Zubair adjusted his stance slightly, ready for anything without looking like it.
Lachlan rolled his shoulders, static crackling faintly around his hands. Alexei’s eyes were already tracking possible entry points, line-of-sight routes, blind spots in the tower placent.
"Walk through or around?" Lachlan asked.
"Through," Sera replied with a shrug. "Around wastes ti."
She started toward the plaza.
As they approached, more of the town ca into focus.
On the fringes of the square, people were moving. Not in the open so much as in the doorways and behind the barricades.
A woman in a stained uniform jacket swept debris from the threshold of a building that doubled as both office and housing, her eyes never leaving the group. A man in a faded CDC shirt leaned against a truck, pretending to smoke while his gaze flicked from Sera to the tower to the road out of town.
They all looked like they’d been holding their breath for a long ti.
There were no street vendors, no open markets, no kids in the plaza. Life here had been narrowed down to survival and orders. Everything else had been trimd away.
Her creature sighed theatrically. Humans are so boring when they behave.
Sera’s eyes tracked up the tower as they crossed the edge of the plaza.
A figure moved behind the tal slats—soone at the top of the container stack. A gloved hand lifted, pressing against a headset. A mont later, the loudspeaker crackled again, this ti closer.
"Unidentified group at central plaza," a new voice said. "You are entering a restricted administrative zone. Present identification and remain where you are."
Sera didn’t stop.
Zubair’s heat rolled harder. Aerenyx’s pathogen taste sharpened like a knife under her skin. Luci gave a low, rumbling sound that wasn’t quite a growl.
"Stop and identify yourselves," the voice insisted. "This is a CDC–authorized command center. Failure to comply will be treated as admission of infection or hostile intent."
"Hostile intent sounds right," Lachlan muttered.
Sera glanced at Aerenyx. "Can you lt that tower without dropping it on anyone we care about?"
He smiled at her, pleased she’d asked. "If you tell which ones we care about, I’ll do my best."
Alexei exhaled once through his nose. "Let him handle the hardware later. For now, we need to see what they think they can still hold."
Sera reached the base of the steps leading to the command building’s entrance and only then ca to a halt.
Three ard guards waited at the doors, armor cleaner than the patrols they’d seen earlier. Higher rank. Better rations. Less field ti. Their rifles were up, safeties off.
"Last warning," one of them called. "Hands up. Identification. Now."
Sera studied him.
He was sweating under his helt, veins standing out along his throat, eyes too wide for soone in full gear. His weapon didn’t waver, but the hands holding it were a fraction too tight. He didn’t sll like faith the way rcer had.
He slled like exhaustion and orders and the slow rot of doing things he no longer believed in.
Her creature considered him. He’s not a king. Just a doorman. Don’t waste claws on doorn.
Sera lifted her hands—not because he’d told her to, but because she wanted to see what he’d do when she pretended to obey. A half-second later, Aerenyx’s fingers brushed the back of her wrist, slow and deliberate, as he mimicked the gesture.
It was possessive in a way that was more about attention than control.
Zubair’s heat spiked. Lachlan’s jaw flexed. Alexei’s expression didn’t change, but his creature snarled loud enough that Sera’s own could hear it.
The guard seed to feel that pressure even if he didn’t understand the source. His stance tipped back a fraction. "State your nas," he demanded.
"Sera," she said.
He waited.
She didn’t give more.
Aerenyx smiled lazily. "Aerenyx."
The guard wet his lips. The na didn’t an anything to him yet. It would.
"Zubair," ca the calm voice to her left.
"Lachlan," from behind.
"Alexei."
The guard looked between them and the tower above, waiting for soone to tell him what to think. No one did. Whoever was on the other end of his radio was either very smart or very dead. Maybe both.
"You’re supposed to be in containnt," he blurted finally. "Or your ho."
"That didn’t work," Sera replied with a shake of her head. "And our ho is a long way from here."
He swallowed. "We have protocols for this."
"No," she replied. "You had protocols for before this."
Aerenyx laughed softly.
For a mont, everything held—guns up, soldiers braced, civilians hiding, systems humming, the town’s fragile control tested by a weight it was never designed to bear.
Then sothing overhead shifted.
The clouds that had been a uniform sheet all afternoon thinned near the horizon. Light changed, subtle at first, then stronger. Shadows lengthened across the plaza, stretching long and thin from soldiers and trucks and barricades.
Alexei glanced up, and Sera followed his gaze.
The sun had moved.
Not snapped, not glitched, not dropped, just moved—steady, precise, the way it had before the world broke. The sky was heading toward evening at a pace that made sense. No sudden night. No wrong storms. No scream from the bones of the earth.
"It’s normal," she said quietly.
Her creature leaned toward that change with curiosity. You rember this, don’t you? The slow fade. The way light used to die like it had sowhere to be.
She rembered... but that didn’t an she wasn’t surprised.
Lachlan let out a low whistle. "Well, that’s new."
"Or old," Alexei answered. "This is how it was supposed to work."
Zubair’s heat settled into sothing steady. "We’ll see how long it lasts once they realize standard operations don’t an anything anymore."
The guard at the door looked as unnerved by the sky as he was by them. "Curfew starts at sundown," he insisted, like repetition could still make rules real. "You can’t be out here."
Sera stepped up one more stair, close enough that he had to tilt his head down to see her properly. "You keep saying ’can’t’ like the world is listening," she told him. "It isn’t."
Behind her, the town adjusted to the approaching night.
So windows lit up, small squares of yellow behind curtains as people turned on lamps or candles or the last of their power reserves. Streetlights flickered, so failing to ignite, so buzzing to life with an anemic glow. The loudspeaker voice started a new loop, warning everyone to return to approved housing.
Sera watched twilight gather at the edges of Region T and felt sothing inside her settle. This wasn’t safety. It wasn’t peace. It was just darkness arriving at the ti it was supposed to.
That made it easier to asure.
Her creature smiled inside her chest. Good. Let them have their neat little curfew under a normal sky. It will make it hurt more when they realize night isn’t what they should have been afraid of.
She let her hands fall back to her sides.
"We’re going through," she told the guard, voice calm and certain. "You can either stand aside or find out if your command center holds up better than the last one did."
His finger twitched on the trigger.
The sun slipped another notch toward the horizon.
Night was coming... only Sera didn’t know what that ant.
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