The five minutes were up.
Zarek flicked his wrist. A soft chime sounded somewhere inside his head, the air beside his hand bent for a split second, and a protein bar was lying in his palm. He tore the corner open with his teeth and tossed it to Elsa.
She caught it against her chest. Her eyes went to the empty space beside his hip, then up to his face, wide with awe and something uneasy underneath.
"Eat it while you walk." He didn’t explain. Explaining the System Space to a slave was a waste of breath.
She ripped the wrapper and shoved half the bar into her mouth, her other hand tight around the pry bar. "Where are we going?" she asked around the food. "The lower floors... we heard things down there. Big things."
"Half a bottle of water won’t last us, and the fire on four is going to spread." He pushed open the heavy exit door. "Back stairs down to the loading bay."
She fell in behind him, eyes darting along the dark hallway. "If we run into one of those dogs again..." She bit her lip. "Will you kill it?"
He stopped. He turned his head just enough to catch her at the edge of his vision.
"If something attacks us, you handle it."
The bar nearly slipped out of her fingers. "What? With this?" She held up the pry bar, its flat tip dull and smeared with grey dust. "It’s a piece of scrap metal!"
"You wanted protection. I decided to teach you instead. Don’t waste it."
He turned and kept walking. Elsa stood there for a few seconds, staring at his back. The hallway behind her was quiet, but the shadows felt alive. She grimaced, folded the rest of the bar into her fist alongside the grip, and hurried after him.
They reached the lower corridor five minutes later. The air here was foul, thick with ruptured sewage and burnt plastic. An emergency light hummed overhead and threw jittery shadows over walls stripped bare by some earlier blast. At the far end, a pile of overturned vending machines blocked half the passage.
Zarek slowed. Behind the rusted frame of a soda machine, something was scratching, a faint, wet sound. He stopped three paces short of the rubble and folded his arms.
Elsa dropped low and tucked herself behind his right shoulder, using him as a wall.
The scratching stopped.
From under the crumpled chassis of a snack machine, something slithered into the light. It wasn’t the giant from the street. This one was about the size of a feral dog, hairless, grey skin pulled tight over its ribs.
Its front legs ended in long bone claws that clicked on the tile, and its snout split sideways, showing rows of needle teeth that dripped black saliva. Yellow eyes locked onto them.
Her breath hitched. She pressed against his back. "Zarek... Zarek, do something! It’s right there!"
He didn’t draw anything. He didn’t even shift his feet. He reached back, took her by the collar of the shirt, and shoved her out into the open hallway.
"Your turn."
She stumbled and skidded to a stop three feet in front of him, then whipped around. "Are you insane?! It’s going to kill me!"
"Then don’t let it." He stepped back and leaned his shoulders against the cracked paint.
The creature growled and lowered its head. It smelled her fear. Its claws scraped the floor as it began to circle her in a slow, tightening arc.
Her breathing came in ragged hitches. The pry bar shook so hard the tip rattled. Everything in her screamed to run, to drop the iron and beg. But she looked at him once, and his face gave her nothing. If she ran, he would step aside and let it have her.
The creature lunged straight at her throat.
"Ah!"
Panic wiped out everything he’d taught her. She shut her eyes and swung the bar sideways like a bat, all her weight behind it.
The steel cut empty air. The swing was far too early, and it spun her around and exposed her back. The creature’s shoulder clipped her ribs, and one bone claw caught her sleeve, tearing the fabric and dragging three shallow red lines across her upper arm.
"Ugh!" She stumbled sideways into a row of dented lockers and hit them with a bang, chest heaving. The bar almost slipped out of her sweaty hand.
The creature landed lightly on all fours and turned, snout twitching at the smell of her blood.
She cowered against the lockers, arms rising to cover her face.
"Stop staring at its teeth!" Zarek’s voice cut through her panic like cold water. "Watch where it moves! Look at the back legs!"
She opened her eyes. Sweat ran into the scratch and stung. The creature was coiling its hind legs to spring.
Feet shoulder-width. Lock your wrists. Don’t swing it. Drive it through.
The fear didn’t leave her, but under it something hard formed. She pushed off the lockers, planted her left foot forward and her right foot back, dropped her hips, and gripped the bar with both hands, elbows tucked against her ribs, the flat tip aimed at the creature’s nose.
It leaped.
This time she kept her eyes open. She watched the coil of its thighs and knew where it was going before it left the floor. She didn’t swing. She slid a step to the left and thrust with everything she had.
Tuck. Drive. Lock.
The tip hit the creature in mid-air and slammed into its ribs. The crunch carried down the narrow hallway. The impact jarred her forearms up to the shoulders, but her wrists held. The creature shrieked and went sideways, rolled twice on the tile, and scrambled up again with black blood leaking from a crushed spot on its side.
Elsa stood frozen, arms shaking, staring at it.
"You hit it once!" Zarek barked from the wall. "Are you going to stand there admiring it? Finish it!"
His voice snapped her out of it.
The creature dragged its damaged leg and charged again, jaws snapping. Anger flared in her chest. She stepped into the attack, pivoted her hips the way he’d shown her, and drove the flat tip straight down into the split snout.
It punched through skin and soft bone and caved in the front of the skull. The creature convulsed, one long claw scraping across the floor once, twice, and then its legs went slack.
The corridor was quiet except for her breathing.
She backed away slowly, arms numb, the bar hanging from her right hand. She looked at the dead creature, then at her own hands. Dust and a few flecks of dark blood, but whole.
She was alive. And she’d done it the way he had taught her, on purpose. The dog in the hotel room had been panic and a marble ashtray. This had been something else.
Footsteps behind her.
Zarek walked up to the corpse and nudged the crushed snout with his foot, then glanced at the scratches bleeding through her torn sleeve.
"Ugly. Slow. And you nearly lost to it."
Her shoulders slumped. The small spark of pride went out under his flat assessment, and she looked at the floor.
He studied her pale, blood-spattered face. The corner of his mouth lifted.
"But you killed it. That’s a start."
Her legs gave out, and she slid down the wall until she was sitting on her heels, cradling her arm. She watched him with a wary, tangled look. She still hated him. She still feared him.
Part of her hated him for forcing her into that fight. But one uncomfortable fact had settled in: without his instruction, she would have died. It didn’t make him trustworthy, and it didn’t erase anything he’d done to her. But she couldn’t pretend any more that what he’d taught her was useless.