A few seconds of checking was all they could afford.
Asylia ran through it quickly — tracking his eyes, asking him to follow her finger left and right, having him repeat a short sequence of words back to her. He managed all of it, slow but accurate. Speech clear, responses coherent. Whatever had hit his head, it hadn't gone deep enough to matter right now.
"Healing tablet when we stop somewhere safe," she said, more to Serein than to him. "He'll be okay until then."
Serein looked at him for a moment longer than necessary, then nodded.
"Can you keep up?"
"Yeah."
He said it without hesitation, which was either reassuring or exactly what someone not okay would say. She decided to take it at face value.
"Then let's go."
The path ahead opened into a wide luxury hall — shops lining both sides, some featuring drinks, gadgets, stuffed animals for children. Half the walls were transparent, giving a clear view over the ocean. Cool, dim light filtered in across the wreckage left behind by some earlier panic: overturned chairs, glass across the floor, smears of liquid and dried food that looked like a bad dream rendered in abstract art.
At first glance the space felt profoundly desolate. Vast, and utterly quiet.
*It should have been full of people.* The thought moved through him without attaching to anything. *Chatter. Movement. Now it's just — this.*
Three heads eased out of the corridor and looked around carefully.
Asylia scanned the space, searching for the stairway. Her eyes lit up when she spotted it, far across the hall.
"There it is."
*Crack.*
Breaking glass — from somewhere behind a beverage stall.
Then movement. A bulbous head lurched out from behind the counter like something out of a horror film, skin pale and bloodless as wax, textured like worm-flesh. Tiny pale eyes, no bigger than sesame seeds, swept the room.
It let out a faint, eerie sound.
Ren felt the chill move through him before he'd consciously registered what he was looking at. His hand came up and pressed against his mouth.
"An infected," Asylia said, her eyes going cold. Not surprised — she'd been expecting this.
She stilled her breathing and looked at them both.
"We avoid it and cross without drawing attention. If it comes toward us, we engage first and run."
They'd learned from waiting too long on something dangerous.
The creature surveyed the space with something like suspicion, then slipped back behind the shop.
"Alright."
The group moved in silence.
Serein went first, slipping quickly across to crouch behind a shop counter, scanning for anything hidden. From behind the stall came the faint sound of something crunching — the infected, absorbed in whatever it had found. It hadn't noticed them yet.
Her slender ears twitched slightly. She glanced back and made an okay sign.
"Clear."
Ren and Asylia were a few meters back, concealed beneath a table, watching her hand signals.
They resumed moving.
Ren didn't dare breathe too loudly — each breath was careful, almost sipped, like he could make himself smaller by taking in less air. He kept his eyes fixed ahead, stepping around broken glass and debris, every footfall deliberate.
*Okay. Okay. Just a little more.*
He checked his companions' progress. Serein was nearly at the corridor that led to the stairs. Asylia was a few meters behind her, slipping quietly through obstacles and under structures.
And I was behind her, watching and following close.
I don't know why, but the longer I moved, the more the world felt like it was receding behind glass — dim and unreal, edges softened, like something seen from the wrong side of a window.
*Is this even real?*
A sharp noise cut through it.
Sound snapped back. Shapes sharpened.
I swung my eyes toward the source.
A tall figure stumbled out of a corridor to the right — a man, clutching his broken right arm, staggering forward with desperate, ragged steps. He was yelling.
"He — help!"
His voice came out hoarse, scraped raw.
The corridor opened directly toward us, and he'd come out facing right at us, leaving us exposed. His eyes found mine and something like hope flickered in them, wild and awful.
He summoned something from nowhere and broke into a sprint.
"You! Help me!!"
He wasn't trying to be quiet. Maybe he'd stopped caring — or maybe, the shape of it becoming clear quickly, he was doing this on purpose. Using the noise. Using us. Angling to put something between himself and whatever was behind him.
*Clang.*
Somewhere I didn't have to look to understand. The bulbous-headed infected had heard.
"Get away from me!"
The man kept closing the distance, close enough now to read the desperation on his face.
"I'm in so much pain!! Help!!"
He wasn't listening. Still coming, faster, like his life depended on it — because it did, just not in the way he was pretending. A grim calculation moved behind those eyes.
*If I draw their attention toward this group, I might get out alive.*
"You—"
Ren looked past the man's shoulder and went pale.
"This dumb—"
He bit off the rest, met Asylia's eyes for half a second, and ran.
"Don't blame me."
He swiped a used glass off a table as he passed and flung it down behind him, the smash of it sharp and deliberate.
"Asylia! Ren! Run!"
Serein had already seen the commotion. She rose from cover and threw one cold glance at the man who'd exposed them, then turned toward the bulbous-headed infected charging from the other side, fingers gathering cold air, raising to fire — and stopped. Changed target.
*Why?*
A scream answered. Then silence.
A massive hand reached out of the corridor and closed around the man's upper body, dragging him down. He managed a few desperate, broken sounds before the hand lifted him clear off the floor — and a huge dog-like maw opened and swallowed him whole.
A wet sound. A crunch. Liquid slid from the corner of its mouth.
It stood three, maybe four meters tall, dressed in the blue-black uniform bearing the same logo as the staff Ren had seen before. Its most distinctive features were the arm and leg on one side, each twice the size of their counterpart, grotesque in proportion.
It grinned, savoring.
*Hiehie.*