The resort smelled like the memory of wealth. Not wealth itself, but the lingering aftertaste of it. A place that had once been expensive and then, at some point, realized it wasn't anymore.
The walls wore peeling lacquer like a failed disguise. The carpet might have been cream-colored once, before salt air and time collaborated to invent a new color that no one had bothered to name. Vines slipped through a broken window at the end of the corridor and climbed almost to the ceiling, unchallenged.
Overhead, a chandelier hung dark and dust-covered, its crystal fittings still intact. Simply because there had been nothing left worth stealing, and no one around to appreciate how ironic that was.
Proxy moved the way he always moved, which was to say at the slowest pace that still counted as progress. His hands stayed in his pockets. His cyberdeck ran passive scans along the corridor's dead network while they walked, projecting the east wing's layout across his vision as a faint wireframe skeleton.
Nyx was attached to his sleeve.
She had been attached to his sleeve since they left the courtyard. Two fingers hooked into the fabric above his elbow. She walked half a step behind him and slightly to his left.
She looked around at the decaying grandeur of the place with the very specific behavior of someone searching desperately for something nice to say.
Eventually she succeeded.
"This is kind of like a honeymoon," she said.
Proxy continued walking.
"The resort setting," she clarified helpfully. "It's romantic. If you don't think about the battle royale."
"The battle royale is somewhat central to the current situation."
"But the aesthetic." She gestured with her free hand toward the corridor. A vine sagged slightly in response, as if embarrassed to be involved. "It's us, alone, in a beautiful hotel-"
"A decomposing hotel."
"-with nobody around to bother us-"
"Thirty-one somebodies, actually."
She made a small irritated noise. Her two-finger grip on his sleeve tightened just a little, the incremental pressure suggesting that this was how she expressed emphasis.
"You are ruining this."
"I'm being honest."
"Same thing," she muttered.
She also pulled a face at the back of his head.
Proxy knew this without turning around to check. He didn't need to. At this point he possessed a fairly complete mental catalog of Nyx facial expressions.
The east wing curved left past what had once been a restaurant. Tables were still set behind dark glass. Dusty glassware waited exactly where it had been placed, as if the staff had stepped out halfway through service and simply never returned.
Which, realistically speaking, was probably close to the truth. Corporations rarely sent polite farewell letters when they abandoned a property.
The signal improved as they approached the end of the corridor. A tight, low-frequency node pulsed from behind a service door, steady and patient in the way only machines could manage. It had the rhythm of something that had been waiting a long time for the opportunity to matter.
Proxy pushed the door.
It opened immediately. The latch had rusted into philosophical indifference.
The room had once been storage. Empty shelving lined one wall. A broken trolley leaned in a corner like it had given up standing properly. A narrow window high on the wall let in a bar of gray daylight.
And on the floor, centered with suspicious neatness, sat a corporate lockbox that very obviously did not belong in an abandoned resort unless someone had placed it there on purpose and quite recently.
It was the sort of container that implied the word tactical without ever saying it aloud. Matte-black, with a lock panel on the front glowing with a soft amber light. No branding. The corporations responsible for equipment like this had long ago learned the wisdom of not signing their work.
Proxy crouched in front of it and interfaced with the node through his deck.
The lock's architecture was uncomplicated. Corporate standard encryption. Off-the-shelf. The kind of security that didn't require more than the standard knowledge to bypass.
He opened it in seconds. The lid released with a clean mechanical thunk.
"Ooh," Nyx said from directly over his shoulder.
Inside were two compression-packed tactical backpacks, two sealed ration blocks, three water pouches, a flat trauma kit, a roll of adhesive wound sealant, and beneath those, nestled carefully in cut foam, two firearms with several magazines each.
Proxy leaned back on his heels and examined the contents.
"Corporate hospitality," he said.
Nyx made an appreciative noise and immediately grabbed one of the ration blocks, turning it over in her hands while reading the stamped label with the focus of someone studying a restaurant menu.
She was still wearing the dried blood. It had darkened along her jaw and caught in the ends of her hair, which still hung loose and slightly chaotic from the drop. She looked like someone who had survived something catastrophic and was now mildly curious about the nutritional information.
They divided the supplies efficiently, without commentary. Two people who had spent enough time in unpleasant circumstances tended to stop narrating obvious logistics.
Backpacks on. Rations stored. Water distributed.
The trauma kit went into Proxy's pack on the fairly straightforward reasoning that he was more likely to need it. Nyx accepted that without argument, which implied she had already categorized it under obvious and moved on.
Then Proxy picked up the first gun.
A compact 9mm automatic pistol. Minimal moving parts. Small. Blocky. The kind of design philosophy that prioritized reliability through stubborn simplicity. Fully automatic. Muzzle weight-compensated. Small enough to vanish into a jacket pocket while still being effective at close range.
He checked the chamber out of reflex. Empty. He loaded a magazine and held the weapon loosely at his side.
It didn't feel natural.
It also didn't feel incorrect.
He considered it an emergency option and tried, perhaps optimistically, to think of it as just another tool rather than a philosophical change.
"That one's cute," Nyx said.
"It's a gun."
"It's small. It matches you."
He looked at her.
What that's supposed to mean.
She was already picking up the second weapon.
The other gun was a completely different category of problem. A compact submachine gun. Lightweight black frame. Stubby barrel. Built for one purpose and possessing absolutely no interest in subtlety about it. The street had several affectionate nicknames for this model, all inspired by the noise it made while clearing a room.
Nyx turned it over in her hands. She fumbled slightly while testing the grip, her fingers slipping just enough to make the weapon tilt.
Proxy instinctively stepped half a pace back.
"Careful-"
The slide snapped back. The magazine seated. The safety clicked off. She brought the weapon up with both hands, elbows loose, stance slightly open, muzzle angled safely downward at rest. Her thumb ran along the top rail. A quick tilt checked the feed. The gun returned smoothly to a low carry position.
The entire sequence took roughly two seconds.
She looked up.
She was wearing a skirt. Leggings. A shirt with a small unraveled thread near the collar that she had been absentmindedly worrying before the kidnapping. Her hair was still loose, still stained with dried blood.
The tactical backpack sat over all of it, straps buckled without attention. And the submachine gun rested in her hands as if it had always belonged there.
Proxy watched her for a moment.
Several thoughts occurred to him. Some dubious.
None of them escaped.
Nyx tilted her head. Her eyes widened slightly. She scrunched her shoulders toward her ears in a small squirming gesture.
"You're staring again~"
"I'm thinking."
"You do that a lot." She swayed lightly in place, the gun still held in a flawless low carry that her body apparently no longer needed to think about. Her cheeks turned pink. "Is it because I'm pretty?"
"It's because you keep surprising me."
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
She beamed. A completely sincere beam. Unconcerned with the dried blood, the submachine gun, or any of the surrounding circumstances.
"You should say things like that more."
Proxy exhaled quietly through his nose, looked briefly at the wall as if it might offer a second opinion, and lifted his backpack.
He holstered the handgun at his hip, confirmed his deck was running clean, and performed one more passive sweep of the building's network to see if anything had moved since they arrived.
Nothing had.
Thirty-one people on the island. None of them had reached this wing yet. Which meant the clock on that situation wasn't stopped.
It was merely ticking.
He looked at Nyx.
She had stopped swaying and now watched him with her hands clasped around her backpack strap. The submachine gun hung from a sling at her side. She looked exactly like someone waiting for a tour guide to begin the next part of the tour.
"So," she said. "What now?"
Proxy considered the question. Also the broader circumstances. There was no exit that didn't involve surviving until someone somewhere decided the spectacle had run its course.
And at present, two people standing in a forgotten supply room equipped with one handgun, one submachine gun, and a respectable amount of ammunition.
"Now," he said, "we try very hard not to die."
He walked out of the room.
After half a second, the quiet sound of her footsteps followed.
Two fingers found his sleeve again before they had taken three steps down the corridor.