"Don't."
It was the first word she said when he reached for the barricade.
He had his hand on the bookshelf edge. He looked at her over his shoulder. She was standing in the middle of the apartment in his shirt and her hunter trousers, both guns in her hands, her jaw set in the way it set when she had already decided she was going to fight something and was just waiting to find out what.
"I'm not going far," he said.
"You said that about the bathroom yesterday and then you were gone for twenty minutes."
"I was checking the fire escape."
"Without telling me —"
"Nana." He turned to face her fully. "Three walkers have been circling this floor for two days. Last night the handle moved. The night before, they were in the corridor for forty minutes." He kept his voice even. Not to dismiss what she was feeling — he could see what she was feeling, it was visible in the way her hands were gripping the guns — but because even was what the situation needed. "If they find something more interesting on another floor they'll move on. If they don't, the barricade works until it doesn't. I need to know what we're dealing with before we're dealing with it."
She looked at him.
"And food," he said. "We're on day three of six. If I can get more, we extend that."
A silence.
"I'm coming with you," she said.
"No."
"Xavier —"
"Someone needs to be inside the barricade," he said. "If I can't get back in — if something goes wrong out there — you're still safe in here. If we're both out there and something goes wrong, neither of us is safe." He held her gaze. "You know I'm right."
She knew he was right.
She looked at the guns in her hands. She looked at the door.
"If you're not back in thirty minutes," she said, "I'm coming out."
"Twenty minutes is enough."
"Thirty," she said. "Because you're going to be careful and careful takes time."
He almost smiled. Almost.
"Thirty minutes," he agreed.
She helped him move the barricade — quiet, coordinated, they had done this enough now that they moved around each other without instruction — and she held the door while he slipped out, and her hand was on his arm for one second before he went, just the pressure of it, the same gesture he'd used on her shoulder on the train.
*Stay,* it meant.
*Come back,* it meant.
He went.
The corridor was empty.
...Too Empty.
He stood in the doorway for ten full seconds before moving — the assessment first, always the assessment, sound and sight and the particular quality of the air in a space that may or may not contain something dangerous. The corridor was dim, the emergency lighting on its reduced battery setting, casting everything in a low amber that made the shadows sharp.
Empty.
He Walk.
The smell was the first thing — he had noticed it building over the past two days, coming in under the door at intervals, the specific smell of the infection, of the changed, which he was learning to distinguish from the smell of the dead, which was different. The infection smelled wrong in a way that was hard to name, something chemical beneath the organic, something that his body recognized as wrong before his brain finished the classification.
He breathed through his mouth.
He moved down the corridor toward the east end, blade in his right hand, point down.
The first door — 14-C — was closed. He listened at it. Nothing. He moved on.
14-D was half open.
He stopped.
He pushed it open with the blade's edge, keeping himself to the side of the frame. It swung. He looked.
The apartment was — lived in, in the recent past. A coat on the hook by the door. A bag on the chair near the window — packed, zipper partially done, the contents visible: clothes, a document folder, a child's stuffed animal that had not made it into the bag before —
The walker in the kitchen turned.
—shhrkk–
The sound of its foot dragging against tile.
He had already seen it before it turned. Had clocked the movement in his peripheral the moment the door swung. The blade moved the way it moved — the practiced, economical arc that had nothing wasted in it, the motion he had trained until it required no decision, just assessment and response.
THUD.
It did not take long.
He stood in the apartment afterward and breathed and looked at what was on the floor and did not let himself look at it for more than the necessary moment.
He had known this man.
Not well. The way you knew neighbors in a building — the nod in the elevator, the occasional exchange at the mailbox. A quiet man. He had a daughter, he thought. He had seen them once in the lobby, the man carrying the girl's bag, the girl skipping ahead.
The bag on the chair.
He looked at it.
He did not look at the floor again.
He moved through the apartment. Efficient, thorough, clinical. The kitchen cabinets: rice, tinned food, cooking oil, salt. He found a bag of his own from the hook by the door — a different one, not the packed bag — and filled it. Bottled water from the cabinet under the sink, still sealed. Medicine from the bathroom cabinet: paracetamol, antiseptic, bandages, something for fever.
He picked up the child's stuffed animal.
He looked at it.
He put it in the bag.
He went back to the corridor.
14-E was empty — truly empty, no walkers, no signs of recent occupation, the apartment stripped of food already, probably in the first day by the occupants before they left. He found nothing useful and moved on.
14-F: a walker in the bedroom, another in the hallway outside the bathroom. He heard them before he reached the door and waited, blade ready, and took them as they came through — the hallway one first, the bedroom one second, ten seconds between them.
Two more on the floor below, on the stairwell landing.
He heard them coming up.
thud—drag—thud
He pressed to the wall.
He took them as they reached the landing.
Five total, now. His jacket had blood on it — the spray pattern of the blade's work, the clinical geometry of what happened when you disrupted the neural function of something that had been a person, which he was working very hard not to think about in those terms, was thinking about in terms of threat and response and the distance between the blade and what it needed to reach.
He crouched on the stairwell landing and breathed.
The building was quiet in the specific way that buildings were quiet when there was no ambient human noise — no televisions, no music, no conversations drifting through walls. Just the building's own sounds: the climate system on its residual power, the settling of the structure, the sounds from outside filtering up through the stairwell from the street below.
He glance down to the stairwell.
The lower floors were dark.
He did not go down.
He had what he needed. He knew what he needed to know.
He went back up.
CLICK—!
She had the door open before he finished the last step.
She had been watching the peephole — he saw it in how fast she moved, how she was already on the other side of the barricade reaching for him as he came through, her hand on his arm, checking, her eyes going over him the way he always went over her.
"You're — is that —" she saw the jacket.
"Not mine," he said.
She breathed out. Something in her face rearranged itself from the shape it had been holding for thirty minutes back into something that could move. "Okay. Okay." She helped him with the barricade, sliding things back into position, and he set the bag down on the table and she looked at what he'd brought and then back at him.
"How bad is it?" she said. "Out there. Tell me."
He took his jacket off. He folded it with the stained side in and set it on the floor by the door. He sat down at the table.
She sat across from him.
He looked at her face — at the steadiness she maintained, the particular kind of courage that wasn't the absence of fear but the decision to function anyway — and he told her.
"The corridor had three walkers. I cleared them." He kept his voice even. "The apartments I checked — some were evacuated before the outbreak reached this floor. Some weren't." A pause. "Some of the walkers I recognized."
She looked at him. She understood what that meant. She didn't make him say more about it.
"The lower floors," he said. "I could hear them. I didn't go down, but I could hear them from the stairwell." He looked at the table. "I think we may be the only people left in this building, Nana."
The words sat between them.
She was quiet for a moment.
"The building across the street," she said. "I've been watching the windows. There's a light on the ninth floor. Someone's been signaling — I don't know if it's deliberate but it goes on and off." She looked at the window. "We're not the only ones."
He looked at her.
"You've been watching the windows," he said.
"While you were gone." She pulled the bag toward her and started sorting the contents, her hands doing something while she talked. "It helps. Having something to look for instead of just listening." She found the child's stuffed animal and stopped.
She picked it up.
She looked at it for a moment. Set it carefully on the table between them.
Neither of them said anything about it.
"We'll eat the rice tonight," she said, eventually. "The tins we save." She was already calculating, the inventory running behind her eyes. "With the water you brought, we're at eight days now. Maybe nine."
"Nine," he agreed.
She nodded.
She did not put the stuffed animal away.
.
.
.
.
.
She had found the candle in the kitchen drawer — the emergency kind, unscented, the squat white cylinder that people kept for power outages without thinking much about it — and she had lit it as the afternoon dark came in.
The light was small and warm and immediate in a way that the emergency lighting's amber was not, and she had been sitting with it in the middle of the table for twenty minutes before Xavier looked at it and said, very carefully: "The light."
She looked at the candle.
She looked at the window.
"The walkers are drawn to light," she said.
"Yes."
She cupped her hand around the candle, blocking most of its light from the window angle. "If I keep it low —"
"The smell too," he said. "Heated wax. I don't know if they process smell the way —"
"Fsshh—"
She blew it out.
The apartment went to the ambient dark of a curtained room in the evening — not full dark, the city's residual light coming through the edges, enough to see shapes and faces at close distance.
She sat in the near-dark across from him and she said: "I miss light."
It was such a small thing to say. He knew it was not a small thing to mean.
"I know," he said.
"I keep thinking about —" she stopped. "Stupid things. I keep thinking about the noodle place near the station. The one with the red lanterns outside. My mother kept saying we should go and we never went." She looked at her hands. "She's going to make us go when this is over. First thing."
He was quiet.
"My father's going to say it was always a tourist trap anyway," she continued. "And my mother's going to say *then why did you want to go for three years,* and he's going to say —" she stopped.
He watched her stop.
He watched her put the structure back up, the deliberate reconstruction, the thing she did when the other thing got too close.
"They're okay," she said. Quietly. To herself as much as to him. "The building has a security entrance. My mother locks everything. She's been locking things since I was five, every window, every —"
"Nana."
She looked up.
He looked at her. He had things he could say and things he could not say and the line between them was very specific and he was trying to hold it. He knew things she didn't know. He had seen the southern sector from the street outside the military convoy's range. He had looked at the building density there and done the arithmetic that he did not want to have done.
He could not give her false certainty.
He could not take away the structure she was building.
"Tell me about them," he said.
She looked at him.
"Your parents," he said. "Tell me about them."
A pause. Something in her face eased — just slightly, the particular ease of being invited to talk about something you loved.
"My mother —" she started slowly. "She's smaller than me. Barely. She has this way of looking at you when she thinks you're being an idiot that doesn't involve any expression change whatsoever, she just — looks. And somehow it's worse than if she said something." The ghost of a smile. "My father is the opposite. He announces everything he's thinking. He thinks out loud constantly and then acts surprised when you know what he's thinking."
"And they balance each other."
"Perfectly. Like — she'll decide something and not say it and he'll talk through every alternative out loud until he lands on the same thing she decided ten minutes ago and she'll just nod." The smile got slightly less like a ghost. "I used to watch them do it when I was small. I thought it was the funniest thing."
"And Caleb's parents," he said.
"They're mine too," she said immediately, without thinking about it. Then: "Sorry. That probably sounded —"
"No," he said. "It didn't."
She looked at him.
"It didn't," he said again. "They raised you."
"They did." She was quiet for a moment. "Caleb's mother — she's the one who taught me to cook. She's very patient. She taught me the same recipe seven times and never once made a face about it." She laughed, small and real. "And his father used to take us to the market on Saturday mornings. Every Saturday, the same market, the same route. I still walk that route sometimes when I'm in the district."
"He sounds steady," Xavier said.
"He is. He's very steady." She looked at the table. "Like Caleb."
He watched her face when she said "Caleb."
"He's going to find you," Xavier said.
She looked up.
"He came down here," Xavier said. "From SKYHAVEN. Against protocol, almost certainly. He's operational in the city, he's fighting his way south, and he's going to find you." He held her gaze. "That's not optimism. That's a reading of available data."
She was quiet for a moment.
"You sound like him," she said. "When you do that. The — the data thing."
"Do I."
"It's a compliment," she said. "Both of you. The way you both just — think things instead of feeling them out loud." She tilted her head. "Except you do feel them. I know you do. You just keep the feeling in a different room."
He looked at her.
She looked back, and she was doing the thing she did — reading him, the way she had been reading him for months now, with the specific patient attention of someone who had decided he was worth understanding. He had been aware of it since early in the partnership and had never said anything about it and had never wanted her to stop.
"Different room," he said.
"I'm learning the floor plan," she said simply.
He almost said something.
He didn't say it.
He looked at the table.
She was still looking at him, and the near-dark of the apartment was very quiet, and the sounds from outside were the sounds they had become, background, managed, and they ate the rice she had made and they talked and it was — it was something that had no category, this specific thing, sitting in the dark in an apartment at the end of the world with someone and talking about rice and your mother's look and the floor plan of a person.
He did not have a word for it.
He thought he might be finding one.
BANG–!
The sound tore through the ceiling.
It came at 21:00.
One shot.
Above them — the fifteenth floor, the ceiling, the footsteps they had occasionally heard up there over the past days, someone moving, someone alive.
One shot.
And then silence.
Xavier stiffened.
Nana had gone very still beside him, both of them in the dark with the rice half-finished, and neither of them said anything because there was nothing to say that would make the silence mean something different.
*One shot,* he thought. *One. Not a fight. Not defense.*
His throat closed around nothing.
He had known people. Not the person upstairs — he didn't know who was up there, had hoped for two days that they were okay, had listened to the footsteps as evidence of someone else surviving — but he had known people. He had known people who had been through things that broke the part of a person that kept choosing. He understood the arithmetic of it.
He understood the arithmetic and he hated it and there was nothing to do with either of those things.
"Xavier," Nana said. Barely a whisper.
He couldn't answer.
She moved. She came to him — not the full lean of before, just close, her shoulder against his, her hand finding his hand, the small point of contact in the dark.
"I know," she said.
He looked at the ceiling.
He looked at it and he thought about the person up there who had made a calculation and the calculation had come out a certain way and there was nothing he could have done, nothing he had known to do, and the ceiling was just plaster and the city was just a city.
His eyes were wet.
He had not cried — had not let himself, had been running the assessment and the plan and the inventory and the next move and the contingency and the distance from the window and the blade angle and all the things that lived in the doing, because the doing was what kept the other thing manageable — and now the other thing was not manageable, it was just here, and his eyes were wet.
"Hey," Nana said.
He looked at her.
She was looking at him in the dim. Her face was wet too — had been, probably, since the shot, and she had been sitting with it quietly the way she sat with difficult things when she decided they needed sitting with.
She lifted her hand and pressed her palm to his face, briefly, the same way he had pressed his to hers — the gesture returned. Then she tucked herself against his side and he put his arm around her and they sat in the dark together.
BANG—!
Another one.
Not the same place.
Not the same person.
Different floor. East side of the building.
BANG!
Then a third.
Different building — the one across the street, he thought, the one with the light on the ninth floor.
*They're losing hope,* he thought. *Or they're losing their minds. Or both. Or there is no difference anymore between those things.*
Outside, the sound of the shots was already pulling the horde — he could hear the shift in the collective sound, the movement-toward, the infected following the noise the way they followed all noise.
shhrk—drag—shhrrk—
The horde moved closer to the building.
He pulled Nana closer.
She held on.
The sounds gathered outside — the growling, the shuffling, the mass of it — and inside the apartment on the fourteenth floor two people sat in the dark and held each other and did not speak, because some things did not need speaking to be understood between two people who had been sharing an apartment and a fear and a ceiling for four days.
He looked at the ceiling.
He thought about the fifteenth floor.
He thought about Lily, in the outer district, with a white bunny named Snowball.
He thought about his parents.
He thought about the pink bunny on the nightstand.
He thought about Nana saying *I'm glad it was you* in the grey morning light, and the way he had said *me too* and meant it with a completeness that surprised him even now.
*I am not going to let this be the end.*
Not a question. Not a hope.
A decision.
He breathed.
He felt her breathing against his side — the slow, exhausted rhythm of someone who was holding on with everything they had and was not going to let go.
"Nana," he said.
"Mm."
"We're going to get out of this building."
She was quiet.
"Not tonight," he said. "But soon. The military perimeter is moving. Caleb is operational. The government specialists are working." He kept his voice low, just for her, just for this room. "We are going to get out of this building, and we are going to find him, and we are going to get somewhere safe."
She lifted her head.
She looked at him.
In the dim, her eyes were very clear.
"Okay," she said.
Not I hope so. Not maybe. Just: okay.
He nodded.
She put her head back on his shoulder.
Outside, the horde moved with its collective sound, and the shots did not come again, and the city continued its terrible night, and inside the apartment on the fourteenth floor two people sat in the dark and breathed and held on.
The candle was still on the table, unlit.
The stuffed animal was beside it.
The pink bunny was on the nightstand.
They held on.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.