Three nights on and Marcus still hadn’t slept a full shift.
He’d been riding the Holding Sense across every hour of dark, walking the perimeter at midnight, checking the east barricade at two, standing the cold stretch before dawn when the dead were quietest and the living were boldest, and his body was starting to keep a ledger he couldn’t pay.
His eyes were gritty.
His hands had developed a fine tremor that matched Dell’s.
The overlay’s hum was blurring at the edges, thin and crackling like a radio signal pushed past its range.
The service bay was cold.
Dell was working by lamplight, a single bulb wired to a car battery and rigged with electrical tape and hope, his hands steady on the generator housing, his voice a low mutter that had been running for three days straight.
“Brushes are shot. Armature’s got a flat spot. Compression’s weak on the second cylinder. I can keep it coughing but I can’t make it run without parts I don’t have.”
“We’ll find parts,” Marcus said.
“Where? The depot you didn’t take? Cutter’s band?” Dell didn’t look up from the generator.
His voice was fraying at the edges, thin and sharp, the voice of a man who’d been holding on to something and was starting to lose his grip.
“The walls aren’t going to hold. You know that, right? The east barricade’s got a hinge I fixed twice already and it’s still not right. The west is walker-thick every night. The south’s open ground and we’ve got nothing on it but chain-link and a prayer. We’re six people holding a block that needs eight, and the one thing that might make this place worth holding, the water, is twenty feet under dirt we can’t dig through because we’re too busy patching holes.”
“Dell.” Marcus crouched beside him.
The mechanic’s face was pale in the lamplight, the lines around his eyes deeper than they’d been a week ago.
“What do you need?”
“I need someone to tell me the walls will hold.” Dell’s voice cracked on the last word.
He set the wrench down on the housing, careful, like it was the last steady thing he had.
“I need someone who knows. Not someone who thinks. Not someone who hopes. Someone who can stand at the east barricade and feel whether it’s going to fail before it does. And that’s you. And you can’t be everywhere. So either the walls hold without you, and they don’t, or you don’t sleep, and you burn out, and then nobody can feel anything.”
“I’ve held it three nights.”
“You’ve held it three nights on no sleep, and your hands are shaking the same as mine, and you think that’s a coincidence.” Dell picked the wrench back up, turned it over, set it down again without using it.
“I fix engines for a living. I know what a part looks like right before it fails. It doesn’t look broken. It looks tired.”
The Holding Sense flared at the north wall: a pressure, a presence, something testing the barricade where the fender met the chain-link.
Marcus straightened and turned toward it, his body responding before his mind had finished processing the read.
“See?” Dell’s voice followed him out of the bay.
“That. That right there. You feel something and you go. You don’t even think about it. And I’m supposed to believe this place works without you?”
Marcus didn’t answer.
He was already walking the north wall, chasing the pressure, the overlay narrowing to a single point of heat at the fender-line.
A walker, just one, a man in what had been a postal uniform, his bag still slung across his shoulder, was pressing against the barricade with the mindless, patient persistence of the dead.
Marcus put him down with the tire iron: one clean blow to the temple, the body slumping against the fender, the bag’s contents rattling loose against the metal, and the pressure faded.
The north wall was clear.
The Holding Sense flickered and went quiet.
That was one.
There could be more.
There could be more and I might not feel them.
The Sense is getting thin.
I’m getting thin.
He was still crouched by the fender, wiping the tire iron clean on his jeans, when Hollis Pruitt came up the line with a tin cup in each hand, steam curling off the top of both.
“Figured you’d be here.” Hollis held one cup out.
“Broth. Not much, but it’s hot, and hot’s most of what it’s good for.”
Marcus took it.
His hands were cold enough that the tin burned before it warmed.
“Thanks.”
“When’d you eat last?”
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s not an answer either.” Hollis crouched next to him, easy, unhurried, already decided this conversation was happening whether Marcus wanted it or not.
“Ran a diner before all this. Guy comes in looking like you look right now, I’d cut him off the coffee and send him home. You don’t run on empty. Body doesn’t care how good your gut feeling is if there’s nothing behind it.”
“The wall needs watching.”
“The wall needed watching an hour ago too, and you watched it, and you’ll watch it again in an hour, and you’ll keep doing that until you fall down. I’m not telling you to stop. I’m telling you eat the broth and sit still for five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
Marcus drank.
The broth was thin, mostly salt and whatever Hollis had scrounged, but it was warm going down and his stomach reminded him, sharp and sudden, that it had been ignored for a long time.
Hollis watched him drink like he was checking a gauge.
Sam Okafor found him at the north wall an hour later.
The ex-deputy had been walking his own patrol: the south approach, where the chain-link was weakest, and his face in the thin moonlight was tired and careful and completely unreadable.
“You need to build a rotation,” Sam said.
“A real one. Four-hour shifts, six people, you’re not on all of them. You sleep. We watch.”
“The Sense —”
“The Sense doesn’t work if you’re too exhausted to read it. You’re burning yourself out, and you’re burning out Dell, and the whole settlement is starting to look at you like you’re the only thing between them and the dead. That’s not a settlement. That’s a cult of one man. And I’ve seen how that ends.”
“Give me a night. One more night, and I’ll think it through.”
“You said that yesterday.”
“I know what I said.”
“Then you know it wasn’t true.” Sam’s voice didn’t rise.
It never did.
“Hollis feeds you, I watch you fall asleep standing at the fence post, and you still won’t hand off two of six hours. That’s not caution, Marcus. That’s not trusting anybody with the thing that matters.”
Marcus turned the words over in his head.
He’s right.
The math says he’s right.
Six people, four-hour shifts, I take two instead of six.
But if I’m asleep and the wall fails —
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.”
Sam held his gaze, long enough that the silence between them turned into its own kind of answer.
Then he nodded: the same cop’s nod Marcus had seen before, the one that meant I’m filing this away and I don’t like what I’m filing, and walked back toward the station without another word.
The night stretched.
The cold deepened.
The Holding Sense narrowed to a single loud pressure at the north wall: the postal walker’s body, maybe, drawing more dead to the smell, and Marcus, chasing it, never felt the breach opening low and unremarked behind him at the east.
A hinge he’d waved off as good enough.
A section of barricade he’d refused to let Dell check because Dell was already fraying.
The ground giving at exactly the point he’d stopped watching.
Somewhere past the third hour of no sleep, the overlay flickered and a line of text surfaced at the edge of his vision, small and cold and utterly without comfort:
SOUL DELL: MORALE THIN.
THE WALLS, UNBELIEVED, WILL NOT HOLD.
The mechanic was starting to stop believing.
And Marcus, riding the Sense alone into the fourth hour of a night he should have split six ways, was too tired to notice.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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By order of the Crown.
The royal vault holds chapters the public throne room has yet to receive.
Long live the Kingdom.