The restroom was small.
Two sinks. Three stalls. A fluorescent light overhead that hadn't committed to either state — cycling between on and off in a way that left the corners permanently unresolved.
The water was already running.
She grabbed the counter with both hands and tried to pull herself up. Her arms gave on the first attempt. On the second she got her stomach against the edge, feet sliding on the wet tile until one of them caught. Not enough leverage. Not enough left in her. But enough to get her arm under the tap.
The bitten one.
It felt heavier than the rest of her body — not just pain but weight, like something inside it had changed its mind about belonging to her. She forced it upward and held it under the stream and her whole body jerked with the contact. A sharp inhale, broken in the middle. She didn't pull away. She pressed forward, nearly folding into the sink to keep it there, the water running over the wound and darkening where it touched — spreading, staying dark, carrying something away from her or pulling something out. She couldn't tell which. It didn't clean.
Her grip slipped.
Something small dropped from her hand, hit the drain with a dull sound, and the water stuttered and began to rise — backing up in the basin, patient, filling the space she'd left.
She didn't notice.
Her arms gave completely.
She hit the cabinet below on the way down, then the floor — too fast, too heavy. Her hand missed the tile and found it again. Cold. Wet. The fluorescent light above her kept cycling.
Her breathing came apart. Short, uneven, each inhale not finishing before the next began. Her vision bent at the edges. Under the skin of her forearm the lines had spread further — thin, branching, dark — visible now in a way they hadn't been even an hour ago. Her fingers curled inward and locked and trembled.
She tried to push herself up.
Couldn't.
Behind her, the sink overflowed.
Water spilling over the edge, hitting the floor, spreading across the tile in the unhurried way of something that doesn't need to rush. Clear at first. Then wrong — the dark from the basin threading into it as it moved, following the grout lines outward, reaching her hand, her wrist, the length of her arm.
She didn't react.
Her breathing slowed. Softened. The room kept doing what rooms do — the light cycling, the water running, the walls holding — indifferent to what was happening at its floor.
Then faded.
__________________
Leon stepped into it without realizing.
A thin layer across the corridor floor, catching the emergency lighting. He stopped and looked down, then followed the water forward — each step slightly deeper, the sound of it getting louder, something else underneath the running water that his body registered before his mind caught up with it.
Movement.
Near the restroom entrance, a figure slumped against the wall. Head down. Still in the way that meant not yet. It snapped toward him and he fired and it dropped and kept moving — he put a second round into it and it stopped, but he'd already stepped back into a patch of water and his boot skidded farther than he expected, the wall coming up fast against his free hand. He pressed into it, got his footing back, and turned to the next one coming through the doorway.
Another behind it.
He worked through them in the corridor, each shot deliberate, measuring the ammunition against what was left. One came at an angle he hadn't tracked properly and he drove the knife in close and fast and shoved the body sideways into the wall, the momentum of it pulling him half a step forward before he caught himself.
He stood there for a moment, breathing harder than he wanted to.
The corridor settled.
He looked at the water around his feet. Darker near the restroom threshold — the color of it wrong in a way that had nothing to do with the light, like the water itself was carrying something that didn't belong in water.
One more near the door — seated against the wall, not reacting. He watched it until a single weak twitch resolved the question. One shot. It didn't rise.
He stepped past it to the door.
Closed. Not locked. Just resting in the frame, water seeping steadily through the gap at the bottom.
Leon knocked once.
"Anyone inside?"
The water ran.
He knocked again.
"Police. If you can hear me — say something."
________________
Sound reached her the way it reaches you from underwater.
Shapeless at first. More sensation than meaning. Something in her that was still operating beneath conscious thought moved toward it — the way a hand in the dark reaches toward warmth without deciding to. Her fingers twitched. Her body tried and failed and tried once more. Her head lifted barely, dropped again, and something slipped from her hand and hit the tile.
Small. But loud in the quiet.
_____________
Leon stepped back from the door, turned his shoulder into it, and drove through.
The frame gave at the latch. The door swung open. The smell hit him first — water and something layered underneath it, organic, wrong — and then the water itself, spreading across the floor from the overflowing sink, dark where it pooled near the far wall.
And then her.
Small. Too small for this room, for this building, for any of the conclusions this night had been arriving at one after another. Lying on the floor in the dark water, half on her side. The bite on her forearm visible from the doorway — fresh, swollen, the skin around it tracing the same branching lines he'd learned to recognize tonight, though he'd never seen them on anyone this young.
He stopped for one second.
Not hesitation. Just the moment it took for his mind to acknowledge that nothing he'd prepared for — in training, on the road, in every room of this building — had included this. A child. Alone. Here.
Then she moved.
Just her head, turning a few degrees, breaking the stillness.
Leon crossed the floor and lowered himself beside her, the gun still in his hand but angled away — reaching toward her with the other hand, already working through what he could do, what she needed—
Her eyes opened.
Found his face.
Held it.
The color stopped him the way nothing else had stopped him tonight.
Yellow.
Not catching the light. Not reflecting it. Holding it — like it had gone in and found something to stay for.
Leon didn't move.
She didn't move.
The water ran between them, dark and patient, carrying whatever it was carrying.
And the space between what Leon understood and what he was looking at opened up into something that didn't have a name yet. Something that wasn't in any of the categories the night had built so far.
He stayed where he was.
Waiting for it to make sense.
It didn't.