Fair. I can work with ongoing objectives. Something in the middle-distance moves. Not debris settling. Something with intention. A shape crossing between two pieces of wreckage with a specific kind of motion that my threat-assessment instincts, honed over three years of watching everyone who walked past my observation window, classify immediately asaware of us.
Colt has already seen it. His pace hasn't changed, but his posture has. The same restructuring I observed in the facility, everything coming forward into readiness without announcing itself. The shape disappears, and we move faster.
"Human?" I ask.
"Unknown."
"The movement pattern was-"
"I know."
"-not entirely human," I finish, "which, given what I saw in those corridors back there, is a sentence I'm going to need to get comfortable saying." He doesn't respond to that, which is its own kind of response.
My feet have developed opinions about the terrain that I'm actively overriding. A sharp edge finds the arch of my left foot, and I adjust my stride without stopping, redistributing weight, modifying my gait. You learn to do that in a lab, too, adjust without showing it, keep the surface presentation steady while managing the actual situation underneath.
A roar rolls through the air from behind us. Not close. Not far enough. Colt's arm moves. A fast, reflexive sweep that brings me closer to his side without breaking stride, his body angling slightly between me and the direction the sound came from. He does it the way his heart beats faster than his face shows, automatically, without deciding to, in a way that suggests the decision was made at a level below conscious choice.
I don't say anything about it. I note it with the careful precision of someone who has learned to keep their observations quiet until the right moment. We move through three more blocks in silence. Real silence this time, both of us reading the environment, both of us tracking the sounds and the spaces between them.
This is new for me. Moving through space that isn't monitored. Being in a place where nobody has a clipboard, a camera, and a professional obligation to note my responses. The absence of observation has a texture I keep brushing against with surprise, like a wall that isn't there anymore. I find myself still reaching for it by habit, though, and finding open air.
Strange. Good strange, I guess. The kind that'll take time to process.
"You're quiet," Colt says.
"Taking it in."
He glances at me, "the city?"
"The outside."
I look up at the smoke-filtered sky, "the fact that there is an outside." I pause.
"In the lab, they had a window in one of the observation rooms. Not to the outside, but to another interior space. The angle of the light was different in there, and sometimes I could tell roughly what time of day it was from how it moved." I watch the distant fires.
"That was the closest I had to a horizon."
A moment goes by. He doesn't offer anything hollow. Doesn't sayI'm sorryorthat's terribleor any of the things people say when they want to acknowledge something without sitting with it. He just lets the information exist without rushing to cover it.
I find I appreciate that more than reassurance would have been.
"The facility ran trials on schedule," I say, the words coming out steadier than I expect.
"Same times every day. After long enough you start building your sense of time around the trials. When they were late, it was-" I stop, recalibrate.
"You calibrate to what's available."
"Yeah," he says.
Just that. The word of someone who understands the specific skill of calibrating to what's available because they've done it somewhere, in some version of a small room of their own. I don't push it. That's a thread for later, if later exists, which requires surviving the current situation. Speaking of which.
"The thing in the facility," I say, "the one making the roars. What was it?" His jaw tightens fractionally.
"I don't know exactly."
"But you know something. You have to know something about it, right?"
A pause where he's deciding how much that pause communicates.
