I don't know how long I stayed on my hands and knees in the rubble after I woke up.
A few seconds.
A minute.
Maybe longer.
Time felt wrong now, stretched thin and sharpened into pieces that no longer fit together the way they were supposed to. My breaths came hard and uneven, scraping my throat with smoke and dust. Every inhale tasted like ash. Every exhale felt like it was leaving behind something heavier than air.
The city was still burning.
I could hear it beyond the ruined wall in front of me, the distant crack of collapsing timber, the roar of fire feeding on broken homes, screams that rose and cut off too quickly, the wet growls of monsters moving somewhere out there in the streets.
And beneath all of it, quieter but clearer than anything else, there was another sound.
Breathing.
Mine.
And not mine.
I froze.
The voice inside my head had gone silent for a while after telling me to get up. I had almost started to think I'd imagined it, that whatever had happened in that void had been some dying hallucination my mind had thrown together in its final moments before going dark.
Then the voice spoke again.
"You are trembling."
I clenched my jaw so hard it hurt.
It wasn't coming from my ears. It wasn't an echo in the room or some whisper hiding beneath the roar of the city. It was simply there, inside me, carried beneath my thoughts as if it belonged beside them.
"I noticed," I muttered.
My own voice sounded rough and wrong. Too thin. Too tired. Like I had been screaming for hours.
For a moment, there was silence from the presence inside me.
Then:
"You are alive. That is what matters."
I looked down at the rubble beneath my hands, at the dust and splintered wood and dried patches of blood darkening the floor. My blood. Nate's blood. Some of it may be from the people who used to live in this house before it became another ruin in a dying city.
Alive.
The word didn't feel clean.
It felt stolen.
My gaze shifted past the broken wall into the street.
Nate still lay there where the lion had thrown him.
I stopped breathing for a second.
He hadn't moved. Of course he hadn't. Some stupid part of me had still been half-hoping, clinging to something impossible and pathetic, some thought that maybe if I looked again his chest would rise, or he'd cough, or I'd see his hand twitch and know he wasn't…
But no.
He was still slumped where he had hit the wall, his body folded wrong, blood spread beneath him in a dark pool that had soaked into the stones.
Something in my chest tightened until it hurt worse than any of my wounds.
I pushed myself to my feet.
Pain flashed through my side and ribs, sharp enough to make my vision blur for half a heartbeat, but it didn't drop me this time. The wounds were still there. I could feel them pulling every time I moved, deep and raw and terrible. But they were closed enough for me to stand. Closed enough for me to walk.
Closed enough for me to keep going.
That should have felt impossible.
It did feel impossible.
I pressed a hand against my side and felt torn fabric, sticky blood, and beneath that the ragged line where the lion's claws had opened me.
I should have been dead.
"Yes," the voice said, answering a thought I hadn't meant to say aloud. "You should have."
I flinched. "Stop doing that."
"Doing what?"
"Reading my thoughts."
A pause.
"I do not need to read them. You are not subtle."
I almost snapped something back, but the words died before they got out. My eyes had gone back to Nate.
I stepped through the ruined wall and into the street.
The air outside hit me like a slap, hot from nearby fires, thick with smoke and drifting ash. The street looked worse than it had before. More bodies. More broken stone. More blood. It was as if the whole city had been fed through a grinder and spat back out in pieces.
I crossed the distance to Nate slowly.
Partly because my body still felt like it was held together by something that could tear at any second.
Mostly because I didn't want to reach him.
As long as I was still walking toward him, there was still that last fraction of distance where nothing had to be final yet.
But then I was there.
I dropped to one knee beside him.
His eyes were half-open. Empty. Staring at nothing.
The wound through his chest was as bad as I remembered. Worse, maybe. Blood had dried in dark streaks down his front and pooled beneath him in a thick black-red stain. His hand had fallen palm-up near his side, fingers slightly curled like they had frozen mid-reach.
I couldn't make myself look at his face for more than a second at a time.
The image of him in the alley flashed through my head instead—dust on his cheek, hair a mess, giving me that incredulous look when I asked how he had known where I went.
Because I know you.
My throat tightened hard enough to hurt.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
The words barely existed.
I swallowed and tried again.
"I'm sorry."
For following me.
For not running.
For saving me.
For dying because of me.
I didn't say any of that part aloud. Maybe I couldn't. Maybe if I had started, I wouldn't have stopped.
My hand hovered over his face for a second before I forced myself to move it the rest of the way. I closed his eyes.
His skin was cooler now than my mother's had been.
That thought almost split me open again.
I pulled my hand back fast.
"I'll kill them," I said, staring down at him. "I swear I'll kill them."
The voice inside me was silent.
For once, I was glad.
A low growl rolled down the street.
I looked up instantly.
Three shapes were moving at the far end of the road, slipping between wrecked carts and fallen masonry. Smaller than the lion. Smaller by far. Their bodies were low and twisted, their movements quick and uneven.
Beginner-class monsters.
Three of them.
One looked vaguely wolf-like if a wolf had been skinned alive and stitched back together by something that hated symmetry. The second was broader through the chest, with a jaw that hung too low and forelimbs longer than its hind legs. The third crawled more than walked, dragging one side of its body but still moving fast.
They had smelled the blood.
Mine. Nate's. The city's.
They were coming.
I rose slowly from beside Nate's body.
For the first time since waking, I became aware of something else, something cold and deep sitting beneath my ribs, beneath my heartbeat, beneath even the ache of my wounds.
A well.