Every breath burned like fire in my chest, every step like dragging a corpse—only the corpse was mine. Blood trickled down my side, staining my already ruined shirt. Kane kept moving ahead, barely sparing me a glance, but I caught the tension in her shoulders. She was worried. She wouldn’t say it, but I knew.
"Slow down," I gritted out, forcing my legs to keep up.
"We don’t have time for slow," she shot back without looking at me. "Zero is right behind us, and if we stop, we die."
I hated how right she was. But I hated the feeling in my gut even more—the helplessness. The system had rewritten the world so many times that I wasn’t even sure if the sky had always been this shade of deep violet or if the buildings crumbling around us had ever been whole. I could feel the shift in the air,
