The dark in the cellar was absolute.
Ares sat braced against the damp concrete.
His right arm hung at his side like dead weight.
The bullet had ripped his shoulder open, and blood pooled through his fingers onto the floor.
He had chosen this cellar for the same reason he chose every hiding place now one way in, walls thick enough to hold, and a door he could see without turning his head.
He had found it three blocks from the hotel, half collapsed under a burned-out laundromat, the kind of ruin no one bothered searching twice.
He had checked it anyway.
Empty shelving.
A drain in the floor clogged with a decade of silt.
No second exit, which meant no second way for anyone to come at him unseen.
It would have to be enough.
He knew he would bleed to death before dawn if he did nothing.
The flesh-eaters knew how to track.
Even with his zigzagging and wide loops around the military base, they would come.
He didn’t hesitate.
Using only his left hand, Ares cleared the dirt from the floor, working in a slow half-circle until he had a bare patch of concrete free of anything that would catch and smoke wrong.
He pulled dry splinters from a wooden crate, breaking them shorter with his knee when the length wouldn’t fit through his fingers, and stacked them high enough to hold a real flame instead of a spark that would gutter out in the damp air.
He struck his fire-steel one-handed, awkward, the motion unfamiliar without his right hand to brace the striker, until sparks finally caught and a low, harsh flame rose from the kindling.
He fed it slowly.
Too much at once and the smoke would climb through whatever gaps the ceiling still had, visible even in rain, even at night, to anyone who knew to look for a thread of gray against the dark.
He kept the fire small and mean and hot, exactly the size it needed to be and nothing more.
He picked up a thick piece of rebar he had pulled from the collapsed section of wall near the drain and jammed the end directly into the coals.
He waited.
He sat with his back against the wall, his right arm useless in his lap, and watched the metal change color by degrees black, then a dull red at the very tip, the red climbing slowly up the shaft as the coals did their work.
He thought about Garrow’s face in the half-second before the shot came.
Not recognition — almost recognition.
He thought about the cages opening from the inside, the mechanical click of latches that had never needed a key.
He remembered the two men he had killed inside the hotel.
The spear had gone through one.
The others had fallen beneath the shattered shield.
He waited for the usual hesitation to follow the memory.
It didn’t come.
Ares looked down at his bloody hand.
The wound was still bleeding.
That mattered more.
The metal shifted from black to red, then to glowing white.
Ares pulled a deep breath into his lungs, filling them slowly.
He reached back with his left hand, grabbed the cold end of the steel, and drove the white-hot rod straight into the entry wound below his right shoulder blade.
Flesh seared instantly.
The stench of burning meat filled the cellar, thick and sweetish.
Ares’s stomach turned.
He ignored it.
Ares locked his jaw so hard his teeth groaned, and a raw, animal scream tore from his throat before he could stop it.
His vision flared blinding white at the edges, narrowing to a single point of black at the center, but he stayed upright.
He did not let himself fall.
Falling meant losing the angle.
He held the iron in place.
One second.
Two.
Three.
He counted against his own pulse, which hammered so hard he could feel it in his teeth, and only pulled the rod free when he was certain the bleeding beneath the crust had stopped.
He yanked the iron out, thrust it back into the coals for five seconds, and brought it around to his chest.
His left hand was shaking now, but he slammed the glowing metal directly into the exit wound beneath his right collarbone.
Another loud sizzle.
Smoke stung his eyes.
The pain was crushing, a second wave stacked on top of the first, but the bleeding stopped.
The dark stream that had been running steady down his chest slowed to a trickle, then to nothing, sealed under blackened, ruined skin.
Ares dropped the iron.
It clattered against the concrete, rolling twice before it went still.
He breathed in short, violent gasps, sweat running cold down his spine despite the fire.
Using his combat knife and his teeth, he sliced his fresh shirt into thick strips and bound them tight around his chest and shoulder with his left hand, tying the knots against his knee for leverage.
He killed the fire with wet dirt, smothering it in handfuls until the last coal went dark.
Darkness returned, total and immediate.
Sleep was out of the question.
Ares sat with his back against the wall, spear across his thighs, the bandages already darkening at the edges where the wound wept beneath them.
Four seconds in.
Four seconds out.
Again.
The pain stayed.
His breathing slowed.
He kept going.
The pain remained in his shoulder, a deep, banked heat that pulsed with every beat of his heart.
Ares kept breathing.
He did not move.
He listened.
At first there was nothing to hear but the ordinary sounds of a dead building — water finding its slow way through cracked pipe, the settle of old timber somewhere above, a rat’s claws scratching briefly against a far wall.
Hours passed.
Ares did not move a millimeter.
He mapped the building by sound.
A loose floorboard above him that groaned under a rat’s weight.
A loose door frame upstairs that rattled in the wind.
Long after midnight, something else entered his range.
Footsteps.
Heavy boots crushing wet gravel.
Fifty yards out, moving slow and methodical.
Three sets of tracks.
Above him, wood splintered as doors were kicked open one after another.
They were searching room by room.
Ares opened his eyes in the pitch black.
His left hand locked around the spear, the grip absolute.
If the cellar door opened, he would drive the steel through it before the first word left whoever stood on the other side.
One cleanly, maybe two if the first body blocked the doorway.
Ares pushed the thought of failure away.
Footsteps were closer now.
One of the trackers stepped directly onto the concrete floor above his head.
Dust rained down from the ceiling onto Ares’s hood, fine and gray, settling on his shoulders without a sound.
Ares didn’t even breathe.
He waited, hand set on the spear, thumb resting along the cold iron shaft.
He waited for the door.
Then, from far across the courtyard, a sharp whistle pierced the air.
Two notes.
Deliberate.
A signal, not an alarm.
The footsteps directly above him stopped dead.
For three full seconds nothing moved anywhere in the building.
Ares held the stillness with them.
Then the men turned.
Boots scraped gravel as they broke into a run toward the whistle, the search abandoned mid-room.
Whatever the whistle meant, it had pulled the searchers away.
Ares waited.
He would not move until he was sure they were gone.
When the building had been silent long enough that even his own patience began to doubt itself, he allowed himself to move only enough to peel back the edge of the bandage and check what the dark could tell his fingers.
The skin around the burn had gone tight and hot, swollen at the border.
He flexed his right hand, slow, testing.
The fingers answered, sluggish and distant, but they answered.
He closed them into a fist.
Not gone, then.
Not yet.
He rebound the strips tighter than before, set the spear across his lap, and settled back against the wall.
The wound throbbed with every heartbeat.
Night was not over.
He kept the spear across his lap and waited out the dark.