Page 13 of What We Become

We leave the car at the bottom of the driveway and move up on foot. No talking. Hand signals only.

Holden takes point. Micah flanks left. I take right.

The house is shadowed except for a single ground-floor light visible through the front windows. No movement inside. No car in the drive. The garage door is down—could be a vehicle inside, could be empty.

Holden gestures. Front door. Me first. You two hold.

He tests the handle. Locked. He steps aside as Micah pulls a pick set from an inside pocket and goes at it. Four heartbeats later, the deadbolt gives with the tiniest click. Micah steps back and meets our eyes. Holden sweeps in, gun low, and I follow on his shadow. If there’s a threat, it goes through me first.

Inside, it’s quiet. No TVs, no music, not even the hum of a fridge cycling. Just the tick-tick of a thermostat, the closed-up stillness of a house nobody lives in. The air smells wrong—chlorine? Sweet under sharp. Sugar and solvent.

We don’t call her name. We listen and we move.

The foyer is wide, real wood floors, every seam machined perfect. Holden signals left, so I peel off that way. He takes the center, Micah sweeps right. My knife is already in my hand. I listen for anything in this house that could be human.

Kitchen’s empty. No sign of struggle. A single cup in the sink. Unopened cereal on the island. Plastic wrap and local receipts in the trash—the only evidence anyone has been here at all.

I sweep the other rooms—living, den, the glassed-in trophy room that makes my hair stand on end from twenty feet away—rows of lit shelves, and not one thing on them is a cup. No people. No movement. No dogs, not even the sound of a mouse. I make it back to the foyer as Micah appears from the other hallway, raises a flat palm: clear.

Holden waits at the foot of the stairs, frozen, eyes and gun both trained up. A light is on at the top landing—thin sliver under the crack of a door. For a second everything inside me stills.

We fan out. I take the lead up the staircase—slow, steady, using my toes to take the weight off each creak. Holden’s breath is low behind me. Micah’s is silent. We move as one. No sound.

Up top, the hall is black except for that slit of light. The smell gets sharper up here—chemical, and now something sweetly rotten under it. It makes my nose itch, like I’m breathing through fiberglass.

I edge toward the door, pause, listen. Nothing from the other side. Only the buzz of a cheap ceiling bulb and a faint, steady hiss behind the door. Holden gestures: on three. I count, then burst it fast, and we’re over the threshold as one.

The room is all unfinished drywall, bare subfloor, lamps taped to a plywood table. Construction plastic lines half the wall, and the ceiling is the kind that slopes down on one end because the room is right up against the roof. But it’s the wall beneath the slope that gets my attention. More importantly, the mismatched brickwork and the large yellow canisters feeding hoses through it.

I don’t need to touch the bricks to know what’s behind them. My jaw is set so tight I’m seconds from cracking a crown, but all that matters is getting to Fury.

“Here,” I say, already moving to the brickwork and dropping to my knees. I wedge my knife between the mortar to work one free with the tip, wrenching it and dropping it by my feet.

The smell hits me—expanding insulation. It oozes out of the gap, dropping to the floor, fizzing as it grows.

“Do you see her?” Micah asks, and I can hear the shake in his voice.

I don’t respond. Can’t. I grab another brick and pry it loose. Drop it. Then pull another. Another.

The moment my arm can fit through the gap, I reach through, hitting plastic instead of the expected foam.

He sealed her in twice.

I get the knife and cut it open, and the smell comes out at me—chemical, sweet, wrong.

I cough. “Fuck.”

Fighting for breath, I plunge my arm through the gap and into the foam, fighting against the stickiness until I find something solid.

Fury.

“She’s here.”

I push my arm in as deep as I can manage, tearing plastic and scooping out foam while Micah and Holden pull out the bricks. The foam is hot, sticky, sucking my forearm down to the hairs and binding to everything it touches.

“Is she breathing?” Holden asks. His voice is level, but when I glance over my shoulder at him, his face is ghost-white.

“Don’t know.” I dig. The foam is packed around her head, sealing her mouth and nose. I scoop it away with both hands until her face is clear.