Petrichor mixed with the scent of blood in the air.
Icy droplets fell from the sky, pattering against the ground. The water mixed with the blood that had already soaked the earth and spread the crimson puddles everywhere. After more than two and a half hours of steady rain, the bodies strewn across the district were half-drowned in the puddles, floating about grimly. A few limbs here, a dozen severed heads there, human and inhuman.
Blinding light flashed through the storm clouds overhead, accompanied by the fierce rumble of thunder.
It was at the sound of the thunder that Chloe stirred. She cracked open one eye and squinted to bring her vision into focus. She was in a room lit by the dim, sterile glow of fluorescent bulbs, gloomy shadows clinging to the corners of the bare concrete floor. Her bed was placed against one of the shadowed corners, just beside a window that provided a sufficient view of the district beyond.
She pulled the window's curtains apart and peered out onto the district. Lightning flashed through the sky again, illuminating for a moment the outlines and shapes of the bodies and limbs that floated in puddles and pools of water and blood. She saw also the outlines of half-collapsed buildings and entirely collapsed ones, the outlines of massive shapes, creatures with multiple spindly limbs. Dead, of course, but chilling still to behold at this time of night. It was the stuff of nightmares, the sort of thing she'd seen in crappy horror films growing up.
There was someone out in the rain, someone who wasn't half a torso or a floating head. Someone whole and alive, sat at the edge of the rooftop of a dangerously lopsided building that was missing a good chunk of its walls.
Chloe shut the curtain, then climbed out of bed. She'd gone to sleep in a baggy tank top and pajama pants, both of which she'd helped herself to. The district had long been evacuated and most of what was left around was anyone's to take. Beneath her bed, she'd thrown her regular clothes in a pile. She changed from her pajama pants into a well-fitting pair of jeans, then contemplated whether or not to put on shoes.
On one hand, she didn't want to get her boots wet. On the other, she wasn't sure she wanted to move across gruesome puddles of blood and water and flesh while entirely barefoot. Eventually, she threw on her boots and fastened them firmly.
Then she slipped out of her room and into the long, narrow hallway that ran through the Chancellor's Hall, just as sterilely lit as her bedroom.
No one else seemed to be awake. She heard no movement coming from within the hall as she went, heard nothing at all, except for loud snoring when she moved past Chancellor Hardy's room, the door to which had been left slightly ajar.
A peek through the crack revealed the Chancellor bare-chested and in a pair of briefs, spread rather comically on his little mattress, one hand and one foot dangling toward the ground. His back and chest heaved rhythmically as his snoring filled the room, doing its best to compete with the sound of rain and thunder beyond the walls.
She oddly found a strange pleasure in seeing the Chancellor like that. He was, after all, the man long tasked with ensuring their district's stability and continuity, and most of the time, he'd done so by being strict and intimidating. He'd given her and her unit orders and had been thoroughly no-nonsense in doing so. And then great trouble had come to the district, there'd been a great battle, and the district had been all but lost.
That had been the first time she'd seen him like this. Just as stressed as the rest of them, just as plain. She almost considered him just as human, then reminded herself that she wasn't human to begin with. Other than the Chancellor, none of them were.
She left his door behind and a minute later slipped out of the Chancellor's Hall and into the rain, cold droplets pelting against her skin and soaking her almost immediately. Her tank top clung to her and felt a little heavier. Her blond hair dripped rainwater, strands matting to the front of her face, some getting in her eyes. She brushed the wet strands aside and made for the lopsided building.
It was a four-minute brisk walk from the Hall, and another thirty seconds to scale up the side of the building and arrive on the rooftop. When she did, she saw the figure she'd made out from her window.
It was a boy, clad in a white T-shirt now glued to his skin, such that she could make out in great detail the lines of his back, the perfect broadness of his shoulders and the defined bulge of his arms. His hair was blond, a lighter shade than hers, almost white, angelically so even in the gloom of the night and the rain. The rain had flattened it, stuck strands to his face as with hers, but the wind still sent other strands whipping about.
Silently, Chloe walked up to the boy, the sound of rain masking her approach. When she reached him, she said nothing, simply dropped down beside him, sitting at the edge of the rooftop with her feet dangling over the side in a manner that would have been terrifying for a regular person, but was nothing more than playful for her. A fall from this height would do little more than scrape and cut her a little.
As soon as she sat down, he shifted suddenly and turned to her in surprise. Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed overhead, illuminating for a moment Lucas's dark blue eyes, devoid now of much of the excitement and mischief Chloe had come to associate with them over the years.
"Chlo," Lucas murmured. "What are you doing here?"
"Could ask you the same." Chloe shrugged, her gaze focused below them, on the particularly harrowing sight of the remnants of decapitated monsters. "Not a particularly good view, is it?"
Lucas snorted. "I'm not here for the view."
"The ambience then?" Chloe asked.
Lucas was quiet for a moment. Then he chuckled. After a while, he shook his head. "No, just got tired of feeling cooped up inside the Hall."
"Cooped up?" Chloe repeated. "We were sleeping out of tents before this."
"Tents felt like home. The hall feels like a lab. Like a prison," Lucas answered. "Hard to sleep in there, especially considering—,"
His voice trailed off. He shook his head again. "Doesn't matter." He turned to her and smiled a little, his eyes twinkling for a moment like they used to. "What are you doing up?"
Chloe shrugged. "Think my body's getting annoyed by the amount of sleep that's been forced on it these past three weeks. Heard the thunder and woke up immediately, half-expecting there'd be some fight to charge into."
"Yeah, I get that." Lucas nodded. "What do you think about it?"
"About what?"
"This place is running on backup power now, not enough to keep the fences going. It's literally No Man's Land right now and yet there's been no Servants, no Nighthounds, no angry gods in the past three weeks. Weird, isn't it? What's happened to them? Why aren't they coming after her anymore?"
Chloe shuddered as she pondered it, though that might have had more to do with the chill of the rain. She stared at the Servant remnants floating about below, remnants of the diseased, flesh-eating, zombified creatures who'd attacked the district three weeks ago, along with Nighthounds and angry gods, fifteen-foot-tall monsters.
In the three weeks since the battle, there hadn't been a Servant sighting anywhere near the district. Not a Nighthound or an angry god either. Nothing. It was strange, because Chloe knew there were still swarms of these monsters out there, which meant that if they weren't coming within vicinity of the district, it was because they had orders not to. Orders from the alien invaders who'd let them loose on the world.
But why? What were the Others planning?
"Things going quiet this long, it's rarely ever a good sign," Lucas said quietly. "And why haven't we heard back from the Capital yet? We're supposed to stand by and await redeployment orders. It's been three weeks. Where are the orders?"
"The Capital's a bureaucracy." Chloe shrugged. "It takes them forever to arrive at even the simplest decisions. And there's nothing simple about what we've told them. They're going to be thinking carefully about what to do with us. With her."
Lucas stiffened at the mention of her. His eyes darkened and she saw his jaw clench. He said nothing, and so she chose to say nothing either, at least for another few minutes.
Once five minutes had passed, she cleared her throat. The rain had only gotten heavier, roaring loudly now as cold drops poured from the sky, the rumbling of thunder more frequent. "Rain's not letting up," she said, rising to her feet. "We should head back inside."
"Why, scared we'll catch a cold?"
"I don't think we're even capable of getting colds." Chloe snorted. "One of the extremely few benefits of what we are, I suppose. Still, best to head back inside before Jon wakes up and loses his mind thinking we've been kidnapped."
"Yeah, I suppose," Lucas said, rising too, water dripping from him considerably. "Although, it would be fun to see Jon go into a panic."