“Yes.” I pointed down the street, past an overturned delivery truck. “Two blocks down, there’s an alley between two brownstones. It goes straight through to my street.”
“Okay, let’s move,” Finn said, his voice stripped of whatever warmth it held on the rooftop, leaving only something functional and flat.
I followed his gaze south.
They were still out there.
Three of them were visible in the intersection a block down, moving through the rain with that lurching, disconnected gait. The downpour pelted their bodies, and they gave it nothing; no flinch, no hunching of shoulders, no instinct to seek shelter. They stood in the deluge as if it were a minor inconvenience, vacant and inhuman. One walked directly into a fire hydrant, bounced off the impact without registering it, stumbled two steps sideways, and kept going. The second stood motionless in the middle of the road, its face tilted skyward and its mouth open.
The third was crouched at the mouth of an alley, hunched tight over something, arms working in short, rhythmic jerks. A sound came from it that I had not known before two days ago and would never be able to un-know: connective tissue separating from bone. A pale arm reached out from beneath its body, fingers open against the wet pavement. Beside it, something coiled and glistening caught the rain.
None of them looked our way==——-
The thunder pulled their attention sideways. The lightning made them twitch and stagger toward it. The sheer, overwhelming volume of the storm drowned whatever hunting instinct drove them otherwise.
For now.
“Once it stops—” I said, my voice coming out thinner than I intended.
“They’ll hear everything,” Finn finished.
I nodded.
And we moved.
Finn set a fast, low pace, somewhere between a jog and a sprint. Our boots kicked up arcs of water from the flooded gutter, the sidewalk a shallow river. Rainwater ran with a pink tinge I chose not to examine. Near the curb, a split garbage bag had scattered its contents wide. Among them, half-submerged and turning slowly in the current, was a human jaw. I stepped around it without breaking stride.
We reached the alley and slipped inside.
Four stories of brick pressed in on both sides, close enough to touch both walls at once. The rain funneled down through the narrow strip of sky in a single, hard stream. Sound had nowhere to go in the tight space—it simply built and built until it stopped being noise and became something felt instead.
Finn stayed just behind me, one hand loose at his side. The other reached forward at intervals—two fingers grazing my sleeve, my wrist, the back of my hand. Not grabbing, just finding my edge and letting go. Each time, I caught myself holding the contact for the half-second before it broke. Each time, I told myself it was the dark.
I stayed close. Closer than the passage required.
Lightning split the sky above the narrow gap between the buildings.
The passage blazed white for a single, frozen instant.
And as I looked back, I saw him, really saw him.
“Libby.”
His voice was sharp, pulling me out of my musings.
“Yeah.” The word came out a half-second too fast. I swallowed, forcing the next words out. “I’m here.”
“Keep moving.”
Not a request and not quite an order.
“I am.”
The passage opened onto my street.
Twenty yards. Fifteen.
My legs shook. My hands shook. Everything shook—cold and exhaustion and whatever stays in your body after it has spent hours convinced it is about to die.
