Chapter 3
Chapter three
Jen
The last door is not like the others. No klaxon-lit corridor on the far side of it. No drywall, no LED.
Dean hits the push-bar and the door gives outward and what comes through the gap is cold air. And smell. Wet. Green. Growth and rain. Earth. The enormous layered smell of a living place. After weeks of scrubbed alcohol and recycled air, it hits me so hard my eyes water.
Outside.
We are outside. I have not been outside since the gravel road.
Dean takes it first — through the door, into the dark, a fast low sweep with his head up and his nostrils flared — and then Thaw is moving me through, his hand finding mine and folding it back into his waistband, and I step out of the building and the ground under my bare feet is not concrete.
It gives.
Needles, soil, something cold and soft and broken-textured, and the wrongness of it after weeks of slab nearly puts me down. Thaw feels me stagger and does not stop, just steadies the line, and I get my feet under me and I look up.
There is no ceiling.
After weeks of eight-foot rooms the up of the world is a kind of violence and my body does not know what to do with it.
Forest. That is all I have. Dark, wet, cold, vertical, enormous forest, no road, no light, no sign, no sound that is human. The building behind us is the only made thing in the world and the building is full of things that want us back.
But the twins.
The twins have changed.
I feel it through the new threads — a shift in both of them at once, the raw climbing want of the last hour reorganizing into something steadier and sharper.
Dean has gone still at the tree line, head up.
Daron is doing a slow turn with his whole body open to the dark. Both of them are breathing it in.
This is theirs.
Inside, they were working. Out here, something in both of them has landed.
Then the door behind us slams open again and the relief is over.
Guards.
Not the panicked teams from the breach — these are organized, this is a regroup, four of them coming out of the building in a spread with weapons up, and a voice on a radio, and a light, a hard white searchlight beam swinging out across the trees and the broken ground.
We are in the open. The clear-cut strip around the building, gravel and stumps and low brush, no cover, and the light is coming.
"Down the slope." Thaw does not raise his voice and every one of us hears it. "Tree line. Now."
And then he is assigning the pack, and there is no discussion.
"Dean — point. Find us a line down, away from the road, into the deep timber.
" Dean is already gone, a shape dropping into the dark ahead.
"Daron — rear. Anything that comes off that building is yours before it is ours.
" Daron peels back, between us and the searchlight, the growl rising in him and aimed behind.
"Crull — you carry Fen and you stay on Jen's left.
Harek — her right. I am front. She does not have an open side. Not one. The whole way down."
I am inside the box again.
The slope drops away under us and the timber closes over our heads.
The forest swallows the light behind us and we disappear into the dark.
The Syndicate is still behind us. Armed. Organized. Hunting.
I know that. But all I can think about is the way five monsters closed ranks around me.
No open side. Not one.
The whole way down.