Hidden Class

Chapter Five: Supply Run

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. Nobody looked at him when the group started sorting itself into who would go and who would stay, but he'd learned enough in the last day to read the shape of a decision before it was spoken out loud, and he understood, watching Halden's eyes skip past him and land on Terrence, on Oduya, on a Ranger named Simone who'd been quiet since the warehouse but moved like she trusted her own body, that this was not a decision he was going to be included in.

"I'll come," Kade said anyway, because staying silent through every exclusion so far hadn't done him any favors and he was curious, in the specific, practical way he was curious about most things, whether saying something out loud would change anything at all.

The pause that followed answered the question before anyone spoke.

"We need people who can move fast and fight if it comes to it," Halden said, careful, reasonable, the same register he'd used at the rest stop the day before. "No offense. It's not personal."

"It's a supply run," Kade said. "Not a fight. Extra hands to carry things back seems useful."

"We'll manage what we can carry," Halden said. "Better to keep the numbers small and quiet. You understand."

Kade did understand, which was the frustrating part, understood it well enough that arguing further would only have cost him whatever thin credibility he had left with the group, without changing the outcome. He nodded, once, and said nothing else, and watched Halden's shoulders drop slightly with relief that this hadn't turned into the confrontation he'd clearly been braced for.

"Rest of us hold here," Terrence said, to the group at large, though his eyes found Kade for half a second longer than anyone else's, something almost like guilt passing over his face before he looked away. "Andrew, keep watch on the window. Priscilla, you're on the door. We'll be back within the hour."

The three of them slipped out through the mattress store's rear entrance, into the gray light, and the rest of the group settled into the particular restless quiet of people waiting on news they couldn't control.

Kade found a spot near the back again, close to a stack of box springs, and let his rectangle do the thing it had been doing quietly since the warehouse, scanning, cataloguing, patient in a way that no one else in the group had any reason to notice or care about.

SALVAGE: PROXIMITY DETECTION ACTIVE. MINOR MATERIAL DETECTED: [FRAME METAL — DAMAGED].

Not much. A box spring's frame, bent and rusted, hardly worth the label of a resource at all, but he'd learned in the last day that hardly worth it and worth nothing weren't the same category, not for a class built the way his was. He crouched near the frame, quiet, working it loose from the fabric with his hands while Andrew kept watch at the window and the rest of the group traded low, anxious conversation about what might be taking so long.

It wasn't taking long. Not really. Ten minutes, maybe twelve. But the wrongness of the sky, the wrongness of everything, had a way of stretching every span of waiting into something that felt three times its actual length.

The sound that finally broke the quiet wasn't the sound anyone had been braced for.

It was Simone's voice, first, distant and sharp with something Kade's stomach recognized as fear before his mind had fully processed the sound, and then Oduya's voice under it, lower, urgent, and then no voices at all, just a crash that carried through two blocks of ruined city like the sky itself had cracked a second time.

Andrew was the first one moving, out the rear door before anyone told him to, and the rest of the group followed in a ragged clump, adrenaline overriding whatever caution Halden had tried to instill the night before about staying together and staying quiet.

Kade followed too, a few steps behind, the frame metal fragment still sitting half absorbed in his palm, and by the time he reached the mouth of the alley that opened onto the street with the hardware store, the scene had mostly resolved itself into aftermath rather than danger. Something large, insect bodied, easily twice the size of the thing that had come through the warehouse's loading dock the day before, lay twitching in its final moments in the middle of the street, already starting to dissolve into the same gray ash Kade had watched drift away from smaller kills. Oduya was on the ground, gripping his own forearm, blood dark against his sleeve, and Simone stood over him with her bow still drawn, breathing hard, while Terrence and Halden closed the last of the distance at a dead run.

"It's not deep," Oduya was saying, through gritted teeth, when Kade reached the edge of the group. "Caught me on the way past. I'm fine. I'm fine."

He did not look fine. Nobody argued with him about it out loud, but the Healer, whose name Kade still hadn't properly learned, dropped to her knees beside him immediately, hands already glowing faint gold, murmuring something too quiet to hear.

"We got turned around," Terrence said, breathless, to the group that had come running. "Hardware store was already cleared out, and then that thing came out of nowhere. We were heading back when it caught up to us."

Halden's eyes moved over the group, doing the same math Kade had watched him do at the rest stop, counting who was present, who was hurt, what the morning had cost them for a supply run that had come back with nothing but a wound and an empty bag.

"We need to move," Halden said, once the Healer had finished, once Oduya was upright again, pale but steady. "Now. Before something bigger comes to see what's left of that one."

They moved. Fast, this time, no pretense of a formation, just a group of frightened people putting distance between themselves and a street that had nearly cost them one of their own for nothing, and in the scramble, in the particular chaos of twelve people moving at once through streets that kept reshaping themselves into unfamiliar angles, Kade found himself, for the second time in two days, a few crucial steps behind.

He didn't notice exactly when the gap widened past the point where catching up was still simple. He was busy, in that first minute, letting the frame metal fragment finish settling somewhere behind his sternum, a small, private task that took his attention for exactly as long as it took the group ahead of him to round a corner he hadn't yet reached.

By the time he rounded it himself, the street was empty.