Chapter 25: Closing In

The clicking followed them out of the laboratory.

It travelled through the hospital walls in quick, uneven bursts: claws inside a ventilation shaft, then silence, then claws again. Ava carried the research folders in a sealed bag against her back. Harrow had refused to surrender the notebook he called his sister’s and held it beneath his coat with one hand.

Gabriel stopped at a junction. The service elevators waited to the left, their doors furred with rust. A maintenance sign pointed right.

“Tunnels,” he said.

“The elevators are faster,” Harrow whispered.

Gabriel pressed the call button. Nothing lit. “Not today.”

They passed through a warped fire door and descended a concrete stairwell. At the bottom, pipes crowded a passage barely wide enough for Gabriel’s shoulders. Condensation ticked from the ceiling. The detector on his wrist showed green, then blinked once to amber.

“Masks sealed,” he said.

Harrow fumbled with his strap. Gabriel fixed it with one hard pull and sent him ahead toward the exterior ladder marked on the map.

Ava remained beside Gabriel. The spores could not infect her as they infected him, but she could already feel the colony inside her answering the contaminated air: heat beneath her nails, an ache along her spine, hunger without an object.

“I’m still here,” she said.

Gabriel looked at her amber-bright eyes. “Tell me if that changes.”

The next scrape came from a side passage.

A human-shaped mutant unfolded from behind the pipes. Its head hung at a broken angle. Black veins corded its throat, and pale fungus packed the hollow where one cheek had been. One hand still wore a hospital identification band.

It charged Harrow.

Ava caught the back of his coat and threw him behind her. Her first strike with the flat of the blade knocked the creature into the wall. It rebounded without pain, fingers snapping for her face.

Ordinary steel would kill it badly. Gabriel could not fire in the passage without filling the tunnel with fresh spores.

Ava drew the blade across her palm.

Pain came clean and immediate. Blood sheeted over her grip and ran along the metal. She drove the wet blade beneath the mutant’s ribs.

The creature seized. Fungal tissue collapsed inward around the wound instead of bursting. The body struck the floor with a sound too soft for its size.

Gabriel checked the detector. Amber. No worse.

“It’s neutralized,” he said. “Ava, step back.”

She heard him, but the strength inside her had not finished. Her wounded hand had already closed around the knife again. The mutant’s ruined face became a scientist’s visor, a guard raising his rifle, Cole asking for a promise she could not make.

She stabbed the body a second time.

And a third.

Again.

Gabriel said her name. He did not grab her. He moved into her line of sight and raised both empty hands.

“The route, Ava. We still need the route.”

Her arm locked above another strike.

Water knocked through the pipes. Harrow whimpered behind her. Gabriel stood close enough that one uncontrolled movement could open his suit.

Ava lowered the blade.

She had stopped because he gave her something to do. Find the route. Leave. The instruction remained simple while she obeyed it; afterward she would have to remember that she had needed an instruction to stop stabbing something already dead.

What if he hadn’t spoken?

The identification band lay against the floor. She could not read it. She did not try. That refusal would stay with her too.

The cut in her palm was already pulling shut, leaving blood drying between her fingers. Nausea replaced the violent clarity. She turned from the body and vomited against the wall.

Gabriel waited until she could breathe before offering a cloth. “Can you walk?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.” She wiped her mouth. “But I can walk.”

Harrow stared at the inert mutant. “You could have done that from the start.”

For a second she imagined handing him the knife and offering her palm. Show her how little it cost, then. Tell her exactly how much of herself he thought they should spend getting out of here.

She kept the knife. The anger made speaking easier, but she did not want him to see how near she was to crying.

Ava looked at the cut she had made. “Then use yours.”

Harrow recoiled. “That isn’t what I meant.”

“Cut your hand every time we meet one. Open it again before it heals.” She held the wet blade toward him, hilt first. “Show me how little it costs.”

He did not take it.

“No,” Ava said. “You only want mine to be free.”

Something struck metal deeper in the tunnel. The clicking multiplied.

They ran.

At the exterior ladder, Harrow climbed first with the notebook clenched between his teeth. Ava followed, one-handed, while Gabriel guarded the passage below. The detector flickered amber twice more.

“Gabriel.”

“Keep climbing.”

She reached the hatch and forced its corroded wheel until the seal cracked. Cool evening air spilled down the shaft. Ava pulled herself into a maintenance yard, dragged Harrow clear, then turned and reached back through the opening.

Gabriel took her wrist. Together they hauled him into the open as claws struck the lowest ladder rungs.

He slammed the hatch and locked the wheel. The metal jumped once beneath their hands, then held.

For several seconds none of them moved.

Gabriel’s mask filter hissed. Harrow lay on the concrete, hugging the notebook. Blood from Ava’s palm marked the hatch in a partial red print.

“We keep moving,” she said.

Gabriel looked at the blood, then at her. “After I wrap that hand.”

“It’s almost closed.”

“It’ll split on the next thing you grab.” He held up the dressing.

Ava offered her hand.