Chapter 22: Distant Allies

Jenna’s scouts arrived the following morning. Gabriel checked their call sign over the radio before Ava moved the cabinet. The older man carried the child’s blankets; her mother fastened the replacement mask the scouts had brought.

At the cabinet the girl stopped. She did not take Ava’s hand. She did look at her, a long careful look, and then she lifted the cup she had carried all night — the one poured from Ava’s row — to show she still had it.

“She wouldn’t leave it,” her mother said. Not an apology. A fact offered across the remaining distance.

Ava nodded. The gladness came late, which was how she trusted it. “Keep it. The station will have water.”

The girl went with her mother. Gabriel, waiting at the radio, saw Ava’s face when she turned back and did not ask her to explain. He shifted the pack on his shoulder, letting his arm brush hers while they waited for the detail leader. Love, just then, was letting the small victory stay small.

“We’ll take them to the railway station,” the detail leader said. “Vehicle meets us there. Our forward team will check your rendezvous route.”

Gabriel passed over the count and waited for the leader to repeat it. Only after the last survivor had left with the detail did he turn toward the hospital.

By midday, the ruined city had become an oven.

Heat lifted tar from the road in black strings. Gabriel’s mask rasped with every breath, the filter already grey around its rim. Harrow wore his badly, one strap twisted above his ear. Since giving Lila his last good filter, he kept tugging at the loose seal to wipe sweat from his mouth.

“Touch it again,” Gabriel said, “and we go back.”

Harrow flattened the mask against his face.

Ava walked without one. The air carried hot stone, old fuel, and the faint sweetness of mutated vines, but no fresh spore bloom. Gabriel’s detector agreed: three green bars on the device at his wrist, steady since they had handed the survivors over at the garage.

Harrow kept looking at her naked face.

“It still affects me,” she said.

“I didn’t ask.”

“You’ve been asking for six blocks.”

He turned away.

I still hurt.

Ava regretted snapping at him, then resented the regret. Sweat ran beneath her collar. She had explained the bargain so many times that even her exhaustion could be mistaken for ingratitude.

Above the alley, a curtain hung through a broken window, caught in leaves that had grown around the fabric. The flowers were small and translucent. She slowed before she could help it. Light passed through their petals almost without colour, picking out the branching veins.

She wanted a lens. A minute to look without somebody watching the street for teeth. The old eagerness returned so cleanly that for a few steps she forgot to be ashamed of finding the growth beautiful. Then Gabriel stopped at the corner, and she caught up without reaching for a specimen.

Gabriel checked the paper map against the hollow towers ahead. “At this pace, we reach the hospital before dark.”

He led them into the shade of a narrow alley. Ava watched the vines instead of the windows. Most leaves had turned their pale undersides toward the heat. Near the far end, one creeper trembled against the still air.

She caught Gabriel’s sleeve.

His fist rose: stop.

A dry clicking travelled between the buildings. Harrow’s breathing quickened until his mask valve fluttered.

“Mutants?” he whispered.

Gabriel nodded toward a service courtyard on their right. They crossed one at a time and crouched behind the shell of a delivery van. The clicking followed, joined by claws ticking over glass.

Harrow pressed his back to the van. “We should barricade the alley.”

“With what?” Ava asked.

“Anything. That door. The bins.”

“And when they climb?”

He had no answer.

Gabriel studied the courtyard. A fire escape zigzagged up the opposite wall. Beneath it, a rain gutter sagged under a clot of dead leaves. “We draw them east, we leave west. No shots unless the route closes.”

“I can do it,” Ava said.

“We do it together.”

His answer irritated her less than it once would have. Not stay here. Not let me. Together.

They moved along the van’s blind side. Ava eased a loose wheel brace from the debris while Gabriel unwound a length of cord from his pack. He tied the brace, fed the cord through the lowest rung of the fire escape, and handed her the free end.

“On three.”

He counted against her wrist. On the third tap, she pulled.

The brace shot across the courtyard and struck the gutter with a noise like dropped scaffolding. Metal tore loose. The gutter crashed into the eastern alley, spilling leaves and rust.

Three shapes burst from the shadow behind them—former dogs, perhaps, though their shoulders moved too high and their jaws had split well past the hinge. They wheeled toward the impact and vanished east in a clatter of claws.

Gabriel pointed west. Harrow ran first.

They did not stop until two blocks lay between them and the courtyard. Gabriel checked the detector. Still green.

Harrow bent over with both hands on his knees. “You people do that often?”

“Avoid dying?” Gabriel asked. “Whenever possible.”

Harrow gave a breathless, unwilling laugh. It made him look younger and more tired.

They crossed the next street beneath the shadow of a collapsed rail line. As the hospital rose between the buildings—a broad concrete tower furred with vines—Harrow slowed.

“The laboratory was on the lower research level,” he said. “My sister worked there. Suppressants, blood assays, anything that might slow the change.”

“A cure?” Ava asked.

“That’s what she called it. I don’t know how close she got.”

“I want that to be true,” Ava said. “That’s why I don’t trust myself to decide whether you’re lying.”

“I’m not lying.”

“You don’t know what’s left in there. Wanting it isn’t the same as knowing.”

“And you believed her?”

His eyes stayed on the hospital. “I needed to.”

Ava understood that answer well enough to distrust it.

Since Harrow said cure, she had been imagining her hands without the light beneath them. It was a foolish picture: no evidence, no method, barely a claim. Still she had gone further. A mirror in which she recognized her eyes. Gabriel asleep close enough that she did not have to consider where a spike might grow.

Let it be true. Just this once, let someone be right.

She brought her attention back to Harrow’s worn mask. He did not know what was in the building. Neither did she. Wanting him to be right would make him easier to believe, and she could already feel herself doing it.

Gabriel folded the map and checked the seal of his mask. “We find the records. We copy what we can. If the building turns, we leave.”

Harrow nodded too quickly.

They reached the end of the rail line and found the street collapsed into a flooded cutting. The hospital stood beyond it, close enough for Ava to read part of its sign. There was no way across.

Gabriel unfolded the map again. He drew a finger along a longer route while Harrow stared at the water.

“Before dark?” Harrow asked.

“Not from here.” Gabriel turned them toward the detour.