The world had shrunk.
Minutes ago, the alley had been a cage. Now, it was a coffin. The massive slab of scrap Jyoti had brought down didn't just crush the beast; it sealed them in. The impact had collapsed the surrounding stacks, twisting metal and stone into a suffocating, tomb-like shed.
The air wasn't air anymore; it was solid dust. A stagnant, grey fog, heavy and suffocating. It coated the back of Jyoti's throat with the gritty taste of rusted iron and pulverized bone, a texture so thick she felt like she was breathing dirt.
Silence pressed against her ears, heavier than the scrap above. It was absolute. Broken only by the ragged, wet rasp of their own breathing and the settle of heavy debris groaning under its own weight.
Jyoti shifted, trying to pull her arm free from a tangle of wire. Her leg bumped the boy's knee.
He flinched. Micro-movement. His muscles coiled instantly, vibrating against her leg like a loaded spring. He didn't pull away; he prepared to strike.
They were forced into an uncomfortable, terrifying intimacy. The space was too small for two people, let alone two strangers who had just used each other as bait. Their limbs were practically entangled in the gloom, bare feet scraping against dirty shins, shoulders brushing against the cold, jagged steel of the walls. She could smell him—not just the copper tang of fresh blood, but something else. A dry, static scent. Like the air was slowly burning around him.
Jyoti leaned back against a slab of corrugated metal. It dug into her spine, finding the bruises already there. She looked at him.
The gloom was thick, a suffocating grey twilight, but she could see his eyes. They weren't looking at her. They were scanning her.
He wasn't seeing a girl. He wasn't seeing a companion in misery. He was looking at her arm reach, the way her chest heaved with exhaustion, the scars on her feet. He was calculating. Cold. Sharp. She was just another variable in a survival equation he was desperately trying to solve.
He thinks he can solve me, Jyoti thought. The realization sparked a flicker of irritation in her gut, hot and sudden. He thinks I'm just another broken part of this machine.
She needed to break the silence. It was too loud. It let the fear creep in too close.
She cleared her throat. The sound was rough, scratching against the dry dust like sandpaper. She adopted a mask, forcing her trembling lips into a crooked, cynical line. She slumped her shoulders, widened her eyes just a fraction. The 'nervous chatterbox.' It was a good play. People underestimated the mouthy ones. They thought noise equaled stupidity.
"So," she whispered. Her voice trembled—a nice touch, half-fake, half-real. "That went well. For a total disaster."
The boy didn't blink. He stared at a rusted rivet on the opposite wall as if it held the secrets of the universe.
Jyoti pressed on, her voice gaining a harder edge. "You've got a heavy swing for someone who looks like a strong breeze would snap him in half. Where did you learn that? The thumb thing? That was... educational. Does it hurt, or is that part of the trick?"
Nothing. He was a statue carved from ash and blood. He didn't even twitch.
"I'm Jyoti," she tried again. She offered the name like a peace offering, or a lure on a hook. "You have a name? Or do I just call you 'The Bait'? Or maybe 'The Corpse'?"
The boy turned his head. Slowly. The movement was refined, mechanical—almost uncanny. He looked at her face, then her throat, then her hands.
"Quiet," he said.
His voice was a monotone drone. No fear. No anger. Just a flat statement of fact. A command issued by a machine.
Jyoti felt a vein in her temple pulse. A sharp, hot throb against her skin. Robotic little—
She wanted to snap at him. She wanted to grab him by his bloody collar and shake some humanity into him. I just saved your life, she wanted to scream. I crushed a monster into paste for you. I jumped into the dark for you.
But she swallowed it. She forced the rage down into her stomach. It tasted bitter, like bile. Anger was energy, and she couldn't afford the spend.
"Right," she muttered, letting her head thump back against the metal. "Quiet. Got it. Wouldn't want to interrupt your brooding."
The conversation died. The silence rushed back in, colder than before, filling the space between them with cement.
And with the quiet, the adrenaline faded.
It didn't leave slowly. It crashed.
The reality of her body slammed into her. The pain wasn't a dull ache anymore; it was a scream. Her ribs burned where the metal pressed them. Her legs felt like they were filled with lead shot. But the hunger... the hunger was a living thing.
It woke up. It clawed at her insides. It twisted her stomach into a tight, cramping knot that made her gasp.
A headache bloomed behind her eyes. Not a normal headache. This was a spike, driven deep into the soft grey matter of her brain. It pulsed with every beat of her heart, a rhythmic sledgehammer.
Thump. Pain. Thump. Pain.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Nausea rolled over her in a sick, oily wave. She gagged, clamping a hand over her mouth to stifle the sound, her fingers digging into her cheeks.
Too much, she realized. I used too much.
The burst of strength on the pin. The jump. It wasn't free. The scriptures didn't give gifts; they took payment. And the currency was her own vitality. She was burning fuel she didn't have.
In the dark behind her eyelids, she saw the text again. The jagged, impossible symbols of the scriptures. They weren't just memories anymore. They felt active. Alive. They writhed in the blackness of her mind, glowing with a malevolent heat.
They were calling to her.
A mental pull, like a fishhook caught in the meat of her mind, dragging her toward... something. A sensation. The "It."
She remembered the feeling from the Pits. That raw, electric hum she had touched just before the explosion. It was closer now. Louder. It buzzed in her teeth. Was it because she had used the strength? Or was it because she was remembering it, inviting it back in? Or was it simply that she was dying, and the veil was getting thin?
The headache spiked again, blinding white.
Focus, she told herself, biting her lip until she tasted copper. Don't vomit. Don't pass out. Not here.
She opened her eyes, gasping for air that wasn't full of dust.
Skritch.
The sound came from the other side of the wall.
Jyoti froze. Her breath caught in her throat, trapped in a painful lump. The boy froze too. His eyes snapped to the metal slab behind her.
Skritch. Skritch. Skritch.
Heavy. Rhythmic.
It wasn't the frantic scratching of a rat. It was the slow, deliberate testing of stone by claw. It was the sound of something looking for a weakness.
The other beast.
It was alive. Desperate.
The one she had maimed. The one that had lost a leg. It hadn't run. It hadn't died. It was right there, separated from them by a thick inches of twisted scrap. It was digging.
The blockade was solid. Feet of compressed steel stood between them and the teeth. Physically, they were safe. The cripple couldn't break through, not with three legs. It couldn't jump the pile. But the safety was a lie. They had seen the unison earlier. The synchronized turn of heads. The silent, telepathic click of a hive mind. These things didn't hunt alone, and they didn't keep secrets. If one knew they were here, the others would know soon. The scratching wasn't just an attempt to dig; it was a beacon.
They couldn't stay.
The boy was already moving. He uncoiled from his spot, ignoring the lack of space, folding his body with impossible flexibility. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. The equation had changed. The variable of 'hiding' was no longer valid.
Jyoti forced herself up. Her head swam. The walls tilted violently. She grabbed a protruding to steady herself, the rust flaking off under her fingers.
"Up," the boy whispered.
He pointed.
High above them, near the jagged roof of their tomb, a beam had shifted. It had created a fissure. A gap in the wreckage where the air filtered in—grey and dim, but real.
It was their only way out.
Jyoti looked at it. Her heart sank.
"It's too small," she hissed, panic rising in her throat. "A cat couldn't fit through that. We'll get stuck."
The boy didn't argue. He didn't even look at her. He just started climbing.
He found footholds in the trash. A bent bolt. A crushed crate. He pulled himself up, his movements jerky but efficient. He reached the gap. He didn't hesitate. He shoved his head in, then his shoulders.
He got stuck.
Jyoti watched, horrified. He twisted. He exhaled, emptying his lungs completely, making his ribcage collapse until he looked like a skeleton wrapped in parchment. He pushed.
He slid through.
Jyoti stared. It wasn't magic. It was anatomy.
He fit because he was starving. He fit because there was no meat on his bones, no fat to catch on the jagged edges. He was a creature of angles and famine.
She looked at her own hands. Thin. Skeletal. The skin stretched tight over the knuckles, blue veins prominent. She touched her own ribs; they felt like the rungs of a ladder beneath her shirt.
A grim realization washed over her. The hunger that was killing her... it was the only reason she was going to live.
A morbid advantage, she thought bitterly. Saved by the famine. If I had eaten yesterday, I would die today.
She followed him.
The climb was torture. Every pull of her arms sent fresh spikes of pain through her skull. Her muscles trembled, weak and watery. She slipped once, her bare foot skidding on a slick patch, but she caught herself on a jagged piece of rebar that sliced her palm. She didn't cry out. She dragged her body up the wall of refuse.
She reached the gap.
She shoved her head through. The metal scraped her cheeks, cold and unforgiving. A draft of ozone and smog hit her face, but she didn't get far. Her shoulders slammed into the frame.
The edges were sharp, serrated like teeth.
She exhaled. She pushed.
The metal bit into her shoulders. It scraped the skin raw, drawing blood. She felt her hip bones grind against the steel. The pressure on her chest was immense; she couldn't breathe. Panic flared.
Push.
She wiggled, twisting her body like a worm on a hook.
Pop.
She was through.
She tumbled out onto a ledge, gasping, her chest heaving as she sucked in the dirty air.
They weren't out of the danger. They were just out of the box.
They were in a vertical shaft of debris now. A chimney formed by the collapse of the massive stacks. The flow of air was coming from above.
"Move," the boy said. He was already climbing again.
They ascended the rubble mountain. It was a vertical crawl. They were ants scrambling up a shifting sand dune of razor blades.
Jyoti's vision blurred. The headache was a constant hammer. Her stomach cramped so hard she had to stop, doubling over, dry heaving nothing but spit and bile onto a rusted plate. Her body was screaming for fuel, for rest, for mercy.
The boy didn't wait, but he didn't leave her behind either. He paused ten feet above her. He looked down. He waited until she stood up. Then he started again.
Variable assessment: She is slow, but moving. Acceptable.
They climbed for what felt like hours. It might have been minutes. Time had no meaning here, only elevation.
Finally, the slope leveled out.
The boy pulled himself up over a final lip of metal. He rolled onto his back, staring up at the darkness-choked sky.
Jyoti followed. She clawed her way over the edge, her fingers bleeding, her breath coming in ragged, tearing gasps that burned her throat.
She collapsed on the flat surface. A high plateau of wreckage. They were high up now. The air was slightly clearer here, though it still tasted of sulfur and ruin.
They had made it.
Jyoti lay there, letting the cold surface leech the heat from her feverish skin. Alive. We're alive.
She sat up slowly. Her body protested every inch of the way. She needed to see. She needed to know how far they had come.
She turned.
She didn't look down at the ravine. She looked out. Her eyes traced the darkness, stretching far beyond.
Pure, distilled horror washed over her face. She turned her head slowly, the cold wind biting her skin. She looked at the boy lying next to her on the jagged plateau. He was staring into the same darkness, unblinking, his face a mask of terrifying calm.
A cold thought settled in her chest, heavier than the fear.
I was right.