The red didn't stop spreading.
It poured across the sky the way blood poured across water. Slow, then all at once, until there was no sky left, just a single bruised color pressing down over the entire city. Below, the festival's silence broke into something worse than panic. The noise of a few thousand people realizing, simultaneously, that nobody had a plan for this.
Then the sound started.
It wasn't a klaxon. Will's brain reached for that word first, klaxon, alarm, System warning, and rejected it immediately, because klaxons were mechanical and this wasn't. It was organic. A low, resonant pulse, evenly spaced, like something enormous breathing in a rhythm that wasn't meant for human ears to count but that human bodies counted anyway, on some level below thought. Each pulse landed in Will's chest like a second heartbeat, slightly out of sync with his own.
"What IS that sound—" Zeraya was already moving, already pulling Lariya toward the rooftop's edge.
"I don't know." Will was moving too, the climb down suddenly nothing like the easy descent it had been an hour ago. "Khan doesn't either."
Boy. Khan's voice arrived flat, immediate. The pulses are slowing. When they stop, something happens. I do not know what. I know that it will not be good.
They hit the crowd at ground level. It wasn't organized panic yet. Just bodies moving in every direction, nobody running toward anything because nobody knew what toward meant.
"We stay together," Will said, grabbing both their hands without thinking about it. "All three of us, all the time, no matter what."
"Yeah." Lariya's grip was already tight around his fingers. "Obviously."
Across the PATH, the tears began.
They looked like the dome. The same wrongness, the same quality of paper crumpling, reality folding with a violent pop of imploding air. Except there were dozens of them now, scattered across every level, opening and closing in different places, the world developing a stutter.
Things came through. Smaller than the dome demon, faster, more numerous, the same frost-and-iron aesthetic in miniature, swarming rather than stalking. The crowd's panic found a direction: away from the nearest tear.
"PLATFORM SIX!" Someone was shouting it ahead, voice cracking. "There's something there — people are going through and they're not coming back the same way—"
"That's the only thing anyone's said," Zeraya said.
Will's instinct fired. The cold-before-a-strike sense, the one that had told him the path was clear in another version of tonight. This time it didn't lie. It just told him the truth, and the truth was everything was wrong, everywhere, all at once.
"I can't tell if it's better than anywhere else," he said. "Everything's reading wrong right now."
"Better than standing here," Lariya said.
Will looked at her. Looked at Zeraya. "...Yeah. Okay. Together. Let's move."
They moved as a unit. Will and Zeraya on the outside, taking anything that got close, Lariya kept between them. A small thing came through a tear to their left, frost-rimed and shrieking; Zeraya put it down without slowing. Another tried the right flank and Will's bracer caught it mid-leap.
"This way—" Lariya tugged them sideways, into a gap between two collapsed support struts that Will would have walked straight past. "There's a maintenance cut-through, it skips the whole flooded section—"
"How do you even know that?" Zeraya said, already following.
"I have a life, Zeraya."
"Focus, both of you," Will said, and he was almost laughing, despite everything. Because for a moment, just a moment, it was working. They were moving. Lariya's shortcut was real, the platform-six light was visible ahead through a gap in the wall, warm and quiet against all the wrong red, and for thirty seconds it felt like maybe, just maybe, all three of them were going to make it through this together.
They rounded the last corner before the open platform.
The temperature dropped.
Not the tears' cold. Will knew that cold now, frost and burnt wire and rot. This was different. Familiar in a way that made his stomach drop before his mind caught up, the same cold-before-a-strike sense firing on something it recognized.
A man stood between them and the light. Not emerging from anywhere. Just there, the way Zeraya had once been on the I-beam. Someone who'd been close for longer than anyone realized, choosing the moment to be seen.
A terrified Raider sprinted blindly for the platform, desperate to escape the spreading red. He didn't look where he was going. He slammed directly into the man's chest.
The man didn't budge a millimeter. He looked down at the bleeding survivor with a warm, deeply sympathetic smile. His hand moved in a single, blurred kinetic snap. The Raider's head came completely off, tumbling into the flooded tracks.
The man looked at his own knuckles. His smile turned into an exaggerated, theatrical pout. "Oops," he sighed, his voice echoing loudly in the damp tunnel. "I really only meant to maim that one. They told me the new gene therapies would take a month to calibrate. You try to be gentle, but..." He shook his head, brushing a speck of blood off his pristine corporate-tactical jacket. "A billion Glitch-chits of occult R&D injected straight into my spine, and I still can't get the haptics right."
That face. Khan's voice arrived heavier than Will had ever heard it. Heavier than the dome, heavier than the dead tongue. I told you I knew it. I did not tell you what it cost me, the last time I saw it. A pause, and underneath it, for the first time in the entire year, something that was unmistakably fear. Boy. Whatever happens next. Protect Zeraya. Not the child. Her. Do you understand me.
Will stepped slightly in front of both of them without deciding to.
"Isaac."
Isaac looked pleasant. Calm. Unhurried, the way a man looks when he's arrived exactly on time for something he's been looking forward to.
His eyes went past Will entirely.
"You got tall," Isaac said, to nobody, to the air near Will's shoulder. Then his gaze settled past Will, onto Zeraya, and something in his posture eased, like a man finally finding the thing he'd actually come for.
"Wasn't looking for you, actually." He smiled. "Hello, Zeraya."
Will felt Zeraya go rigid beside him. He didn't understand why. Not yet.
"Vesper send you," Isaac asked, conversational, almost warm. "Or did you finally go independent? Because my sponsors are getting really tired of sharing the board. I'm supposed to be humanity's ultimate return on investment, Zeraya. It's embarrassing for me to be down here in the mud with the beta-tests."
Behind them both, Lariya took a slow, deliberate step backward. She looked at the man's relaxed, theatrical smile, then at her sister's rigid spine, and her hand dropped silently toward the hilt of her boot knife.