Speedrunning the apocalypse

CHAPTER 5 - Adrian

We had gone maybe half a block toward the university when Adrian stopped walking.

"Do you hear that," he said.

I did. Screaming, two streets over, coming from the direction of the Eastern Gate's overflow zone — not the panicked, directionless noise of a city reacting to the sky cracking, something more deliberate, more sustained, the sound of people who were currently losing a fight they had not chosen to be in. My side still burned faintly where the crawler in the parking structure had caught me, and I filed that discomfort away along with everything else this morning had decided I didn't have time to feel yet.

"That's not our problem," I said, already knowing it was a lie the moment it left my mouth, because it had never once been that simple where my brother was concerned.

Adrian was already moving.

"Adrian—"

He didn't stop. That was the thing about him I loved most and could least afford. In the life I had already lived, that exact instinct got him killed in Month 3, a crawler wave in the industrial quarter that caught him without backup because I had been somewhere else doing something I had decided was more important.

I was not doing that again.

"Stay with her," I told Kira, and went after him.

Kira did not stay with anyone. She was half a step behind me before I'd finished the sentence, and I didn't have the breath to argue about it.

We found him behind a parking structure two streets over, trash can lid in both hands, doing a genuinely impressive job of keeping four crawlers from flanking him by moving in tight arcs and making noise every time they tried to split. Behind him, pressed flat against the wall with both hands over his mouth, a man in his sixties who was clearly the entire reason Adrian hadn't already cleared the situation and walked away.

None of the crawlers had reached him yet. That was the best thing I could say about it.

I went through all four the way I'd gone through everything today — economy of motion, no wasted strikes, five years of muscle memory running in a body that hadn't technically earned the right to move like this yet. It took under a minute. When the last one dropped, I straightened up and found Adrian staring at me with the expression of a man rapidly updating a lot of assumptions about his older brother.

"When did you learn to do that," he said.

"Later."

"You always say later."

"And I always explain later."

"That is not a defense," he said. "It's a pattern."

I crossed to him and ran the check I'd been running in my head since I heard the screaming — both arms, collar, the sides of his neck, looking for bite marks, for the faint discoloration that came before the fever started. Six seconds. Fast enough to pass for concern instead of what it actually was. Clean.

I stepped back.

Kira had watched the whole thing without a word, and when I looked at her, something in her expression had shifted — not the way it shifted watching me fight, something quieter. She didn't reach for her notebook this time. She just filed it the way you file something you've already decided matters too much to write down where anyone else might read it.

The old man — Greg, he said, still catching his breath, still shaking Adrian's hand with both of his — was already thanking him in the breathless, unmistakable way of someone who'd just processed that they were alive and hadn't gotten to the part where they figured out what came next. His knee, he explained without being asked, wasn't built for running anymore, which was exactly the kind of detail Adrian would have found out eventually whether or not Greg volunteered it. Adrian received all of it with the same easy patience he brought to everything, already asking where Greg was trying to get to, already thinking about the next problem before this one had finished.

That was Adrian. Save someone, then immediately look for the next person who needed saving. I'd spent five years treating that instinct like a liability. I wasn't making that mistake again.

"We need to move," I said. We put Greg between the two of them, which put him in the safest position without making the geometry of it obvious.

My Foreshadow passive caught something at the edge of a rooftop two streets over, and I didn't break stride.

A figure. Standing completely still while the entire block around them moved in panic. Not a crawler. A person, positioned with the deliberate stillness of someone who'd chosen their vantage point before any of this developed and was now watching it unfold exactly as expected. Watching us. Specifically us.

I looked directly at the spot. They were gone before I finished looking — not fled, not startled. Gone the clean, prepared way of someone who'd already decided the moment of observation was finished.

I had felt that quality of stillness once before, across a planning table in a life that no longer existed, standing next to a woman who'd survived three years longer than anyone else by always already being gone by the time you understood she'd been watching.

I didn't reach for my phone this time. I'd already let them set the terms of this conversation twice today, and something in me had decided, watching that rooftop go empty, that I wasn't going to make it three.

The phone buzzed anyway, unasked.

*Good instinct, not reaching for it. Day 6. Do not go to the northwest sector before then.*

I read it once and put the phone away without answering.

"Tristan," Kira said quietly, beside me. "The rooftop."

"I know."

"You're not going to tell me who that was."

"Not yet."

She was quiet for a moment, and I braced for the question I'd been dodging all morning. It didn't come.

"Okay," she said instead. "Then I'll wait until you're ready. But I want you to know I'm not waiting because I've stopped noticing. I'm waiting because I've decided that's more useful than pushing."

I looked at her, and understood, for the first time since Caldwell Tower, that being seen this clearly by someone who hadn't earned the right to see it yet was going to be harder than anything the gates had thrown at me today.

Somewhere behind us, Greg was asking Adrian if he'd always wanted to do this kind of work, and Adrian was laughing at a question that, six hours ago, would not have made sense to either of them. I let the sound of it carry me a few more steps.

Day 6.

Stay away from the northwest sector.

I intended to find out why.