The bells changed pace again somewhere past the second hour, dropping from that frantic double-time clatter into something almost lazy, as if a bell ringer had gotten tired and decided the apocalypse could wait for a smoke break.
Mavra caught it before I did.
She had better field instincts than I did, and by civilian number nine I’d filed away my bruised pride as operational drag that wouldn’t shave a fraction of a second off my reaction time.
“That’s the lull,” she said, pressed against the same wall I was pressed against, watching the mouth of the marketplace where the crowd had thinned to scattered stragglers instead of a solid wall of bodies.
“Won’t last. Twenty minutes, maybe less. We move now or we don’t move for another hour.”
I didn’t argue.
We had eleven people behind us this time, herded out of a collapsed grain store two streets back, and eleven people crouched in a ruined building were eleven people who’d eventually do something stupid out of boredom or fear, whichever arrived first.
I nodded toward the market stalls, the overturned carts, the open ground between us and the next row of buildings that might actually hold a door worth barricading.
“Small groups. Three, then four, then four. I’ll take point on the first.”
Mavra didn’t answer that so much as move, which I’d also stopped commenting on.
She had a way of agreeing with a plan by simply executing the part of it that belonged to her, and I liked that better than most conversations I’d had back home about who was covering whose shift.
The first three made it across without incident, tucked behind a cart that used to sell something with a smell I didn’t want to think too hard about.
Then the stench of grease and wet wool rolled off the cobblestones as I brought the second group forward, four people including an old woman whose bad hip dragged with every limp.
Her rasping breath and the scrape of her heel pushed us directly into the path of a knot of standing corpses, giving me an uncomfortably close look at something I’d been wondering about since the first street.
They didn’t move on us.
Not immediately.
Four of them stood in a loose cluster near a toppled awning, swaying slightly the way all of them swayed, but their heads turned toward Mavra specifically, toward the torn strip of insignia still clinging to her shoulder from whatever uniform she’d scavenged before I found her.
One of them, a woman with half her jaw hanging awry, took a shuffling step forward and then stopped, like something in whatever passed for her mind had hit a wall.
“Please,” it said.
The word came out wet and slow, but it was a word—formed on purpose, aimed at Mavra like a request.
“Please don’t. Not the coat. Not the coat, ma’am.”
I froze with the old woman’s arm still looped over my shoulder, because a talking corpse begging for mercy from a strip of fabric was not a category of problem I’d budgeted time for.
Mavra’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t stop walking, didn’t so much as slow her pace, and the four of them parted around us the way a crowd parts around someone they’ve been trained since childhood not to touch.
“Military conditioning,” she said once we were past them, her voice flat, eyes already scanning ahead for the next threat.
“Whatever they were before, some of it’s still down there. They see the uniform, they see rank. It buys us maybe ten seconds before whatever’s driving them now overrides it.”
“Ten seconds is ten seconds,” I said, and meant it, filing the information away next to everything else I’d learned the hard way in this city: that doors could be braced but not trusted, that crowds moved like weather, and now that a torn scrap of officer’s cloth could apparently buy a small mercy from something that used to salute it.
We reached the row of buildings on the far side with all eleven intact, funneled them through a door that at least had two working hinges, and that was when the gate became a problem.
It was iron, waist-high, rusted into its frame at three separate points, and it sat directly across the only gap wide enough to move the group through without doubling back into the open street.
I put my shoulder into it twice and got nothing but a groan of metal that didn’t budge and a fresh ache radiating up through the shoulder I’d already been favoring since the storefront door two hours back.
“Move,” Mavra said, already crouching in front of the thing, palm flat against the corroded lock plate.
I’d seen her do this once before back at the grain store, pulling the heat out of a cracked beam until it was cold enough to touch, her hands shaking for minutes after.
I didn’t understand the mechanics and didn’t care to, since most things in this city fell well outside my pay grade anyway.
What mattered was the speed of it.
The gate’s rigidity drained out in seconds, the rusted iron sagging inward like wet cardboard, buckling at the hinges with barely a shove.
Mavra didn’t come apart at the joints.
She just stopped moving.
Her legs locked mid-stride, knees rigid, the whole lower half of her gone stiff as the gate she’d just softened, and she started tipping sideways with the particular helpless tilt of dead weight.
I got a shoulder under her arm before she hit the ground, which did nothing good for the shoulder in question, and held her upright while she swore at the sky in a language I didn’t recognize and probably didn’t want translated.
“How long?” I said, because that was the only question that mattered.
“However long it takes to burn off.” Her teeth were gritted so hard the words came out flattened.
“Could be minutes. Could be an hour. Depends how much I pulled.”
“Next time pull less.”
“Next time you carry the gate.”
Fair enough.
I got her arm over my shoulder properly, took most of her weight, and we moved like that, her legs dragging stiff and useless behind her like she’d been fitted with the wrong prosthetic, through the gap where the gate used to be, toward the next row of cover.
That was when the world stopped.
Not all of it.
The stragglers still shuffling at the market’s far edge froze mid-step, one of them caught with a foot raised and never brought down, the whole scene going still and silent like someone had hit pause on a recording, which I supposed was exactly what had happened.
Above a stall to our left, a cleaver hung suspended in midair over what looked like a merchant tied to a chair, the blade caught three inches from his scalp, held there by nothing I could see, waiting for someone to press play again.
The merchant’s eyes were the only things still moving, darting side to side in a panic that the pause hadn’t bothered to freeze along with everything else.
Vassago’s voice arrived a half second later, warm and delighted, coming from everywhere and nowhere the way it always did.
“Veyr! Look at you, dragging a woman with cinderblock legs through a war zone. Our viewership just spiked 11% in the last four minutes, and I want you to know that’s entirely your doing. People love a man who commits to a bit.” A pause, theatrical, the kind meant to let a studio audience laugh that didn’t exist.
“Speaking of commitment, your next shelter’s getting a delivery. After-Massacre Support crate, compliments of our friends at Cordevane Wellness. Bandages, staples, the works. I do want to be upfront, though, because our legal team insists: the crate covers structural repair only. It does not cover pain management. If something hurts after we staple it shut, that’s between you and whatever you brought in from home.”
“Generous,” I said, mostly to Mavra, who was too busy hating her own legs to appreciate the sarcasm.
“I try,” Vassago said, and the pause held a moment, long enough for me to notice that the merchant’s eyes had stopped darting, that his chest had gone still with the rest of him, frozen mid-breath just like everything else.
The cleaver stayed exactly where it was.
Nothing about him looked worse than it had a second ago.
Nothing about him looked better either.
Then the bells resumed their cadence, and the world lurched back into motion all at once, the cleaver completing its arc a full three inches short of where it had been aimed, burying itself in the chair’s armrest instead of the merchant’s skull for reasons I decided not to examine too closely.
The merchant screamed.
The stragglers resumed their shuffle like nothing had happened at all.
We kept moving.
A checkpoint waited two blocks up, a barricade manned by things in the same officer’s cloth that had bought us those ten seconds back in the market.
One of the guards had gone down at some point, sprawled near the barricade’s edge with its coat mostly intact.
I stripped the garment off him while Mavra leaned against the wall working feeling back into one knee at a time, threw it on over my own gear, torn insignia and all, and walked us both past four more of them with nothing but a slowed step and a murmured word I didn’t catch.
Once we were clear, I pulled the coat off and held it out to her.
“Keep it on you. If I get pulled somewhere else, you’re still walking through checkpoints without it.”
She took it without arguing, which told me more about how she rated our odds of staying paired up than anything she could’ve said out loud.
The supply cache sat behind a locked grate three streets farther, and it took both of us and a length of pipe to force the mechanism, but the chest inside was exactly what the wristband had promised somewhere in its endless fine print: bandages, a staple gun that looked like it belonged in a hardware store rather than a hospital, and a scatter of loose tablets nobody had bothered to label.
A medic’s runner found us there, someone assigned to the cache who didn’t ask questions about why a man was walking around with a sliced-open palm two hours after the fact, just grabbed my wrist and went to work.
The staple gun clicked twice, pinching hard enough to bring water to my eyes as it dragged the split flesh together.
Right on cue, an ad ticker drifted across my optic feed with all the cheerful urgency of a collection notice: Protect your digits with FingerSure—underwritten losses up to full digital replacement, ask your onboarding rep for details.
I watched the runner mop a smear of dark red off my knuckles and realized the pause back in the square had frozen the cleaver and stopped the merchant’s breath mid-gasp, but it hadn’t done a damn thing to slow my blood.
The show could freeze the cameras and stage the drama, but the timer and my body had kept bleeding at full retail price.
“Staples will hold the skin,” he said, “but you kept bending that hand through a lot of dirt today. Fingers could still go bad on you. Gangrene doesn’t care how tight the stitching is.”
“Good to know,” I said, testing the tension of the staples with a quick twitch of my fingers and immediately regretting it.
Whatever bill the house was running up on me, I was going to end up paying it out of pocket.
The alarm hit five seconds later, a short triple tone I hadn’t heard before, and my wristband lit up with a single line: SWAP INITIATED.
PAIRING: VEYR — RULVEN.
SECTOR: ODRANCE.
The medic still had my hand turned palm-up, gauze half-unrolled, mouth already open on whatever he’d been about to say next.
He never got to finish it.
The gauze fell from fingers that weren’t holding my wrist anymore, because I wasn’t there to be held, and where my hand had been a second before, someone else’s leg buckled hard against the cache’s stone floor, a man I’d never seen clutching a wound in his thigh that hadn’t been mine to give him.