Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Zero
The sky exists. I have to remind myself of this because what's above us doesn't look like sky at all.
It looks like the sky's aftermath. A churning ceiling of smoke and particulate, and the kind of haze that forms when a city stops being careful about itself.
I swallow hard, trying to push my anxiety down.
Somewhere above all of that, the sun is making its best effort to shine through the destruction. You can tell because the light has a direction, a source, something filtered and yellowish pressing down through the layers. I haven't seen the actual sky in three years.
This is what I get for the wait.
"Fantastic," I say, to no one, to the apocalypse, to whatever committee approved this as my introduction to the outside world. The city spreads in every direction like something that was mid-thought when it stopped.
Towers are listed at angles that violate what I understand about load-bearing engineering.
Cars were distributed across the street in arrangements that suggest the traffic stopped very suddenly and very finally.
Entire sections of road cracked and heaved upward, the concrete expressing its feelings about whatever passed through here.
Fires in the distance. Not emergency fires. Not the contained, purposeful kind. The kind that started and then nobody stopped.
My gut churns with worry as I take it all in over approximately three seconds because that's all the time I have before Colt pulls me forward. The taking-in becomes moving-through. My bare feet meet cracked asphalt.
The texture is immediate and specific and completely novel. I've been on concrete for three years. Smooth, sealed, controlled concrete. This is something else… irregular and rough and warm from whatever sun managed to reach it, with small sharp things I'm recognizing by feel as we move.
"Any chance," I say, half-breathless, "that wherever we're going has fucking shoes?"
"Focus."
"I'm focusing. I'm focusing on the rocks, currently communicating with the soles of my fucking feet. Very distracting. Shoes would resolve this."
He doesn't answer. His grip pulls me at a pace that assumes functional footwear, and I decline to correct the assumption out loud because we're still moving and moving is the current priority.
The city smells nothing like the lab. The lab had a smell I'd stopped noticing. So constant and complete, it had become the baseline of reality. Chemical and sealed and human only in the way that controlled environments are human, which is not very.
Out here, the air is a different problem entirely. Smoke from the fires. Dust from surfaces that haven't been disturbed for however long. It causes me to sputter out an uncontrollable cough, and I take another deep breath in. The metallic edge of broken infrastructure. And underneath all of it.
Him.
Smoke and steel and something warm that keeps bypassing my cognitive filters and going straight to whatever part of my brain handles things I can't think my way out of.
His scent has been a constant since the facility, but out here, with the open air mixing everything together, it has a different quality.
More present somehow. Less diluted by the environment.
"Congratulations, Zero," I mutter, just to myself, just to keep the monologue running because silence makes me feel the situation more acutely.
"You have successfully graduated from lab rat to catastrophic pheromone incident in under twenty minutes."
Colt glances down at me. The fast, diagnostic look he does when he's deciding whether what I just said is a problem he needs to address.
"Stop talking to yourself," he grunts.
"That's not going to happen. I've tried. The habit is structural at this point," I manage to get out.
Something ahead. I see it before he redirects us toward it. A blockage across the street where a section of the building has been introduced into the pavement. Concrete and rebar, and the kind of debris that doesn't have a clear path through, only over.
I assess it.
"Okay," I say quietly, doing the math, "the left side has better footholds. That chunk on the right looks like it's considering a second fall. Middle is-" I tilt my head to the side as I survey it, "actually, probably fine if you don't weigh the slab at the top."
Colt looks at me.
"What," I ask.
"You assessed that in four seconds."
"I've had a lot of time to develop spatial processing skills. Small room. Very little else to do." I gesture toward the left approach.
"Left side. I'll go first if you want a stability read."
He studies the pile for a moment. Then nods once, and I start moving.
The rubble shifts under my feet in two places but holds, and I can’t help the sigh of relief that escapes me.
The rebar I use for a handhold on the middle section takes my weight without complaint.
The top is less stable than it looks from ground level.
A slight give when I step onto it that I adjust for without stopping.
I reach the other side and turn back. Colt is already halfway up, moving with an efficiency that makes the whole thing look like a minor inconvenience.
"Jump down," he says when I'm standing at the edge of the descent, "the footing on that side is bad."
I look down. He's right… loose rubble, uncertain surface.
"You'll catch me," I say. It isn't a question. I say it the way you state a fact you've already verified. Something moves in his expression.
"Yes."
I jump.
He catches me the way he does everything.
Without drama, just with the complete physical competence of someone for whom this is within the normal operating range.
His hands close on my waist, and the momentum gets absorbed and redirected, and I end up against his chest with a solidity that is extremely unhelpful for my current attempts at physiological regulation.
His scent at chest-contact range makes my brain fire off several sensations simultaneously. I bite down hard on every external indication of this.
"Thanks," I sigh, stepping back to a distance that allows independent breathing.
His hands don't linger. He releases me and moves forward, which I appreciate as a tactical decision even while the omega half of my nervous system registers it as a loss. We keep moving.
The city offers new information with every block.
This wasn't a sudden event, or if it was sudden, it happened long enough ago that the aftermath has had time to settle into permanence.
The fires in the distance are established.
The plant life coming up through cracks in the pavement has years of growth on it.
Whatever happened here happened, and then time continued anyway, and the city has been sitting in this state while the world did other things. Three years in a lab. Three years of news controlled by the people controlling everything else.
I have no idea what happened out here. I add that to the list of things I need information about, right below shoes and right above, where exactly are we going?
"Colt," I say.
"Mm."
"Where are we going?"
A pause that contains navigation. He scans a ruined intersection, reads something in the geography, and commits right.
"Somewhere defensible," he says.
"That's a category, not a destination."
"It's what I have right now."
Fair. I can work with ongoing objectives.
Something in the middle-distance moves. Not debris settling.
Something with intention. A shape crossing between two pieces of wreckage with a specific kind of motion that my threat-assessment instincts, honed over three years of watching everyone who walked past my observation window, classify immediately as aware of us.
Colt has already seen it. His pace hasn't changed, but his posture has. The same restructuring I observed in the facility, everything coming forward into readiness without announcing itself. The shape disappears, and we move faster.
"Human?" I ask.
"Unknown."
"The movement pattern was-"
"I know."
"-not entirely human," I finish, "which, given what I saw in those corridors back there, is a sentence I'm going to need to get comfortable saying." He doesn't respond to that, which is its own kind of response.
My feet have developed opinions about the terrain that I'm actively overriding.
A sharp edge finds the arch of my left foot, and I adjust my stride without stopping, redistributing weight, modifying my gait.
You learn to do that in a lab, too, adjust without showing it, keep the surface presentation steady while managing the actual situation underneath.
A roar rolls through the air from behind us.
Not close. Not far enough. Colt's arm moves.
A fast, reflexive sweep that brings me closer to his side without breaking stride, his body angling slightly between me and the direction the sound came from.
He does it the way his heart beats faster than his face shows, automatically, without deciding to, in a way that suggests the decision was made at a level below conscious choice.
I don't say anything about it. I note it with the careful precision of someone who has learned to keep their observations quiet until the right moment.
We move through three more blocks in silence.
Real silence this time, both of us reading the environment, both of us tracking the sounds and the spaces between them.
This is new for me. Moving through space that isn't monitored.
Being in a place where nobody has a clipboard, a camera, and a professional obligation to note my responses.
The absence of observation has a texture I keep brushing against with surprise, like a wall that isn't there anymore.
I find myself still reaching for it by habit, though, and finding open air.
Strange. Good strange, I guess. The kind that'll take time to process.
"You're quiet," Colt says.
"Taking it in."
He glances at me, "the city?"
"The outside."