The world cracked.
A gunshot tore the night in half.
The climber's skull erupted in a wet blossom. Bone and black tissue sprayed across the rock. The body dropped, knees clacking stone, rolled, and took two more with it.
Another shot. The head of the thing on Eli's side popped like a swollen tick. It folded in on itself, shuddered, stilled. A third shot—clean, controlled, cored the fast one that had been waiting to spring while we looked away.
Each bullet landed with the sure punctuation of a sentence. I knew the action, bolt cycle, breath, and trigger. No panic. The kind of calm that came with practice, lots of it.
"Move your asses, goddammit!" he barked, even though we were already moving.
We didn't argue. He shouldered past us, reversing down the trail, rifling up and talking. Two more infected broke the brush. He put them down mid-stride—two shots, wet mist, thunk—like punctuation, not drama.
I risked a glance.
A figure stood at the tree line above the road. Long coat torn by weather and war. Rifle anchored to the shoulder, muzzle smoking. He pivoted like he'd been born with a sight line instead of a spine.
He sent three more. Three fell.
"Down!" I pulled Eli into a crouch as splatter rained on the shelf. The infected hesitated, and then they turned stupidly toward the new noise, pouring off the ledge toward the ridge in a pulsing surge.
"Now!" I hissed and hauled Eli to his feet.
We ran to the shelf, skirting bodies that still twitched. I kicked a hand that tried for my ankle. It spun away and thudded wetly somewhere below. We reached the place where we'd climbed up and slid, boots and bare feet skidding, grabbing sapling trunks, bouncing off stone.
Gunfire stitched the night in steady bursts. The man above us—whether angel or devil—walked the rounds down the slope with surgeon calm, each impact a pulpy thwack that sent pieces skyward and back to the earth with the slap of wet meat.
We hit the trail and sprinted hard, lungs scorching. Pain ran through each rib. Eli's branch cracked against his thigh; he didn't let go.
"Spike strip?" he asked without looking at me.
"Yeah."
"Then they'll have more company behind. Human." He spat the word out. "Up the ridge. There's a cut in the fence. Go."
Eli glanced up at me, eyes too big in a too-small face smeared with someone else's blood. I put a hand on the back of his neck and steered him after the man.
"Thank you," I said to nobody, to anybody that cared to hear it.
We climbed, legs burning. Behind us, the roadman screamed at the other infected. A last shot shut him up. The echo carried a long way through the valley.
At the fence cut, the man who helped us paused just long enough to look at Eli, then me, and read everything he needed to know. He nodded once, an approval he didn't have time to give but gave anyway.
"Keep your heads down," he said. "Welcome back to the bad part."
We ducked through the ragged wire and ran into whatever came next.
Wet grass as high as my knees licked against my ripped jeans, made colder by the wetness.. The field rolled away from the highway like a dark ocean frozen mid-swell.
Marcus. The voice I'd come to accept as Lily's whispered.
What? I questioned her.
His name. It's Marcus. I know him. Or I knew him.
Can he be trusted?
I'm not sure. Lily confessed.
Marcus moved with a hunter's rhythm—short bursts, pause, listen; repeat—angling us toward a wedge of black trees where the wind sounded like rain, but the sky still held.
"Sound and heat," he murmured, just loud enough. "They see like dogs. Hear like gods."
Eli's breath rattled. I slid my hand from his neck to his shoulder and felt the tremor still living in him. He kept the branch. I didn't tell him to drop it.
My forearm stung where nails had scored lines that continued to bleed. The knife's handle had my palm print, a dark stamp of proof. Somewhere below, the truck ticked as it cooled. Somewhere, he called it safe.
We reached the tree line. The forest closed around us with a soft hush.
"Here." Marcus stooped, shoved aside a fern big as a tablecloth, and revealed a foxhole someone had widened into a crawl space. "Half mile to the safehouse if we keep the creek to our right, but this'll cool your signatures. Thirty seconds."
He slid in first, belly and rifle, and rolled to watch the field. I eased Eli down after him, then dropped, heart drumming, cheek to damp soil, pine-sap sweetness cutting the rot that still clung to us.
Gunfire was silent, for now. The night reset, smaller, intimate: leaf-pressed against ear; counting my breaths; Eli's sniff swallowing a tear before it could decide to fall.
Marcus kept his eyes on the grass. "How many set the strip?"
"Didn't see," I said. "Three at least. One in the road. A whistle."
Figures," Marcus muttered, spitting into the dirt. "They've been pulling this trick since the thaw—ever since the snow melted and people started moving again. They use fake signal lights to lure survivors in, let the infected tear them apart, then come back later to steal their gear. Copycats pretending to be Lantern operatives—but without any of the training or sense."
The name Lantern made my stomach drop. The Lantern Division had been part of the old government's rescue program—the scientists and soldiers who tried to build safe zones when everything first collapsed.
Eli's head snapped up. "Wasn't that Project Eden?" he said quietly.
Marcus's eyes narrowed. "You shouldn't know that name."
"He knows it," I said, keeping my voice flat. "And so do I."
For a moment, Marcus just stared at me. I could see it in his face—the realization that I wasn't just another survivor.
"Yeah," he said finally, his tone shifting. "You do."
Don't tell him the rest, the voice whispered. Lily—my Lily, the one whose bones I wore—cool at the edges, torn at the center.
Not my secret to tell, I answered her.