I hesitated.
I forced a small smile, the kind that costs everything, and pressed my lips to the top of her head.
“Promise. I love you, Lily. Always.”
Finn’s voice came from beside me, steady and grounded as bedrock.
“We’ll be back before you know it.”
I glanced at him.
He stated it as a fact, like something already decided.
And for one brief second, I believed him.
But I was looking at Lily’s fingers twisting the hem of her shirt. I saw Fiona’s arms folded tight across her chest. And the fear flooded in anyway.
Finn opened the front door just enough to slip through, every movement slow and deliberate, his body already oriented to the outside before the rest of him had crossed the threshold. The security door let out a faint creak as he eased it wide. He wincedand went completely still for half a second before stepping out onto the stoop.
I followed him into the hostile world and stopped.
The stoop, the steps, the street below—all of it identical to how it looked every morning for fifteen years. The same and completely unrecognizable all at once.
The street below was empty and silent.
Not the chaos of yesterday—no one running in every direction, no sirens. This stillness carried its own horrific quality, heavier and more unsettling than any amount of chaos would have been.
Two figures drifted at the far end of the block, moving with a jerky, broken rhythm down the middle of the road, as if they had lost the thread connecting intention to movement. One walked into a parked car and stayed there, its head twitching in sharp, repetitive spasms, going nowhere.
I pulled my eyes away.
Finn glanced back at me—one look—and gave a small, sharp motion with his hand.
Move.
I nodded and stepped down behind him, staying close, exactly as he’d told me.
We slipped down the steps and into the alley between the brownstones. The temperature dropped immediately. The smell hit next—damp stone, old garbage, and something metallic and faintly sweet that registered in the throat before the nose made sense of it.
I breathed through my mouth in slow, shallow breaths, staying close enough to Finn to hear the controlled rhythm of his own breathing.
The city was quiet in a way Boston never was. No traffic, no voices, no dogs, no horns—none of the thousand sounds a living city made without trying. The rumble of the T somewhereunderground. A siren blocks away. Someone’s television through a thin wall. All of it gone, replaced by an absence so complete it pressed against the ears like something solid.
For a few moments, we were just two people cutting through an alley on a gray morning. Nothing unusual about the image if you didn’t look too closely.
Then a scream.
It was close enough that my body responded before my mind processed the sound—every muscle clenching, breath stopping.
Finn’s hand shot back and caught my arm, yanking me hard against the wall, his body shielding mine.
“Don’t move.” His breath was at my ear, barely a disturbance in the air.
His arm braced against the brick beside my head. His other hand held the gun low, angled toward the alley entrance. My back hit the cold wall, and I stopped—breathing, thinking—stopped everything, because the alternative had just announced itself thirty feet away and it sounded like…
Footsteps. Panicked and irregular, the sound of someone running without coordination.
They tore past the alley opening so close I caught everything—the wet breathing and the frantic slap of shoes on wet pavement.
