AVERY’S POV
“Marcus, stop. Stop, okay? Just— Marcus, look at me.” My hand shot out and I took a step back.
He didn’t stop and he didn’t look at me, not really, because whatever was doing the looking wasn’t him anymore and I think I’d known that from the moment his spine made that sound.
The eleven people behind me were screaming and someone was grabbing at my arm but I shook them off and took a step back and said his name one more time, loud, the way you’d try to wake someone up but he tilted his head at that wrong angle again and took another step forward.
That was it, that was the last second where I had a choice about it.
I gripped the fire extinguisher and swung.
I kept swinging until he went down and then I kept going a little longer than that because I was terrified and my body didn’t know how to stop once it had started.
The screaming behind me had gone to this awful pitch that I could feel in my bones, and then the room went quiet all at once.
I was standing there with the extinguisher still in both hands, my chest heaving and everything was very still.
Oh god.
I turned away from everyone and pressed my fist hard against my mouth, breathed through my nose and waited for my stomach to stop lurching.
It took a while, longer than I wanted, and my hands were shaking badly enough that I could see it without looking for it.
I wiped them on my jeans anyway and turned back around.
Emma was crying so hard she’d stopped making sound and someone in the corner was throwing up and Keiran was just standing there looking at me but I couldn’t deal with his face right now so I looked at the wall behind him instead.
“We need to move,” I said, and my voice came out wrong so I cleared my throat and tried again.
“Second floor. Grab the radio, grab the lamp, grab the water, and let’s go right now.”
“Avery—” Keiran started.
“Now, Keiran.”
Nobody argued and we moved.
Twenty minutes later we were in a storage room on the second floor with a shelving unit dragged across the top of the stairwell and the door blocked and everyone sitting on the floor in the low orange light of the lamp.
I sat down against the wall and pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes and just breathed.
One two three, one two three, while around me people cried quietly and someone kept saying, “oh my god” under their breath over and over again like a prayer that wasn’t working.
“Is he actually dead?” someone asked.
I dropped my hands.
“Yes.”
“But was he still— like, was it still Marcus when you—”
“No, I think it’s the stuff I saw on his skin that caused it,” I said, firmly enough that nobody pushed it, partly because I needed that to be true and partly because I’d looked into his eyes right before and whatever had been looking back wasn’t him.
That was the only thing keeping me from losing it completely on this floor.
I just… killed someone.
Or at least what used to be someone.
“What even happened to him?” Hannah said, and her voice was flat, like she was trying to keep it controlled.
“That stuff on his skin, what was that?”
“I don’t know.”
“So it could happen to any of us, we were all out there, any of us could have —”
“Hannah, I don’t know, okay?” I said it as evenly as I could manage.
“I don’t have answers right now, none of us do, so can we just focus on what’s in front of us.”
“What is in front of us?” Theo cut in from across the room, and his voice had an edge that was really just barely held together panic looking for somewhere to land.
“Because from where I’m sitting we have no signal, no way to contact anyone, those things are still possibly out there and our plan is based on a radio broadcast that cut out halfway through telling us the actual plan, so—”
“So we move to Northgate like the broadcast said,” I told him.
“That’s the plan.”
“Based on what, your gut feeling?”
“Based on the federal emergency broadcast, Theo!”
“And if those machines are still active between here and Northgate?”
“Then we find cover and we wait for a gap and we keep moving,” I said.
“What’s your alternative, stay here and wait for the airstrike they mentioned?”
He didn’t have an answer for that, so he went quiet and stared at the floor instead and the room settled back into that terrible breathing silence that I was starting to hate more than the noise.
Keiran shifted next to me and kept his voice low.
“You’re shaking.”
“I know, I’m aware, thanks.”
“That’s not what I— I’m not criticising you, Avery, I’m asking if you’re okay.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again and looked at the ceiling for a second before I answered him, because the honest answer was that I had no idea, I had absolutely no framework for how okay or not okay I was right now, and saying “I’m fine” felt so spectacularly wrong that I couldn’t even get it out.
“Ask me when we get to Northgate,” I said finally, and he nodded, didn’t push it but instead handed me a water bottle from somewhere and I drank from it without tasting anything.
Priya hadn’t said a word since the basement and I kept glancing at her but she kept staring at the same patch of floor with her arms around her knees so I left her alone because there was nothing I could say that would be worth saying.
About an hour after that, when the crying had died down to something quieter and Demi had gotten the radio cycling through frequencies again without any luck with Theo had stopped asking questions out loud even though I could see him still forming them, I stood up and told Keiran I was doing a sweep of the corridor.
“I’ll come with you,” he said immediately.
“No, stay here, keep the radio going, if it catches anything write down exactly what it says.”
“Avery, going alone is—”
“Keiran.” I looked at him.
“Stay here.”
He didn’t look happy about it but he sat back down and I picked up the fire extinguisher before I remembered and then I put it back down slowly and grabbed the lamp instead.
Theo opened his mouth but when I looked at him, he closed it again and I slipped out before anyone else could say anything.
The east corridor on the ground floor was dark and smelled like smoke that had drifted in through the cracked windows, and I moved fast with the lamp low so the light didn’t carry too far, I didn’t let myself think about anything except the next door and the next corner until I got to the campus security office at the end of the hall.
It had been ransacked, door hanging open, filing cabinet on its side, desk swept clean, and I walked straight through all of it to the back room without stopping because I wasn’t here for any of that.
The safe was still locked and I let out a breath when I saw it.
I crouched in front of the keypad and typed in the override sequence from memory, because my dad had sat on the edge of my bed when I was fifteen and walked me through this exact scenario once, with his hands clasped and his voice doing that careful measured thing it did when he was saying something he needed me to actually retain, and he’d said, “if you’re ever on campus and something goes wrong, here’s what you look for and here’s what you do,” and I had rolled my eyes at the time because I was fifteen and invincible and the world had not yet demonstrated otherwise.
The safe clicked open.
One handgun.
Two spare magazines.
And a radio, newer and cleaner than the one upstairs, and it was already on and already crackling with a man’s voice speaking in a flat military cadence, rattling off coordinates.
I grabbed it, adjusting the frequency until it settled.
“— mutation confirmed in sector four, all units maintain distance from affected civilians, I repeat, do not approach affected civilians, they are no longer —”
Static.
Then silence.
I stayed crouched on the floor with the radio in one hand and the gun in the other and the word “mutation” just sat there in my head and I thought about the fluid on Marcus’s shoulder.
I thought about his fingers twitching and his jaw moving wrong and his eyes going still, and then I thought about the city outside and how many people had been standing in that car park when those things opened fire and how much of that fluid could have touched how many people, and whether anyone else in this city right now was starting to feel different.
Whether the eleven people waiting for me upstairs were all still just people.
I stood up slowly, put the gun in the waistband of my jeans, pocketed the spare magazines, and held onto the radio.
Then I went back upstairs.