Different direction than before.
Colt's arm does the thing again. The automatic half-shield thing, bringing me slightly into his space. His jaw sets.
"We need to get off the street," he says.
"Agreed," I mumble, my eyes darting around the area as if waiting for something to jump out at me.
I scan the intersection, "the building on the northwest corner has intact upper floors. The ground-level entry looks compromised, but there's a secondary access on the side. You can see the fire escape from here."
He follows my eyeline. Checks it and nods once. We move toward it. I'm matching his pace now without being pulled, my feet having negotiated a workable path through the debris by feel. My stride is adjusting to the terrain with the automatic competence of something that has become a habit in the last ten minutes.
His hand is still in mine. The grip has evolved frommaintaining control of a subjectinto something that doesn't have a tactical label. Fingers adjusted. Contact that knows what it's doing.
He hasn't mentioned it.
I haven't mentioned it.
The fire escape is intact. He goes first, then holds a hand down for me.
I take it.
We climb.
The city spreads below us as we rise, expanding with each floor into something I don't have the emotional capacity to fully receive right now. The scale of it. The damage. The miles of a world that has been going on without me while I was in a twelve-step room, memorizing ceiling cracks. Later for that.
We reach the third-floor landing, and he finds the window access. It’s already broken, already open, the glass gone long enough ago that the edges have dulled. He goes through first, checks the interior, and signals. I follow.
Inside, it’s dim, dusty, and structurally intact. A building that’s emptied and has been sitting quietly ever since. Furniture still in place. A life interrupted mid-arrangement and then abandoned.
I stand in the middle of it and breathe.
Just breathe.
The outside air follows us in through the window, smoke-touched, carrying everything the city is currently made of. And underneath it.
Still.
His scent.
Present and consistent and becoming, against my better judgment and previous objections, something that I am starting to use as a reference point, the way I used to use the direction of light through an interiorwindow. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about this. It’s become a thing that tells me where I am. I don't say this out loud. I save it for the part of me that keeps the honest inventory.
Colt moves through the room, checking it with the systematic attention he applies to all spaces. I watch him do it and think about three years in twelve steps and the screaming rabbit on the ceiling and the way the floor felt when I first pressed my bare feet to the cracked asphalt outside.
"Hey," I say. He looks at me.
"We made it out," I say. Notwe survived, orthat worked, or any of the operational framings. Just the bare fact of it.
His expression doesn't change exactly, but something behind it does.
"Yeah," he says. We stand in the quiet of an abandoned room in a broken city with the roars of something enormous still carrying through the air outside, and for one breath, it's almost okay.
Then he turns back to the window, scanning the street below, and we both return to the work of figuring out what comes next.
Chapter Seven
Zero
The city is burning. Not metaphorically. This shit is beyond real. More real than I ever thought possible. I’ve pinched myself at least a dozen times as if it will somehow wake me up from all of this. Actual fire, actual smoke, actual columns of black rising from actual wreckage in a way that makes the worddisasterfeel like it was invented specifically for this view.
