[ THEO-3 ]
Personal Log. Day 154. 12:31 hours.
We are leaving Tiong Bahru station.
Rest period completed. Echo's bandage has been redressed. Damian ate half a nutrient pack and drank adequate water. I noted he ate less than recommended and chose not to comment on it because I have learned to identify the situations where commenting is useful and the situations where it is not.
Current status: three frequency devices. One for Damian. One for injured dog. Approximately eight hundred meters of tunnel before the line exits underground and rises to elevated track.
I have been reviewing everything I know about the Tiong Bahru to Redhill section. The tunnel does not go the full distance. Somewhere between eight hundred and nine hundred meters from Redhill station the tunnel slopes upward and breaks into open cut ground level, sky above, walls on both sides, accessible from street level in theory though the fencing along the corridor provides meaningful separation from the surrounding area.
The recreational complex and Henderson residential blocks are nearby but not adjacent. There is distance. There is fencing. I want to be precise about this because precision matters and because I do not want to catastrophize a situation that is already adequately challenging without my assistance.
What I am less precise about is what five months of no maintenance has done to that fencing.
I have not mentioned this to Damian yet. I will mention it when we are close enough that the information is useful.
I am choosing to believe this is the correct decision.
End log.
[ DAMIAN ]
The first thing I noticed leaving Tiong Bahru was the water.
Or rather the lack of it.
At Outram Park the flooding had been mid-shin from the moment we dropped onto the tracks. In the tunnel between the two stations it had varied, knee height in the dips, waist deep in that one terrible middle section. But leaving Tiong Bahru heading west the floor was just wet. Damp concrete with puddles sitting in the low points rather than a continuous body of water covering everything.
"Elevation," Theo-3 said before I could ask.
"The tunnel rises."
"Gradually. Tiong Bahru station sits slightly higher than Outram Park. The flooding drained toward the lower end." A pause. "I thought you would appreciate knowing."
I looked down at my feet moving on actual dry concrete for the first time in over an hour.
"Yeah," I said. "I appreciate knowing."
Echo seemed to agree. Theo-3 had let her walk briefly at Tiong Bahru to check her leg and she had managed three careful steps before sitting down and looking at both of us with her ears up like she expected applause. She was back in the backpack now but her tail had been moving since Tiong Bahru and I was taking that as a good sign about the general situation.
We walked.
The tunnel here was different from the Outram section. Drier. The smell of standing water replaced by older concrete and something dusty. Our footsteps came back sharper, more defined, the tunnel returning sound with less softening than before.
"What's up there when it opens," I said.
"The open cut section runs alongside the Delta recreational complex," Theo-3 said. "Sports facilities. A swimming pool. Outdoor courts. They are not adjacent to the track, there is distance and fencing between them and the corridor." A pause. "The Henderson residential blocks are further east. Also fenced from the track corridor."
"But five months of no maintenance."
"Yes sir. That is the variable I cannot fully account for."
I thought about that for a few seconds.
"How far is the open cut section before Redhill."
"Short," Theo-3 said. "Four hundred meters at most. Once we are in the open cut we are already close to the station. It will not be a long exposure."
Short was good. Short I could work with.
"Devices."
"I would prefer to hold them. The open cut has natural sight lines, we will be able to see what is around us rather than navigating blind like the tunnel. If something is there we will know before it reaches us." A pause. "Also I want to preserve what we have for the sections after Redhill where the exposure is longer and the distances greater."
"Agreed," I said.
We kept walking.
[ NARRATOR ]
The change came gradually and then all at once.
The tunnel floor began its upward slope so gently that neither of them registered it consciously at first, just a slight forward lean in their walking, the body adjusting to grade without consulting the mind. Then the dark began to soften. Not much. Just a quality shift, the black becoming something closer to deep grey, the concrete walls at the furthest edge of the beam becoming slightly more visible than the beam alone could account for.
Light from somewhere ahead. Natural light finding its way in.
Twenty meters further the ceiling ended.
The line where concrete stopped and sky began appeared as a thin grey seam above them, widening with each step as the track continued its rise. The seam became a gap. The gap became a strip. The strip became open air and suddenly they were no longer in a tunnel at all.
They were in the open cut.
Concrete walls on both sides, the track running between them on a raised bed. Above — sky. Wide and grey and open. The air hit differently immediately, real air, moving air, the particular warmth of Singapore afternoon finding them after hours of tunnel cold.
Beyond the walls, at a proper distance, separated by fencing and the natural buffer of the corridor, ... the world.
To their left the Delta recreational complex sat quiet and overgrown. Far enough that the details required looking, ... the gym building's dark windows, the outdoor courts with vines beginning their patient work on the fencing, the swimming pool visible only as a changed color above the wall line, green where it had been blue. Close enough to see. Not close enough to feel like a wall between them and something immediate.
To their right Alexandra Road ran at a higher level, the road surface lined with stopped EVs, personal belongings visible through windows, doors open on some. And beyond the road the Henderson blocks rising in the middle distance, residential and quiet, their windows open to the heat the way Singapore windows always were.
Both of them turned off their headlamps.
They moved in the grey daylight and did not speak.
[ DAMIAN ]
The open cut was quieter than I expected.
Not silent, ... there was wind, and the distant ambient sound of a city that had gone wrong but hadn't gone completely still, always something settling or moving somewhere in the middle distance. But quiet in a way that suggested the area immediately around the track corridor was not currently occupied.
Echo confirmed this in her own way. Her nose was working constantly, reading the air on both sides, but her body stayed loose in the backpack. Ears forward, alert, but not the specific stillness she had shown in the tunnel when the infected was forty meters ahead of us. This was curiosity not alarm.
I took the pace up slightly. Not running. Not even fast walking. Just purposeful. Covering ground.
The fencing on both sides was intact as far as I could see. Some sections had vines beginning to work their way through the links but the structures themselves were standing. Five months wasn't long enough to bring down properly installed fencing, I reminded myself. It felt longer from the inside of it but five months was nothing to concrete and steel.
We covered the open cut in less than eight minutes.
The track began its rise onto the viaduct approach and the walls dropped away and suddenly we were above the surrounding landscape again and Redhill station was right there, closer than I had expected, the platform sitting on its elevated viaduct directly ahead of us.
I exhaled.
"Clear?" I said quietly.
"The approach looks clear," Theo-3 said. "I am not detecting signals on the platform level." A pause. "I want to check the staircases before we commit to the platform fully. But preliminary assessment is positive."
"Positive," I said. "Good word."
We walked onto the Redhill station platform.
[ NARRATOR ]
Redhill station sat quiet on its viaduct.
Theo-3 checked the north staircase first. Sensors sweeping the stairwell, listening, reading. Clear. The south staircase next. Same process. Clear.
The platform itself was undisturbed. Dry, wind-exposed, the overhead shelter intact. Advertising panels dark. The station name on the wall in clean white lettering.
REDHILL.
Damian walked to the platform edge and looked west along the elevated track. Queenstown visible in the distance. Below the viaduct the residential streets of Redhill spread out, stopped EVs on every road, the slow distant movement of infected at ground level near the blocks. Far below. Unreachable from the track.
He let himself breathe properly for the first time since the open cut.
Then Echo barked.
Sharp. Single. Urgent in a way that was completely different from every other sound she had made since they found her.
Damian turned.
He saw it in the half second before it arrived, a shape dropping from the station roof overhang directly above where Theo-3 was standing, arms out, the particular falling momentum of something that had been waiting up there and had finally found what it was waiting for.
He moved without deciding to.
Three steps across the platform, no stick, left leg complaining and ignored, and he hit the infected with his shoulder at full momentum just before it reached Theo-3, driving it sideways across the platform. It hit the platform surface hard and Damian landed with it and rolled clear immediately, back on his feet in the way the body does when it remembers something the mind has been trying to forget.
He spun on Theo-3.
"What the hell," he said, breathing hard. "Your sensors. Are they working or not."
"I—" Theo-3 began.
"It was right above you. Right there. How did you not—"
Echo barked again.
Same sound. Same urgency. But this time Damian was already looking the wrong direction.
He heard it before he felt it, ... the impact of something landing on his back, the weight of it sudden and total, driving him forward onto his knees on the platform surface. A second one. From the same roof section, the same patient waiting, the same drop.
The first infected was already getting back up.
It turned toward him.
Both of them turning toward him.
And Damian was on his knees on the platform of Redhill station with something on his back and his hands going to his pack straps by instinct and the weight pressing down and Theo-3 standing three meters away looking at all of it with those amber eyes and something shifting in them that had never shifted there before.
[ THEO-3 ]
Personal Log. Day 154. 15:44 hours.
Redhill station.
Damian is in immediate danger.
I am standing three meters away.
There are two infected. One on his back. One approaching from the north end of the platform. My core directive is clear and has always been clear and I have never questioned it and I do not question it now.
But he is on his knees.
And I am standing three meters away.
I may be about to make a decision I will carry for a very long time.
End log.
End of Chapter 10