I tap twice. Soft. Controlled.
Rogue answers. He’s already moving, repositioning ahead of her, closing off routes she doesn’t know exist yet.
I shift along the catwalk, angling toward the next vantage point, and that’s when she does it. She looks up.
Not randomly. Not scattered.
Deliberately.
Her gaze sweeps the upper levels, slow and methodical, like she’s mapping the architecture in her head. Like she’s trying to figure out where the pressure’s coming from. Her eyes pass over me.
I don’t flinch. Don’t move. But I feel it, that splitsecond where her attention lands near me, close enough to matter, like she knows someone’s there, even if she can’t see them.
She doesn’t call out. Doesn’t challenge. She just… registers it. Then she keeps moving.
And I realize something I should’ve noticed earlier. She’s not trying to escape anymore. She’s trying tounderstand. What the Rot is. What the Hunt is. Who’s running it and how. She thinks if she can map it, she can beat it.
My mouth curves again, sharper this time. She’s wrong.
But the fact that she’s trying, that she walked in here with a plan and refuses to let go of it even now, that’s exactly the problem.
I watch her disappear into the next corridor, limping but steady, and the thought I’ve been avoiding lands clean and cold. She’s not here by accident. She didn’t stumble into the Rot out of desperation or bad luck or because she ran out of options.
She came herefor something.
And I need to know what.
13
ARMEN
She stopsat the junction like she knows it matters.
Maybe she does.
I’ve been steering her here for the last ten minutes, closing routes with tapped signals, repositioning Rogue to block the cleaner paths and get rid of other Rotters, letting the mall’s architecture do the rest. Every choice she’s made has felt like hers, at least as far as she is aware. Every turn deliberate. Strategic.
She just doesn’t know how many of those choices I shaped.
From where I’m positioned two levels up, behind the skeletal remains of a Christmas display someone never bothered to take down, I have a clean view of the crossroads below. Three corridors meet here, each one offering a different kind of gamble.
To her left: the route back toward the food court. Wide. Exposed. Emergency lights still functioning, casting that sick yellow glow across tile and overturned furniture. It’s the obvious choice if you’re scared. More space to maneuver. More chances to see what’s coming.
It’s also where the other hunters are circling.
Straight ahead: a retail corridor, storefronts half collapsed, gates bent and hanging loose. Neutral territory. The kind of space where you can disappear if you’re fast and the board hasn’t shifted against you yet.
But the board has shifted.
To her right: Rogue’s corridors.
Narrow. Dark. The emergency lights don’t reach that far. Half of them are dead, the other half flicker so irregularly, they’re worse than useless. The floor dips where the foundation settled wrong years ago, and the ceiling’s low enough that the space feels compressed, deliberate. It’s where the Rot stops pretending to be a mall and starts showing its bones.
Most runners won’t go there. Too tight. Too unknown. The kind of space that feels wrong before you even step into it, like the air itself is warning you off.
She stands at the junction, weight shifting carefully off her injured leg, and I watch her calculate. Her head tilts, listening. Her gaze sweeps each route in turn, left, straight, right, taking in the details. Light. Sound. The way the corridors bend or open. She’s not just reacting anymore. She’sreading.
Smart. Too smart.
