The tunnel beneath the freeway was narrow enough that the adults had to hunch as they moved.
Aiden didn't. He walked in the center of the group—tucked between Mira's flashlight beam and Nathan's shadow—with his hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket, gripping the silent radio so tightly his knuckles ached.
He tried not to breathe through his nose.
The air in the tunnel felt old—like it had sat unmoved for decades. Damp and sour. The concrete walls dripped slow algae-tinged rivulets, and the floor was sticky in places with water that didn't reflect right.
They had no map. No plan. Just forward.
Every step echoed.
Every echo returned wrong.
Behind them, somewhere back in the neighborhood, a siren began to whine—then cut off. No gunfire now. No screaming.
That was worse.
Mira paused at a junction—where the tunnel split to the left and right, one passage half-flooded with black water. She turned, her flashlight catching Aiden's face in a flash of pale gold.
"You okay?" she whispered.
Aiden nodded.
She didn't ask more. She knew that look. She'd seen it before—when they found a kid on the side of the road outside the city last month, eyes wide open but no breath in his chest. That glassy, locked-in look.
She turned and kept moving.
The grate above them, when they reached it, was already half-open. Its bars had rusted and warped outward, like something had bloomed too large beneath it.
Cal climbed up first—straining, swearing under his breath—then reached down and hauled Mira after him. Nathan passed up the bags. Tess kept her pistol drawn the entire time, standing guard in the dark without a word.
Aiden hesitated before going up.
He looked back.
The tunnel was empty. Just water. Moss. Darkness.
But the stillness in it… felt alive.
The city was worse than Aiden had imagined.
The last time he'd seen downtown—really seen it—was from the back seat of his dad's car, driving home from a school field trip to the museum. That was three months ago.
Now, the skyline looked like it had been picked apart by birds.
Smoke bled through high-rises. Signs blinked dead and flickered, casting ghost-light over silent intersections. A burned-out tram lay across the road in a slanted, crushed heap. The street beyond was cracked open by tree roots—fresh ones.
They walked fast, Mira and Aiden in the middle, Cal scanning rooftops, Nathan always turning back to check their flank.
Tess moved like she knew what she was doing—every alley checked, every shadow measured.
They passed a gas station. Empty. Looted.
Passed a car with its windows fogged from the inside. Cal opened the door. Inside, no one was alive. He didn't comment.
They stopped only once, in the ruins of an old coffee shop. Chairs overturned. Mugs shattered. A menu board still read "Wednesday: Mushroom Quiche."
Mira sat in a booth and closed her eyes.
Nathan stood at the door. Tess kept moving, clearing each room with slow, deliberate sweeps. Cal scavenged what he could from behind the counter.
Aiden sat on the floor and didn't speak.
His fingers still gripped the radio.
It hadn't made a sound since the fence.
He didn't dare turn it back on.
It was well past dusk when they reached the edge of the city. Past the university campus. Past the stadium that had been converted into a quarantine zone and then quickly abandoned.
Everything looked half-finished—half-evacuated.
A line of riot shields still stood in the street like a forgotten chess game. Behind them, stretchers lay scattered. Blood smeared the pavement in long, blurred trails—as if someone had tried to mop it up and failed.
They made camp inside a bank that had been looted clean of everything except plastic pens and dusty pens of fake plants.
Tess barricaded the entrance with old filing cabinets.
Nathan found the break room. Mira curled up beside a tipped-over desk.
Cal took first watch.
Aiden wandered into what used to be the vault room.
The door stood open.
He sat in the middle of the room, back against the wall, staring at the concrete.
He couldn't sleep.
Because the moment he closed his eyes, he saw the window again.
His mother's silhouette.
The twist in her limbs. Her fingers reaching for him through the glass. The sound of his father's voice cracking—just once—before it vanished into silence.
The humming.
The humming never left him.
He didn't know it, but miles south, in a collapsed research facility buried under the Miraat jungle's northern cliffs, a small sliver of light flickered to life.
For the first time in years, a battery hummed.
A terminal bled static.
A machine dreamed.
And somewhere in that dreaming—encrypted in bone and code—was the name of a boy the world had already tried to forget.
The System did not speak.
Not yet.
But it remembered.