The tree roots under the sidewalk started to move.
Not fast.
Not like snakes. Not like some neat horror-movie effect.
They pushed up through the buckled concrete with slow old strength, splitting the slabs wider and wider until dirt showed black beneath. One corrupted thing took another step and its foot punched through the gap to the ankle. It jerked, snarled, tore free with half the sole still trapped below.
Isaac didn't wait to see more.
That was the lesson.
Not every answer had to end with bodies opening.
He backed away, crossed his fingers once more, and pictured the cracked playground fence folding inward across the path behind him. The iron obeyed with a shriek, bending down into the street and tangling the first two things that tried to force through.
Then he turned and left them to fight metal and roots and each other.
He took the side cut by the dead fountain, limped across the little median, and went down a narrower lane between two brick apartment buildings where trash bins leaned against peeling stucco and old flyers fluttered from a community board no one had bothered tearing down.
The sounds behind him stayed behind him.
That mattered more than winning.
His left arm dragged hot and mean in the sling. Every quick breath scraped his ribs. The hand he kept using felt wrong now too—too important, too available, too much like a loaded thing hanging off his wrist.
By the time he reached the back stairwell of the smaller building, he was shaking hard enough that the rail looked like it moved on its own.
The outer door had already been kicked once and not well. The latch plate hung half off, screws stripped, wood split but still catching. He put his shoulder into it and got inside on the second try.
The stairwell smelled like wet concrete, old cooking oil, dust, and the trapped heat of a place people had lived in right up until they didn't.
No lights.
Just the weak gray-blue leak from the narrow landing window and the occasional amber pulse from the broken streetlamp outside.
Isaac stood in the dark stairwell and listened.
No footsteps above.
No TV through a wall.
No crying.
No radio.
No movement except the building settling into itself.
Empty, maybe.
Empty enough.
He went up one flight because ground-floor windows felt too much like asking for company and second-floor apartments were still low enough to leave fast if he had to. Halfway up the next landing his knees softened once and he had to stop and lean his forehead against the cold painted wall until the dizziness passed.
When he lifted his head, the wall had one wet spot on it from his skin.
Sweat.
Maybe tears.
Hard to tell anymore.
Apartment 2B had a dented brass number hanging crooked and a lock already half-broken. He twisted the knob.
Nothing.
He crossed his fingers and stared at the latch.
Open.
The deadbolt inside clicked back by itself with a tiny neat sound that made his stomach turn because there had been no resistance in it at all.
He pushed the door inward.
The apartment breathed stale air at him.
Small place. Living room and kitchenette joined together. Couch against one wall with a blanket still thrown over the arm. Little table by the window. Cheap lamp with a yellow shade, unplugged. Blinds drawn but not fully shut, so little bars of streetlight cut through and striped the room in pale, dirty lines.
A mug still in the sink.
A pair of shoes by the door.
A potted plant on the sill gone fully brown and bent over into itself.
The kind of place someone had meant to come back to.
Isaac stood in the doorway too long.
Then shut the door behind him and slid the chain over because some habits still worked even when nothing else did.
The quiet inside the apartment felt different from the quiet outside.
Not safer.
Closer.
Like every object in the room had been waiting all day to see who walked in and what shape he'd make of it.
He went to the kitchenette first because bodies were stupid and still needed things even after everything. The fridge hummed when he opened it.
That almost made him laugh.
Not because it was funny.
Because one little appliance still doing its job in this city felt like an insult.
Inside was more than he expected.
Half a carton of eggs.
A plastic tub of takeout rice.
Deli turkey in a torn packet.
A bottle of orange juice.
Mustard.
Pickles.
A heel of bread in a zip bag.
Two yogurts.
Butter.
Actual food.
Enough food that it made the room feel inhabited all over again.
He stood there with the fridge light on his face and one hand braced on the open door and had the stupidest thought of the whole night:
somebody was going to be mad this went bad.
Then he shut his eyes because that was so close to normal it hurt.
He made himself take things out.
Bread.
Turkey.
Juice.
No plate. He didn't care. He tore the bread one-handed, made a crooked sandwich that fell apart in his lap, and carried it to the little table by the window. The chair scraped too loudly against the floor. He winced at the sound and sat anyway.
The lamp was dead or unplugged or both. He didn't turn it on. The only light came through the blinds, pale strips across the table and his hands and the front of his scrubs.
He looked down.
Same hand.
Same fingers.
Same little scar by the thumb.
The sandwich shook in his grip.
He took one bite.
Chewed.
Swallowed with effort because his throat still felt full of blood memory and hospital disinfectant and everything he hadn't screamed enough out of himself yet.
The orange juice was warmish from the carry back to the table and too sweet and somehow perfect because it tasted like a thing from before. Not good before. Not magical before. Just ordinary.
He sat there in the striped light and ate half the sandwich and drank straight from the bottle and then, without warning, one tear dropped off his face onto the table.
He stared at it.
Then another hit the back of his hand.
He set the food down very carefully.
His chest had gone tight again.
No panic this time.
No immediate threat.
Nothing to survive except the fact that he had finally stopped moving.
He looked toward the couch because some part of the room had shifted.
Jadah stood by the far corner near the lamp.
Not fully.
Not really.
Just there enough to destroy him.
Dark hair.
That slant of shoulders.
One hand at her side.
Head tipped slightly like she was about to say something mean and smart and exactly what he needed.
His breath vanished.
He pushed the chair back too hard and it tipped over.
"Jadah."
She didn't move.
Didn't blink.
And the longer he looked, the less of her stayed right.
The outline softened.
The face blurred.
Not like smoke.
Worse.
Like memory being rubbed too hard with a thumb until the details started lifting off the page.
No.
No, no, no.
He stumbled toward her around the table, reaching with his good hand before the rest of him had caught up.
"Please don't go."
His voice cracked on the first word and broke completely on the last.
He reached for her shoulder.
His hand went through empty air.
Momentum took the rest of him with it. He crashed down hard on one knee, then both, then his shoulder clipped the side of the couch and pain flared white through the broken arm hard enough to blind him for one second.
By the time the pain cleared, the corner was empty.
Just the lamp.
The wall.
The little dead plant on the sill.
Nothing.
Isaac stayed on the floor where he'd fallen.
Then the sound came out of him.
Not the scream from the blood room.
Not the manic laugh from the street.
This was smaller and worse.
A ruined animal sound dragged up through a throat that had finally stopped pretending it could hold everything intact.
He curled in on himself on the floorboards and put his hand over his face and sobbed into the heel of it.
"Why."
The word tore.
He hit the floor once with his fist.
Not hard enough to matter to the building.
Hard enough to matter to him.
"Why—"
Again.
His forehead hit the floor next because sitting up required too much structure and he didn't have any left.
"I can't—"
He swallowed against snot and tears and breath and the ache sawing through his ribs.
"Your face—"
The sentence disintegrated around him. He dragged himself half a foot across the floor like movement could pull the memory back into focus if he just suffered in the right direction.
"Why can't I see you clearly again?"
His fist hit the floor a second time.
Then a third.
Duller now because his arm hurt too much and grief had started making his body stupid.
He kept crying anyway.
No audience.
No witness.
No reason to make it neat.
On the fourth attempt to hit the floor his arm gave and he just stayed there shaking, cheek against the wood, tears soaking into dust and old varnish and somebody else's apartment.
The room did nothing.
Didn't comfort him.
Didn't judge.
Didn't bring her back.
Eventually the sobbing burned down into those ugly little aftershocks that hurt more because they came with no force left in them. He rolled onto his side. Pushed himself up slowly. Used the couch, then the wall, then finally slid down the wall beside the little table until he was sitting with one knee up and the other leg stretched out wrong because the left side of him had started filing complaints all at once.
His face felt hot and raw.
His eyes hurt.
His throat hurt.
The skin under them had gone darker, redder, swollen from too many hours and not enough sleep and the sort of crying that left no pride intact.
He looked at his hand again.
Palm up this time.
Opened.
Closed.
Opened again.
Slowly.
Like if he watched it long enough it might confess what it had become and why it kept answering the worst parts of him first.
He turned the hand over.
Watched the veins under the skin.
The flex of the fingers.
The shape of the knuckles in the striped light from the blinds.
This hand had held hers.
This hand had tried to save her.
Killed her.
Protected him.
Dragged concrete up.
Bent steel.
Opened distance.
Fed him.
Reached for a ghost.
He let it fall into his lap.
Then his head dropped after it.
Shoulders slumped.
Broken arm tight in the sling.
Mouth parted because even breathing had become a choice he was tired of making.
For a long time he just sat there under the bars of light from the blinds, looking like the room had found the exact shape of his defeat and built furniture around it.
When he finally spoke, it came out low enough that maybe only the apartment heard him.
"I miss you…"
His voice broke on the last word and he had to start it over softer.
"So much."