Every part of me locked up at once.
The sound had come from ahead.
Or maybe from just around the next bend where the alley turned behind a low brick partition.
My heartbeat slammed so hard it hurt.
A kicked stone, my mind offered.
Or a claw.
Or something dragging itself around the corner.
I couldn't breathe properly. My mouth had gone dry. My hands felt useless at my sides.
Another sound.
A scrape.
Closer.
I took one slow step backward, then another, staring at the corner ahead like staring harder would make it less deadly. There was nowhere to run in a space this tight. If it was a monster, I was trapped.
The corner stayed empty.
For half a second.
Then a head appeared.
I jerked backward so hard my shoulder slammed into the wall.
It was a human.
Messy dark hair. Wide eyes. Dirt smeared across one cheek.
Nate.
For a second I was too shocked to speak.
He looked just as startled. "Mark—"
"What the hell are you doing here?" I hissed.
He stepped fully around the corner, breathing hard. His uniform was filthy. One sleeve was ripped near the elbow. There was dust in his hair and a fresh scrape near his jaw. "I could ask you the same thing."
"You followed me?"
"I lost you," he whispered back. "Then I found where you peeled off, and after that…" He shrugged once, like the rest should've been obvious. "I guessed."
I stared at him. "How could you possibly have guessed that?"
He looked at me like I'd asked something stupid. "Because I know you."
That shut me up.
Nate took another step closer. "You vanished the first chance you got. You were barely holding it together after the attack. The second things got chaotic enough that no one would notice, you disappeared."
He lifted a hand slightly. "Of course you were going to look for your family."
The way he said it, flat, certain, no hesitation at all, hit me harder than I expected.
Of course.
Like there had never been another option.
Maybe there hadn't been.
I looked away first. "You shouldn't have come."
"Probably not," he said. "But you definitely shouldn't have come alone."
Despite everything, a strained breath escaped me that almost sounded like a laugh. It died immediately.
I scrubbed a hand over my face. "You could've died."
Nate glanced back toward the alley entrance. "Still very possible."
That pulled another almost-laugh out of me, thinner this time.
Then it was gone.
He looked at me properly then, and his voice changed. Softer. "Are you okay?"
The question was so absurd I almost said yes automatically.
Instead I said, "No."
He nodded once. "Yeah."
For a moment neither of us spoke.
The city filled the silence for us. Distant crashes. Alarms. A sound from somewhere farther off that didn't sound human and didn't sound like anything I ever wanted to hear again.
Finally Nate asked, "How far?"
"Not much farther," I said. "A few streets."
He nodded toward the far end of the alley. "Then let's move before something else decides to come looking."
So we did.
Moving with two people was harder. Louder. Riskier. We had to stop more often, listen longer, time our crossings better. But somehow having Nate there changed the shape of the fear. It didn't lessen it. Not really.
It just made it less lonely.
At the end of the alley we paused again before stepping into the next street.
This had always been one of the quieter residential stretches. Small front gardens. Painted doors. Chalk drawings from neighborhood kids in summer. The kind of place where people actually waved at each other.
Now it looked torn open.
Fences were smashed flat. A lamp post leaned badly to one side. One house had lost a chunk of its roof. Curtains stirred out of shattered windows. Flower boxes had been overturned and ground into the street.
Nate stared for a second. "God."
I said nothing.
We moved from cover to cover, staying close to walls, ducking behind broken carts and sections of masonry whenever the road opened too wide. Once, both of us dropped flat behind a fallen stone planter as a large shadow crossed the far end of the street.
Neither of us got a good look at it.
Neither of us said a word until it was gone.
The closer we got to my neighborhood, the worse it became.
Every damaged house felt like a warning for the next one.
Every broken door made my chest tighten harder.
I knew this route by instinct. Left at the narrow lane with the birdbath. Straight past the low ivy-covered wall. Right where the cobbles dipped slightly near the drainage channel.
Only now every landmark was damaged enough that it felt like finding them in a dream.
I remembered racing Nate down this same street last summer, both of us laughing over something so stupid I couldn't even remember what it was now. I remembered dragging myself home in the rain after class with my socks soaked and my bag half-open. I remembered the light in my kitchen window on winter evenings, warm and steady.
I wanted that light now more than anything.
"There," I said quietly.
My own voice sounded wrong.
Nate followed my line of sight.
At first, I didn't understand what I was seeing.
The house should have been at the end of the row, just past the iron fence and the little patch of garden my mother was always trying to keep alive no matter what the weather did to it.
The fence was there.
Part of it.
Bent inward.
The garden was gone.
And the house—
I stopped walking.
Everything inside me dropped out at once.
The front of the house had caved in.
Not all of it, but enough. The front wall had collapsed inward, stone and timber spilling out over what had once been the path to the door. One side of the roof had folded down into the middle like a crushed ribcage. Smoke drifted from somewhere inside in thin, ugly threads. The windows were gone. The door was gone. Pieces of my life were scattered across the street in broken fragments.
A chair leg.
Shattered dishes.
A strip of curtain I recognized.
For a second, there was no sound.
No alarms.
No wind.
Nothing.
Then I heard myself drag in a breath that didn't feel like enough.
Beside me, Nate said something, but I didn't hear it.
I couldn't stop staring.
Home.
Or what had been home.
Because all that was left were ruins...