything about SKYHAVEN's protocols — but it did. The certainty of it.
She nodded.
"Three blocks," she said.
"Three blocks," he said. "Move when I move."
"I know," she said.
She did know.
She had been moving when he moved since the train.
.
.
.
.
The first block was the hospital.
They heard it before they saw it — the sounds coming from the building that were not the sounds hospitals made, not the organized hum of a functional medical facility but something else, something wrong coming from multiple floors simultaneously, and the people outside the entrance who were running away from it, away from the building that was supposed to be the place you ran to —
"Don't look," Xavier said, beside her.
She looked.
The ground floor windows of the ward — she could see shapes against the glass. Hands. Many hands, pressing, and the glass was doing what the containment room glass had done in a laboratory across the city, developing the stress-fracture pattern of something being pressed from inside by something that did not stop.
tik...tik..tik...
A shot went through one of the windows.
Krrrkkk—
Glass and then the sound of it, the two arriving in wrong order because of the distance, and the shape that had been against the glass was gone and two others took its place immediately.
CRASH—!
"Move," Xavier said.
She moved.
They went around the hospital block. She did not look at the entrance. She heard it — the sounds from inside and the sounds from outside, the police at the perimeter attempting to establish a line, the officers shouting at each other and at the people still trying to push past toward the entrance because they had someone inside, because they needed to know, because the people inside were their people —
"My wife is in there —"
"I can't reach my son —"
"Please, please, she was just in for a checkup —"
The officers holding the line looked like people who had been doing a job they understood for years and had been handed a situation they did not understand and were working with what they had, which was not enough, which was never going to be enough for this.
Nana thought of her parents.
Not consciously. Not a decision. The thought arrived — *they don't know, they're home, are they home, did they stay home, are they —* and she pushed it back down because pushing it back down was the only available option while she was running on one shoe through a city that was currently demonstrating the many ways it was not safe.
*I'll call them from the apartment,* she thought. *From Xavier's apartment, I'll call.*
She held onto that.
The second block was worse than the first.
A cluster of infected had found something near the transit stop — she knew this because of the sounds and because Xavier turned hard right without warning and said *don't* and she trusted that and did not see whatever was at the transit stop and kept moving.
But she heard it.
A wet Tearing Sound,And Something that used to be a scream.
She heard it and she made a sound she did not intend to make and Xavier's hand tightened on hers and he pulled her faster and she went with him, away from the sounds, her bare foot on the cold concrete and the blood starting — she could feel it now, the skin worn through on the ball of her foot, the wet and sting of it — and she did not mention it.
Three blocks, He had said.
Three blocks, she had been told.
The third block was Xavier's building.
He got them in through the side entrance, the one that needed the resident keycard, and the door closed behind them and the sounds went from everywhere to muffled, to distant, to the particular relative quiet of an interior space with the chaos locked outside.
She stood in the lobby and breathed.
Her foot was bleeding.
The lobby floor was showing it.
"Stairs," Xavier said. "Elevator is a risk."
"Okay," she said.
They took the stairs.
Fourteen floors.
She counted them.
She counted them because counting was something her brain could do that was not think about what is outside or think about the train or think about the hospital windows or think about the sounds from the transit stop.Counting was available. Counting was hers.
One, two, three — Xavier in front of her, one hand back to maintain contact, his other hand at the blade as they cleared each landing — four, five, six — her breath loud in her ears, her foot leaving prints on every other step — seven, eight, nine —
"Almost," he said, without being asked.
Ten, eleven, twelve — the stairwell was quiet except for them, except for the muffled sounds from outside coming through the building's skin, the car alarms and the gunshots and the things she was putting in the not-thinking box as fast as they arrived — thirteen, fourteen.
His door.
He had the key in the lock before she'd finished the landing.
CLICK!
Inside: clean, spare, the western-facing apartment with nothing decorative in it that she had never been to before but that she recognized immediately as him— the economy of it, the function, the lack of anything that didn't earn its space. A desk. A window. The blade kit on the wall rack, the gear organized the way his gear was always organized.
He locked the door.
He moved immediately — the bookshelf first, dragging it from the wall with a force that shouldn't have been possible for one person moving quickly in a small space but that he managed because he was the person who caught her from four-meter drops without losing his balance and who had held a grip on her wrist on the train platform that had not wavered once. The bookshelf went across the door. The table followed. A second chair, wedged under the handle.
THUMP–!
He stepped back.
He looked at the barricade.
"Hh...hah ...hhh..."
He was breathing hard. Not the controlled field-breathing — harder than that, the genuine aftermath of running and fighting and carrying a fear he had not let surface while they were moving.
His hands were at his sides.
His blade hand was shaking slightly.
She looked at it. She had not seen his hands shake before.
"Xavier," she said.
"I'm fine," he said.
She recognized the words. She had said them on the rooftop. He said them the same way — meaning it the same way she had meant it, which was: *I am not fine but I am functional and the distinction matters right now.*
She sat down on the floor.
Not the couch, not the chair — the floor, because the floor was available and solid and her legs had been making the we are done now argument for a while and the floor was the most direct way to address it. She sat with her back against the wall below the window and looked at her foot.
It was not as bad as it felt.
This was the thing about pain — it often felt worse than it was, the body erring toward overreporting. The ball of her foot had worn through and was bleeding and would need cleaning, but it was not a serious wound, it was a running-on-concrete-without-a-shoe wound, which was a thing that happened when you ran on concrete without a shoe.
She was looking at it when she heard Xavier — the sound of him crossing to the bathroom, the cabinet opening, returning. He crouched in front of her without preamble, the first aid kit in his hands, and she looked at his face while he looked at her foot and she thought: he is scared and he will not say it and I know what that is like.
"I'm going to call my parents," she said.
He was already cleaning the wound, the antiseptic stinging in a way that was almost grounding, the sting meaning real, present, here, not the train.
"Okay," he said.
She got her phone.
Her parents' number: her mother first.
Ringing.
Ringing.
Ringing.
Voicemail.
She felt something cold move through her chest. She pressed it back. The networks are overwhelmed. Everyone is calling everyone. The lines are full.She tried her father.
Ringing.
Ringing.
Voicemail.
"The networks are busy," Xavier said, without looking up from the bandaging. He had heard. She had not been trying to hide it. "The city emergency — everyone is calling. The lines will be overwhelmed."
"Right," she said.
"They'll call back," he said.
"Right," she said again.
She looked at her phone. She tried her mother again. Voicemail.
She put the phone on the floor beside her and looked at the window.
She thought: *they stayed home this morning. My mother stays home in the morning. My father had a late start, he mentioned it at dinner — he was working from home today. They're home. The apartment is on the fourth floor. The building has a security entrance.*
They're home. They're safe. The lines are busy.
She was building this structure in her mind and she was doing it on purpose, the deliberate construction of a thing to stand in, because the alternative was the cold in her chest expanding outward and she could not afford that, not right now, not while she was sitting in Xavier's apartment on the fourteenth floor listening to the city.
She was not going to think about what she had not let herself think at the hospital.
She was not going to think about what she had heard from the transit stop.
Not yet.
Xavier finished the bandaging.
He looked up.
She met his eyes.
"Thank you," she said. Her voice came out steady. She was grateful for this.
He nodded. He stayed crouched in front of her for a moment — not moving away, not moving forward, just there, at her level, close, and she thought about his hands shaking and about the way he had taken her hands on the rooftop and she thought: He is also trying not to fall apart. He is doing what I am doing.
"Your family," she said. "Have you tried —"
"My parents are in the outer district," he said. "And Lily —" he stopped.
She saw him stop.
She saw what stopping cost him.
She reached out and took his hand, the way he had taken hers on the rooftop, the same gesture returned. He looked at her hand on his and his jaw moved slightly.
"The outer district is further from the hospital," she said. "From where it started. They might have more time."
"Yes," he said.
He did not say I know. Because neither of them knew. Because knowing was not available.
He turned his hand over and held hers.
They stayed like that for a moment.
Then he stood, and she stood, and they went to the window.
The city was still going.
That was the thing — it was not finished, not done, not the post-apocalypse of films where the crisis was already past and the survivors were picking through the aftermath. It was happening,ongoing, unresolved, the city still in the process of becoming something else, and watching it from the fourteenth floor was like watching something that should not be visible at this scale.
The police line near the hospital had not held.
She could see the intersection from here — two blocks north — and the line was gone, and what was happening in the space where it had been was something she made herself observe clinically, the way she had learned to observe things that were difficult in field training, because the clinical observation was something to do with it instead of just feeling it.
People running.
Others not running.
Small clusters, moving with that wrong-lurch, converging on things. On people.
The military — SKYHAVEN's surface response units, the dark-uniformed rapid deployment teams — were visible at the north end of the intersection, three vehicles, and they were trying to establish something, a perimeter or an extraction corridor or something with structure, but the structure was struggling against the scale of it.
"They're trying," she said.
"Yes," Xavier said.
"They can't —" she stopped. Started again. "There are too many."
"Yes," he said again.
He was standing just behind her left shoulder, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him. His arms were crossed, not because he was closed off but because his hands needed something to do and crossing them gave them something. She had learned to read him in the small things.
She pressed her forehead to the glass.
Her parents' building was south from here. Not visible from this window. The western view showed mid-district north, the hospital, the transit hub, the commercial zone. Her parents were south.
*They're home,* she told herself. *Fourth floor. Security entrance. My mother would have heard the news and locked everything. My father would have — he would have called neighbors, gathered information, he always did that, practical, steady —*
*They're home.*
"Nana."
She turned.
Xavier was looking at her with an expression she had not seen on him before. Not the field-face. Not the composed everyday face. Something underneath both of them — something that was worried and was not hiding it, which was unusual enough that it caught her full attention.
"Whatever you're thinking about," he said, "you can say it."
She looked at him.
She thought about the cold in her chest.
She thought about voicemail. Twice. Both of them.
"I'm thinking about what happens next," she said. Which was true. Which was also not all of it.
He waited.
"I'm thinking about how long we wait," she said. "And who comes. And whether —" she stopped. Looked at the window. "The Association will send response. The military is already deploying. SKYHAVEN has resources that the surface units don't." She pressed on, building the structure out loud, the same construction she had been doing in her head. "Caleb will know. He's been watching the feeds. He's probably already trying to reach me —"
She picked up her phone.
No missed calls from Caleb.
No signal.
She looked at the signal indicator.
No bars.
"The network," Xavier said.
"I know," she said.
She put the phone down.
She looked at the city below, at the morning light on chaos, at the smoke beginning to rise from somewhere to the northeast, at the SKYHAVEN carrier blinking its slow lights overhead, at the place where the police line used to be.
She looked at the pink bunny.
She had carried it this whole time. Had not noticed. It was in her left hand, had been in her left hand since the train, since she grabbed Xavier's jacket and the bunny had been in her hand and then everything had happened and her body had held onto it without consulting her.
She looked at it.
The pink bunny with the yellow ribbon. The one he had caught and given to her because of a calculation she still hadn't fully understood, the one that had produced a feeling in her chest that she didn't have a name for yet.
She held it against her chest.
"I keep thinking," she said, quietly, "about how ordinary this morning was. We were going to the library. I had a list."
"I know," he said.
"It doesn't feel real."
"I know."
"Xavier." She turned to look at him fully, the window behind her, the city behind her. "Are we going to be okay?"
He looked at her for a long moment.
He did not say yes with the reflexive confidence that would have been a lie.
He did not say I don't know with the honesty that would have been too much.
He said: "I'm going to make sure of it."
The difference was everything.
She held the bunny.
She looked at him.
She thought about what she had been trying to say on the platform before the emergency alert cut her off — the question she had started and not finished, the why do you — that had no ending yet.
She thought she was starting to understand the ending.
She looked at his face — the worry in it that was not for himself, the steadiness under the worry, the way he was positioned between her and the window even now without thinking about it — and she thought about the morning and the library list and the ordinary and the pink bunny and the feeling in her chest that was still there, under the fear, under the cold, still there and warm and specific and —
Oh, she thought.
That's what it is.
BANG–!
A gunshot.From Outside.
Close.
Then another.
Somewhere below, shouting.
"HELP!! –PLEASE!—"
They both looked at the window.
The city continued becoming what it was becoming.
In SKYHAVEN, seventeen missed calls sat on a screen.
Caleb stood at the monitoring station with his hands flat on the console and his eyes on sectors twelve through nineteen.
The sector nine anomaly had expanded to cover sectors eight through fourteen.
He had already filed the deployment request.
He had already been denied. Active incident management, surface response protocol, insufficient personnel for secondary deployment.
He filed it again.
His hands on the console were the steadiest they had ever been.
His face was the controlled face, the Colonel's face, the face that gave nothing.
His heart was doing something he had no protocol for.
He looked at the feeds. At the city. At the part of the city where her apartment was, where her parents' building was, where the Association compound was, where she had last sent a text from at 07:58 saying:
gege!! library day!! xavier says hi (he didn't say hi but he would if i asked him) 📚
He looked at the time.
10:23.
He filed the deployment request a third time.
This time, he added his personal authorization code.
He was not going to wait for approval.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.