Chapter 11
ARMEN
She’s favoring her left leg.
I watch it from two levels up, where the railing’s rusted through and the line of sight opens clean across the atrium.
She moves through the shadow of what used to be a department store entrance, keeping low, using the overturned display racks for cover.
Smart. But the hitch in her stride gives her away.
Blood.
Not much. Just enough to darken the denim below her knee, a small stain spreading slow. She wrapped it—I can see the makeshift bandage, gray fabric tied tight, but it’s not holding. Every step she takes leaves a faint drop on the tile, breadcrumbs she doesn’t know she’s dropping.
I exhale through my nose and adjust my stance, boots quiet on the metal catwalk. The Rot hums low around me, generators thrumming somewhere deep in the guts of the mall. Emergency lights flicker in their rhythm, casting broken shadows that shift and re-form as she moves.
She shouldn’t still be running.
Most of the others are accounted for by now. I’ve heard the signals, the double taps, triple taps, the cadence that means secured or processed or out of play. The Hunt’s thinning. Soon it’ll just be her and a couple others left standing.
But she’s not panicking and that’s what catches me.
She pauses at a junction where three corridors meet, head tilting as she listens. Her breathing’s controlled. I can see it in the rise and fall of her shoulders, the way she keeps her mouth shut and pulls air through her nose. No gasping. No sobbing. Just calculation.
She’s learning.
I’ve seen it happen before, but not this fast. Most runners spend the first hour in pure reaction—fight or flight, adrenaline drowning out thought. By the time they start thinking strategically, they’re already caught.
She started thinking ten minutes in.
I tracked her through the bookstore earlier, watched her use sound as a weapon, tossing that hardback to draw attention while she slipped out the back. Efficient. Clean. No wasted movement.
Now, she’s doing it again.
She scans left, then right, then up, not looking for an exit but looking for angles. Where the sightlines break. Where sound carries wrong. Where someone might be waiting.
Her gaze sweeps past me.
I don’t move.
And she doesn’t see me. The catwalk’s too high, the shadows too thick. But she knows someone’s there. I can see it in the way her shoulders tighten, the way her weight shifts onto the balls of her feet.
This is the part I didn’t plan for. I should be managing the whole board right now—tracking groups, adjusting territories, making sure the idiots in the president masks don’t fuck up the flow.
The Hunt runs smooth when everyone stays in their lane, when competition sharpens instead of collapsing into chaos.
Instead, I’m fixated on one runner. One injured, bleeding, too-smart-for-her-own-good runner who should’ve been caught an hour ago.
I tap once against the railing. Low. Controlled. The vibration travels through metal and concrete, a pulse that doesn’t carry sound but pressure. Rogue will feel it before he hears it. That’s his thing. Always has been.
A beat passes. Then another.
The answer comes, not a tap but a shift. A shadow moves where it shouldn’t, three corridors over, just visible through a gap in the collapsed ceiling tiles. Rogue, repositioning without announcement. He’s closer to her than I am now. Closer than she knows.
Good.
I track the other groups next, scanning the levels below and the corridors that feed into this section.
The bone-mask pair is sweeping the west wing, methodical but slow.
They won’t be a problem. Another trio of Runts wearing animal masks are licking their wounds near the loading docks after running into Sting earlier. Also not a problem.
But there’s another group.
Four of them, moving fast from the east. No masks I recognize. Opportunists, probably. The kind who show up to Hunts, thinking numbers and noise will carry them through.
They’re angling toward her.
Like hell.
I watch their path, calculate the intersection point. Thirty seconds, maybe forty, before they cross into her corridor. She won’t see them coming, not with the way the space bends, not with the way sound dies in that stretch.
My hand tightens on the railing.
They’ll box her in. She’s injured, tired, running out of clean moves. Even if she fights, even if she uses that piece of metal she’s been carrying like a weapon, four on one doesn’t end well.
And I don’t want her caught by them.
The thought lands before I can stop it, sharp and unwelcome.
Claim. Not protection. Not fairness. Claim.
She’s already marked. The lipstick in the sign-up room, the way she looked straight at the glass like she knew we were watching, that wasn’t bravado. That was acknowledgment. She walked into this place knowing exactly what she was signing up for, and she didn’t flinch.
That makes her ours. The possessive thought irritates me more than it should. I don’t need this. I don’t need a runner who makes me recalibrate, who pulls my attention away from the board, who makes me think in terms of keeping instead of catching.
Attraction’s a liability in the Rot. It clouds judgment. Makes you sloppy. I push it down and focus.
The rival group’s still closing. I could let them take her. It’d be clean, efficient, one less variable to manage. Someone else’s problem.
I don’t.
I tap twice, sharper this time. Not to Rogue but to Sting.
The answer comes fast. Too fast. A scrape of boots on tile, deliberate and loud, echoing from somewhere above the east corridor. Sting doesn’t do subtle. He does presence.
The rival group hesitates.
I can’t see their faces from here, but I know what they’re hearing. Footsteps where there shouldn’t be any. Weight. Intent. The kind of sound that makes you second-guess whether the route you’re taking is worth the trouble.
They slow.
One of them taps against metal—a signal, probably checking if the path’s contested. No one answers. Because the path isn’t contested. It’s closed.
They veer left instead, cutting away from her corridor, choosing another target. Easier prey.
I exhale and straighten.
Below me, she’s moving again. She didn’t hear the rival group. Didn’t see them get redirected. She just knows the corridor ahead feels wrong, so she adjusts. Left instead of right. Shadow instead of light. She’s choosing the harder path.
Most runners go for exposure when they’re scared. Back to the food court, back to the wider spaces where they think they’ll have room to maneuver. They don’t realize exposure just makes the endgame faster.
She’s doing the opposite.
Narrower corridors. Tighter spaces. The parts of the Rot where the mall’s bones show through, where retail died first and infrastructure took over. Rogue’s territory.
I don’t stop her. I should. I should steer her back toward open ground, toward the spaces I control, where I can see every angle and adjust in real time. Instead, I let her go.
She disappears into a service corridor, the kind that used to be marked EMPLOYEES ONLY back when that meant something. The door swings shut behind her, the sound swallowed almost immediately.
I count to five. Then I move. Not following. Positioning.
I take the long route, cutting across the catwalk and down a maintenance stair that spits me out one level below where I started. The Rot exists around me, familiar and cooperative. I’ve walked these paths so many times, I don’t need light to navigate. Muscle memory carries me through.
By the time I reach the next vantage point, a gap in the drywall where I can see into the corridor she just entered, she’s already halfway through. And she’s slowing. Not tired. Not hurt.
Wary.
She feels it. The way the air changes here. The way sound doesn’t bounce right. The way the space presses in, heavier than it should be.
She stops at another junction, this one darker than the last. Emergency lights barely reach this far. The floor’s uneven, tiles missing, concrete showing through in patches. Her head tilts. Listening.
I don’t move. Don’t breathe.
She’s close enough now that if I wanted, I could drop down, close the distance, end it.
I don’t. Because I want to see what she does next.
She shifts her weight, testing her injured leg. Grimaces. Adjusts the bandage without looking down, fingers quick and certain. Then she straightens, rolls her shoulders once, and keeps moving. Deeper. Into the parts of the Rot that don’t forgive mistakes.
My mouth curves before I stop it.
She thinks she’s choosing her path. She is.
She just doesn’t know how many of those paths I’ve already closed.