The window was cold.
Whooossshh....
She had known it would be cold — had known it intellectually, had prepared for it, had told herself she was prepared — and still the actual cold of the air coming in when Xavier lifted the sash was different from the preparation. The city smell came with it: smoke and the particular smell of the past four days, the one she had catalogued and catalogued and still could not fully describe except to say that it was the smell of something fundamentally wrong, of a city metabolizing itself.
Xavier tested the rope.
creeakk—
The bed frame groaned under the strain.
tch...tch...
The knots tightened.
He had anchored it to the bed frame — the heaviest fixed piece in the apartment, positioned close enough to the window that the angle was workable — and had tested the knots four times, each time with his full body weight pulling against them, and each time they held. He had made her watch him test them. He had made her test them too, had put her hands on the rope and said: pull and waited while she pulled.
"It holds," she had said.
"Now you know," he had said.
She knew.
She stood at the window now with her pack on and her blade at her hip and the rope in her hands and the city spread out below her and she breathed.
"The ledge is solid," Xavier said. He was already half out the window, one leg over the sill, his body tilted toward the exterior with the ease of someone who had done things like this before and whose body had learned that heights were information rather than threat. "Thirty centimeters. Your feet will fit. You face the building, hands on the rope, and you move east. Don't look down."
"I wasn't going to look down," she said.
"You were going to look down," he said.
She was going to look down.
"Move east," she said. "Service panel. I know."
"Three windows," he said. "Count them. If I've reached the panel before you're halfway, I'll signal — I'll tap the exterior wall twice. Keep moving when you hear it."
"And if you don't reach the panel."
"I'll reach the panel," he said.
"Xavier."
He looked at her. The morning light on his face — early, grey, the specific light of a city that had been burning and was still burning but the fires were further away than yesterday. His expression was the field-face, fully operational, but underneath it she could see the thing she had been learning to read: the careful management of something that was not calm.
He was scared too.
He was scared and he was going first because he was scared for her and going first was the only thing available to do about it.
"If I don't reach the panel," he said, "you go back in the window and you wait. You do not follow me until you see me at the panel. Agreed?"
"Agreed," she said.
"Nana."
"Agreed," she said again, firmly. "Xavier. I agree. I'm a hunter. I understand operational parameters."
He looked at her for one more second.
Then he went over the sill.
She watched him — one hand on the rope, body pressed to the exterior wall, feet finding the ledge, the thirty centimeters that looked from here like almost nothing and from his position apparently was enough. He moved east with the controlled carefulness of someone who had converted fear into precision.
She counted.
He reached the first window.
tap… tap...
She breathed.
Second window.
She moved to the sill.
Tap...tap...
Third window — she heard the two taps on the exterior wall, the sound coming faint but clear through the cold air, and she swung her leg over the sill and found the ledge with her foot and her hands closed on the rope and she was outside.
She did not look down.
She moved east.
The ledge was cold under her feet — she could feel the sensation of the exterior of the building, the concrete rough and real and exactly thirty centimeters wide and enough, it was enough, she kept her hands on the rope and her body pressed against the wall and she moved.
First window.
Tap....
The city below made its sounds. She did not look at the city below.
Second window.
Tap....tap...
Her arms were shaking slightly — not from fear, or not entirely from fear, the cold was real and the muscles were working — and she focused on the rope and the wall and the sounds Xavier was making at the panel, the metallic working of the access mechanism.
Third window.
His hand found her arm and pulled her onto the service platform and she was inside the frame of it, solid footing, wall on three sides, the city behind her and Xavier in front of her, and she breathed.
"Okay?" he said.
"Yes," she said. It came out mostly steady.
He looked at her for a moment.
"You didn't look down," he said.
"I told you I wasn't going to look down."
"You didn't," he agreed, and something in his voice was — not quite a smile but the sound a smile would make if it were audible without being visible.
She straightened her pack.
"Service stairwell," she said.
"Service stairwell," he said.
The service stairwell smelled of disuse.
Not of the infection — that smell was everywhere now, in varying concentration, and she had become capable of reading it the way she read weather, the strength and direction of it telling her something about what was nearby. The service stairwell smelled of dust and metal and the specific institutional neglect of a space that existed for function and nothing else.
It was empty.
Xavier went first, blade out, the descent careful and measured — each landing checked before he stepped onto it, each door listened to before they passed. She followed two steps behind him, her own blade in her right hand, the weight of it familiar enough now that it had become part of the position.
The tenth floor landing.
He stopped.
He looked at the door — the one that connected to the residential corridor — and then at her. A question in the look: here.
She understood. They had agreed the previous night, going over the building layout from memory: the tenth floor. High enough that the ground-floor density was unlikely to have fully penetrated, low enough to shorten the eventual descent to ground level.
Creeeak—
He opened the service door.
The balcony door was unlocked.
This was the first thing, the simple thing, the thing that meant they were in and the unit was available. The balcony itself was empty — a small space, the standard size, with a folded chair against the railing and a dead plant in a pot that had not been watered in some time before the current situation and had been done long before the current situation began.
Xavier went inside first.
Nana followed.
The apartment was — lived in, in the recent past. The specific quality of a space that had been a home and still carried the evidence of it: a jacket on the chair, a mug on the coffee table with the ring of dried liquid at the base, a book open face-down on the armrest. The small ordinary archaeology of a life interrupted.
She went to the kitchen.
The cabinets: she opened them with the systematic efficiency she had developed over the past four days, reading the contents the way she read mission briefs. Rice, tinned vegetables, a jar of sesame oil, crackers still in their packaging. She set it on the counter and continued.
From the other room: nothing from Xavier. Which meant clear, which was its own sound by now.
She found the shoes in the hallway.
They were on the shoe rack by the door — the owner's, clearly, a pair of trainers in approximately her size with the wear pattern of someone who used them regularly. She picked them up. Turned them over. Set them down and took off the shoes she was wearing — the ones from her apartment, the ones she'd had on since the outbreak began, worn through the train and the three-block run and the corridors.
She put on the trainers.
She tied the laces.
She stood up.
There was a photograph on the hall table, in a small frame — she saw it as she straightened. A young girl, maybe eight, in a red dress, holding a balloon, mid-laugh at something outside the frame. The specific open-faced laugh of a child who was completely happy in the moment and not thinking about anything except the balloon.
Nana looked at the photograph.
She looked at the shoe rack.
She looked at the jacket on the chair — adult-sized, worn, the kind of jacket you kept because it was comfortable and not because it was new.
She put the thought down.
She went to tell Xavier what she'd found in the kitchen.
She stopped in the bedroom doorway.
Xavier was standing very still.
He was facing the window, his back to her, and she read his stillness — the particular quality of it, the stopped-movement, the held breath — and she looked.
The room was ordinary in every respect except one.
In the corner, by the wardrobe, a rope. Fixed to the wardrobe rail — the upper bar, the sturdy one meant for hanging clothes that now held something else.
She looked at the floor.
She looked away.
"Oh god..."
She pressed her hand over her mouth.
Xavier turned. He saw her face. He crossed to her immediately and turned her by the shoulder, back toward the hallway, putting himself between her and the corner, and she let him, she turned and went back to the hallway and stood by the photograph of the girl with the balloon and breathed through her nose, steady, steady, the way Xavier had taught her to breathe when the thing was too large for the chest.
She did not cry.
She wanted to.
She breathed.
After a moment, Xavier came to the hallway. He did not say anything about the bedroom. He looked at the trainers on her feet and the photograph on the table and he said, very quietly: "Ready?"
"Ready," she said.
She took one more look at the photograph.
She picked it up.
She laid it face-down on the table, gently, with both hands, so the girl with the balloon was not looking at the room.
Then she went.
The ninth floor: empty. Truly empty — every cabinet open, every drawer pulled, the apartment stripped by someone who had taken what they could before they left. She found nothing useful.
The eighth floor: a walker in the kitchen that Xavier cleared before she was fully through the balcony door. She checked the bathroom while he checked the bedroom and found medical supplies still in the cabinet — more antiseptic, more bandaging, a prescription bottle of antibiotics that she took without knowing exactly why except that antibiotics were the kind of thing that might matter.
The seventh floor: a door with a chair wedged under the handle from the outside. They both stopped at it.
She looked at Xavier.
He looked at the chair.
The chair meant someone had been here, had left, had blocked the door from the outside. She could not tell if that was a precaution or something else. She could not tell and she did not open the door to find out and Xavier did not suggest opening the door to find out.
They moved on.
The sixth floor: two walkers in the corridor visible through the service door window. They waited eight minutes for the walkers to move. They moved on.
The fifth floor: the balcony door was locked. They moved on.
The fourth floor: the balcony door opened.
The apartment was empty — she could see it from the balcony, the open floor plan, the kitchen and the living space visible through the glass, no movement. She stepped in.
She found a man's shirt in the bedroom that was closer to her size than the one she was wearing, which had been Xavier's and was functional and was not hers and carried the smell of four days in it. She changed in the bathroom with the door closed, quickly, and came out with the old shirt folded in her hands.
She set it on the bed.
She thought about leaving something in exchange and had nothing to leave.
She went back to Xavier.
They stopped at the third floor balcony and she understood immediately.
She heard it before she saw it — the collective sound, the one she knew now the way she knew her own heartbeat, carrying a weight and a direction. She moved to the railing edge, looked down, and stepped back.
Xavier stepped back beside her.
They stood on the balcony and breathed.
The street below the building's west face was — concentrated. Not the dispersed ranging of a horde that was moving toward something; this was a settled density, the particular congregation of infected that had been drawn here by the building and had found no entry point from the ground floor and were waiting. The word waiting was not accurate — they did not wait, did not have the cognition for waiting — but the effect was the same. They were there. Many of them. The specific many of a crowd that had no purpose except proximity to a signal they could not name.
Three floors.
She looked at Xavier.
He looked at the street.
She watched him do the calculation she was doing — the drop, the crowd density, the nearest clear ground, the nearest structure that offered height, the direction of the nearest exit route toward the plaza, the weight of the packs, her ability to move fast in new shoes that were not broken in, his blade radius versus the density below.
She watched him arrive at the same place she arrived at.
"Not yet," he said.
"Not yet," she agreed.
"Inside," he said.
She turned.
The balcony door was already moving.
Creakk..
She registered it wrong for a second — registered it as wind, as the building's air pressure, and then her body updated before her brain did and she was already stepping left as the door swung fully open.
Three.
SLASH—!
The first came through the door with the uncoordinated lurch, the shoulder leading, the head tilted wrong, and Xavier was already moving — blade up, the arc, the practiced motion — and the first one went down before it had fully cleared the doorframe.
"Ghrrkkk....."
The second was directly behind it.
Xavier was mid-recovery from the first, his body angle wrong for the second, and she saw it and she moved. Her blade came up — the form she had watched him use, the approach angle, the wrist rotation, not identical to his but functional — and the second one went down.
The third was large.
Larger than the other two. The infected did not lose the bodies they had been born into — this one had been a large man, broad-shouldered, the kind of size that would have been imposing when there was a person inside it, and the combination of that size and the strength that had no ceiling made the third one's momentum carry it into her before she could fully set her position.
"Ugh—!
She went down.
THUMP—!
The floor of the balcony, her back hitting it, the impact knocking her breath sideways — and the third one was on her, the weight of it enormous, its face descending toward hers and she could see the eyes up close, the wide fixed absence of them, the mouth opening, the sound it was making —
Her hand found the bookcase.
Not a bookcase — the small side table that had been against the balcony wall, displaced in the fall, within reach, and she grabbed it, grabbed the edge of it, and drove it upward into the opening mouth with everything she had.
CRACK!
The wood split.
The thing's teeth were in the wood and it was still pushing and it was inches from her face and the smell of it was —
SHLK—!
The blade came through.
Xavier, from the left, the angle she had not been able to reach from the floor — clean, precise, the motion he had trained until it required nothing except the assessment.
THUD—!
The weight dropped.
"Hah...hhh .."
She lay on the balcony and breathed.
Her arms were shaking. Both of them. The shaking she had learned to identify as aftermath, the body reporting in after the fact, and she breathed through it and stared at the sky above the balcony railing and breathed.
Xavier got the weight off her.
Not quickly — with care, moving it sideways, keeping the mess contained to the far side of the balcony because he was already thinking about what came next even now. She sat up while he worked and she looked at the broken table in her hands and she set it down.
"Ghk—eungh!.."
Her stomach turned.
She looked away from the balcony floor.
"Inside," Xavier said. Low, controlled. "Now."
She went inside.
He came in after her, and she heard him on the balcony for another minute — the sounds of the containment, the practical work she was not going to look at — and then he came in and closed the balcony door and looked at her.
She was standing in the middle of the apartment's living space with her hands at her sides.
Her jacket had something on it.
She looked at her jacket.
"HURK—"
Her stomach turned again. She moved to the bathroom, fast, and her body made its report fully and without apology, the gauging that had been building since the second floor, since the bedroom, since the building's smell in the stairwell, everything coming up at once.
She stayed over the sink for a while.
When she straightened, Xavier was in the doorway. He had a clean cloth from somewhere — the kitchen, she thought — and he held it out.
She took it. Pressed it to her face.
"I need to change," she said. "My jacket —"
"There are clothes in the bedroom," he said. "I checked."
She nodded.
She went to the bedroom.
She changed in the same methodical way she had changed on the fourth floor, efficient and quick, leaving the jacket folded on the floor because she could not put it in the pack and she was not going to think too long about why she was folding it instead of dropping it.
She came back out.
Xavier had also changed his jacket — she noticed, taking a moment to notice, because the clean one sat differently than the one he'd been wearing, a darker color from the bedroom closet, and the absence of what had been on the previous jacket was its own specific relief.
She breathed.
"The smell," she said. She could still smell it — on herself, faintly, or in the apartment, or in the residual memory of her nose which was going to be keeping records of this for a long time. "I know it's — I know it's just blood. I know what blood smells like."
"It's not the same," Xavier said.
"No," she agreed. "It's not."
"It's a reasonable response," he said.
"I know." She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. "I know. I just —" she breathed. "I keep thinking about who they were. Before. I keep trying to not think about it and I keep —"
"Don't stop," he said.
She looked at him.
"Don't stop thinking about it," he said. He was looking at the window, at the street-side view, his voice careful. "I've been trying not to since the train. It doesn't —" he stopped. Started again. "They were people. They deserve to still be people in your memory even if they're not anymore." A pause. "Trying to make them less than that makes it easier to keep moving. But it costs something."
She looked at him.
He was looking at the window.
She thought about the man in the corridor on the fourteenth floor — the transit authority jacket. She thought about the woman on the ninth floor with the painter's hands. She thought about the photograph of the girl with the balloon.
She thought about the third floor bedroom and the chair that was wedged under the handle from outside.
*Someone had done that,* she thought. *Someone had blocked it from outside. To keep whatever was in there contained, or to mark it, or to say: there is someone in here who deserves to not be forgotten.*
"Okay," she said.
She looked at him.
"Thank you," she said.
He turned from the window.
He looked at her face.
"We'll wait here until the horde disperses," he said. "Then we reassess the approach to ground level."
"Okay," she said.
She sat down on the apartment's couch. She was tired — deeply, specifically tired, the kind that lived below sleep, in the muscles and the jaw and the space behind the eyes. She held the pack in her lap, the blade on the cushion beside her, and she looked at the window and thought about floors and rope and balcony doors and people who had been people.
She held all of it.
She did not put any of it down.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.