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Maven didn’t look back, but their shoulders softened just a little. The world here was wrong, but also more right than anything I’d known in years.
As we moved, eyes followed us. Some lingered on Kang, then looked away with calculated disinterest. Others fixed on me, and I realized with a jolt that they knew who I was. Maven had broadcast my name before I even spoke it. Some nodded. Some just stared.
We passed a market — tables of pickled vegetables, cans of Authority soup, even fresh greens. Two men haggled over screws. A woman traded cigarettes for bleach. It was a city, or the memory of one.
Kang squeezed my hand once.
“Almost normal,” he murmured.
We could stay here, I thought. Build a world from these bones.
Instead I said, “Almost,” and let go of his hand as we neared the far end of the market. Maven stopped, waiting for us.
“Council’s through there,” they said, pointing to a plywood door stenciled CONCLAVE. “They’re waiting.”
I squared my shoulders. Kang did the same, Authority posture snapping back into place — not for show but for armor.
We walked the last twenty steps together — Maven at my side, Kang at my back — into the dark. Somewhere ahead, decisions waited. I was ready to meet them.
The plywood door marked CONCLAVE opened not into a council chamber but another corridor — narrower, lined with corrugated steel and rivets like the belly of an old ship. The air changed too, losing the stew-smoke warmth of the market and taking on a chill that smelled of stone and oil. Our footsteps echoed in a different register, a deeper drumbeat under the hum of hidden machinery.
Maven led without slowing, coat swinging against their knees. Kang stayed a half step behind me, silent, scanning the walls the way soldiers scan treelines. His presence was a pressure at my back; every time I stumbled on the uneven floor his hand twitched as if to steady me and then stopped.
We turned a corner and the corridor dead-ended at a door that looked like it had been pried out of a submarine: steel slabs bolted together, paint flaked to bare metal, frost bleeding from the seams. A keypad hung dead beside it, wires cut, as if it hadn’t been powered in years.
Maven rapped their knuckles in a rhythm — three short, two long, three short — then leaned close to a small grille and said, “Signal shifts at dawn.” The words were flat, practiced, but something in their shoulders loosened as they spoke them, like a ritual completed.
Inside the walls, bolts turned. A heavy lock clanged open. Somewhere deep a motor whined to life. The door began to move, slow and deliberate, the kind of mass you feel in your teeth. Cold air hissed out around the edges as it split.
Maven turned back to us. Their gaze flicked to me, then Kang— a quick, professional nod — before cutting to Kang. They didn’t say a word, just tapped two fingers against their temple and smirked, a little gesture that said I’m watching you. Then they swung their coat back into place and stepped aside to let us pass.
Kang’s jaw tightened at the look but he didn’t rise to it. His hand brushed my elbow instead, guiding me forward without touching, and the weight of it was steadier than I wanted to admit. My pulse kicked up as we crossed the threshold, the door’s breath still spilling over my skin.
Beyond was only dim light and the promise of answers. I stepped through, Maven’s smirk still flickering in my peripheral vision, Kang’s shadow a silent guard at my back.
The hall beyond the Conclave door ran far longer than I’d expected—long enough for the tension to breed and multiply. Each footstep echoed off the concrete like we were being followed by ghosts. The corridor bent and doubled back on itself, past rooms closed off with tarps, alcoves stacked with boxes marked MED or FUEL, and people posted at intervals like living checkpoints.
Some just watched, flat-eyed. Others whispered, voices pitched low but not low enough.
“Authority,” someone hissed, staring at Kang as if he might detonate on command.
“Heard she killed three in the pit,” another muttered, and I couldn’t tell if the awe was fear or hope.
I kept my head down but used my hair as a curtain to watch. The way they looked at me was different than how they looked at him. Kang they hated. Me they studied, like a problem that might also be a cure. A few nods, one quick smile from a girl with unevenly clipped hair and eyes bright with a kind of worship—it made me want to run.
Kang felt the attention too. Authority steel slid back into his spine, his scowl reflexively locked in place. Once it had made him invisible; here it just marked him as the one to watch. He hovered at my shoulder, every sense on red alert.
Maven didn’t slow. If the eyes bothered them, they didn’t show it. They threaded us through a series of switchbacks, the whispers trailing after like ribbons:
“You see her arm?”
“Heard she bit off the guy’s ear. Ate it.”
“Petrov’s gonna nuke us, I swear.”
Each new rumor felt like a bootprint between my shoulder blades.
We turned into a narrower passage where the light shifted from Authority-blue to a warmer gold. The air here was different—sweet and yeasty over the tang of fried onions. At a low table, kids rolled dough between their palms while a woman corrected their technique with military precision.
