FULL GEAR — CHAPTER 20: "Dark"
The building smelled like time.
Not rot, not mold — though both were present in the background the way old buildings carried everything they'd ever been. What hit Herro first was something older than that. The specific quality of air that accumulated in spaces after the people left and the ventilation stopped and the building became something it hadn't been designed to be: a container for the absence of everything that used to happen here.
His phone flashlight cut a narrow column through the dark ahead of him. Fourteenth floor. Desk frames. Filing cabinets tipped at angles, drawers open and empty. Ceiling tiles missing in patches, the metal grid above exposed. Someone had put a chair through a window at some point — the frame was still there, the glass long gone, and through the gap North Valor performed its nighttime version of itself three floors below the roof, orange-lit and continuous and completely indifferent to whatever this building had once been.
He'd been thinking about Lyra since they came through the door.
(She looked at that brief like it was a person,) he thought. (Not like it was a job. Like it was someone she recognized.)
He glanced at Hilda ahead of him. She was moving through the dark with her phone light angled low, reading the floor rather than the ceiling, the practiced navigation of someone who'd cleared enough unfamiliar buildings to know where the problems usually were.
"Hey," he said, keeping his voice low in the way the building suggested you should. "Lyra. The way she looked at the brief—"
"I don't care," Hilda said.
"You don't think it's—"
"I think she's weird about a lot of things and this is probably one of them." She stepped over a fallen ceiling tile without breaking stride. "Whatever it is, it can't be anything too crazy. The brief said retrieval. We retrieve."
He looked at the back of her ponytail and decided she was probably right. He filed it.
They cleared the stairwell to the fourteenth floor in silence, Hilda's light leading, Herro's following. The floor was darker than the ones below — fewer windows intact, the city light coming in at narrower angles. The flashlight beams made the shadows move instead of disappearing them.
"Split up," Hilda said, at the center of the floor. "We'll cover more ground. Package should be somewhere in the eastern half based on the brief's coordinates." She turned to face him. In the dark her blue eyes caught his phone light and held it for a second. "Turn your brightness all the way up. If you find something, text me before you touch it."
"Got it."
"And Herro."
"Yeah."
"Don't be weird in the dark."
"I'm not weird in the dark."
She was already walking.
Hilda, from what little Herro Touya knew about her, had a habit of saying things just to make a person rile up, and he had been on the receiving end since the day he met her.
He went west. She went east. The flashlight beam moved with him, picking out desk legs and chair frames and the occasional intact ceiling tile that had managed to outlast everything around it. The floor was quieter than the ones below, which had at least carried the echo of the city through the broken windows. Up here the sounds were internal — the building settling, the wind through gaps, something in the walls that he was going to decide was pipes.
Something else. Further down the corridor. Not the building.
He stopped.
Listened.
It was probably nothing. Buildings made sounds. Old buildings made more sounds. He'd been in three floors of this one and every floor had its own vocabulary of settling and creaking and the occasional complaint from infrastructure that hadn't been maintained in years.
He kept moving.
The eastern section of floor fourteen came into view as he rounded a corner — a wider open area, probably a shared workspace once, the desk frames more densely clustered here. His light moved across them in sequence and found nothing on the first sweep.
Then his phone buzzed.
"AH CRAP—"
He flinched. Caught himself.
He fumbled his phone in his hands for a second or two before regaining his composure and, hopefully, his dignity.
He looked at the screen.
📱 HILDA [10:41 PM] found a generator on 9. getting it running. package desc from brief: hard case, industrial grey, yellow hazard stripe on the left side panel. should be obvious if ur in the right area. don't touch until i confirm ur position
He typed back: understood, floor 14 east, still looking
He pocketed the phone and kept moving. The flashlight beam swept left. Desk. Filing cabinet. Another desk. A phone receiver on the floor that had been there long enough to become architectural.
Something caught the light.
He stopped.
Ahead of him — low to the ground, barely visible — a faint ambient glow. Not the city outside. Something closer. Warmer. And against the darkness at floor level, the specific quality of yellow that didn't belong to concrete or metal or anything a building produced on its own.
(Yellow stripe,) he thought. (Left side panel.)
He moved toward it carefully, stepping around a toppled chair, keeping the flashlight angled so it wouldn't blow his night vision before he got close enough to confirm. The glow resolved as he approached — not bright, just the faint phosphorescent quality of the hazard stripe catching ambient light from somewhere he couldn't identify.
The case was there. Low to the ground. He could make out the industrial grey of the casing and the yellow panel and the size matched what the brief had described.
He reached forward.
His hand went over the case. Past it slightly. His fingers closed around something that was not the handle.
It was soft.
And slightly springy.
And it was attached to something.
(That's not—)
He pulled.
The something resisted.
(Maybe it's stuck in there.)
He pulled again, with slightly more intention, because the brief had said secure the package and he was securing it—
It rose.
Not the case. The thing his hand was around. It rose, slowly, from the low crouching position it had been in over the case, and it kept rising, and what had been at floor level was now at waist height and then chest height and then the shape of a person was assembling itself in the dark in front of him as whatever he was holding continued to lift—
His flashlight found her face.
Herro's brain performed a complete emergency stop.
He was holding a single upright strand of golden blonde hair between his fingers.
The strand belonged to a head.
The head belonged to a girl. An actual person, right there — he was grabbing a girl's hair. A girl who was seemingly his age. He might be in trouble.
The girl was the kind of pretty that registered before anything else did.
Short golden hair, cut clean at the jaw — not styled into anything, just precise, the way expensive things were precise, the bob's tips curving inward slightly at the ends. Thin wispy bangs across her forehead, stopping exactly at the eyebrows as though someone had measured them. And at the crown, that single upright strand — the ahoge he'd just been holding — standing apart from everything else like it had its own opinion about where it belonged.
Her eyes were amber. Not just brown with some warmth in it — amber, the real thing, the gradient that darkened toward reddish-brown at the outer edges and caught the returning fluorescent light the way glass caught fire. They were large and almond-shaped and currently doing something that pretty eyes rarely did, which was communicate a very specific and accelerating fury.
The rest of her followed the same logic. Oval face, rounded chin, a nose that was small and pointed, a choker around her throat with a silver pendant sitting at the hollow of her collarbone. The leather jacket over the structured crop top over the pleated skirt with the black lace hem, the stockings, the combat boots. A body built narrow at the waist and wider at the hip, with legs that were long and toned in the way that meant she used them constantly and for nothing gentle.
She was, taken all at once, basically perfect.
She was also making a fist.
For one moment — one complete, frozen, suspended moment — neither of them moved.
Herro was holding a stranger's hair.
The stranger was a girl.
The girl was crouching over the case he'd been sent to retrieve.
The embarrassment on her face turned to a look of rage and hate, which fired off signals in the brain of Herro Touya — the specific signals that told an individual they were in trouble and the best thing to do was to stop whatever was putting them in danger.
He let go.
The lights came on.
Not all at once — a flicker, a surge, the fluorescent panels overhead cycling through their startup sequence in the specific stuttering way that industrial lighting came back after long disuse. The floor resolved into full visibility in stages. The girl in front of him resolved into full visibility in stages.
He could see her completely now.
She was 5'7" and she was standing straight up and her amber eyes had finished the full process of understanding what had just happened and had arrived somewhere considerably past wide open. Her hands were at her sides. One of them was forming a fist.
(Oh no.)
"YOU—" she started.
Herro opened his mouth.
She hit him.
CRACK.
The right hand came from somewhere below his sightline and connected with his jaw before the trajectory registered as a punch, and the force behind it was not the force of a 119-pound girl throwing a punch in a dark building — it was something categorically different, something with a different physics behind it, and Herro left the floor.
He went through the wall behind him.
Not a window. The actual wall. The drywall and the internal framing and the layers of material that made up the partition between what had been two separate office spaces, and he went through all of it and came down on the other side in a section of floor he hadn't been in yet, surrounded by dust and the particular debris of a wall that had recently stopped being a wall.
He lay there. His entire world rocked. Honestly, he couldn't tell if there was a world for him to return to.
He looked at the ceiling.
The ceiling had tiles in it. Most of them were intact. One of them had a water stain in the shape of something he couldn't identify.
From the other side of the hole he'd just made, a voice:
"PUNK ASS—"
He heard her land on the debris of the former wall. She was moving already.
Herro got one full breath into his lungs and registered that he was still alive, which felt like meaningful information given what had just happened to the wall.
"THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!"