Iwake up burning.
Not the wrist. All of me. My skin is hot to the touch — I press my palm to my forehead and it's like gripping a pipe that's been running hot water. The sheets are damp with sweat. My hair is plastered to my neck. The room is freezing — frost on the window, my breath visible in the air — and my body is throwing off heat like it's trying to melt through the mattress.
I kick the covers off. Sit up. Vapor lifts off my arms. Thin wisps, barely visible in the dark, rising off my skin like I'm a road in August.
This isn't a fever. Fevers come with ache and weakness. This is the opposite. I feel more. Every nerve lit up. The cotton of my shirt against my stomach is a texture I can count threads in. The hum of the building's generator, which I've barely noticed for days, is loud enough to trace through the walls. And the smells —bleach, concrete, the metallic bite of cold air leaking through the window seal, and underneath all of it, something else.
Him.
I can smell RJ. Not the way you smell someone who's in the room. The way you smell something carried on a current — faint, directional, threading through the building's recycled air like it took a route to reach me. Pine and sweat and something animal and underneath that, something warm. Something that my body identifies before my brain has language for it.
Mine.
The thought arrives uninvited and absolute. I shove it away. It comes back.
My left wrist is pulsing. Hard. Each beat synchronized with my heart but running hotter, the heat concentrated at the vein, and when I look down in the dark I can see it — not the gold thread from the fence but something new. A shadow beneath the skin. A mark along the inside of my wrist, an arc, darker than the surrounding skin. Like something underneath drew itself onto the surface.
I press my thumb into it. The heat blooms outward.
And I hear him.
Not through the wall. Through the building. Through the concrete and the doors and the hallways between us — pacing. The rhythm of his steps. Back and forth, back and forth, and underneath it a low sound that isn't a growl and isn't a whine. Something in between. Restless. Searching.
He's awake. He's pacing. And I know — the way I know my own pulse — that he's burning too.
I stand up. My legs are steady. The fever should make me weak but it doesn't. It makes me sharper. Faster. The room is too small. The walls are too close. My body wants to move, wants to follow the pull in my wrist down the hallway and through every locked door between me and the source.
The bolt on my door is on the outside. I can't open it.
I grip the handle. It's cold. My hand is so hot that the metal hisses under my palm — moisture evaporating on contact. I pull. The door doesn't move. Steel bolt. Steel frame.
I pull harder.
Something gives. Not the bolt — the frame. The faintest groan of metal shifting in concrete. Not breaking. Flexing. Like the door wants to open and the building is considering letting it.
I shouldn't be able to flex a steel door frame. I weigh a hundred and ten pounds. This is not something my body can do.
I pull again. The groan is louder. A crack appears in the concrete around the upper hinge — hairline, barely visible, but there.
My hands are shaking. Not from effort. From the realization that the effort isn't hard. That my body is doing something it shouldn't be capable of and it feels natural, feels right, feels like I've been operating at half capacity my whole life and the fever just plugged me in.
One more pull. The bolt scrapes. The door shifts in the frame — an inch. Two. Not open. But loose. Loose enough that I can get my fingers into the gap and push and the bolt catches and grinds and —
Open.
I stand in the hallway. Bare feet on cold concrete. Emergency lighting only — dim orange strips along the baseboards, casting long shadows. The hall is empty. No skeleton crew in sight. The checkpoint is somewhere behind me, around the corner, and Leo said the night guy checks every ninety minutes.
The pull in my wrist is a rope now. Not a thread. A rope, thick and insistent, tugging me left down the corridor toward the common room.
I follow it.
The hallway is different at night. Longer. The doors on either side are closed, bolted, and behind some of them I can hear breathing. One door has a low moan leaking through it — not pain, not nightmare. Restless. The building is stirring. Whatever is happening to me, they're feeling echoes of it in their sleep.
I pass Leo's door. My wrist aches – connected. He's behind that door. I can feel him the way I can feel RJ — a point on a map that my body has drawn.
I keep walking.
The common room door is closed but not bolted. The handle turns. I push it open.
