Interesting.
I stop above her, just past the edge of her peripheral vision. She’s close enough now that I can see the tension in her shoulders, the way her hands flex at her sides. She scans for a weapon. Finds nothing.
I let my presence bleed into the space. Not noise. Not movement. Just pressure.
Her spine locks instantly.
Good instincts.
I let the moment settle, long enough to see what she does with it.
She doesn’t freeze. She doesn’t bolt. She moves.
I track her again from above as she slips into another passage, choosing shadow over speed. The attraction hits sharper this time, unwanted and immediate. Not hunger but interest. The dangerous kind, the kind that distracts if you let it.
I don’t get distracted.
She thinks she’s being chased. She isn’t. She’s being assessed.
I check the other groups again. One has made a clean capture near the west wing. Efficient. No noise. They’re out of play now. Another group is circling wide, hoping for some girl to make a mistake.
They won’t get one. The biggest bimbos have all been caught by now, leaving behind the smarter ones. This is when the hunt really gets entertaining.
I take the long way around, climbing higher, using the broken service catwalks above the retail floor. From here, the Rot looks almost orderly. Paths intersect. Territory overlaps. The girl below cuts left again and disappears from view.
I smile once, slow and thin.
She thinks she’s choosing her path. She isn’t wrong. She just doesn’t know how many of those paths belong to me.
5
VI
She doesn’t runstraight into them. That’s the first thing she gets right.
The group waiting near the old sporting goods store is obvious from my vantage point above—five men this time, spread across the corridor in a loose arc. They wear masks pulled from the ruins of a Halloween pop-up that never bothered to close. Plastic wolves. A flayed deer face. One cracked porcelain doll with a mouth frozen open too wide.
Idiots.
They’re loud, too. Boots scuffing. One of them raps his knuckles against a metal gate like he’s bored already. They want to be seen. They want her to panic.
She sees them before they see her.
I watch her slow half a step, not enough to draw attention. Her head tilts. Her stride adjusts. She doesn’t turnaround. She doesn’t sprint. She lets the distance compress just enough.
Then she cuts sideways into a shoe store instead of retreating.
Good.
The masked group reacts late. Two of them surge forward, eager, knocking shoulders as they funnel into the entrance. One laughs. Another makes a sound through his mask that’s supposed to be threatening.
They’ve already lost her.
The shoe store is a disaster from where I can see with shelves collapsed, boxes burst open, single sneakers scattered like debris. Mirrors still cling to the walls, cracked into jagged shapes that fracture movement. She uses them.
She ducks low, weaving through displays, letting the men follow the noise of their own bodies. One trips. Another curses. The wolf mask slams into a shelf and snaps it sideways, leaving it hanging crooked.
She doesn’t look back. She climbs.
