I stand in it for approximately two seconds before Colt pulls me forward, and then we’re moving again, trying not to die on terrain that has strong opinions about bare feet. The smoke has layers to it.
The bottom layer is chemical, plastics, and synthetics, and things that were never meant to burn. The middle layer is older, the smell of things that have been burning for long enough to move past acrid into something almost ambient. The top layer is just particulate, the city in suspension, everything that was solid now distributed through the air at varying altitudes.
I inhale all of it and file the complaints underlater problems.
"Congratulations, Zero," I mutter to the part of myself that required three years of captivity and an active apocalypse to get outside.
"Excellent timing on the escape. Really nailed the window."
Colt doesn't glance down. His attention is fully distributed across the street ahead, scanning rubble and movement. The spaces between structures with the systematic efficiency I've been observing since the facility. He reads environments the way I do. We are, it occurs to me, doing the same thing from different training bases.
My bare feet have developed a working protocol. Small steps on uncertain surfaces. Weight is distributed before committing. The constant low-level read of what the ground is communicating upward. It's slower than running, marginally faster than the alternative of being unable to walk at all.
His grip on my wrist is warm and constant. It's going fine.
"Stop whining," he says.
"I wasn't," I say, "I was narrating."
"Quietly."
"I was narratingquietly."
He moves us around a section of overturned vehicles. Three of them, distributed across the street in a pattern that suggests they were moving when whatever stopped them stopped them. The doors on two are open. The third is upside down.
Nobody in any of them. Which could mean they evacuated, or it could mean something else. The silence of the open doors says something permanent happened. I stop myself from going down that line of thought. Nothing good could possibly come from it.
The roar comes from two blocks north, rolling toward us through the haze and bouncing off the angles of damaged buildings in a way that makes direction estimation unreliable. Not close enough to be immediate. Close enough to update the timeline, as well as cause my stomach to clench with worry.
I freeze for a half-step.
"Don't stop," Colt says.
"I wasn't stopping. I was recalibrating."
"Keep recalibrating while moving."
Fair.
I move.
The street changes character at the next block. Less vehicle wreckage, more structural collapse. A building has offered a significant portion of itself to the pavement, which has accepted the donation and cracked under the weight. The rubble creates a landscape of its own, irregular and chaotic, with the occasional piece of furniture or personal item visible in the debris like punctuation in a sentence that stopped mid-word.
A shoe. One shoe, sitting upright on a chunk of concrete, its partner absent. I look at it as we pass and feel something I don't have time to name.
"Left or through," I ask, assessing the blockage.
"Through is faster."
"Through has bad footing on the far side. See the way the slab is angled? It'll shed weight when we step on it." He looks. A pause of about two seconds, which is how long it takes him to verify what I've already calculated.
"Left then," he says.
We go left.
"You're welcome," I say. Something that might be a sound escapes him. Very small. Gone immediately.
The left route adds a block, but the footing is workable. Cracked but flat, the debris is smaller and more navigable. We move faster. His stride opens up, and I match it, and for thirty seconds we're just moving through a ruined city in a rhythm that almost feels like we've been doing this longer than twenty minutes.
