I couldn't breathe.
The room seemed to narrow around me, the broken walls folding inward, the splintered beams above me bending down as if the whole house wanted to crush me with them. My eyes stayed fixed on the floor, on the shape of my parents where they had fallen, and everything else in the world slipped away.
No sound.
No motion.
Nothing but them.
My mind refused to understand what I was looking at.
It tried. I could feel it trying—grasping at details, arranging them, searching for the shape of something else, but the truth was too large, too wrong, too final. The bodies on the floor were my mother and father, and yet my thoughts kept skidding away from that fact like it was too sharp to hold.
This isn't real.
That was the first thought.
This isn't real. This isn't happening. This is something else. A nightmare. A mistake. A cruel trick of smoke and shadow and blood.
But it wasn't.
I knew their faces.
That was the worst part at first.
Their faces were still recognizable.
My father lay twisted onto his side, his head turned at an angle that looked almost natural until the rest of him destroyed that illusion. His face was smeared with blood, dried in some places, fresh and dark in others, but it was still him. I could still see the shape of his brow. The line of his jaw. The mouth that had been laughing that morning over coffee and badly buttered toast.
My mother lay partly on her back, her hair matted dark where it clung to her face and neck. One side of her face was streaked red, and there was dust on her cheek, but it was still her. I could still see the softness of her mouth. The line of her lashes against skin gone far too still. Her face looked almost peaceful from a distance if I let myself lie for half a second.
The rest of them had been torn apart.
My father's chest had been opened by claws or teeth… I didn't know which, and I didn't want to know, except some part of me saw it anyway. His shirt was shredded into hanging strips soaked black-red, and beneath it, the flesh had been ripped so deeply I could see pale bone under the ruin of muscle and blood. One shoulder had been mauled almost to the joint, the arm dragged half out of place, leaving it twisted wrong beneath him. His side had been ripped open so badly that I could see dark coils of organs spilling from the wound, slick and glistening in the broken light, mixed with plaster dust and splinters from the floor.
My mother's body was no better.
Her abdomen had been torn open in long, savage rakes that had split clothing, skin, and everything beneath as if the thing that killed her had treated her body like paper. One of her legs had been crushed at the thigh, mangled so badly the bone had punched through flesh in a jagged white shard. Her arm—her left arm—had been nearly severed, hanging by strips of blood-slick tissue and ruined sleeve. There were bites too. Deep, ragged chunks missing from her side and shoulder, as if something had fed on her and been interrupted before it could finish.
There was blood everywhere.
Not just around them.
Everywhere.
It had sprayed the wall in thick fans and streaks. It had soaked into the bedding that had been flung halfway off the ruined mattress. It ran in dark channels through the cracks in the floorboards, pooled beneath broken furniture, and smeared across the stone where something had dragged or thrashed or tried to crawl. Small pieces of them, skin, flesh, threads of torn fabric stuck together with blood, clung to the jagged splinters of the broken bed frame.
The smell hit me fully a second later.
Blood.
So much blood.
Thick and metallic and wet, mixed with ruptured insides, broken wood, smoke, and something else, something animal and rotting already, though maybe that was only my mind turning it worse.
My stomach turned so hard I thought I would vomit, but I didn't.
I couldn't.
I was too far gone into shock for even that.
I took one step forward.
Then another.
My feet stuck faintly to the floor where it was wet.
The sound of it, soft, tacky, almost gentle, made something inside me recoil, but my body kept moving anyway.
I felt far away from myself.
That was the only way to describe it.
As if I were watching from somewhere over my own shoulder, watching some other boy walk toward the bodies of his parents without screaming, without falling apart, without stopping.
I don't remember deciding to kneel.
One second I was standing, swaying slightly, the next my knees hit the blood-slick floor hard enough to jar my whole body. I barely felt the pain.
My hands hung uselessly at my sides for a moment.
Then, slowly, so slowly it seemed to take forever, I reached out.
I touched my mother's face first.
Her skin was cooling.
Not cold yet.
That realization hit with an intimacy so brutal it nearly split me open. There was still some trace of warmth there, fading and useless and too late, and my fingers shook so hard I almost couldn't keep them there.
"Mom," I whispered.
My voice barely existed.
It scraped out of me thin and torn.
I turned my hand and touched my father's face next, my fingertips brushing blood and dust and skin I knew as well as my own.
"Dad."
The room blurred.
I hadn't realized I was crying until tears fell onto the back of my hand and mixed with the blood there. More came after that, silent and steady at first, sliding down my face faster than I could understand.
My arm retracted without me thinking about it.
I dragged the back of my wrist across my cheek, as if wiping tears away would do anything, and only then did I realize my sleeve and hand were slick with their blood. It streaked across my skin in a dark red line from temple to jaw, warm in some places, cooling in others. I could feel it on my face. Smell it. Taste salt and iron where some of it reached the corner of my mouth.
That was when the truth finally hit.
Not as a thought.
But as a force.
A wave of it slammed through me so hard I folded forward over myself, my breath breaking in my chest. My parents were dead. Dead. Dead. There was no shelter they had reached, no corner of the city where they waited for me alive and frightened and angry. They had died here. In this room. In this house. Alone. Torn apart while I was somewhere else.
The numbness shattered.
Everything came at once.
Grief first, huge and bottomless, opening inside me like the floor had given way.
Then anger, so sudden and violent it burned through the grief like fire through oil.
Then guilt—thick, choking, unbearable guilt.
I wasn't here.
I wasn't here.
I left them.
I failed.
I failed the test. I failed them. I failed everything.
A sound tore out of me before I knew I was making it.
It started low, almost like a groan, then ripped upward into a scream that scraped my throat raw. It echoed off the ruined walls and the exposed beams and came back at me broken, the sound of an animal being gutted.
"Why?" I choked out.
My hands fisted in my pants so hard my nails bit through the fabric.
"Why?"
The word cracked apart.
My shoulders shook. I bent over, tears spilling off my face onto the bloody floor, onto my knees, onto them.
"Why didn't you run?" I shouted, though I didn't know if I meant them or myself or whatever god watched this happen and did nothing. "Why didn't you get out?"
My voice broke again, smaller this time, helpless and furious and ruined.
"Why did you die?"
The question sat in the room like an accusation.
There was no answer.
Only blood. Broken wood. Bodies.
I lowered my head until my chin nearly hit my chest. Tears kept falling. I couldn't stop them. My fist closed tighter and tighter until my knuckles ached.
I didn't hear Nate come closer.
I only felt it when a hand settled on my shoulder.
I flinched so hard my whole body jerked.
I turned sharply.
Nate stood over me, pale and wrecked-looking, his eyes wet. There were tears there, caught in the corners, though he was trying not to let them fall. His face looked pinched with grief and fear and something like helplessness.
He swallowed before he spoke.
"Mark," he said quietly. "I know this is hard."
Hard.
The word almost made me laugh.
A horrible laugh. A sick one.
"This is—" He stopped, took a breath, and tried again. "I know. But we have to go."
I stared at him.
He glanced once at my parents, then away, like even now he couldn't look at them for long. "We need to get back to an evacuation point before something finds us."
Something in me recoiled from the words instantly.
Go?
Leave?
Leave them here?
"No," I said.
My voice sounded distant. Dead.
Nate's hand tightened slightly on my shoulder. "Mark—"
"No."
"We can't stay."
I looked back at my parents. Blood pooled darkly beneath them, soaking into the broken floor. The room smelled like slaughter. My tears kept falling.
"I'm not leaving them," I said.
Nate's breath hitched. "We don't have a choice."
"Yes, we do."
"No, we don't." His voice grew sharper, though I could hear it shaking underneath. "If we stay here, we die here."
I said nothing.
He crouched a little, trying to get into my line of sight. "Mark. Listen to me."
I didn't look at him.
"I'm staying," I said.
His jaw clenched. "If we stay, we'll become monster food."
That got me to turn.
Not because he was right.
Because I hated hearing him say it.
Something ugly twisted through me, fed by grief and shame and fury and the sight of my parents on the floor behind him.
"Then fuck off," I said.
The words came out flat at first.
He stared at me.
I barely knew my own voice when I spoke again. "Just leave me alone."
"Mark—"
"Maybe I deserve it."
His expression changed.
"What?"
I laughed once—short, broken, without humor. "Maybe I do."
My eyes burned. My whole face felt hot and wet and filthy.
"I wasn't here," I said. "I wasn't here for them."
Nate opened his mouth, but I kept going.
"I failed them." My voice shook harder now. "And I failed the spirit test too. I couldn't do anything right. Nothing." I looked at my parents again and the words started coming faster, harsher. "I couldn't protect them. I couldn't even become compatible. I couldn't even be worth something when it mattered."
"Stop," Nate said.
"So maybe this is what useless people get."
"Mark, stop."
"Maybe I should've just—"
His fist hit my face before I understood he had moved.