Attraction’s a liability in the Rot. It clouds judgment. Makes you sloppy. I push it down and focus.
The rival group’s still closing. I could let them take her. It’d be clean, efficient, one less variable to manage. Someone else’s problem.
I don’t.
I tap twice, sharper this time. Not to Rogue but to Sting.
The answer comes fast. Too fast. A scrape of boots on tile, deliberate and loud, echoing from somewhere above the east corridor. Sting doesn’t do subtle. He doespresence.
The rival group hesitates.
I can’t see their faces from here, but I know what they’re hearing. Footsteps where there shouldn’t be any. Weight. Intent. The kind of sound that makes you second-guess whether the route you’re taking is worth the trouble.
They slow.
One of them taps against metal—a signal, probably checking if the path’s contested. No one answers. Because the path isn’t contested. It’sclosed.
They veer left instead, cutting away from her corridor, choosing another target. Easier prey.
I exhale and straighten.
Below me, she’s moving again. She didn’t hear the rival group. Didn’t see them get redirected. She just knows the corridor ahead feels wrong, so she adjusts. Left instead of right. Shadow instead of light. She’s choosing the harder path.
Most runners go for exposure when they’re scared. Back to the food court, back to the wider spaces wherethey think they’ll have room to maneuver. They don’t realize exposure just makes the endgame faster.
She’s doing the opposite.
Narrower corridors. Tighter spaces. The parts of the Rot where the mall’s bones show through, where retail died first and infrastructure took over. Rogue’s territory.
I don’t stop her. I should. I should steer her back toward open ground, toward the spaces I control, where I can see every angle and adjust in real time. Instead, I let her go.
She disappears into a service corridor, the kind that used to be marked EMPLOYEES ONLY back when that meant something. The door swings shut behind her, the sound swallowed almost immediately.
I count to five. Then I move. Not following. Positioning.
I take the long route, cutting across the catwalk and down a maintenance stair that spits me out one level below where I started. The Rot exists around me, familiar and cooperative. I’ve walked these paths so many times, I don’t need light to navigate. Muscle memory carries me through.
By the time I reach the next vantage point, a gap in the drywall where I can see into the corridor she just entered, she’s already halfway through. And she’s slowing. Not tired. Not hurt.
Wary.
She feels it. The way the air changes here. The way sound doesn’t bounce right. The way the space presses in, heavier than it should be.
She stops at another junction, this one darker than thelast. Emergency lights barely reach this far. The floor’s uneven, tiles missing, concrete showing through in patches. Her head tilts. Listening.
I don’t move. Don’t breathe.
She’s close enough now that if I wanted, I could drop down, close the distance, end it.
I don’t. Because I want to see what she does next.
She shifts her weight, testing her injured leg. Grimaces. Adjusts the bandage without looking down, fingers quick and certain. Then she straightens, rolls her shoulders once, and keeps moving. Deeper. Into the parts of the Rot that don’t forgive mistakes.
My mouth curves before I stop it.
She thinks she’s choosing her path. She is.
She just doesn’t know how many of those paths I’ve already closed.
