AVERY’S POV
The silence was doing something to my head.
It had been maybe forty minutes since the last explosion— maybe longer, I genuinely couldn’t tell anymore— and the quiet that replaced it was eerie.
Outside, nothing.
No jets, no gunfire, no mechanical whirring that had been vibrating through the walls since this whole thing started.
Just the sound of twelve people breathing in the dark and trying very hard not to make it obvious that they were terrified.
Someone’s phone screen lit up across the room and I watched a girl— I didn’t know her name yet, she had a piece of someone’s blazer wrapped around her forearm and a split lip that had crusted over— refresh her contacts list for maybe the sixth time since we’d barricaded the door.
No signal.
She knew there was no signal but she kept checking anyway because what else was there to do with your hands when the world had just ended outside.
I understood that completely.
My own phone was gone, lost somewhere between the blast and being thrown across the hall and the absence of it was making me feel slightly insane.
Not because I needed to scroll or anything stupid like that.
Because my mum had sent a text this morning that I hadn’t replied to and now I couldn’t and I didn’t know where she was.
She’d been at work when this started.
Which meant she was either sheltering somewhere, or she was outside when those things opened fire on the city, or she was—
I pressed the heel of my hand into the gash on my hip until the pain came in sharp enough to interrupt that thought.
She was fine.
She had to be.
Keiran was sitting beside me, close enough that I could hear him breathing in the low orange glow of the lamp one of the girls had found in the equipment room.
He had barely spoken in the last half hour, which I appreciated.
I think we all just needed some time to think about everything that happened.
“The sound stopped,” the girl with the split lip said suddenly, to nobody in particular.
“Yeah,” someone else shifted.
“So do you think they’re gone?”
A long pause followed and I could feel everyone waiting for someone to answer that with something hopeful.
I wasn’t going to be the one to do it.
“I don’t know,” I offered.
“But if they were still out there we’d hear them, right? They were huge, they made noise, so if—”
“We don’t know that.” I wasn’t trying to be harsh about it.
“We don’t know enough about them to know what they do when they’re not shooting. So until we get more information, we sit tight.”
She went quiet.
The lamp flickered once and half the room flinched.
Marcus was against the far wall with his eyes closed and his head tipped back.
The colour had come back into his face in the last hour or so, which should have been straightforwardly good news.
I kept looking at his shoulder— at the patch of skin where the fabric had been burnt away, where that fluid had been.
Iridescent.
Teal and violet shifting under the surface like petrol on wet ground.
I’d seen it clearly.
I knew what I’d seen.
It wasn’t there anymore.
My brain wouldn’t stop snagging on that.
No matter how much I tried to forget it, something drew my attention back to it and unease prickled under my skin.
It seeped in.
Into what?
Into his skin?
Into his bloodstream?
That wasn’t possible.
That was— I didn’t have the biology for whatever that was and I sure as fuck didn’t have the framework for any of this.
“Hey.” Keiran’s voice was low.
“You’ve been staring at him for like five minutes.”
“I’m not staring.” I immediately looked away.
“You are.” He didn’t say it accusatorially.
“What are you thinking?”
I exhaled slowly through my nose and looked down at my hands instead.
“Nothing useful.”
He didn’t push it, thankfully.
Just leaned back against the wall.
*******
Joel— I learnt was his name— died at some point around what I estimated was the early afternoon.
I didn’t have a clock I trusted.
The lamp was fading.
But it felt like afternoon when his breathing changed— when it became that particular kind of shallow that stops sounding like breathing and starts sounding like something horrible— and Priya, who had been sitting beside him with her knee pressed to his since we got here, looked up at me with an expression that made my head spin.
Oh god.
He’d been semi-conscious since the blast.
Seventeen years old, one arm gone from the elbow, bleeding through the bandage around his stomach and for the last hour Priya had been talking to him in this low steady voice about their biology class, about a project they were supposed to hand in next week, about whether the café near campus had restocked the good sandwiches yet.
Just talking.
Like if she kept him hearing his name for long enough then he would stay.
He didn’t.
He just… stopped.
One moment his chest was moving and then it wasn’t and Priya sat there for what felt like a very long time before she made a sound that I will not be able to describe accurately for the rest of my life.
Someone across the room started crying quietly.
Then someone else.
The girl with the split lip pressed both hands over her mouth and stared at the ceiling and her shoulders shook.
Bile crawled up my throat.
A seventeen year old boy was dead on the floor of a gym and there was nothing to do about that except know it.
Keiran got up quietly and found a gym banner folded on a shelf at the back of the room.
He brought it over and covered Joel with it without asking anyone’s permission then he came back and sat down beside me and we didn’t speak for a long time.
The crying didn’t stop for a while.
That was okay.
It shouldn’t have.
Because it was right to mourn him for that long even if we didn’t know him personally.
My chest felt like something was sitting on it and God help me, I was trying not to burst into tears.
Later.
I kept making that deal with myself.
Later, when this is over, when everyone is somewhere safe.
Then I’d cry.
The dark hall remained silent for a while and then Keiran came back with a functioning radio.
He’d disappeared into the equipment room at the back with a boy named Demi who apparently knew something about electronics, and I’d watched them go without comment, mostly because the alternative was sitting still with my thoughts, and my thoughts were not great company right now.
My fingers were resting flat on my sternum and I was staring at the ceiling when Keiran came back through the door with a dusty hand-crank emergency unit.
I immediately dragged myself to my feet.
Thank fuck.
It took him another forty minutes to get a signal.
I didn’t watch.
I stared at my hands and I listened to Priya’s breathing even out incrementally from across the room.
I listened to the girl with the split lip— Emma, someone called her— ask Marcus if he wanted some water and Marcus say “yeah, thanks,” in a voice that sounded normal enough that I almost let myself relax.
Then the radio caught, and everyone’s head came up at once.
“—repeat, this is an emergency broadcast. All civilians remaining within the red zone perimeter are advised to evacuate immediately to designated assembly zones. The primary assembly zone for this district is Northgate Stadium, approximately four kilometres from the city centre. Military escort units are currently active on main roads. Civilians are strongly urged to begin moving now. A controlled aerial strike on the red zone has been authorised and will be executed in —”
Static swallowed the rest of the message but the implication was clear.
No one moved.
Then the radio came on again.
“— move now. This is not a drill.”
“Aerial strike, they’re going to bomb the whole —”
“Four kilometres, in what condition, have you seen what’s outside—”
“My parents are somewhere in this city —”
“Those machines could still be out there —”
“We’ll never make it four kilometres —”
“Enough.” I cut through the noise.
I stood up, ignoring the flare in my hip.
“The broadcast is telling us to move. That means moving is something people can survive. Staying here when they drop ordnance on this district is not. Those are the actual options. One of them is clearly better.”
A boy near the back made a sound that wasn’t quite agreement.
“You’re assuming those things are gone. You don’t know that.”
“No,” I said.
“I don’t. But the military does, and they’re telling civilians it’s safe enough to move. I’ll take that over waiting here.”
“You’re a college student, you know?”
I stared at him for a second.
“So are you. You want to stay, stay. But the rest of us are going.” I turned back to the group before he could say anything else.
“We listen to the broadcast again on the next cycle for the timing on that strike. We figure out who needs help moving and we sort that now. We keep the radio on us. When we move, we stay together, we stay low, and we don’t stop.”
Nobody argued.
Even the broad-shouldered boy didn’t argue again, which I took as the closest thing to consensus I was going to get.
We didn’t move immediately.
We listened to the broadcast two more times to confirm the location.
We tore strips from gym shirts to make rough slings for the two students who couldn’t use their arms.
Keiran quietly redid the cloth around my hip because apparently I’d gone slightly grey without noticing.
And then we waited, because that was all there was to do and the waiting was the worst part.
Worse than the fear, almost— the fear at least had a shape.
The waiting was shapeless.
It just sat on your chest heavily and didn’t move and let your brain fill in every possible version of what was happening outside, what had happened to the city, what was happening to the people you hadn’t heard from since this morning.
I sat with my back against the wall and my knees pulled up and I thought about my mum’s handwriting in texts.
The way she typed like she was dictating to someone slower than her.
“Will be home late from work. Do not order any pizza. Left some macaroni instead.” I thought about how I’d been mildly annoyed by that this morning.
How deeply, profoundly small that annoyance seemed now.
It couldn’t have been more than an hour since we’d settled back into waiting when Keiran shifted beside me and said quietly, “Hey. Marcus is fully awake.”
Oh.
I looked up.
Marcus had his eyes open and was looking at his own hands, turning them over slowly in the low light like he was checking something.
His fingers were moving and not intentionally or restlessly, but with a particular quality I couldn’t decide what it was.
A tremble, a pause.
A tremble, a pause.
“Marcus.” I kept my voice easy.
“How are you doing?”
He looked up.
“Fine,” he said.
“Yeah. I’m alright.”
“You sure? You look a bit—”
“I said I’m fine.”
I watched him for another moment and then I looked at his jaw.
It twitched.
Clenching as though he was fighting against something.
My blood ran cold.
Don’t look at his eyes.
But I looked at his eyes and my stomach dropped.
His pupils were wrong.
They were still.
Completely, unnaturally still.
Like whatever lived behind them had stopped running the simulation of normal.
“What?” He caught me looking and his mouth moved into something adjacent to a smile.
“Seriously, Avery, I’m fine. It’s just— it’s been a lot. It’s stress, yeah? Just stress.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Of course.”
I turned to Keiran but I didn’t touch him, just shifted slightly so my shoulder was angled toward him and I said, very quietly and casually, “Can you get everyone to start moving to the far end of the room? Tell them we’re making space near the door in case we need to move fast.”
Keiran looked at me then looked at Marcus before he looked back at me.
He didn’t ask a single question, he just got up and started quietly moving people, one hand on a shoulder here, a murmured word there, steering the group to the far wall without making it into a thing.
Marcus watched them go as the lamp between us flickered.
“Why is everyone moving away from me?” His voice was lower.
I didn’t answer but instead I stood up slowly as my fingers closed around the fire extinguisher that was sitting next to me.
Something was wrong.
“Avery.” He said my name the way you’d say a word in a language you’d just learned.
“Why is everyone moving away from me?”
“Marcus, just—”
“What the fuck is happening?” Emma’s voice shook behind me.
“Oh my god — what is wrong with him —”
“Emma.” I said it low and sharp without turning around.
“Stay back.”
“Marcus?” Someone else muttered, barely a whisper.
Marcus tilted his head and looked at the group behind me.
“I feel different,” he said, conversationally, like we were discussing the weather.
“That’s interesting.”
“Marcus, stay where you are —”
He stood up and I let out a choked gasp.
His spine was audibly wrong.
I don’t have a better way to say it than that— there was a sound as he rose, low and sequential, wet and it sounded like something being rearranged.
Someone behind me made a sound like they were going to be sick.
His head tilted slowly past the point where necks tilt.
Past the point of anything that should be possible, the angle just— continuing and I just stared.
Something behind his eyes was gone.
The look in his eyes was vacant.
Like someone who was in a new environment and didn’t know what to do with it.
His feet stumbled as he took a step forward.
Oh god.
I stumbled back.
His lips opened but instead of words, a snarl ripped out.
Behind me, the other students started screaming and scrambling for the door.