The road out of the tunnel spat us into a gray noon that felt older than the sky. Houses leaned into each other like drunks after the party ended years ago. Yards were a wild tangle of weeds and rusted toys. Far off, something metal clanged—wind, or a scavenger pushing valuable finds inside a shopping cart. The light had the color of old dishwater; it made everything look used up and dingy.
Marcus didn't ask if we were following. He just started walking, shoulders square, that long fighter's gait like he owned the ruined street. Eli stuck close to my hip, the strap of his pack sawing a line into his shoulder. I kept my blade hidden under my jacket and the pistol heavy against my spine because sometimes weight is the only honest thing in the world of ghosts. My boots scuffed grit and bottle glass. Someone had spray-painted SMILE on a garage door and then shot the S, a bullet hole dead center.
Every few steps, Marcus looked back—not over his shoulder, but straight at me. Measuring. The way you check if a bridge will hold your weight before you cross it. The way you look at a stray dog to determine if it will decide to bite.
"You walk differently," he said finally.
Eli's hand tightened around the edge of my jacket.
"Different how?" I asked. Keep it even. Keep it bored. Keep it, Lily.
"The real Lily ran with her toes first," he said. "Like she was always bracing to stop. You… land on your heels."
He didn't slow down. Just kept naming the things I didn't know I was giving away. The set of my jaw. The way I scanned windows before intersections. How I said thank you to no one when we stepped past a half-collapsed fence—some old manners that weren't Lily's.
"Maybe people change," I said.
"They do," Marcus said. "But not down to their bones, not overnight."
We passed a school with the windows tarred over to keep out the heat. A mural of children holding hands peeled itself away from a brick wall and flapped in the wind like it wanted to escape the scene it was stuck in. The flagpole had no flag, yet still looked efficient.
Eli cleared his throat. "Where are we going?"
"Somewhere less exposed," Marcus said. "Convoy rolled down Grant Avenue at dawn. If they doubled back, we don't want to meet them in the open."
"Roadmen?" Eli asked.
"No." Marcus's mouth went tight. "Lantern clean-up."
The word "Lantern" slid between us like an invisible blade. I felt the old ache ignite behind my left eye—the one that came with specific names and certain smells, like hospital disinfectants, gasoline, and singed hair. I swallowed it back and kept pace. Lantern made rules. Lantern broke their own rules and rewrote them without notice. Lantern kept lists. Lily loved her job at Lantern. But I was told she was just an "assistant" there. Lies, I thought.
We cut two blocks over to a strip mall with its teeth knocked out. A nail salon with mirrored glass. A mattress store full of dust dunes. A dentist's office sign still promised painless whitening for $159, which seemed like a treasure from another species' religion. Above the door hung a plastic tooth the size of a cat, yellowed at the roots.
Marcus took us behind the buildings to a service alley. He stopped at a door warped around the handle, crouched, and touched the metal like it might be listening. He clipped a wire, slid a thin blade into the lock, and the mechanism gave way with a quiet click, letting us slip inside.
He glanced back into the darkness. "In the old days, this alley was where they bought and sold smiles for cash."
The dentist's office smelled like dry paper and damp gypsum. Dust motes drifted like slow snow in the thin window light. We passed the reception desk, then through a hallway lined with rooms where chairs were still faced with ghost televisions. A tray held a fossil of cotton rolls and a mirror shaped like a lollipop. Marcus knocked on one cabinet panel twice, then once, and pulled it open. The back was false. Behind it, a crawlspace yawned—a pocket between walls that smelled like old rain and insulation.
"Emergency room," he said, motioning us in. "You'll be safer if I talk to you here."
Safe felt like too strong a word, but it sounded nice. Eli climbed in first. I followed, sliding onto plywood. Marcus sealed us in darkness, then clicked on a penlight. The cone of illumination seemed to hum. We became three faces at the bottom of a well.
He crouched across from me, forearms on his knees, the light angled down so it cut his face into planes. In its white edge, I could see the scars on his knuckles, the fine callus on his trigger finger, and those eyes that had watched me since he recognized my not-Lily walk.
"You're different," he said again, quiet now. "And not just your stride."
I held his gaze. When lying is a skill, stillness is the first lesson.
He studied me as if he were searching for a word to describe what he was thinking. "Back at the tunnel, you asked me three things Lily would never have asked. What the Roadmen barter for blood bags. Why do the Lanterns move at dawn? Whether the wind carries sounds farther underground or across rooftops. Lily didn't think like that. She was an arrow—you pointed her and told her when to stop."
I could hear Eli breathing in the dark. He was trying to quiet his breath, but the penlight made his pupils enormous. He always hated these moments: when the floor beneath them began to creak, it's subtle warning that it wasn't solid ground anymore.
"People change," I said again, softer. "Especially after an accident."
Marcus's head tilted. "Accident?"
The ache behind my left eye thickened, memory gathering like a storm approaching. A road at dusk. Headlights blooming into a field of glass. The long, slow skid where the world turned to syrup. The sound a body makes when it chooses one girl and not the other.
"My… head wasn't right for a while," I said, and it wasn't a lie. "There was a car. We hit the median. It was raining." I could smell it again—wet rubber, copper, the warm-sour of a seatbelt burned into my clavicle. "My sister didn't make it."
The pen light didn't move. Marcus didn't speak. The space between our heartbeats stretched until I could hear the wood under my palms groan. Deep inside the building, a ceiling tile fell, exploding dust into the darkness.
"The building is literally collapsing around us. Is this safe?"
The response wasn't mine. "Better than outside," a voice inside me whispered, cold and dry.
"Ah, there you are," I thought, relief battling panic. "Lily. Help me out here."
Nothing. She was gone again.
Eli's fingers ghosted over my elbow. "We can tell him," he whispered, but the way he said it meant "We can tell him some of it."
Marcus breathed out. "I'm sorry."
The two words punched the air out of me. People didn't say sorry anymore. They said you're lucky, or it should have been me, or I had to. Sorry, felt like a returns policy from the old world.
"She was older?" he asked.
"She was… Lily." The name tasted like a prayer and a lie. "She was everything that made sense when things didn't."
"And you," he said, watching my face like it might crack, "were who?"
There are questions that open doors and questions that open graves.
"I was the one who lived," I said simply.
The pen light trembled, just once. Marcus's mouth pressed into something like grief, or maybe recognition. He leaned back until his head touched the drywall. The light made a dim halo where his hair met the gypsum.
"I know what Lantern does to people," he said. "Before the fall, after the fall. It doesn't matter. They look for holes and fill them with obedience. So, when I see someone who stands a little sideways to what I remember, I don't think accident." He steadied the light. "I think survival."
Outside, a burst of engine noise ricocheted down the alley. We froze. Boots. A truck door slammed. Voices. Male. Two? Three? Marcus snapped off the light, and the dark wrapped us like a second skin. Eli counted under his breath, a habit that steadied him, and I tried to match it to my pulse—four in, four out. Don't chase the breath; let the breath come to you.
Footsteps scraped past the back door. Someone jiggled the handle. A radio squawked, then stuttered out. One of the men laughed, short and nervous, and the sound moved away like an evil thought. The footsteps wandered on.
We stayed still for a hundred years, which was just minutes. When Marcus breathed again, it was with careful permission of the living.
He flicked the light back on. "Lantern sweeps," he said, voice low. "They'll keep circling. We'll move when it's louder—cover noise, more engines. Don't fire unless you must."
"You think they're here for us?" Eli whispered.
"I think they're here for a list," Marcus said. "Always a list. Names to cross off."
"We are all on that list now, aren't we?" I questioned.
Marcus watched me a moment longer than necessary, careful with his words: "Yes," he sighed. "We are all now."