Then—
“Move.”The voice behind the command was deep and authoritative. The kind you don’t question.
The grip loosens.
Not because these guys are done with me but because something just changed. The men hesitate, glancing past me toward the corridor I just came from. One of them swears under his breath. Another takes a step back.
I glance over my shoulder to see what they’re looking at.
The other men I’ve seen during the hunt seem to wear whatever masks they could scavenge—plastic faces from costume shops, cracked visors, cheap stuff ripped off shelves, grabbed in a hurry.
But this guyI’m looking at is different from the others. His half-mask isn’t colorful or improvised. Its bone-white, smooth, heavy-looking, sculpted into something not quite a skull but close enough to make bile rise in my throat. The permanent, tooth-bared grin isn’t scavenged from a costume shop. It’s bespoke. Designed to set him apart from every other hunter in this place. Like someone put some time and thought into it.
I don’t wait to hear more. I wrench free and run.
Pain detonates up my leg, white and blinding, but I force myself forward anyway. I cut left, then right, ducking through a narrow passage that barely exists.
Behind me, voices rise. Arguing. Sharp. Controlled.
Then—
“Vi.”
Holy shit. My name.
Clear.
Certain.
Too close.
I stumble, catch myself, then keep going, heart hammering so hard it hurts. I don’t turn around. I don’t slow down. I don’t try to understand how anyone here knows my name and I don’t want to know who the hell the man in the skeleton mask is.
I only know one thing.
The Hunt didn’t just find me. It recognized me.
Footsteps surge behind me again, faster now.
And I sprint into the dark.
11
ARMEN
She’s favoringher left leg.
I watch it from two levels up, where the railing’s rusted through and the line of sight opens clean across the atrium. She moves through the shadow of what used to be a department store entrance, keeping low, using the overturned display racks for cover. Smart. But the hitch in her stride gives her away.
Blood.
Not much. Just enough to darken the denim below her knee, a small stain spreading slow. She wrapped it—I can see the makeshift bandage, gray fabric tied tight, but it’s not holding. Every step she takes leaves a faint drop on the tile, breadcrumbs she doesn’t know she’s dropping.
I exhale through my nose and adjust my stance, boots quiet on the metal catwalk. The Rot hums low around me, generators thrumming somewhere deep in the guts of themall. Emergency lights flicker in their rhythm, casting broken shadows that shift and re-form as she moves.
She shouldn’t still be running.
Most of the others are accounted for by now. I’ve heard the signals, the double taps, triple taps, the cadence that meanssecuredorprocessedorout of play. The Hunt’s thinning. Soon it’ll just be her and a couple others left standing.
