“But I know I’m not leaving you.”
I stand.
And start moving again.
Deeper into the lower districts.
But this time, not alone.
CHAPTER 5
KIMBERLY
Darkness presses in on me from all sides like it’s trying to make a point.
Not soft darkness. Not the kind that feels like sleep or privacy or mercy. This is industrial darkness, thick with the faint chemical sting of antiseptic and something older and colder underneath it, like damp concrete that never quite dries out. The air tastes metallic when I breathe in, and every inhale scrapes my throat like I’ve been smoking unfiltered cigarettes for a week straight.
Pain finds me before memory does.
It pulses through my left arm in slow, molten waves, each heartbeat dragging a ribbon of fire behind it that curls up into my shoulder and down my ribs, setting off sympathetic aches in places I don’t remember injuring. It hurts in a deep, structural way, like my body is filing a formal complaint about how I’ve been using it lately.
For half a second I’m absolutely certain I’m dead.
Then I try to move.
Every nerve in my body lights up at once and I make a small, humiliating sound that leaks out of my throat before I can stopit, something halfway between a gasp and a whimper, and the pain gets so bright it washes my vision white.
Okay.
Not dead.
Just aggressively alive.
I lie there, breathing shallow and fast through my nose, staring into nothing, waiting for the pain to dial itself back down from apocalyptic to merely catastrophic. My heart is thudding too hard and too fast, like it’s trying to punch its way out of my rib cage and file a missing persons report.
“Fuck,” I whisper hoarsely, because it feels like the correct response to literally all of this.
The surface under me is narrow and too firm, a thin mattress on top of something solid, and when I shift my weight a fraction of an inch I feel the unmistakable pressure of concrete beneath it. The air is cool against my skin, raising goosebumps along my legs and the good arm I still have full feeling in.
Antiseptic.
Concrete.
Cold.
My brain starts booting up in jerky, out-of-order fragments.
Fire.
Smoke.
Sirens.
The sound of something big hitting the wall.
Bone.
My stomach flips.
