A twisted neck and dead eyes.
Samick whips towards us, but he shouts, sharp and hollow—
“Run!”
My face twists with the sudden wave of tears, but I scramble onto my boots—and throw myself into a sprint.
The torch jerks wildly in my hand, its thin beam cutting through the dark just enough to show me—
Nothing.
Endless ruins of nothing.
Debris smears the ground, jagged and uneven, but beyond that… there’s no shape to the world.
No horizon.
No landmarks.
Just blackness.
All I can do is chase the rough surface of the road, and hope that Rust isn’t right behind me.
NINE
My heart beats against my eardrums.
I barrel through the chill that whips my cheeks raw, hearing only my boots smacking down on the road and the hoarseness of my sharp breaths.
My chest is tightening.
Like a fist is clenching around my lungs, each breath is sharper, hollower, than the last.
My lungs are burning for air. But the more I run, the less oxygen reaches them.
The faint stream of white light is weak in the dark, but it’s all I have, and I chase it for a long time, until I’m wheezing and my run is morphing into a sloppy, frantic scramble in the dark.
I’m slowing down.
The vibrations of my heartbeat pulse my brain in my skull, and if I could see a fucking thing beyond the road, it would be warping and spinning.
But I keep running.
I run through the dizziness, through the nausea, the serrated breaths stabbing me—until I run right into something solid.
My legs are lifted off the road.
I smack face-down on the cold bite of metal.
The breath is punched out of me.
Sprawled, a horrible wheeze forces its way through me.
The torch hooked to my wrist clatters over metal. I feel for it, hooking my pinkie finger around the plastic grip, then drag it into my fist.
The breaths running through me are weaker by the second, whimpers now.
I push myself off the cold sheet of metal—and I stagger to my feet.
