The feeling under Isaac's skin vanished so fast he almost convinced himself it hadn't happened.
Almost.
No time.
Below them, Ren had Marlon half over one shoulder and one hand on the rail, black case banging against her hip every time the fire escape shook. Ty was one platform up from her, reaching, swearing, trying to be three extra arms at once. Jadah was pressed to Isaac's side on the landing, breathing through her teeth and refusing to make the shoulder pain louder than it already was.
Above them, the roof hatch kept coughing bodies into the night.
"Move," Ren hissed.
Everybody did.
The fire escape was a rusted argument all the way down. Each platform groaned under their weight. Bolts shrieked. One stair bent under Ty's foot and snapped loose into the alley below with a clang that made every head jerk up and down at once.
No one laughed.
Not even Ty.
By the time they hit the last platform, the alley looked worse than it had from above.
Trash bags split open. Puddles reflecting bruise-light from the sky. A shopping cart on its side like it had given up and laid down. Farther out, beyond the mouth of the alley, the street flashed red-white-red from abandoned hazards and half-dead traffic lights trying to keep order in a city that had stopped asking.
Ren dropped first.
Boots hit wet concrete.
Gun up.
Eyes moving.
"Come on."
Ty and Isaac got Marlon down between them. He landed wrong, nearly folded, and grunted a curse into Isaac's shoulder.
"That was terrible," Marlon said.
Ty looked personally insulted. "I carried you down a death ladder."
"Badly."
"Ungrateful while bleeding out is crazy."
Good.
Still him.
Jadah jumped the last four feet because patience had finally left her body. Her shoes slipped in something wet, and Isaac caught her elbow before she could go down.
"Don't," she snapped.
"I didn't say anything."
"Your face did."
Fair.
Above them, something slammed into the fire escape railing hard enough to shake the whole thing. Rust rained down.
Ren pointed with the gun. "This way."
They ran.
Not fast enough to feel like escape. Too fast to call it anything else.
Marlon was half-dragged between Isaac and Ty, his weight getting heavier every thirty feet. Jadah kept pace on Isaac's wounded side because apparently pain sorted itself by category now and nobody had room left to complain about the order.
The alley fed into another alley, then a service lane behind a row of dark storefronts. Shattered windows. One loading dock door hanging half-open. A delivery truck idling with no driver and both headlights aimed into a wall like it had changed its mind at the last second.
The city sounded wrong.
Too loud in bursts. Then dead quiet in patches where there should've been movement and wasn't. Sirens wailed somewhere close, got cut off mid-run, then never came back. A woman screamed from three blocks over. A man kept shouting the same name over and over until the fourth repetition turned into something wet and unfinished.
Ty heard that and didn't say anything for once.
That scared Isaac worse than the scream.
They cut behind a shuttered liquor store and through a narrow lot full of chain-link, busted pallets, and weeds forcing their way through cracked asphalt. Above them, the bruise in the sky pulsed again, and the whole world seemed to lose color for one heartbeat and get it back wrong.
Isaac felt that weird answer under his skin a second time.
Small.
Needle-fine.
A tug behind his sternum, then gone.
He almost stumbled.
Jadah saw it. "What."
"Nothing."
She looked like she didn't believe him. Good. She was learning.
Ren stopped so hard everybody almost piled into her.
Ahead, across the next street, a two-story tire shop sat dark except for one emergency light glowing red over the side entrance.
Steel shutters down over the front.
Service bay chained.
Office windows black.
Not good.
Still better than open sky.
"There," Ren said.
Ty looked up at the sign hanging crooked over the bay. "We're hiding in a tire shop."
"We're not hiding," Ren said.
"We are literally fleeing cannibal roof people."
"Shelter first," Marlon muttered.
Ty nodded instantly. "See? He gets it."
They broke from the lot and crossed the street.
No cars moving now. Not here.
A city bus sat sideways at the far light with all the windows blown out. Somebody lay in the road ten yards past it, face-down, one shoe missing. Isaac didn't look long enough to know if the body moved.
Ren hit the side door of the shop and tested the handle.
Locked.
She raised the gun.
A voice spoke from the mouth of the side street to their left.
"You think that helps?"
Everybody turned.
A man stood under a flickering streetlamp half a block away.
Not rushing.
Not crawling.
Not blood-mad.
Just standing there in a janitor's blue work shirt with the name patch ripped off and one sleeve dark to the elbow. Middle-aged maybe. Thin. Gray in the beard. One cheek split open in a smile that had nothing to do with his mouth.
His eyes were the bad part.
Not blacked out like the others.
Too clear.
Like whatever had reached in there had left him more awake, not less.
Ty's voice came out rough. "Nope."
The man didn't move closer.
He just looked at them one by one.
Ren. Gun up.
Marlon sagging between his friends.
Jadah pale and furious and bleeding down one arm.
Isaac.
Then Ty.
His head tilted slightly.
"You're loud," he said.
Ty gave a shaky laugh because that was still what his body did when fear got all the way in. "Brother, respectfully, everybody's had that note tonight."
The man in the street smiled a little wider.
Isaac felt it a second before it happened.
That same thin pull under his skin. A line in the air. A wrongness focusing.
He didn't understand it.
He understood enough.
"Ty—"
Too late.
The man lifted one hand.
Not dramatically.
Just pointed.
For one impossible fraction of a second nothing happened.
Then Ty's head opened.
No bang. No muzzle flash. No warning his body could've obeyed.
Just a brutal wet punch through bone and face and back again, like the air itself had grown a bullet and changed its mind about Ty existing in one straight line.
Ty's joke died still half-shaped in his mouth.
His body jerked once.
Then all of him went heavy.
One side of his face disappeared.
He dropped out from under Marlon so suddenly Marlon hit the pavement on his bad leg and screamed.
Jadah did scream then.
Isaac didn't.
Couldn't.
His brain had not caught up enough to give him anything human to do with what he was seeing.
Ty lay twisted on the asphalt, one hand still half lifted like the conversation hadn't finished. Blood spread black-red under his head in the flashing emergency light. One sneaker kicked once on reflex. Then stopped.
No.
No.
No.
Marlon dragged himself toward him with one arm, raw panic finally louder than pain. "Ty."
The word came out wrecked.
Ren fired.
Two shots fast.
The man in the street had already moved.
Not dodged. Shifted. Like he'd known where the bullets would fail before she finished deciding to pull the trigger.
One round took the lamp behind him. Darkness swallowed half the block. The second punched sparks off a mailbox.
The man laughed softly.
Human laugh. Clear this time. Nothing choking it.
"What did you do," Jadah whispered, not to him, not to anyone. Just to the air.
The man looked at his own hand like it interested him. Turned it once under the dead streetlight.
Then looked back at them.
"I asked," he said.
Ren was already moving toward Ty's body and away from it at the same time, which looked impossible until Isaac realized she wasn't trying to save him.
She knew.
She knew on sight.
"Leave him," she snapped.
Marlon made a sound Isaac would hear for the rest of his life.
"No."
He got one hand in Ty's shirt and tried to drag him up.
Ty's head lolled the wrong way. What was left of his face didn't belong to any expression anymore.
Isaac saw it cleanly then.
The hole.
The blood.
The joke still unfinished in the air where Ty had been standing.
Something inside him tore loose.
He went for the man in the street.
Didn't think. Didn't plan. Just moved.
Jadah hit him sideways so hard both of them nearly went down.
"Isaac!"
He fought her on instinct.
She grabbed his shirt with both hands, injured shoulder and all, pain making her face go white and vicious.
"You cannot fix that!"
The sentence hit harder than the shove.
Behind them, the man in the street lifted one finger again.
Ren saw it and fired three times in a line that walked the pavement straight toward him.
This time he actually moved.
Not faster than a person should.
Cleaner.
He stepped back into the dark between two parked cars and vanished like the street had swallowed him whole.
No body.
No fall.
Just gone.
"Move!" Ren shouted.
Marlon was still trying to get to Ty.
Isaac went to him this time.
Not to help.
To stop him.
Marlon looked up at him, eyes wild and bright with blood loss and disbelief. "No."
Isaac grabbed him under both arms and hauled.
Marlon fought him with everything he had left, which wasn't much but felt like enough because grief made up the difference.
"No!"
Jadah got under Marlon's other side without speaking. Her face had gone dead flat now. Blood down her arm. Blood on her jaw. No tears. No room.
Together they dragged him backward.
Marlon's hand slipped out of Ty's shirt.
Ty stayed where he fell.
In the middle of the street.
Under a flickering red light.
Like somebody had hit pause on the wrong part of the world.
Isaac's vision tunneled.
Ren grabbed the back of his collar and physically turned him toward the tire shop door. "Now."
She shot the lock.
The side entrance jumped inward.
They stumbled through.
Dark office. Rubber stink. Dust. Old coffee. Papers thrown off a desk like somebody had left in a hurry that now felt like another century.
Ren kicked the door shut behind them and dropped the deadbolt.
Then shoved a filing cabinet sideways in front of it with one brutal crash of metal.
Nobody spoke.
Nobody could.
Marlon sagged out of Isaac and Jadah's grip and hit the floor on one knee, then both, then just folded there breathing in broken little pulls.
Ty wasn't with them.
That fact moved through the room in stages.
Not all at once.
Isaac stood in the center of the office staring at nothing.
His ears rang. His hands were empty. His ribs hurt. His shoulder hurt. The world hurt in new places now. None of it meant anything because Ty wasn't here.
Jadah pressed her back to the wall and slid down it until she was sitting on the floor with both knees up. One hand clamped over her mouth. The other still bleeding.
Ren checked the window slats with her gun still up.
Still moving.
Still breathing.
Still functioning.
Isaac hated her for that for one full second.
Then hated himself, because somebody had to.
Marlon made a sound.
Not a word.
The kind of sound a body makes when it tries to reject reality and can't.
Isaac turned.
Marlon was staring at the closed door like looking hard enough might undo distance.
"No," he said again.
Not loud.
Worse than loud.
Isaac went to him and stopped two feet away because he had no idea what his own arms were for anymore.
"I should've—" Marlon started, then couldn't finish.
What.
Held him harder.
Moved faster.
Pulled first.
Died instead.
There were a hundred endings to that sentence and all of them were knives.
Jadah was the one who answered, voice shredded and flat.
"No."
Marlon looked at her.
She dragged a shaking hand down her face and left blood there by accident.
"He was making a stupid joke," she said. "He didn't even get to finish it."
That did it.
Marlon bent forward like somebody had hit him in the spine and pressed both blood-slick hands over his face.
Isaac finally moved.
He crouched beside him, because standing over it felt wrong, and put one hand on the back of Marlon's neck.
That was all.
That was what he had.
Marlon shook once under his hand.
Then again.
No tears. No dramatic collapse. Just a body trying and failing not to break in front of witnesses.
Isaac looked at the floor.
There was blood on his shoe that wasn't his. Tiny flecks up the side of his jeans. Something dark drying on his wrist. He knew without checking where it came from.
Ty laughed at bad timing.
Ty called everything ugly.
Ty kept the room from going dead.
Ty had said I can drag him out of hell by the ankles if I have to.
Now Ty was in the street with half a joke still in his mouth.
Ren finally lowered the gun.
Just a little.
Her voice was quieter now, and somehow that made it worse.
"We stay here until first light or until this place gets made."
Isaac looked up at her.
"Made by what."
She didn't answer.
Good. Honest again.
From outside came a distant crash. Then another. Then one long scream that cut off so clean it might as well have been edited.
Jadah leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she looked at Isaac and Marlon and said the one thing nobody in the room was built to hear yet.
"We left him."
Nobody argued.
Because they had.
Marlon made that sound again.
Smaller this time.
Isaac stood up too fast and almost blacked out. Caught the edge of a desk. Stayed upright because falling felt disrespectful now.
He crossed to the blinds and lifted one slat with two fingers.
The street outside flickered red.
Ty's body was still there.
Small from here. Wrong-shaped. Alone.
And farther down the block, standing in the mouth of the side street like a patient neighbor waiting for a ride, the man in the janitor shirt watched the building.
One hand hanging loose.
The other at his side.
Head slightly tilted.
Like he knew exactly what room they were in.
Like he had all night.
Isaac let the blind fall.
Didn't say anything.
Because across the dark office, something else had started happening.
At first he thought Jadah was shaking.
Then he saw the metal leg of the chair beside her vibrate.
Tiny.
Then harder.
Her good hand had curled into a fist on her knee.
The floor under it gave one sharp tick.
A loose screw three feet away jumped straight up off the carpet and snapped to the filing cabinet with a metallic click.
Everyone heard it.
Jadah looked at her hand.
Then at the cabinet.
Then at Isaac, eyes suddenly too wide.
"I didn't—"
The lights in the office flashed once.
Just once.
And in the dark window behind Ren, for the length of a blink, the bruise in the sky pulsed back.