Nobody wanted to be first to move toward the back.
That was the worst part.
Not the screaming before. Not even the blood in the service hall.
It was this.
The whole group packed in the dark with their nerves hanging open, and that thing outside using a dead man's voice like it had a right to.
"Please."
The word slipped through the bent slats soft as breath.
The nurse folded in on herself and covered both ears.
The teenager was crying harder now, face buried against Lucía's side.
Tomasz looked like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin.
Priya didn't raise her voice. "Go."
That broke the freeze.
Idris moved first, because of course he did. He shouldered through a row of dusty display tables and kicked aside a toppled cardboard stand with some dead phone company logo still on it. Dae-hyun followed him, big body turned half backward, watching the gate while he moved deeper in. Lucía dragged the teenager gently but without asking permission. Abeni was breathing through her mouth like she might be sick.
Joshua stayed last.
Not because he wanted to.
Because somebody had to keep eyes on the opening.
The thing outside the gate didn't rush them.
Didn't slam.
Didn't scrape again.
That almost made him go cold all over.
It didn't need to force anything.
It had already learned patience.
He backed up one slow step.
Then another.
The electronics store looked like it had died in the middle of an ordinary bad day years ago and never gotten permission to leave.
Shelves of yellowed boxes.
A register counter caked in dust.
Demo televisions mounted black and dead along one wall.
A cracked glass cabinet.
Plastic signs drooping from their brackets.
Behind all of that, an employee door hung off one hinge, crooked enough to see darkness breathing behind it.
Idris shoved through it first.
"Storage room," he said. "Then another service hall behind that."
"Of course there is," Tomasz muttered.
Joshua kept backing until he hit the edge of the counter and finally turned.
The back room was narrow and ugly. Stock shelves, wire cages, old printer boxes, a busted mop bucket, water stains running down concrete block walls. One emergency bulb glowed dim orange above them like it hated all of them personally.
Dae-hyun positioned himself near the employee door and looked back toward the front anyway. Lucía crouched the nurse down against a shelf and got in her face.
"Look at me."
The woman was hyperventilating so hard her shoulders twitched.
"Look at me," Lucía said again, sharper.
It worked.
Barely.
Priya stepped around a box and looked at Joshua. "How many?"
He knew what she meant.
How many left.
Joshua ran it fast in his head.
Red polo gone.
Suit dead.
Everybody else—
He looked around.
Faces.
Bodies.
Panic.
Ages.
Different clothes damp with sweat and dust now.
He started counting again.
One old man in the brown coat.
The nurse.
Lucía.
Dae-hyun.
Priya.
Idris.
Hana.
Abeni.
The teenager.
Tomasz.
A man in a Yankees cap with both hands on his head.
A middle-aged woman in business clothes praying under her breath.
A guy with a swollen lip and tattoos up his neck.
Two college-looking boys clinging too close to each other.
A heavyset woman breathing like she was trying not to sob.
A thin bald man staring at nothing.
A Black kid, maybe eighteen, hoodie half-zipped, shaking but quiet.
A woman in a long green skirt.
Another in a rain-soaked denim jacket.
And—
Joshua frowned.
"Twenty-eight," he said.
Idris swore softly.
Priya looked at him. "You sure?"
"Yeah."
"Then who's missing?"
Nobody answered.
Because everybody's brain went to the same place.
The corridor.
The dead man.
The red polo.
But that only made twenty-nine.
Not thirty.
Lucía looked up from the nurse. "You counted right?"
Joshua gave her a flat look.
She held one hand up. "Okay. Fine."
Dae-hyun's shoulders tightened. "You saying there's somebody else in here?"
Hana had gone still again. Not frozen. Thinking.
"Maybe they started somewhere else in the structure," she said.
Idris shook his head. "No. We all came in on the same level."
"You don't know that."
"I know what I saw."
Tomasz cut in. "Then maybe one of us can't count."
Joshua ignored him.
The weirdest part was he didn't feel like he was missing a person.
He felt like he was missing something smaller.
His eyes moved over the room again.
Dust.
Shelves.
Boxes.
Shoes.
Hands.
Faces.
Fear.
And then—
A sound.
Tiny.
Wet.
Not from the gate.
Not from the front.
From inside the room with them.
Everybody stilled so hard the silence bent.
It came again.
A weak little noise.
Almost swallowed by cloth.
The old man in the brown coat whispered, "…what was that?"
Joshua turned toward the bottom shelving on the far side of the room.
Lucía heard it too. Her head snapped up.
Abeni's face emptied.
The sound came again.
A thin little cry.
Real this time.
Not copied.
Not adult.
Not anything like that thing outside.
A baby.
For one impossible second, nobody moved because nobody's mind would let the fact sit where it belonged.
Then the teenager gasped, "There's a baby here."
The room broke.
"No."
"What?"
"Shut up."
"Where?"
Lucía was already moving.
Joshua got there same time she did.
Low shelf. Fallen promo banner. Half-collapsed stack of appliance boxes.
And tucked in the narrow wedge between them on the concrete floor—
a baby girl.
Maybe eight months. Maybe less. Hard to tell through the shock of it.
Big wet eyes.
Face red from crying.
Little fists opening and closing.
She had a tiny long-sleeve onesie on, one sock gone, the other twisted halfway off her heel.
No carrier.
No bottle.
No bag.
No mother.
Just a baby on a dirty stockroom floor in hell.
Lucía dropped to her knees so fast her palms smacked concrete.
"Oh my God."
The nurse made a noise that sounded like she was breaking apart all over again.
The older businesswoman in the room started saying, "No no no no no no," like saying it enough could undo what her eyes had already done.
Joshua couldn't hear the rest of the room right for a second.
His ears had gone strange.
Because the baby was looking up at all of them with the confused, betrayed face babies made when the world didn't feel right.
And the whole thing was so wrong it almost tipped over into unreal.
The Realm took babies.
That was the first real shape of it.
Not strangers on screens. Not blood in a service hall. Not a voice-stealing thing outside.
This.
This was the piece that made your chest understand what kind of place it was.
Lucía reached slowly. "Hey, hey, hey—"
The baby cried harder the second hands came near.
Joshua saw Lucía hesitate.
Not because she was scared of babies.
Because this was not a hospital room. Not a crib. Not a waiting room floor after a bad day.
This was a storage closet while death tested the gate outside.
The old man in the coat backed into a shelf and started crying. Full crying. Quiet, ashamed, uncontrollable.
Priya's face actually cracked.
Only for a second.
Then she put it back together.
"Who had her?" she asked.
Nobody answered.
Because nobody had.
Nobody had even seen her.
Or if they had, their brains had refused to understand what they were looking at.
The baby let out a sharper cry, breath hitching hard.
Joshua's body moved before his thoughts got there.
He crouched.
Lucía looked at him like she was about to tell him not to do something stupid.
He ignored her.
He slid one hand under the baby's head and neck, the other under her little body, and lifted.
Wrong.
He felt it immediately.
Too awkward. Too uncertain. He shifted fast, tucked her in tighter, higher against his chest, one hand spread behind the back of her head this time.
Better.
Not perfect.
Better.
The baby cried right in his ear.
Joshua winced. "Aight. Damn."
It came out rougher than he meant to.
Her face scrunched harder.
He bounced once on instinct.
Then again.
Something in his chest went sideways.
Adriel, years smaller, hot with toddler sleep, half-dozing on him in a hallway light.
Gone in a blink.
Joshua swallowed hard and kept the baby tucked close.
"She needs something," the nurse whispered.
"She needs her mother," the woman in business clothes snapped, and then immediately clapped a hand over her own mouth like she hated herself for saying it.
Silence hit the room in another bad wave.
Because yeah.
Where was the mother?
Outside.
Somewhere out there under the same sky Joshua had just lost.
Watching.
Maybe.
Or screaming at a dead phone.
Or on her knees in a street somewhere.
The baby made another small broken cry into Joshua's hoodie.
The gate outside rattled once.
Everybody turned.
A soft drag of metal on metal.
Then the thing outside, in the dead man's exact voice, said:
"Is there a baby in there?"
The entire back room died.
The baby cried again.
Joshua's grip tightened.
Dae-hyun took one step toward the door like he wanted to fight air itself.
Abeni actually whispered, "No."
As if correction could matter.
The thing outside gave a little sound from the front of the store.
Not laughter.
Something thinner.
Interested.
Joshua looked down at the baby in his arms.
Then at the room around him.
Then toward the dark employee hall behind the storage space.
Route.
He needed route.
Because now the map had changed.
Not because the place changed.
Because a baby had started crying in it.
And every option they had just got worse.
He lifted his eyes.
"Hana."
She looked up too fast. "What?"
"You know buildings."
"Yes."
"Then tell me where that back hall goes."
Idris cut in immediately. "Not far if this is a normal stock layout."
Joshua looked at him. "This place ain't normal."
"No shit."
The baby made another hurt little sound into his chest.
Lucía stood. "We can't stay boxed in with her crying."
Priya nodded once. "Then we move before that thing decides patience is over."
Tomasz stared at Joshua holding the baby like he'd gone crazy. "You're not serious."
Joshua looked at him.
Really looked at him.
And Tomasz, for maybe the first time in his life, shut his mouth because he understood he'd found the wrong moment to say one more stupid thing.
The blade outside scraped the gate again.
Once.
Slow.
The baby cried louder.
Joshua adjusted her head against his shoulder, eyes already on the black cut of the hall behind them.
"All right," he said.
And from the front of the store, in Abeni's voice this time, the thing whispered:
"Come out."