The gate opened at six, and the cold hit them first.
Michael hadn't been outside at this hour before, and the city at dawn was a different thing from the city at midday.
The light was flat and grey, and everything had edges that the afternoon softened. The street in front of the building was empty in both directions, and the only sound was the distant, ambient groaning that lived somewhere in the city at all hours, like background noise he had almost stopped hearing.
Almost.
He ran the pulse and it showed they were clean for two blocks north. A scatter of signatures on the block after that, six or seven moving slow and directionless, and beyond them, the hospital sitting at the edge of the range like a destination that had been waiting.
He looked back at the others. Sera behind him, then Shin, then Maya at the rear. All of them were still and watching him patiently waiting for him to tell them what to do.
He gestured north, and they moved.
The first block was easy.
The street ran straight and clear, and the buildings on either side were dark and quiet, and the only thing they passed was a car that had rolled into a lamp post sometime in the first week and stayed there ever since. Michael kept the pulse running continuously and fed position updates to the squad tracker so everyone could feel the rough shape of what was around them without needing words.
Nothing moved toward them.
Maya was good on open street, he noticed. Better than he had expected. She moved quietly and kept her spacing, and her eyes went where they should go without him telling her.
The table leg was across her shoulders, both hands on it, ready without being raised and obvious. Shin moved with a slight favouring of her left leg that was barely visible but present, and he filed it without commenting because she would have his head if he commented.
They reached the end of the first block and stopped at the junction.
Michael crouched behind the corner car and looked north.
The second block was different. He could see three Rotters from where he was: one in the middle of the street about forty meters ahead, moving in a slow circle, and two more near a shop front on the left side, closer to the far end. The pulse showed him four more he couldn't see from here, two in a building doorway on the right and two further back near the junction at the far end.
They were seven total, spread across one block, with no clean path through the middle.
He pulled back and looked at Sera. She had been counting from the same position. She held up seven fingers, and he nodded. She looked at the street again, then pointed left, at the row of buildings running along the west side of the block.
There was a gap between two of them, it was narrow and barely a shoulder width, that ran parallel to the street all the way to the far junction.
He looked at the gap and then looked at the pulse. The two signatures in the right-side doorway were on the east side of the street, which meant the gap on the west was safe.
He nodded and they went left.
The gap was tight enough that they had to go single file, and the ground was uneven, broken concrete and old rubbish and things he didn't look at too closely.
Michael led, with the pulse tracking the seven signatures through the wall to his right, watching them drift and shuffle in their directionless patterns and keeping the group's pace matched to the gaps between movements.
Halfway through the gap, the Rotter in the middle of the street turned.
It wasn't like it had seen them rather it just happened to turn randomly facing a new direction for no reason and then standing still.
Michael stopped and held up a fist, and everyone behind him froze. He watched the signature on the pulse. It stood still for about twenty seconds that felt considerably longer than twenty seconds, and then shuffled forward away from them toward the north end of the block.
He exhaled and kept moving.
They came out of the gap at the far end of the second block and crouched behind a delivery van that had stopped in the junction, its back doors hanging open and its cargo long gone. The third block stretched north ahead of them, and Michael ran the pulse and felt the difference immediately.
The third block was busy.
It was not a horde or the wall of signatures that the pulse caught eight blocks southeast and that he still hadn't figured out, but busy enough. Fourteen signatures spread across the block in a density that had no clean path through it from any angle he could find.
Three on the street, four clustered near what looked like a restaurant on the east side, two on the rooftop of the building directly across from them, which he did not like at all, and five more scattered in the buildings on either side with the particular irregular movement that meant they were inside but not contained.
He crouched behind the van and looked at the block for a long moment.
Sera came up beside him. She ran her eyes across the street, counted what she could see, looked at his face, and read the rest.
"They're roo many," she said quietly.
"Too many for straight through," he agreed.
Maya appeared on his other side and looked at the block, then at the rooftop. "Are those on the roof?"
"Two of them."
"How did they get on the roof?"
"Crawlers can climb," Shin said quietly from behind them. "Or they were up there before."
Maya looked at the rooftop for a second. "I don't like that."
"Nobody likes that," Michael said. He looked at the buildings on the west side of the block and saw different broken stores until his eyes landed on a narrow building that looked like it had been an office with three floors and a fire escape on the side running all the way up.
Between the clothing store and the office building, there was a doorway, set back from the street, partially hidden by a collapsed awning that had folded down over the entrance.
He looked at it on the pulse and thankfully there was nothing inside the clothing store or the door way, but the office building had one signature on the second floor, moving slowly.
"We can go through the clothing store," he said. "And wait it out until the street thins. The cluster near the restaurant looks like it'll drift east, based on how they've been moving."
"How long?" Sera asked.
He watched the pulse patterns. "Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty."
Maya looked at the clothing store. "We're hiding in a clothing store."
"We're making a tactical pause in a clothing store," Michael said.
"That's the same thing."
"Are you even seriously going to argue about it?"
She looked at the fourteen signatures on the pulse relay, then at the two on the rooftop, then back at him. "No," she said.
"Good." He looked at the collapsed awning doorway. "We move on my signal. Fast and low on a single file, into that doorway. Sera you go first."
Sera was already moving before he finished the sentence.