I tap once against the metal frame of the display,barely a breath of sound, just enough to send a ripple through the structure.
Below me, her shoulders tense. She heard it. Or felt it. Or registered the shift in pressure that comes when someone’s attention lands on you hard enough to matter. She doesn’t look up this time. She knows better. Instead, she shifts her grip on the metal base she’s been carrying, adjusts her stance, and makes her choice.
Right into the dark.
I exhale slow and deliberate, something tightening in my chest that I don’t have a name for. Not relief. Not satisfaction.
Anticipation.
She chose the harder path. Not because it’s safer. She’s too smart to think that. She chose it because the alternative felt like a trap, and she’d rather face something unknown than something designed to herd her.
That’s the calculation I wanted to see. That’s what tells me she’s not running blind.
She steps into Rogue’s corridor, and the space swallows her almost immediately. The light dies. Sound follows. It’s not gradual—it’s clean, surgical, like the Rot decided she doesn’t get echoes anymore.
I move. Not following directly. Positioning. I take the catwalk east, boots quiet on rusted metal, and drop down a service ladder that puts me parallel to her route. The walls here are thin, drywall over metal studs, half of it torn away to expose the guts of the mall’s infrastructure. Pipes. Wiring. The grotesque bones of something that used to function.
Through a gap in the wall, I catch movement.
Her.
She’s slowed to a walk now, careful and deliberate, using the wall for balance as she navigates the uneven floor. The metal base drags slightly against tile, a soft scrape that should echo but doesn’t. Because sound doesn’t behave right here. She notices.
I see it in the way she pauses, head tilting, testing the space with a quiet breath. When no echo comes back, her shoulders stiffen. She’s figuring it out. That this corridor isn’t neutral. That someone’s worked on it, adjusted it, made it into something that doesn’t just exist, itfunctions.
She keeps moving anyway.
There’s a moment, just one, where she could turn back. The junction’s still visible behind her, that sick yellow light marking the threshold between here and there.
She doesn’t look at it. She moves forward instead, deeper into the corridor, and that’s when I see it. The smile. Not wide. Not performative. Just a brief curve of her mouth, there and gone, like she’s acknowledging something only she understands.
It’s the same smile from the sign-up room. The one she wore when she pulled out that tube of red lipstick and applied it slowly, carefully, looking straight at the two-way glass like she knew exactly who was watching. Not defiance. Not bravado.
Acknowledgment.
She knew what she was signing. She knew what the Hunt was. She knew the glass was there and she didn’tcare. And now she’s doing it again. Choosing the route that feels wrong because she’s decided thatwrongis where the answer is.
My chest tightens again, sharper this time. I don’t like this. I don’t like how much attention I’m paying. I don’t like that I’m reading intent into a smile that could just be exhaustion or pain or the kind of recklessness that comes when you’ve run out of clean options.
I don’t like that some part of me wants to know what she’s thinking. What she came here for. What she believes is waiting at the end of this.
I tap twice, deliberate and controlled. The signal travels through metal and concrete, a pulse Rogue will feel before he hears. Of course he’s already ahead of her, three turns deeper, positioned where the corridor dead-ends into a service bay that hasn’t seen light in years.
He’ll be ready.
And she’s walking straight into it.
I shift my angle, moving along the gap in the wall, tracking her progress. She’s limping harder now, the injury catching up to her, but she’s not slowing. If anything, she’s movingfaster, like she’s decided that hesitation costs more than momentum.
The corridor bends. She takes it without checking the angle first.
Mistake.
A small one, but enough.
The space beyond the bend is darker, tighter, the walls pressing close enough that she has to turn sideways to navigate past a fallen support beam someone draggedacross the path years ago. She wedges herself through, grimacing when her injured knee scrapes metal, and that’s when she feels it.
The presence.
