AVERY’S POV
It just hovered there.
The teal light swept the front of the building again and the whole house hummed with the frequency of it.
I stood with my back against the wall, my gun in both hands to stop them from trembling and watched the light move across the ceiling and thought, very clearly, oh we need to go right now.
“Up,” I said with urgency, already moving, grabbing my bag off the floor.
“Both of you, up, we’re leaving.”
They didn’t ask any questions.
We went down the stairs fast, me first.
I hit the ground floor and went straight for the back door, the one that opened onto the narrow alley behind the terrace, because the front of the building was lit up like a spotlight and going out the front would be the single stupidest thing I could do.
The back door had two bolts and I threw them both and kicked it open just as cold air hit me like a wall and I pulled them both through and we ran.
The alley spat us out onto a side street and I looked up before I looked anywhere else.
The rig was already rotating, already moving, tracking the alley from above with that teal light sweeping in a wide arc.
Shit.
I grabbed Joel’s sleeve and pulled him left and we ran harder.
“It’s following us!” Hannah gasped from behind me, her feet pounding against the pavement.
Well, didn’t I know that.
A shape lurched out of a doorway ahead of us and I didn’t even fully process it before I’d raised the gun and fired, and it went down, just as another one came around the corner behind it drawn by the noise — the fractured always came toward noise, that was the thing, the rig was making noise and we were making noise and now the street was filling from both ends.
You’ve got to be kidding me!
I fired again and grabbed Hannah’s arm and pulled her into a sprint down the only gap left between two collapsed shopfronts.
“There’s too many—” Joel panted.
“Keep moving!”
“If we could get to the underpass—”
“The underpass is three streets east and completely exposed to get there, so no!”
Something hit the wall above my head and I ducked and kept running, not looking up, not looking back, just running and thinking at the same time because that was apparently what my brain did now, thinking and running and being terrified all simultaneously without any of it slowing me down.
The rig wasn’t firing.
That was the thing that was sitting wrong in my head as I ran, the thing I couldn’t shake — it wasn’t firing, it was tracking, following us with that scanning light in this precise mechanical way that felt completely different from the first day, from the city-leveling indiscriminate destruction of the first day. Follow the newest chapters on novelping dot com.
Hannah swung something— I caught it in my peripheral vision, a metal bar she’d grabbed off the ground somewhere in the last thirty seconds— and hit a fractured across the face as it lunged at her, and it staggered back and she kept running without breaking stride.
The car park came up on the left, a multi-storey, four levels of concrete and steel and shadow, entrance ramp going down.
There was no other choice.
“In here, go, go —”
“In there?!” Joel screeched.
“Concrete above and below and hundreds of things between us and anything trying to track us, GO!”
We went down the ramp at a run, into the dim and the cold and the smell of oil and stale air, weaving between abandoned cars sitting exactly where their owners had left them two days ago when the world was still normal.
I pulled them behind a concrete pillar on the second level where we stopped and I pressed my back against it and looked up at the entrance with my heart racing.
The rig at the entrance was still hovering, filling the opening with that teal light, sweeping it once, twice, but not coming in.
The angles were wrong, it was too big or the ceiling was too low or something about the concrete was blocking whatever it was using to scan, and it just— stayed there, at the threshold while I watched it from behind the pillar and counted under my breath.
One.
Two.
Three.
Hannah was beside me with her hand pressed flat to the pillar and her chest heaving while Joel was on my other side and I could hear him trying to slow his breathing down the same way I was trying to slow mine.
Thirty.
Thirty one.
Thirty two.
It swept the entrance again.
The light moved across the cars, across the concrete floor, across the pillar we were behind, and I didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t do anything except count and breathe.
Four minutes.
I counted every second of it.
Then it moved.
Slow at first, like it was reluctant to go, and then faster, rising above the car park roof and moving north up the street, that subsonic hum fading with it, and the entrance went dark.
Holy shit.
Hannah made a sound next to me that wasn’t quite a laugh but rather relief that we weren’t still dead.
“Okay,” I said, mostly to myself.
“What the hell was that?” Hannah said, pressing both hands over her face for a second.
“I don’t know.” I stood up, struggling to brush stray strands of hair out of my face.
“It followed us specifically, it wasn’t just — it came after us when we ran, it was…” Hannah didn’t finish that statement.
Joel was watching me and he had this expression on his face that said he was thinking about something.
“It was looking for something,” he finally said.
“Yeah.” I furrowed my brows at him.
What I didn’t say was the thing I’d been thinking since the moment it stopped and rotated back.
It had passed over the whole street.
Over the fractured moving below it, over three other buildings, over two dozen abandoned cars, and it had stopped over us.
Over the specific rubble house where three specific people were sleeping.
What did that mean?
And why didn’t it kill us immediately?
Or was this particular one just for scanning?
I straightened up off the pillar, rolled my neck and was about to say we needed to find a position deeper in the structure to wait out the morning when I saw it.
In the shadows between two cars about thirty metres further into the car park.
Something was low to the ground and very still.
I brought the gun up immediately, putting my arm out to stop Hannah moving forward.
“What—” she started.
“Quiet.” I stared at it, trying to make out the shape in the dim, trying to figure out if it was fractured, if it was something worse, if whatever the rig had been following had somehow gotten in here ahead of us.
Suddenly the shadow moved again and I tensed as it stood up slowly, unfolding from the ground.
I kept the gun up and then I registered what I was looking at and my brain just— stopped for a second.
Not a fractured.
Small.
Very small, maybe ten years old, wearing what used to be a school uniform, navy blue jumper and grey trousers, filthy now, torn at the knee.
Standing between two cars in the shadows of the car park and staring at us with wide, terrified, completely human eyes.
A child.