“I’m Sloane,” she added after a moment, her voice still gentle, still steady. “And you’re safe here, I promise.”
Lily didn’t answer. She just pressed her face back into my side and cried harder, her body shuddering with sobs that sounded as if they came from somewhere deeper than her lungs—somewhere that wouldn’t heal quickly and might not heal completely.
Callan stood at the edge of the dock, his back to all of us, staring out at the darkening water with his hands hanging at his sides. He didn’t move, didn’t speak. He just gazed at the empty horizon as if looking hard enough, long enough, with enough desperate concentration, might conjure a shape from the water—a boat, a figure, anything to prove the story I’d told had a different ending.
“He always does that,” he said finally, his voice rough enough to draw blood, barely audible above the wind. “Runs straight at the fire. Every single time. Doesn’t think about it, doesn’t weigh it, doesn’t calculate—just sees someone in trouble and goes.”
No one laughed.
No one spoke.
Lock moved first. He stepped forward and placed his hand on the back of Callan’s neck—a firm, grounding touch that didn’t try to fix anything but simply said, “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.” Callan’s head dropped forward an inch, his chin touching his chest, his breath leaving him in a long, ragged exhale that carried the sound of something essential being surrendered.
I tightened my arm around Lily and held her close as the reality settled over all of us—heavy, permanent, reshaping the air on the dock into something we’d all have to learn to breathe.
We had made it. We had found them. We stood on solid ground, surrounded by people who carried weapons, kept watch, and knew how to survive.
And it still hollowed me out completely.
Because the person who’d brought us here—who’d planned this, who’d believed in this, who’d given everything to get us to this exact moment on this exact dock—stood nowhere among the living faces surrounding me.
The water stretched out behind us, dark and endless and keeping its secrets, and I stared at it the same way Callan did—searching for something I knew I wouldn’t find, unable to stop looking anyway.
Forty Five
Stupid Cat -Finn
Seven hours earlier.
The carrier was in my hand.
Stupid cat.
One thought obliterated all others: grab it, turn, run—simple, survivable.
Then the world collapsed.
They materialized from everywhere. Not one or two, but dozens, pouring from between dry-docked boats, stumbling from trees. I hadn’t even registered the first one before the lot swarmed, as if the ground itself had vomited them up.
Hands first. It always seemed to be the hands.
Gray, split skin stretched too taut over jutting knuckles, fingers bent sideways and backward, nails black and splintered down to jagged edges caked in something dark and wet—they reached, clawed, swiped for anything they could latch onto, anything they could tear.
“Shit—!”
They piled onto me.
Bodies slammed into mine from every direction, bony and heavy at the same time, all dead weight and relentless forward momentum. The smell of rot hit me before they did—deep and sour, something wet underneath it, something that had been wrong for a long time. It filled my sinuses, coated the back of my throat, and I gagged, eyes watering, stomach lurching even as my arms kept swinging.
Something cold and slick brushed my face. I turned just in time to see a mouth inches from my cheek, so close I could count the teeth. Chipped and loose in blackened gums, a few hanging by threads of tissue, others missing entirely, leaving gaps filled with something dark that oozed between them. The lips had torn back from the gums entirely, peeled away like the skin of a rotting fruit, stretched into a permanent snarl that had nothing to do with expression—just decay, just the flesh giving up and pulling apart because it couldn’t hold together anymore.
I drove my elbow straight into its face, hard, twisting my hips into it. Something gave beneath the impact—a crunch, then a wet collapse, bone or cartilage buckling inward. Its jaw dislocated with a sickening pop, hanging loose on one side, but the mouth kept working, kept opening and closing, kept snapping at the air where my arm had just been.
It didn’t stop.
Nothing stopped them.
They just kept coming, kept pressing forward, kept reaching.
