The ninth day taught him that not all threats wore shadows.
He had been moving through a collapsed parking structure, one of those concrete labyrinths where people used to leave their cars while they worked or shopped or lived their lives in the buildings above. The structure had partially collapsed, its levels tilting into each other like a stack of cards caught mid-fall, but the pull in his chest had led him here with a persistence that suggested something important lay on the other side.
The cold sensation had been with him all morning, a constant pressure behind his eyes that made the threads flicker at the edges of his vision. He had learned to read those flickers, to interpret the way the silver lines thickened or thinned based on what lay ahead. The threads were showing him the structure of the parking garage, the stress points in the concrete, the paths that would hold his weight and the ones that wouldn't.
And something else.
The cold sensation sharpened as he rounded a corner, flooding his skull with a warning so intense it made him stop in his tracks. The threads exploded across his vision, mapping not just the concrete around him but something beyond it, shapes moving through the walls in ways that shouldn't be possible.
He focused, pushing past the headache that always came with the sight, and the shapes clarified. Three men. Moving through the collapsed structure on the other side of a wall of concrete and twisted rebar. They were positioned in a way that suggested waiting, their movements coordinated in the manner of people who had done this before.
An ambush.
The threads showed him the geometry of it. They had set up at a choke point where the parking structure narrowed, where anyone passing through would have to funnel into a space barely wide enough for two people abreast. The men had pipes and makeshift weapons, and they were positioned to intercept anyone who came through.
Him. They were waiting for him.
He didn't know how he knew that last part. The threads didn't show intention, only structure and position. But the cold sensation carried something else, a certainty that settled into his bones. These men had seen him, or heard him, or somehow knew he was coming, and they had prepared accordingly.
He stood in the darkness of the parking structure, the threads mapping the walls around him, and considered his options.
He could go through the choke point. Face whatever they had planned. He had the pipe he'd taken from the ruins, and the cold sensation had kept him alive through things that should have killed him. Maybe he could fight them off. Maybe he could survive.
The threads flickered, showing him another possibility.
There was another path. A maintenance corridor that ran parallel to the main route, hidden behind a wall that had cracked enough to create a gap. It would take him around the ambush, out the other side of the parking structure, without ever encountering the men who waited for him.
The cold sensation pulsed, and he felt the pull in his chest redirect, pointing toward the maintenance corridor.
He took the other path.
The gap in the wall was barely wide enough for his shoulders. He had to turn sideways, pressing his back against cold concrete, his chest scraping against broken rebar as he squeezed through. The burn on his arm flared with a cold fire that made him gasp, but he kept moving, inch by inch, until he popped through into a corridor that smelled of motor oil and forgotten things.
He moved quickly now, following the pull in his chest through the maintenance corridor, past rusted doors and collapsed ceiling tiles, through the guts of a building that had never been meant for people like him. The threads guided his feet, showing him where to step, where the floor was weak, where the darkness held dangers he couldn't see.
He emerged on the other side of the parking structure into gray daylight, the bruised sky pulsing overhead with its wrong colors. Behind him, the structure loomed like a broken monument to a world that no longer existed.
He had made it. He had avoided the ambush, circumvented the men who had been waiting for him, continued on his way without confrontation.
The screaming started an hour later.
He was far enough away that the sound should have been swallowed by the ruins, but the cold sensation carried it to him anyway, a distant wail that rose and fell like a siren. Someone had walked into the ambush he had avoided. Someone had taken the path he had refused, and they were paying the price for it.
He stopped walking. The pull in his chest continued forward, but his feet wouldn't follow.
The screaming went on for a long time. Then it stopped.
He stood in the ruins of Ash Harbor, the silence after the screaming louder than the screaming itself, and felt something settle into his stomach like a stone. Guilt, he recognized it. The weight of knowing that he could have done something, could have faced the men and maybe driven them off, could have prevented whatever had happened to the person who screamed.
But beneath the guilt, something else. Something he didn't want to examine too closely.
Relief.
He was alive. He was walking away. The cold sensation had guided him around a threat, and he had followed, and now he was still breathing while someone else wasn't. The relief was heavier than the guilt, and that was the part he couldn't forgive himself for.
He didn't turn back. The pull in his chest wouldn't let him, pointing forward with a certainty that suggested whatever lay ahead was more important than whatever he had left behind. He walked on, the stone in his stomach settling deeper with every step, the silence of the ruins pressing against his ears like a physical weight.
This was the world now. Choices that cost lives, and the relief of surviving them. The cold sensation guiding him through dangers while others fell. The threads showing him paths that led away from death, even when taking those paths meant leaving others to find it.
He didn't know if he was becoming something better or something worse. He only knew that he was becoming something different, something that could walk away from screaming and still sleep at night, something that could carry guilt and relief in the same hand and keep moving forward.
The burn on his arm pulsed with cold, and the sky pulsed with wrong colors, and somewhere behind him, in a collapsed parking structure, three men were doing whatever they did to the people who walked into their trap.
He didn't look back.
He couldn't.