Zubair looked over at the dire wolf who was covered in blood and standing beside a large black dog and nodded once as Luci moved to his side without hesitation.
"Perfect," Zubair said, voice tight with relief that didn’t soften him. "Luci will be able to find Sera faster than the rest of us. I just wish we had him before now."
The wolf didn’t look up for permission. The mont he heard that Sera wasn’t around, he simply pressed in close enough to be felt and then angled his head toward the corridor that led deeper into the Sanctuary, ears twitching as if he could hear sothing the rest of them couldn’t.
His nostrils flared once. Twice. The faintest rumble vibrated in his chest.
Zubair’s hand hovered near the wolf’s neck for a heartbeat, not petting, not comforting—just confirming presence, anchoring function. Then he pulled his hand back, already moving.
The girl with the pigtails watched it all with open amusent, as if she’d expected that exact response and found it satisfying.
"Oh good," she said, clapping once, the sound sharp in the corridor. "Now we can stop pretending we’re wandering around for no reason. I’m Hattie... welco to the Devil’s Playground, where rcy is a rumor, hope is bait, and survival is the only prayer that matters. Tell , boys... do you have a wish you want granted?"
Lachlan rolled his eyes and shook his head. He didn’t ask why she cared or what she wanted. He didn’t ask anything at all. He watched the way the space made room for her, the way the bodies on the floor didn’t seem to register in her attention unless they were in her path.
Zubair didn’t look at the dead either.
Psycho did, but only the way a man watched scraps scatter behind a machine he’d already fed. His eyes were bright, his mouth curved faintly, and the frost clinging to his sleeves kept forming and lting like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to work or play.
One of Hattie’s n stepped over a corpse and glanced at Psycho as if asuring sothing.
Psycho smiled back like a threat.
Hattie turned and started walking toward the inner corridors, and the nine behind her shifted seamlessly, not guarding her, not flanking her, simply moving like they belonged wherever she decided to exist.
One of them stayed too close.
Lachlan noticed it imdiately. Not because he cared about human intimacy, but because proximity ant possession, and possession ant instability.
The man hovered at Hattie’s shoulder like a bad habit, his gaze never leaving her long enough to register anything else as real.
Hattie didn’t acknowledge him.
She didn’t need to.
"Don’t worry about Eric. He only bites if I ask him to. Make sure you keep up, though," she said lightly. "I would hate to lose you to this carnage." And then she was already moving again.
Luci moved first.
The dire wolf slipped forward with quiet purpose, paws landing on concrete without the scrape of claws, shoulders rolling smoothly. He didn’t sniff every body. He didn’t hesitate. He followed a line only he could see.
Zubair fell in beside him imdiately, eyes scanning forward, heat contained but ready. Lachlan took the other side without speaking, lightning already faintly crawling under his skin, not showy, just present. Psycho drifted behind them with the casual confidence of a man who enjoyed being surrounded by dying things.
They passed through a corridor where the disease had finished its work early.
Bodies lined the walls in crude arrangents made by panic: people slumped against doors they’d tried to force open, fingers curled into the seams, nails torn and blackened. Others lay on their stomachs in mid-crawl, faces pressed into the floor like they’d begged the concrete for rcy.
None had been given it.
The dead here didn’t look like the ones above. Up top, the disease still had movent, still had ti to make people fight for breath and dignity. Down here, it had been decisive. People hadn’t stumbled far. They had dropped where they stood and stayed there.
Hattie stepped around an outstretched arm without looking down.
"This is where it started," she said, almost conversational. "You can tell, because no one had ti to perform."
Zubair’s jaw clenched.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
He wasn’t here to witness. He was here to retrieve.
Luci paused at an intersection, head lifting, ears angling. His gaze fixed down the left corridor, then he turned sharply and took the right instead.
Zubair’s shoulders loosened by a fraction, the closest thing to gratitude he would allow himself.
"Good boy," he muttered, and then he corrected himself silently, not because it mattered, but because it was a habit he wasn’t allowed to have. He didn’t do softness. He did maintenance.
Hattie glanced back at him with a grin. "You really are adorable when you’re single-minded."
Zubair ignored her.
Lachlan didn’t.
He watched Hattie the way he watched a weapon he hadn’t chosen. Not fear. Not distrust. A cold assessnt of capability and cost.
"You know where you’re going," Lachlan said.
Hattie’s smile widened. "Of course I do."
She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t offer a reason.
She didn’t have to.
They moved deeper.
The corridor narrowed. The ceiling dropped. The lighting shifted from bright industrial panels to low ergency strips that threw everything into hard angles. The air tasted wrong—not because of sll, not because of rot, but because the structure itself felt contaminated. Like the Sanctuary had absorbed the disease into its bones.
A door hung half off its hinges.
Behind it, a room was filled with bodies stacked against each other like soone had tried to hide them. They’d died anyway. The ones on top had clawed at the ones below.
Lachlan looked at the pile for half a second and then kept walking.
"Humans," Psycho said with mild disdain. "Even dying, they’re still trying to climb up higher than the one in front."
One of Hattie’s n chuckled.
Hattie humd. "It’s sweet, really. Like ants building a little hill and thinking it will stop winter."
Psycho’s eyes flicked to her, delighted.
"Don’t tempt ," he said.
Hattie laughed. "Oh, I’ll do what I want."
Luci didn’t react to any of it.
He moved steadily, head down now, nostrils flaring as he tracked. Every so often he paused for a breath and then adjusted direction by inches, as if correcting for interference.
Zubair mirrored those corrections imdiately, following so close that it was clear he trusted the wolf’s instincts more than any map or human logic.
The group behind them followed without questions.
Even Psycho.
Even the man who was much too close to Hattie.
Even the n who looked like they belonged in a different apocalypse.
They reached a stairwell.
Not the wide main stairs ant for transport and authority. This was narrower, tucked behind a sealed maintenance panel that soone had forced open. The door was sared with bloody fingerprints. The handle had been bent like soone had tried to tear it off.
Luci stopped at the top step and looked down.
A low growl rolled out of him, quiet but unmistakable.
Zubair leaned forward slightly, gaze sharpening. "They went down."
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