On Friday morning, Alex walked the broken cooler to work along Wall Road.
He'd walked this road every day for two years. This morning he could hear much more of it.
He could hear the night shift coming off the top of the East Wall, forty meters up. Boots on the metal walkway. Somebody coughing. A thermos lid being screwed on. Under it all, the wall lights hummed in their cages.
A Hunter truck came in through the east gate with a gray tarp tied over the back. Something under the tarp was still dripping. The drops left a dark dotted line down the middle of the road, and Alex could smell it from across the street. Wet fur, and hot metal.
His mouth watered.
'Eyes front. Don't look at it. Just get the cooler to Sam.'
Outside the pharmacy, the line for the autumn booster already ran past the tire shop. The poster in the window said PROTECT THE LINE in big white letters. Alex used to squint at that poster from the corner. Today he could read the small print at the bottom, from half a block away.
Paid for by the wall levy.
***
Sam's shop smelled like solder and old coffee. Alex put the cooler on the counter.
He'd washed it in his sink at three in the morning. The first water out of it ran pink with blood. Now the blue plastic was spotless, and the four claw marks across the bottom stood out bright white.
The four cuts on his own arm had scabbed over in the night. He'd pulled his sleeve down over them.
Sam picked up the two halves of the lid and tried to fit them together. They didn't fit anymore.
"Tell me what happened," he said.
"It was like this when I got there. On its side on the ledge. The meat was gone. Whatever got to it chewed right through."
Sam put one finger into a groove. His whole finger fit inside.
"Twelve years I've used that hatch," he said. "Nothing has ever touched the box. Did you see what did this?"
"No."
It was the first real lie Alex had ever told Sam. He'd practiced it on the stairs. He was a terrible liar, but this one came out easily, and that scared him.
"I heard a noise further down," Alex said. "So I came straight back up."
Sam rubbed the back of his neck. He came around the counter, took Alex's chin in one hand and turned his face toward the window.
Alex kept his lips pressed shut. His canines had grown longer that week, and nobody had seen them yet.
Sam's thumb rested on his jaw. Through it, Alex could feel Sam's pulse, slow and warm, about an inch from his mouth.
He could smell it, too. Tea, and soap, and under them, the smell of Sam's blood, warm under his skin.
His new teeth pressed into his lip so hard he tasted his own blood.
'That's Sam. That's SAM, you animal! Down!'
"You're not hurt," Sam said, and let go. "I sent a boy down a hole under the wall to swap a box for an envelope. Well, that's finished. From now on, the man leaves the box at my back door, in daylight."
He gave Alex the rest of the day off, paid.
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***
By bedtime the scabs had flaked off, and the skin under them was smooth. That night, Alex slept six hours straight, without waking once.
At the Residence, he'd been the boy still awake at four. Now he closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the green pharmacy cross had gone pale in the daylight.
He wasn't hungry. The hunger was quiet, and the feeding bar sat still.
31%
Toast still tasted like a picture of toast. He ate it anyway.
Late on Saturday night, he went for a run.
The trams had stopped, and Wall Road was empty and shining from the rain. He jogged past the pump house without looking at the green door, all the way to the Annex, the long gray building where the road bent along the wall.
Every window in the Annex was dark except one on the third floor. In it, a man in a paper gown stood with both hands on the glass, looking out at the city. He didn't move the whole time Alex ran past.
'Thirty days in there... is that what it looks like? Is that what they'd do with me?'
At the bend, he turned for home. A patrol truck passed him on the far side of the fence, going the same way.
Alex let it get a hundred meters ahead and stopped holding back.
He ran flat out. The wind dragged tears sideways out of his eyes. He caught the truck's tail lights, drew level with its cab and passed it. The driver was singing to his radio and never turned his head.
At the pump house Alex grabbed the green railings to stop. When he looked back, the truck's lights were still coming.
He'd run four kilometers. His breathing never changed.
Halfway home, he stopped and listened.
He could hear the harbor. Waves slapping against the sea wall, and a ship's chain running out. The harbor was six kilometers away.
He started laughing, alone on the empty road at half past midnight.
'Four kilometers... and I'm not even breathing hard. What am I turning into?'
Back home at one in the morning, he tried the I.Zombie boss that had killed him six times.
He beat it on the first try. Every attack showed in the boss's shoulder a full second before it came. Alex just waited and hit back.
LEVEL UP
He felt nothing.
His phone buzzed.
--moth--
FINALLY
A row of skulls came after it.
--Alex--
lol
He closed the game, with a feeling it might be the last time.
Every night that weekend, he lay still and listened for the soft voice that had said "Lexie" from the empty pillow. It never came back.
***
On Sunday, Alex finally met the man from upstairs.
For two years he'd only known him as work boots on the stairs at six in the morning. Since Tuesday, thanks to a thin ceiling and his new ears, he knew the man's name was Brett.
Alex smelled him before he saw him. Halfway up the stairwell, over the cabbage and floor polish, there was a warm, heavy smell, like a barn after rain.
Brett was two flights up, carrying a fridge.
A full-size fridge. On his back! It hung from a strap across his forehead, and he was bent nearly double, climbing one step at a time. The stair boards bowed under every step.
A woman in a tram conductor's jacket followed one step below him, one hand flat on the fridge door.
"Brett, you're on the corner. You'll scrape the paint."
"I can see the corner."
"You can't see anything. You've got a fridge on your head."
They stopped on Alex's landing so Brett could change his grip. He set the fridge down with a thump Alex felt in his shins.
Brett was twice as wide as Alex. The hair on his forearms was thick and dark, almost fur, and his fingernails were cut very short, like someone kept them that way on purpose.
Around his neck hung a blue lanyard with a plastic card. In Qasra, every family with monster blood in its line had to register and wear one.
REGISTERED: BEAST-BLOOD LINEAGE.
Along the bottom were twelve boxes, one for each monthly clinic check. Ten were stamped.
"You're Downstairs," the woman said. "I'm Lucy. You're the one who plays the shooting game at two in the morning."
"Sorry," Alex said. "I'll get headphones."
Brett was breathing in slowly through his nose. His brown eyes came to Alex's face and stayed there.
'He can smell it. Oh man... whatever I am now, it has a smell, and this guy can smell it.'
"You changed your soap," Brett said.
Alex had scrubbed his hands with dish soap five times since the tunnel. Mostly under the nails, to get the blood out.
"No," Alex said.
"Hm."
Brett bent down, got his forehead back under the strap, and lifted the fridge.
"If you ever need help with anything," he said from underneath it, "you knock on our door. Clinic papers, forms. I've done a lot of them."
Lucy followed him up. Alex stood on the landing until their door shut, his heart going hard.
***
On Monday morning, Alex stopped in the front hall by the mailboxes.
A yellow notice from the residents' committee had hung there since before he moved in. Today, he read all of it.
Registered occupants are reminded to notify the committee of any overnight guest of any lineage.
Beside it, someone had written 5B in ballpoint pen, with an arrow pointing up the stairs.
5B was Brett and Lucy's apartment.
'Who does that? Who stands in the hall with a pen and points at their neighbors?'
Alex lived one floor below them, in 4B.
He went back up the stairs and checked his own door, top to bottom, for ballpoint pen.