The District felt like a ghost town.
The wreckage from the earlier attack coupled with the eerie silence that had settled on everything now that it'd been evacuated gave it an unsettling, haunted feeling. It didn't help that Lucas was constantly blurring around the place like a shadow, keeping watch, checking to see if there was any danger inbound.
"Nothing yet," he said, for what had to be the hundredth time in the hour since the district had been evacuated, before groaning and joining them at the table in the Grove. "Are you sure there'll be more?" he asked, his gaze narrowed at Jin.
It was evident he still hated her but had accepted now that she knew more about whatever was going on than any of them did.
"Certain." Jin's eyes were pointing upward, at the clouds that had pooled overhead in the night. "I do not know how soon. But they will come. We need only wait."
"How long are we talking here?" Hardy asked, groaning as he lifted his head from the table. He was decked in full tactical gear now, two rifles strapped to his back, two pistols holstered on either side of his waist, a small utility pouch dangling from his belt containing a combination of flash grenades and frags. "A few hours? A day? A week?"
"Soon." Jin did not take her gaze off the sky.
"Great," Hardy muttered and lowered his head to the table again.
Aiden arrived in the Grove a few minutes later, his hands and gear stained with dirt. "I just buried Spike," he announced, voice flat and empty, devoid of feeling. "Didn't want the bastards getting any more of their filth on her."
He sat between Lucas and Jon, directly across from Jin, who was sat next to Hardy. Aiden's gaze flickered toward her for a moment and the edges of his lips curled into something ferocious, but then the expression quickly vanished and he shook his head, as though he'd just had some sort of silent debate with himself.
Another hour passed where nothing happened, except of course for a now asleep Hardy snoring loudly at the table. At the other tables in the Grove, a number of the guards who sat there had started to nod off too and some of them slept much louder than Hardy did. Chloe didn't mind though. The sound of their collective snoring did a great deal to make things feel less gloom and doom. If these would be their final moments, she was a little glad she'd gotten to see what a sleeping Hardy looked like before the arrival of the end.
"What are you doing?" Jon asked Jin another half hour later, finally done trying to pretend like her focus on the clouds wasn't uncanny and a little disconcerting. He glanced upward then back at her. "The attack's not coming from above, is it?"
"No." Jin shook her head. "I'm just waiting for the shift."
"The shift?" Chloe repeated.
"Yes." Jin nodded. She provided no further explanation.
Jon and Chloe exchanged looks and shrugged, deciding against pressing the matter any further. A full hour later, the two of them got tired of sitting and rose to their feet, taking a walk through the deserted district.
"You know, it's funny that I'd kind of always hoped for this, but not like this," Jon said, when they were some distance away from the Grove.
"For a bunch of angry gods to come knocking?"
Jon laughed. "No, not that. For the district to be empty. Quiet. No ruckus, no crowds, no bustling. It's just peaceful. It feels kind of like relief, you know, like most of the weight of expectation is gone. No one around looking to me, to us, expecting the most of us, trusting their lives to us. And I know, it's ironic considering this is the one moment where the expectation's highest, where everyone's lives are sort of in our hands…and somehow, for the first time in a long time, I don't feel burdened."
"I think that might just be Jin's blood talking."
Jon laughed again. "Yeah, sure, could be." They walked a little further in silence before Jon spoke again. "What's Jin's blood make you want to say?"
Chloe looked at him and raised one eyebrow over the other. "What makes you think there's something?"
"Dunno." He shrugged. "Isn't there?"
Chloe shook her head. "Nah, it's stupid."
"We might not make it through the day, Chlo. Something tells me if there's ever been a time to be stupid, it's right now. So go on, spill…I won't stop nagging you about it, mind you."
Chloe let out a loud and hearty laugh then, a little surprised by how much like his old self Jon had sounded just then. When at last she stopped laughing, his eyes were still locked onto her. He really wasn't going to let it go.
"Fine," she said, rolling her eyes. "I don't know, I guess I've just been thinking, you know…assuming all of this isn't bullshit and she's not playing some game with us, which she probably is, say we do win here and we do figure things out and take back the world and whatever. Good ending and all of that. What then?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean what next? I mean we're different now, altered, and as far as I can tell, I don't think it'll be possible to reverse that. I don't know if there'll be a place for us in the world if things do ever get back to normal, and I don't even know that they could. But even if things weren't totally weird afterward, there'd still be the question of what we do next. What do killing machines do when there's nothing left to kill?"
She saw Jon's shoulders sag a little and knew at once that some of the weight he'd just spoken about no longer feeling had just returned to him. His brows furrowed as he thought about what she'd asked. He shrugged. "I don't know. I guess for starters, we'd have to rebuild, put things back like they should be…maybe a little differently than before, of course."
"Sure, sure. And then what?"
"Well, I'd really like to go back to my life," Jon answered truthfully. "I'd like to enrol in college, join a frat, attend the stupid parties and make the stupid decisions, skip some classes, flunk a few…just everything that my life would have been if the end of the world hadn't taken it away. Just be Jonathan Taylor again. Chloe Taylor's annoying older brother."
Chloe's eyes went wide and she felt them water just a little. "Really?" she asked. "You've never said that before."
"It never seemed possible before." Jon threw his glance to her again. "But as you said, if Jin isn't playing some twisted game with us then maybe, you know, it is possible, right? And you could also go back to being some nerd, go to college, join chess club, all of that weird stuff."
Chloe shoved him in the shoulder then, playfully, and laughed a little. He laughed too and threw one arm around her.
"But let's not get ahead of ourselves, alright?" he said. "Let's save the world first."
They returned to the Grove twenty minutes later and found that Hardy was wide awake now, pacing the Grove, on the comms with Cole and Glenn, checking that they had everything rigged as it ought to be, and that the fences were ready to come back up as soon as the monsters had been lured in.
They sat at the table and only a minute after they'd taken their seats, Jin rose suddenly, her gaze leaving the sky for the first time in hours and fixing itself upon them. Her face was grim, as was her tone when she spoke.
"They're here."