He looks at it for one second. Then he looks down at our hands. His grip tightens. Not repositioned for better tactical control.
Tightened.
Neither of us mentions it. He pulls me toward the exit like a rag doll. Moving fast again, focused, back in the mode where the corridor is the priority and I'm the variable he's managing. I force myself to match his pace without being pulled along behind him, feet finding the rhythm, navigating the debris field in the corridor floor with the map I've been building since we started running.
"Don't read into it," he grunts. Rough and low. Like he was closing a door he hadn’t noticed they'd left open. I look at our joined hands. Look at the way his thumb has settled against the side of mine with a specificity that doesn't happen by accident.
"Sure," I mutter.
I'm quiet for approximately four seconds, which is as long as I'm capable of being quiet under normal circumstances, and these are not normal circumstances.
"I'm reading into it," I say. He exhales, and I can hear the frustration in that single breath.
"I know," he says, but he doesn't let go.
Chapter Six
Zero
The sky exists. I have to remind myself of this because what's above us doesn't look like sky at all. It looks like the sky's aftermath. A churning ceiling of smoke and particulate, and the kind of haze that forms when a city stops being careful about itself. I swallow hard, trying to push my anxiety down.
Somewhere above all of that, the sun is making its best effort to shine through the destruction. You can tell because the light has a direction, a source, something filtered and yellowish pressing down through the layers. I haven't seen the actual sky in three years.
This is what I get for the wait.
"Fantastic," I say, to no one, to the apocalypse, to whatever committee approved this as my introduction to the outside world. The city spreads in every direction like something that was mid-thought when it stopped.
Towers are listed at angles that violate what I understand about load-bearing engineering. Cars were distributed across the street in arrangements that suggest the traffic stopped very suddenly and very finally. Entire sections of road cracked and heaved upward, the concrete expressing its feelings about whatever passed through here.
Fires in the distance. Not emergency fires. Not the contained, purposeful kind. The kind that started and then nobody stopped.
My gut churns with worry as I take it all in over approximately three seconds because that's all the time I have before Colt pulls me forward. The taking-in becomes moving-through. My bare feet meet cracked asphalt.
The texture is immediate and specific and completely novel. I've been on concrete for three years. Smooth, sealed, controlled concrete. This is something else… irregular and rough and warm from whatever sun managed to reach it, with small sharp things I'm recognizing by feel as we move.
"Any chance," I say, half-breathless, "that wherever we're going has fucking shoes?"
"Focus."
"I'm focusing. I'm focusing on the rocks, currently communicating with the soles of my fucking feet. Very distracting. Shoes would resolve this."
He doesn't answer. His grip pulls me at a pace that assumes functional footwear, and I decline to correct the assumption out loud because we're still moving and moving is the current priority.
The city smells nothing like the lab. The lab had a smell I'd stopped noticing. So constant and complete, it had become the baseline of reality. Chemical and sealed and human only in the way that controlled environments are human, which is not very.
Out here, the air is a different problem entirely. Smoke from the fires. Dust from surfaces that haven't been disturbed for however long. It causes me to sputter out an uncontrollable cough, and I take another deep breath in. The metallic edge of broken infrastructure. And underneath all of it.
Him.
Smoke and steel and something warm that keeps bypassing my cognitive filters and going straight to whatever part of my brain handles things I can't think my way out of. His scent has been a constant since the facility, butout here, with the open air mixing everything together, it has a different quality. More present somehow. Less diluted by the environment.
"Congratulations, Zero," I mutter, just to myself, just to keep the monologue running because silence makes me feel the situation more acutely.
"You have successfully graduated from lab rat to catastrophic pheromone incident in under twenty minutes."
Colt glances down at me. The fast, diagnostic look he does when he's deciding whether what I just said is a problem he needs to address.
"Stop talking to yourself," he grunts.
