The crate had been sitting in Bay 14 for six days before anyone told Kade Ferris not to scan it.That was the thing about warehouse work nobody outside it understood. It wasn't the lifting. It was the waiting, the standing around a pallet while some manager on a headset argued with someone three states away about a manifest that didn't match what was actually sitting on the floor. Kade had learned a long time ago that the fastest way through a shift was to stop asking questions the job wasn't paying him to ask.So when his supervisor, a tired man named Denny who smelled permanently of vending machine coffee, walked past Bay 14 and said, low, like it embarrassed him to say it out loud, "Don't run the scanner over that one, just log it by hand," Kade didn't ask why. He just nodded and wrote the crate number down on his clipboard in pen instead of running it through the handheld like every other piece of inventory on the floor.It was a small thing. It would have stayed a small thing, ex

Chapter Three: The Math of Who StaysThe man who would later apologize to him, who would eventually mean it, was the one who first said, out loud, that Kade was a problem.His name was Halden Cho. He'd been part of the group since the warehouse floor, quiet in a way Kade had mistaken for shyness, one of the forklift crew who kept to himself and didn't say much beyond what the job required. It turned out his quiet wasn't shyness. It was the particular stillness of a man taking stock, and once the group had walked far enough that the black glass tower filled a third of the horizon, Halden stopped being quiet."We're too slow," he said, at the second rest stop, crouched with the others in the lee of a collapsed pedestrian bridge. His class had come back Warrior too, same as Terrence, and something about having two of them in the group had started to shift the group's center of gravity without anyone announcing it. "We've covered maybe a mile in two hours. At this rate we're still in the

Morning came the way everything had come since the sky broke, without warning and without mercy, the bruised purple overhead thinning into a sickly gray that didn't quite deserve to be called dawn.Kade woke to the sound of the group already talking in low voices near the front of the mattress store, and understood, before he'd even fully opened his eyes, that the conversation had continued without him sometime after he'd stopped pretending to listen and actually fallen asleep."There's a hardware store two blocks north," Oduya was saying, crouched by the boarded window, looking out at the gray light through a gap he'd worked open with his pipe overnight. "I can see the sign from here. If it hasn't been picked clean, that's water, batteries, tools, maybe a first aid kit bigger than the one we're working with.""Worth the risk," Halden said. "But we go light. Two, maybe three people, fast in and fast out. Everyone else stays here, ready to move if something comes through."Kade sat up.

The sound got louder before it got clearer, which Kade decided was probably not a good sign. He followed it through two blocks of what used to be a residential street, houses with their roofs peeled back like the lids of tin cans, front yards full of the same fine gray ash that seemed to settle over everything a kill left behind, and by the third block he could hear, underneath the growl-groan sound, something wetter, more rhythmic, a sound his body understood as chewing before his mind caught up and confirmed it. He stopped at the corner of a house with half its siding gone and looked around the edge of it. The thing in the yard beyond was bigger than anything he'd seen since the sky broke, low and heavy on four thick legs, its body somewhere between a boar and something that had never existed before that morning, tusks curved and yellow, hide the mottled gray-brown of old bruising. It had something pinned under one foreleg, feeding, and Kade made himself not look too closely a

They found a place to stop an hour later, a parking garage with enough of its lower level intact to offer real cover, concrete on three sides and a single ramp entrance narrow enough that anything coming through it would have to come through single file.Reyna sat with her back against a support pillar, leg stretched out in front of her, watching Kade with the particular attentiveness of someone still deciding how much of her guard to lower. He didn't mind it. He understood it better than she probably realized, having spent the better part of two days being sized up by people deciding what he was worth."You keep stopping," she said, after the third time he crouched to examine a piece of debris that, to her eyes, looked like nothing at all. "What are you actually doing?"He considered how much to tell her. Told her more than he'd told anyone since the sky broke, mostly because she'd earned it, bleeding out under a pillar and still finding the composure to put an arrow through a Chitin