"What the hell is that?" The boss was the first to recover, his eyes filled with undisguised fear of the unknown.
His attention had moved away from Charlotte entirely.
Lunallu stepped off the exposed floor. One chain shot towards the concrete below and tightened. Her descent slowed with it, boots touching the ground with barely enough force to disturb the dust. The faint Electra residue crawled beneath Lunallu's skin.
For all the ways civilisation had supposedly ended, the scene had become almost theatrical.
An unfinished construction site beneath a dead midnight sky. A tractor carrying a slab of torn-up road with an impossible metallic cube still embedded inside it. A bespectacled woman holding what looked, depending on the last few minutes, like a pen or a murder weapon. A group of construction workers armed with nail guns and sledgehammers.
And now a woman had descended from several storeys above on a glowing violet chain.
For the men surrounding them, spectacle had rapidly become uncertainty. People tended to be brave when they understood the rules. The problem came when something appeared that did not fit inside any of those previous victories.
I landed lightly.
The first thing I checked was the Doctor. Standing. Uninjured.
Then the woman beside him.
...Charlotte Holmes?
I recognised her from broadcasts, though seeing her in person made the resemblance almost exact. Round glasses. Yellow hair. That Stylus in her hand. And a smile worn by someone who had already decided she held the tactical advantage.
So that's her.
The Doctor had said very little over the relay.
Location. Numbers. Danger.
I straightened and let the chain retract around my arm.
Several of the men backed away. One did not. The large one near the tractor.
Boss, presumably. He recovered faster than the rest.
"The fuck are you supposed to be?"
I looked at him the same way I'd looked at countless inmates on their first day.
Pigs.
"We got twenty men here."
Someone behind him corrected quietly.
"Eighteen."
The boss turned.
"What?"
"Three came back late, boss. And—"
"Shut up."
"Rats are always predictable."
I thought I heard the detective mutter under her breath, as her smile widened.
The boss looked back at me.
"We've got the numbers."
He spread his arms. A man with a nail gun lifted it slightly.
"Don't think one chain gonna scare us."
Another laughed, though there was considerably less humour in it than before.
"We've handled people with guns."
"Yeah."
Someone near the back spoke up.
"Just pull them towards the infected like last time."
A few heads turned towards him.
"Idiot."
The man shut his mouth, as the boss stepped forward, face hardened.
"Look. We don't need trouble."
He pointed towards the cube.
"We want what's inside."
Then towards the Doctor.
"He opens it."
His eyes moved to Charlotte.
"And they leave what they've got."
Charlotte tilted her head.
"How about... no?"
One of the men laughed, "Fine. We'll take turns with you too."
"Last group didn't get this much talking. We just tied them up and—"
"Shut the fuck up."
The boss's interruption came quickly.
Just a bunch of low-lifes.
The Doctor's gaze moved across the group, as the boss lifted one hand.
"Enough."
Then he swung it down.
"Get them."
The first man rushed forward.
My chain moved before he finished his second step.
The violet length snapped across his chest and threw him sideways into a stack of timber.
Another raised the nail gun.
Charlotte's Stylus flashed in the corner of my eye.
A thin yellow arc crossed the darkness.
The man screamed and dropped the weapon, clutching his hand.
The Lumen Stylus.
Then everyone started moving at once.
A sledgehammer came from my right.
I caught the man's wrist with a chain before the swing reached its peak and pulled.
Something cracked. He screamed as his shoulder twisted behind him, the hammer dropping harmlessly onto the concrete.
Another charged the Doctor.
Flies.
The chain around my other arm snapped forward. It caught him across the throat. He left the ground. For half a second his legs kicked uselessly beneath him before I threw him into the side of the tractor hard enough to dent the panel.
He did not get back up.
Charlotte's Stylus flashed again.
A man clutching a crowbar stumbled backwards with the needle buried through his forearm. Before he could grab it, a yellow line pulled the weapon free and returned it to her hand.
"GET THEM!"
Someone fired the nail gun.
The Doctor ducked, but that was unnecessary. I interposed a chain.
Three nails struck violet light and dropped uselessly to the ground.
The man's confidence vanished. I stepped forward. The chain followed.
He ran. Others began doing the same.
[Charlotte Holmes has consumed Aporia.]
"Boss!"
"Fuck this!"
"Back! Back!"
The large man shoved one of his own people aside and bolted towards the rear fencing.
"Move! Retreat!"
I launched a chain after him.
"Wait." Someone caught my sleeve. Charlotte.
I looked down at her hand. My brows drew together before I could stop them.
The last of the fleeing men disappeared between the temporary fencing, their footsteps fading into the dark until even the crickets swallowed them. I missed the opportunity to kill the bastard.
"Why?" My voice came out sharper than I had intended.
Noticing that, she released me immediately, though that superficial smile remained.
"Luna. It's okay."
The Doctor's voice came from beside us.
I looked at him.
"..."
He looked towards Charlotte instead.
"You used your ability."
Ability?
Her smile brightened at the Doctor's words.
"You've noticed? Well..." She adjusted her glasses and watched the fleeing men disappear through the fencing.
"The idiot earlier mentioned tying up the last group. Now they're retreating together instead of scattering."
She pointed the Stylus lazily towards the darkness.
"A stronghold... somewhere nearby."
A pause.
"And hostages. There's a reasonable probability they're still alive."
Hostages.
My chain tightened instinctively.
"Then we should go now."
"No." Charlotte seemed almost delighted by my reaction to her refusal.
I didn't appreciate the feeling that she'd already led me to the answer she wanted.
This woman is annoying.
"If we catch them here, we catch a few frightened men."
Her eyes narrowed into crescents.
"If we let frightened men run home..."
She left the conclusion hanging.
Then she turned one hand palm-up, and eyed the Doctor.
He held it out voluntarily, as if expecting something.
Then...
!!! It surprised me.
The detective slipped her fingers between his. Their fingers interlocked completely.
I stared at their joined hands.
"...Is that necessary?"
Charlotte glanced at me over the rim of her glasses.
"It is necessary."
The emphasis felt suspiciously deliberate.
"...I see."
I did not.
"Rumination."
Yellow Photon bloomed between their interlocked fingers.
The Doctor slowly raised his gaze to somewhere through the fencing into the darkness.
I followed it.
Nothing.
"I don't see anything," I muttered.
The Doctor glanced at me.
"Luna, here—"
He held out his free hand.
I reached for it.
—The detective caught my raised hand and slipped her fingers between mine instead.
"..."
Our fingers were fully interlocked.
Charlotte smiled.
I squeezed my grip.
The corners of her mouth lifted.
...
Yellow Photon flickered between our joined hands before spreading coldly across my palm.
Something appeared.
A single thread.
So thin that my eyes lost it whenever I focused too hard, a faint yellow line stretched from our hands, through the fencing and farther into the dark streets beyond.
I narrowed my eyes.
Charlotte finally released me. The thread vanished from my sight with her touch.
"We'll follow close behind," she said.
We started moving. Slowly. Carefully. Yet something continued to bother me.
I glanced beside her. Charlotte was still holding the Doctor's hand.
"...You don't need to hold his hand anymore, do you?"
Charlotte lifted their joined hands slightly, as though only just remembering them.
"Oh, this...?"
The Doctor pulled his hand free. Charlotte let him. His fingers flexed once afterwards, and he gave her a look.
"Charlotte, you'll take the lead."
He gestured towards the road ahead.
"Luna and I will cover the flanks."
Charlotte adjusted her glasses.
"Of course, Doctor." She stepped ahead without complaint.
That smile was still there.
She absolutely noticed.
They ran until the unfinished towers were several streets behind them.
Nobody suggested slowing down.
The boss was ahead for most of it, one hand pressed against his side as he forced himself through an alley too narrow for two people abreast. Behind him came the surviving workers in an ugly line of boots, ragged breathing and occasional swearing.
"What the fuck were they?"
"Keep moving."
"Boss, that chain—"
"I said keep moving!"
A man near the rear looked over his shoulder for perhaps the sixth time.
Nothing followed.
That somehow made the nerves worse.
The yellow-haired one had thrown what looked like a pen through somebody's arm and called it back into her hand each time like a boomerang. The other woman was worse. She had caught a burst of nails on a glowing chain, then moved those chains like they were extensions of her own arms and legs. They snapped, twisted and changed direction with impossible precision. Purple-white electricity ran along them whenever they struck, bright enough to bleach the darkness for an instant.
Some of the men had collapsed before they even understood they had been hit. A few never moved again.
None of them had a useful explanation for what they had seen.
"She fucking lifted Han."
"Shut up."
"She lifted him off the ground!"
"SHUT UP!"
Their route became stranger the farther they went.
They avoided the main roads entirely, slipping instead through the back of an abandoned hardware warehouse, climbing over a concrete drainage divider and crossing an empty service yard behind a row of condemned flats.
To anyone unfamiliar with the redevelopment works, it led nowhere.
That was partly the point. Long before the outbreak, the entire district had been a maze of temporary access routes, contractor gates and sections of land that changed shape every few months. Pedestrian paths became loading zones. Loading zones became trenches. Walls appeared where roads used to be, then disappeared again once the next phase began.
Most people living nearby barely knew which entrances were still open. The men who had built them did. They knew which stretches of hoarding had gaps hidden behind stacked materials. Which service corridors connected two otherwise separate plots. Which temporary staircases had never appeared on any public map.
More importantly, they knew how to change them. A sheet of corrugated steel could become a wall. Scaffolding could become a watchtower. Rebar could become a gate. A forklift, parked sideways in the right place, could make a road unusable.
Construction was usually the slow process of turning an empty place into somewhere people could live. Given sufficiently bad circumstances, the same skills worked just as well in reverse.
The boss finally raised one hand.
"Here."
They disappeared behind a row of precast drainage sections that looked as though they had simply been abandoned beside the road.
One of the men squeezed between two of them and reached into the gap beyond.
Metal scraped. A narrow section of fencing shifted inward.
"Quick."
They passed through one at a time.
From the outside, there was almost nothing worth noticing. A dead-end worksite. Torn safety banners. Rusting machinery. Piles of materials left exactly where contractors had abandoned them. Beyond the false dead end, however, the site descended.
A temporary vehicle ramp ran between retaining walls towards the lower levels of what should eventually have become an underground loading bay. Most of the entrance had been blocked with concrete barriers. Sheets of reinforcement mesh had been welded together behind them, leaving only a narrow gate wide enough for a person to pass.
Someone above called down.
"Who is it?"
"It's us!"
A torch appeared over the edge.
There was a pause.
"Where's everyone else?"
Nobody answered immediately.
The boss looked up.
"Open the fucking gate."
Locks began moving.
The moment the gap was wide enough, they pushed through.
Only once the mesh slammed shut behind them did one man finally bend over, hands braced against his knees.
Another sat directly on the concrete.
"Fuck..."
"Water."
"Someone get water."
"What happened?"
People had begun emerging from deeper inside the half-finished level.
More workers. A few men who clearly had never worked construction at all.
Faces turned towards the returning group.
Then towards the empty gate behind them.
"Where's Seng?"
No answer.
"Where's Marcus?"
The boss snatched a bottle from someone's hand and drank half of it before throwing the rest aside.
"Nobody goes outside."
"What?"
"Nobody."
Someone laughed nervously.
"Why? More infected?"
The boss stared at him.
"No."
That answer brought less relief than it should have.
One of the returning men rubbed at his face.
"Boss..."
"Let me think for one goddamn second."
"Boss... those people aren't normal."
The room went quiet.
His voice had cracked on the last word.
Somewhere beyond the temporary partitions deeper inside the stronghold, something metallic shifted. Then came a sound much softer than the argument. A chain rattling against a pipe.
A few heads turned towards the sound.
The boss did too.
Beyond the temporary plywood partitions, the loading bay had been divided into spaces that were never meant to be rooms. Site offices had been dragged together and reinforced with welded mesh. Tarpaulins hung from scaffolding poles for privacy. Extension cables ran overhead from a portable generator, feeding a handful of work lights that left everything beyond them in thick shadow.
One section had been fenced off entirely.
A man standing guard there glanced towards the boss.
"One of them moved."
"Then tell them to shut up."
The guard struck the mesh with the length of pipe in his hand.
"Oi!"
The rattling stopped.
Nobody behind the partition answered.
Normally, that would have been enough.
Tonight, the boss kept staring at the enclosure for several seconds longer than necessary.
"How many are still there?"
The guard blinked.
"What?"
"Inside."
"Er..."
He looked back.
"Nine? Ten?"
"You don't fucking know?"
"Ten, I think. Two from yesterday, then those people we brought back from the flats—"
"Count them."
The order came quickly.
The guard hesitated before unlocking the outer section and disappearing behind the partition.
One of the returning men finally looked up.
"Boss, what are we doing?"
"Thinking."
"What if they followed us?"
"They didn't."
"How do you know?"
That earned him a stare.
He looked away. The boss wiped sweat from his forehead. They had chosen this place because nobody could simply stumble into it. The outer roads were wrong on purpose. Barricades redirected anyone approaching from the obvious direction. Sections of fencing had been shifted until old pedestrian routes became dead ends. The only usable entrances were through service passages, temporary access lanes and gaps between structures that made sense only if someone already knew the construction sequence.
Even the infected had trouble reaching them.
Especially after the men figured out how to manipulate them.
Noise somewhere else. A generator started at the right moment. A metal sheet dropped from a rooftop. A vehicle horn jammed down and abandoned. Let the infected gather where they wanted them. Then close the route home. It had worked on scavengers and armed survivors. Once, it had even worked on a small EDF patrol they had lured in with cries for help.
The boss had kept their rifles afterwards. He looked towards one of them now. It rested against the wall beside the site office. For the first time since taking it, the weapon seemed very ordinary.
"Boss."
The guard returned.
"Ten."
"All there?"
"Yeah."
A pause.
"Three women. Seven men."
"Move them farther inside."
The guard frowned.
"Why?"
The boss grabbed the rifle and pointed the muzzle at his subordinate's head.
"Move!" he barked.
"A-Alright! I'll go!" The guard backed away quickly before disappearing behind the partition again.
Another worker looked towards the entrance.
"You think those freaks are coming here?"
Nobody corrected the word.
"They come here, we deal with them here."
"How?"
Silence. It was not meant as a challenge.
The boss checked the magazine anyway.
"We know this place."
He looked around at the concrete walls, welded gates and scaffolding platforms.
"We've built our kingdom here. You think they'll beat us that easily?"
Pausing for breath. Then, his eyes glistened with ambition.
"Look outside."
Nobody interrupted him.
"Government's gone. Police are gone. Half the EDF is either dead, hiding or running around pretending someone still gives a shit about orders."
He struck a fist against his chest.
"But we're still here."
His voice grew louder.
"Because this world doesn't belong to the wealthy elites anymore."
He pointed the rifle towards the ceiling.
"It belongs to men like us. Men strong enough to take something and keep it."
A few of the men straightened. Others exchanged grins. None seemed particularly troubled by what that implied.
"This place is only the start."
His gaze moved around the stronghold again, but this time he seemed to be looking at something larger than concrete and scaffolding.
"Food. Fuel. People. Weapons. Territory. We take enough, and eventually everyone around here either works for us..."
The rifle lowered.
"...or dies by our hands."
Someone laughed. The boss grinned.
"I'm not letting two freak women show up and ruin everything we've built."
He checked the magazine.
"They want to come here?"
A round clicked into the chamber.
"Then this is where they learn whose world they're standing in."
The place came alive.
"You heard him!"
Men scattered through the loading bay.
Someone dragged a crate of tools towards the upper scaffolding. Another pair began shifting concrete barriers with a pallet jack, closing off one of the narrower approaches. The excavator coughed twice before its engine finally caught, filling the underground level with diesel fumes and a low mechanical rumble.
"Get the generator on the east side ready!"
"Why?"
"If they come through there, we start it and pull the infected towards the road!"
"What about us?"
"We close the shutter before they get here!"
That answer earned considerably more confidence. A familiar plan that had given them enough confidence to pull it off again. The boss sat on a bench and shut his eyes as his men prepared.
"That's right... come, you fuckers."
He spat onto the concrete.
"Let's see how pretty those two bitches look when they're crawling."
Deeper inside, behind the temporary partitions, the hostages could hear every word.
The guard returned carrying a ring of keys.
"Up."
Nobody moved.
He struck the mesh with the pipe.
"I said get up!"
Chains shifted against concrete.
Ten figures slowly began to rise. Some needed longer than others.
Their wrists had been bound together with plastic ties, rope and, in two cases, actual chain taken from somewhere on the site. Nobody had been given much water. Nobody had been allowed close enough to the exits to work out exactly how far underground they were.
The guard unlocked the mesh gate and pointed the pipe towards the passage beyond.
"Move."
A middle-aged man went first.
Then another.
The three women were pushed into the middle of the group.
The youngest one among them stumbled when the person behind stepped on the heel of her shoe.
"Oi. Faster."
She caught herself against the wall before the guard could touch her.
"I'm moving."
Her voice was quiet and tired.
The guard gave her a look and raised the pipe slightly.
She looked back at him.
"Eyes down."
She lowered them.
The prisoners were marched deeper into the unfinished level.
Past stacks of insulation wrapped in plastic. Past coils of cable, cement bags hardened by damp, and pallets of tiles that would probably never reach the apartments they had been ordered for. Temporary fluorescent lamps hung overhead at uneven intervals, turning every face pale whenever someone passed beneath one.
The woman counted the turns.
Left.
Down a short ramp.
Right at the generator room.
Another left where the ceiling dropped lower.
She had been doing that since the first day.
It had not helped yet.
But there was very little else to do when people took away your phone, your bag, your shoestrings and eventually your sense of time.
Behind them, the stronghold grew louder. Metal scraped across concrete. Men shouted measurements to one another. An engine revved somewhere above.
"Push it more!"
"Cannot already!"
"Then brace the fucking thing!"
She slowed for half a step.
"Keep moving."
The woman had noticed the change before the others. These men were usually loud because they enjoyed being loud. There was a difference between that and what she was hearing now. Too many orders. Fear had a rhythm of its own. The woman glanced towards one of the other hostages beside her.
He had noticed too.
"What happened?" he whispered.
She barely moved her lips.
"Something scared them."
"EDF?"
"Don't know."
The pipe struck the wall beside them.
"No talking!"
They fell silent.
The new holding area was farther inside than the first.
It had probably been intended as a storage room once. Three concrete walls, one temporary partition and no windows. Steel reinforcement bars protruded from an unfinished section of ceiling. Someone had welded mesh across the only proper doorway and threaded a construction chain through it for good measure.
The guard shoved them inside.
"Sit."
Nobody argued. The gate closed. Chain through mesh. Padlock. Then another. He tested both before leaving.
The woman waited until his footsteps had disappeared.
"Everyone okay?"
A few murmured answers came back. One man sat against the wall and cradled two swollen fingers. Another had dried blood down the side of his face. The youngest-looking hostage hugged her knees and said nothing.
The woman moved towards the mesh.
"Don't," someone whispered.
"I'm just listening."
She crouched near the gate. Beyond the corridor, voices carried through the concrete.
"...not normal."
"...two women..."
"...chain..."
"...killed them..."
She frowned.
Someone behind her gave a humourless laugh.
"Sounds like they finally robbed the wrong people."
The woman remained near the mesh, listening. More shouting carried through the concrete. Orders to seal entrances. Prepare machinery. Make noise outside if necessary. Draw the infected towards whoever was coming. She knew the pattern all too well.
It was the same tactic that had broken her squad. The same confusion of blocked routes, redirected noise and infected flooding in from the wrong direction. By the time they'd realised what was happening, most of them were already dead.
She was the only one from her EDF squad still alive.
Her fingers slowly curled around the cold wire.
Whoever was out there, the men were terrified of them.
That should have felt reassuring. Instead, hope came with its own kind of fear. Would they even find this place? If they did, would they bother searching farther inside? Would they know there were prisoners behind the concrete and mesh? And even if they found them, there was nothing yet to say that whoever was coming was any better than the people already holding them.
The outbreak had changed ordinary men quickly. Or perhaps it had simply given some of them permission to become what civilisation had once forced them to hide. Either way, there was very little civilisation left down here to protect her.
The woman lowered her forehead against the wire. Her wrists were raw beneath the bindings. Her shoulders ached. Hunger had long since settled into a dull emptiness, and exhaustion had left her body heavy enough that even standing for too long made her legs tremble. None of that was what frightened her most. She had heard enough of the men talking earlier to know what they intended for tonight. First came whatever supplies they could take from the stranger outside. Afterwards, their attention would return to the prisoners.
To the women.
To her.
She swallowed and forced the thought away before it could finish forming. There had been a point, sometime after her squad died and she was dragged underground, when she had stopped expecting anybody to come.
Expectations hurt more when they failed.
Her fingers tightened around the mesh.
She didn't know who was coming.
She didn't know whether they were good people.
She didn't even know whether they knew she existed.
But someone was coming.
And for tonight, that was enough to make her hope again.