We walked until the sky dimmed into that gray-blue that never became night.
The color didn't belong to any hour I remembered. Not dusk. Not dawn. Just a tired in-between that never finished turning into anything else.
Claire led us through a corridor of toppled cars and broken masonry where the wind struggled to reach. Rusted doors hung open. Glass crunched faintly underfoot. Somewhere above us, loose metal clinked against itself in a slow, hollow rhythm.
Every few steps, she glanced back.
Not at me.
At the fog behind me.
It followed at a careful distance, hovering just above the ground, its edges blurring into the cracks in the street. It didn't wrap around me. It didn't rise.
It stayed where it had learned it was allowed.
"We were five," she said suddenly.
Her voice didn't echo. The street swallowed it.
I didn't answer.
She didn't need me to.
"Not soldiers. Not heroes," she continued. "Just people who didn't want to die alone."
Something in my chest tightened at the word five.
It wasn't a memory.
It was a shape.
"What happened?" I asked.
"It didn't break all at once," she said. "That's what people get wrong. You don't go from five to one in a day."
She stopped near a sunken stairwell where the street had collapsed inward. The opening yawned like a wound in the pavement. She picked up a stone and dropped it in.
We listened.
It struck something far below with a dull, distant sound.
Then nothing.
"First we lost one," she said. "No body. Just blood and fog."
My shoulder twitched.
Not choice.
Reflex.
Like a muscle remembering a motion my mind refused to touch.
"Then we lost another," she said. "And that's when it stopped feeling like luck."
"You think someone caused it."
She didn't answer.
That was answer enough.
"We argued," she said. "About the fog. About whether you fight it or work with it. One of them said if you stop resisting, it stops hurting."
I thought about my legs.
How they moved when I didn't ask them to.
How the ache in them dulled when the fog took over.
How that wasn't comfort.
That was ownership.
"He was wrong," she said.
Her jaw tightened slightly as she spoke it, like she was biting down on something old.
She started walking again.
I followed because the fog moved me.
The street narrowed into an alley lined with collapsed balconies and half-burned doors. Marks scraped across the walls at shoulder height—claw, blade, or something else entirely. I couldn't tell.
"I'm telling you this because if you're staying near me," she said, "I need you to understand something."
"What?"
"I don't mourn," she said. "I count."
"Count what?"
"How many of us are left."
She slowed and glanced back at me. Not at the fog. At my face.
"So don't make me count you yet."
The words didn't sound like a threat.
They sounded like math.
The fog crept closer to my calves.
Not wrapping.
Not forcing.
Pressing.
And I hated that it felt like approval.
(Next chapter: Borders)