I didn't ask for two

Episode 10

POV: Kim

Three hours and forty minutes.

I know because there was a clock on the sitting room wall and I had been looking at it every nine minutes, which meant I had looked at it twenty-four times, give or take, and the number wasn't getting better.

The silence had texture now. That was the thing about very quiet buildings — the quiet didn't stay neutral. It accumulated. Pressed against the walls. Arranged itself into shapes that my brain kept trying to interpret as sounds.

I was not doing well.

Statistically, said Voice of Reason, in the tone she used when she knew she was going to be ignored and was logging the attempt anyway, the correct response to the current situation is to rest. Conserve resources. Wait.

Correct, I said.

You're not going to do that.

Probably not, I said.

***

The rationalization arrived at the three-hour-fifty-minute mark, and I want to be clear that it was completely genuine. I was not looking for an excuse. I was making a reasonable, practical assessment of likely future requirements.

They had left after an alarm. Alarms preceded events. Events, in buildings like this one, which I had now spent four days in and had formed strong opinions about, tended to be physical. People came back from physical events in various states of physical condition. And if someone came back in a compromised physical condition—

We'd need a first aid kit, said Adventurer, with the particular brightness of someone arriving at an answer they'd been steering toward for twenty minutes.

We'd need a first aid kit, I agreed.

That's very responsible of us.

Very responsible, I said.

Voice of Reason, said Adventurer, would you like to note this in the record? Under "Proactive and Sensible Decisions"?

I would not, said Voice of Reason.

I'll note it myself then.

***

The problem was the corridor.

The medical cross — white on a dark panel, the universal symbol for supplies that might be in here — was visible at the far end of the east corridor. The east corridor where the guard had been stationed. The east corridor which I had been very clearly told, through the medium of sustained eye contact and the fundamental laws of physics, was not for me.

I did a reconnaissance lap.

He wasn't there.

He wasn't there.

GO, said Adventurer.

WE ARE VIOLATING A DIRECT ORDER, said Panic, at a volume that was genuinely unhelpful given the stealth requirements of the moment. WE WERE TOLD. WE WERE SPECIFICALLY, DIRECTLY TOLD—

We're getting bandages, Adventurer said. We're being medically responsible. Nobody can object to—

THEY CAN AND WILL OBJECT. THE MAN COMMUNICATED OBJECTION THROUGH HIS ENTIRE BODY WITHOUT USING WORDS—

He's not here right now.

THAT IS NOT THE SAME AS PERMISSION—

I went.

***

The east corridor was darker than the rest of the wing. Not dramatically — no flickering lights, no atmosphere — just: less lit, the kind of deliberate dimness that suggested the things down here didn't require visitors.

I walked quickly. Not running, because running was a statement of intent and I was maintaining plausible deniability for as long as the universe would allow it.

The door under the cross: unlocked.

That's suspicious, said Voice of Reason.

That's convenient, said Adventurer.

I pushed it open.

***

It was a medical room the way the rest of this building was everything — more than it had any obvious right to be. Not a cupboard with a box of plasters. An actual room: steel surfaces, organized supply cabinets, the particular smell of antiseptic and something underneath the antiseptic that I was filing under not my department. The kind of setup that suggested regular use. The kind that suggested whoever used it didn't typically go to the hospital.

I'm adding this to the evidence file, said Voice of Reason, very quietly.

What evidence file?

The one I've been compiling since day one. This is column four. "Implausible Facilities."

I grabbed the nearest kit — proper, substantial, the kind that implied it had been assembled by someone who knew what they were doing and what they expected to need — and turned toward the door.

That was when I heard it.

***

It came from outside. Through the walls, through the small high window on the east side, through the glass and the stone and the distance between here and wherever it was coming from.

A howl.

Not wind. I had heard wind do interesting things through city buildings. This was not that. This was directional and intentional and produced by something with lungs that understood the point of the sound they were making. It rose through three distinct registers — low, then higher, then a pitch at the top that vibrated in my back teeth — and it was long, and it was close, and it was an answer to something because two seconds later there was another one from a different direction.

My body stopped.

Not me. My body, independently, without consulting any of the available committee members, simply stopped moving. A strange, heavy ache pulsed low in my chest — a sympathetic resonance I had no name for — while I stood there with the first aid kit clutched to my ribs.

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

What, said Panic.

For once she said it at a completely normal volume.

What was that.

I don't know, I said.

Was that an animal.

I don't know, I said.

Adventurer, Voice of Reason said, this is not a s*x cult.

I'm revising the theory, Adventurer said. She sounded, for the first time in recorded history, genuinely uncertain. I'm doing a full revision. Give me a minute.

The howl did not come again.

The silence pressed back in around where it had been, and my heart was doing something loud and structural, and I was still standing in the middle of a medical room in a building I didn't understand holding bandages I'd stolen from a corridor I wasn't supposed to be in.

I moved.

***

The east corridor. The main corridor. The sitting room door—

The front door opened.

Not the secondary door, the one they'd all filed through. The main entrance. Heavy, loud, the specific sound of something being pushed by someone who didn't have the capacity to be careful about it right now.

I stopped at the top of the stairs.

The steps below were the uneven kind. Not the measured, deliberate pace I'd memorized over four days. Heavier on one side. A rhythm that suggested weight being distributed differently than intended, a body compensating for something it wasn't compensating for three hours ago.

My hands tightened on the kit.

He appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

For a moment I didn't process it, the way you don't process things that don't fit the available categories. My brain offered several rearrangements of what I was seeing and rejected all of them and went silent, the way systems go silent when the input exceeds the model.

Frank.

Frank. His shirt in pieces. Even from the bottom of the stairs, the unnatural, furnace-like heat radiating from him hit me, clashing violently with the sharp, metallic copper scent of blood and that wild, ozone musk. He had the particular quality of stillness that wasn't composure — that was cost, the stillness of someone spending everything they had on the basic requirement of vertical.

The blood was not incidental.

He looked up.

Found me at the top of the stairs, the way they both found me when they weren't looking for me, and I saw the exact moment he registered what I was holding — the kit, the white case with the cross on it, from the corridor I had been told not to enter — and something crossed his face that wasn't anger and wasn't surprise.

One second.

Two.

Move, said all four voices, in the rare, flat unison of people who have put their differences aside because the situation has escalated past the point of committee debate.

I moved.