The door bangs open and warm dorm air hits the booze on his breath. Sweat, instant noodles, a hint of wet laundry. Someone whistles.
Rhett Vale kills the light with his thumb and lets the door finish its swing. He breathes through his mouth until the heat in his cheeks cools, seals the rubber sweep tight to the concrete, and drags the steel shutter down over the bay window until it bites the floor. Sun stripes vanish. The room becomes a cave that knows its shape.
A low rotor-saw starts far off and fattens. Rhett is on the roof with a pry bar before the instinct finishes being born. The helicopter claws along the western line, too low, too hungry. He whips an orange rag on a length of pipe.
Inside the cabin, a young woman in a headset presses her palm to the window as if touching the roof will let the machine crouch and take weight. The pilot doesn't look at her. He's watching the gauges. The suited man beside them tips his chin with a bored little smile.
'Mr. Wynn?' the pilot asks. 'We've got a—'
'Fantasy,' the man says. 'Who has time to save the poor?'
The girl's mouth tightens. The pilot keeps his jaw locked. The helicopter tips forward and surges past. As it becomes a toy against the bruise-dark shelf of cloud, a wrong glint skims the edge of that weather like a knife flashing where it shouldn't.
Rhett bolts back down the stairs. He mists the stairwell to scrub his scent, kills power he doesn't need, and checks for glow. The room remembers how to be blind.
Beep-beep. 18:45.
Twilight blinks. Night drops like a lid. Whispers travel the alleys. Far away, something screams like a blade dragged the wrong way through steel and then stops dead. The quiet that follows has weight.
He lays dinner out in a neat row: fish, fruit, water, a brick of noodles he softened over a camping stove. Candle breath licks the tin. He eats, cleans the knife, seals wrappers so the room doesn't smell like him, and hauls his backpack up onto the table.
Food isn't what fills it. Junk is. A Bluetooth speaker with the grille ripped away. Three dead phones. A shaver cracked at the hinge. A hair dryer scuffed pale along one flank. Junk, if you don't know better. Treasure, if you can eat machines.
He sets the speaker on a metal plate and lays his palm over it.
Heat crawls from his wrist into his eyes and draws a bright, impossible diagram. Hair lifts on his arms as if the charge in the air turned and pointed at him. The world threads itself for the length of a breath, then unthreads. The speaker slumps into a fist of brown ash that slides across the plate.
[DEVOUR: SUCCESS][MECHANICAL SOURCE +1][MECHANICAL DEVOUR PROFICIENCY +1][BONUS: STRENGTH +1]
He blinks the pane away before the glow has time to find a crack under the door. Shaver. Phone. Phone. Dust heaps, then burns cold in a ceramic cup.
[CURRENT: MECHANICAL HEART LV.1 176/500][STRENGTH: LV.1 22/50][SPEED: LV.0 28/30][DEFENSE: LV.0 15/30][MECHANICAL DEVOUR LV.1 265/300][MECHANICAL FABRICATION LV.1 112/300][MECHANICAL SCAN (PASSIVE)][MECHANICAL REPAIR (PASSIVE)][MECHANICAL OPERATION (PASSIVE)]
The hair dryer is last. Warm from the day. A pale scar where a logo used to be. He settles his pulse, presses his hand to the intake, and lets that new sense map the guts: fan, coils, cheap solder. Ozone nips his nose. The dryer collapses into dust.
[DEVOUR: SUCCESS][MECHANICAL SOURCE +1][MECHANICAL DEVOUR PROFICIENCY +1][BONUS: NEW SKILL ACQUIRED][WIND CANNON: LV.1][DESCRIPTION: CONDENSE AIR AT THE FINGERTIP AND RELEASE INSTANTLY, CAUSING LIMITED DESTRUCTIVE FORCE.]
He sights along his index finger at a seam in the couch cushion. No waste. No light. The air on his fingertip tightens.
A dry pop cracks the room.
The cushion erupts inward. Feathers burst white and drift like slow snow. His finger goes winter-cold, bone-deep. He kneads warmth back into the knuckle and waits. The building groans once. A pipe sings and then forgets its song. Nothing claws the door. Nothing tests the window bolts.
Two months ago thirteen circular zones opened around the world and began to eat light. Officials called the mouths Star Abyss. Everyone else named the outward creep Dark Tide because that is what it does: it comes outward on a schedule, every other day, eating a few hundred kilometers of afternoon until whole regions fall into Polar Night.
Under Polar Night, weather breaks. Things infect things. The dead turn unreliable. The Deep sends strangers up into the empty spaces between buildings. Millions used to live in Grayhaven. Twenty-one straight days of night turned it into a pressure cooker and then a graveyard. The ones left now are stubborn, trapped, monstrous, or all three.
He sweeps feathers with a square of cardboard into a bag and ties it tight. No carbon dust on the table. No footprints in ash. He sprays the baseboards and the gap under the door. He pours the black water slow so the silence keeps its shape.
The radio finds a dozen bad ideas and two that might be worse.
'Head east. Northwest and southwest monitoring teams lost. Repeat - head east.'
'Oasis convoy, founded by Esper Luke Wade, wheels up tomorrow sixteen hundred, Walmart White District. Ages sixteen to fifty, good health. Old, young, and infirm - do not come. If you bring firearms or large stores, you may bring one family member.'
'Ironvale Bunker welcomes all Espers - and beauties. We're rooted in the military facility below the ridge. Headcount three hundred. Departments tight. We can hold through Polar Night.'
'I'm in Cedar Grove A Block, unit 1304. Stocked to the ceiling. Special modifications. Girls sixteen to thirty only. No uglies.'
'Andrew is the envoy sent by the Creator to cleanse evil thoughts. Repent and join Elysium Parish. Donate water, food, and pure maidens, and the God of Salvation will spare the faithful. For deliverance, contact - '
'I'm Professor Ward, Grayhaven Research Institute. By my calculations this city will be swallowed again in five days - and this time there will be no sunrise - ha ha ha - physics - what a joke - you can't outrun it - none of us - '
He twists the dial until the laughter dies like a trapped fly. The room settles around the tick of his watch. He flips his dead phone in his hand and doesn't need a screen to read what lives behind his eyes.
The Infinite Train Plan: a spear of steel - living cars, storage, med bay, garden, energy, fabrication - armored nose to tail like a bunker on rails. Recruit only Espers and specialists. Battery of engines. Keep to a circumglobal corridor. Keep moving east and outpace the night. Even stopped, the plating holds against corpses and worse.
Madness or method, it still points east.
He lays out tomorrow's route with three tokens: a bent fork for the stairwell, a screw for the laundry chute, a coin for the elevator shaft he's jammed with a jack. Workshop on three for motors. Mail lockers for batteries. If he can nudge Fabrication to LV.2, maybe he can build something that isn't only a weapon. Maybe he can build a start.
Something drags along the corridor outside. Wet. Patient. The stairwell door whispers and rests. Rhett clears the table with his forearm and slides behind it, back to wall. The pry bar warms across his thigh. His index finger sights the lock without being asked. Air tightens on his fingertip. He holds his breath until it hurts and then holds it longer.
A breath tests the crack beneath the door. A second breath follows, heavier, like lungs relearning how to work.
Wait.
The wood carries the words into his teeth.
'Rhett. You awake?'
Every muscle wants to jump. He doesn't let any of them. He cages his reply behind his tongue and tastes dust.
The coin on the table trembles and falls. Feather powder lifts and turns. The voice on the other side laughs once, soft and nearly friendly. It knows the shape of his room.
'Open up,' it says. 'Got a plan you'll want to hear. A way to ride the light.'
The knob turns a millimeter against the lock.
Air tightens on his fingertip; the lock answers.