Page 166 of Immune

O’R.

My father’s name sits idle but patient in my brain like a door I refuse to open.

“They followed the crash line,” Fletcher explains. “Or the looters gave them a direction.”

“Or they could very well have been ahead of us this whole time,” Kaito comments quietly, and everyone looks over at him.He’s still sitting, one hand pressed to his side, face calm in that infuriating way that makes calm look like a weapon he keeps sharpened. Then he adds, “They knew enough to sweep the station. They knew enough to circle back. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out this isn’t random.”

No. It’s not. Because random is messy, loud, and hungry. Like Zeds. Like desperate people. Like me on a bad day with not enough water and too much exposed stupidity contaminating my personal space.

This shit feels planned, and that is far worse.

The pilot makes a rough sound from the bench. His skin has turned that wrong fever color, too shiny and too pale under the dirt. Xeon presses two fingers to his pulse and says nothing, which is honestly becoming one of his more worrying habits.

Fletcher watches the service road through the gap in the boarded window. “Open road is out.”

“No shit,” I mutter.

“Residential tower,” he says, ignoring my bad attitude.

I stare over at the nearest building, a tall concrete block connected to the access road by a covered walkway. Most of the lower windows have been blown out, the entrance doors hang all kinds of wonky, and laundry still dangles from some balcony rails six years after anyone cared if they even dried or not.

“Nope,” I say.

Fletcher glances over at me. “No?”

“Residential towers are basically vertical coffins with outdated wallpaper at this point. The stairs are death traps, if you haven’t already realized,” I explain.

Ewan hums under his breath, tilting his head. “Vertical coffins. I like it. She’s got a point, though. Sounds a little occupied.”

Sure enough, above us, somewhere deep inside the concrete coffin, something thumps once. Then again. And again. It’s slow, which tells us it’s a Zed.

“People got trapped inside when everything fell apart,” I tell them. “Doors will be barricades. Stairwells will be blocked. Families would have been turned in their apartments. Every single sound echoes and climbs, every smell lingers. If those are Zeds, which I will bet a knife they are, there will be a whole lot of them.”

“But if we stay out here, Vector will see us in less than three minutes,” Fletcher says, and I hate that he’s right. I hate it with my whole chest.

He doesn’t tell us to move, though. He doesn’t demand that we follow, doesn’t tell us to hang tight, and that’s progress. Annoying progress, because it steals several very convenient reasons to argue. Damn it.

“Tower gets us above the road,” Fletcher informs instead. “Second floor walkway crosses over the stores and drops us closer to the west service lane. It’s risky, but it’s covered.”

I look at the road again. The Vector men are moving slowly, checking every parked car, broken door, and fucking shadow. They’re not frantic and crazed about it, but eerily methodical. One of them crouches on the ground, but he’s not just looking. He’s literally tracking, and my skin prickles as I watch.

I step away from the window and mutter, “Fine. But we avoid stairwells if we can manage it.”

Fletcher nods once. “That’s fair.”

“Don’t sound so on board with it,” I grumble. “It’s weird. It’s freaking me out.”

“Noted,” he replies.

“Etch it into your brain, just in case,” I tell him.

We leave the maintenance office through the back and cross to the tower in a curved line, using trashed vans and the covered platform’s shadow to keep us hidden. The pilot moves awkwardly between Fletcher and Xeon. Kaito is walking at the back with Ewan now, because his side is still a pretty big issue and if he tries to pretend otherwise, I might actually knock him unconscious just for the sake of efficiency.

Not concern.

Efficiency.

That’s all.