Finn sat beside me, close enough that his shoulder touched mine, and I left it there, and he didn’t move away.
Below, the milky, ruined eyes tracked every small movement we made on that platform without losing a single degree of focus. Not the teeth. Not the hands. Not the sounds they made or the things they had done to themselves climbing toward us. What carved the deepest was simpler and worse than any of it.
They knew exactly where we were.
And they had nowhere else to be.
Ten
Hunger Bellow -Finn
“What do we do?”
Her voice, breathless beside me, broke the silence.
For a moment, I couldn’t answer.
I sat, hands braced against cold metal, chest heaving, dragging air into my lungs. Her proximity, her warmth in the cold, was a presence that shouldn’t have existed alongside the hellscape below: a relentless, grinding chorus of clawing and wailing that seemed bottomless.
I forced myself to look down.
Bad idea.
Too many. Too close. A mass of upturned faces below, eyes the color of old fat, all of them locked on the platform with an undimmed, fixed concentration. No confusion, no wandering, only patient hunger. Mouths gaped. Hands reached up, found nothing, and reached again. Whatever controlled their want had narrowed to a single point: us.
I pulled my eyes up and away, toward the dark outline of the building above, toward anything that wasn’t the movement below.
“We go up,” I said, my voice rough but steady. “Get to the roof, wait them out, find another way out—another fire escape, a close building, something.”
The remnants of a plan.
Every part of me understood it wasn’t one.
She nodded anyway. No hesitation, no argument, no demand for a better plan.
“Alright.” The word was for myself more than for her. “Let’s move.”
We climbed.
The ladder groaned and rang under us with every step. My hands slipped on the rungs, slick with rust and sweat. Near the top, I pressed past her to reach the next section—her body and the railing leaving almost no room between us.
The contact lasted less than two seconds.
That same sharp, badly timed draw, the kind I couldn’t logic my way out of.
I held onto the rung for a half-second longer than I needed to.
Then I hauled myself over the roof edge, rolled onto gravel, came immediately to my feet, and swept the area.
Clear.
I crossed to the roof access door first and tested the handle.
Locked.
I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Good,” I said quietly.
Then, after a second: “And not good.”
