TUESDAY, JULY 14, 2026 — 15:20
The route south was a problem that kept revising itself.
He'd planned for the Battery Tunnel, underground, defensible chokepoints, predictable geometry. That plan lasted four blocks. At the corner of Greenwich and Rector the tunnel entrance was already gone: not blocked, gone, the mouth of it collapsed under something he hadn't seen fall but whose result was thirty feet of concrete and rebar heaped across both lanes and three of the insectoid soldiers picking through the debris with their forelegs, methodical, looking for something or clearing it, he couldn't tell which. He pulled her back before they saw them.
"Bridge," he said.
She didn't argue. They went east.
The Manhattan Bridge approach was worse than the tunnel. He saw it from two blocks out and they stopped moving. The bridge was a pressure point, half of lower Manhattan was trying to get onto it simultaneously, and the swarm had found the pressure point. Soldiers on the towers, soldiers on the cables, soldiers moving through the crowd on the walkway, the crowd unable to get away from them fast enough. The sound carrying from it was not something he wanted to move toward.
"Brooklyn Bridge," Felicia said.
"It'll be the same."
"Worse or same?"
He thought about it. The Brooklyn Bridge was older, narrower, more defended by its own geometry, fewer approach vectors, better sight lines. Same number of civilians trying to use it, probably, but the chokepoints worked both ways. "Same," he said. "Maybe slightly better."
"Then we go."
They cut north along Water Street, staying close to the buildings, moving fast through the stretches of open pavement and slow through the stretches that weren't open. The Financial District had a different quality from the Village, the streets narrower, the canyons deeper, the sky visible only in slices overhead. The swarm moved differently here too. Fewer of them on the ground, more on the buildings, clinging to the facades with the effortless adhesion of things whose limbs were built for vertical surfaces. He kept his eyes up as much as forward.
One dropped from a ledge four floors above them onto the pavement eight feet ahead, landing on all six limbs with a sound like something hard hitting something hard, and was upright and oriented before he'd fully processed the drop. He shot it twice. It took both shots badly and kept coming and he put a third round through the joint where the head connected to the thorax, where the carapace thinned enough to matter, he'd learned that in the last forty minutes. It went down.
Felicia had stopped moving and was watching him. Not the shooting. How he'd found the third shot. "You've been learning them," she said.
"Since we first saw them."
"Fast."
He reloaded, reaching into the Panel for the magazine, the motion natural now, the second time she'd seen it, and she watched the magazine appear in his hand the same way the pistol had. He caught her expression. "Later," he said.
"I'm keeping a list," she said, and moved.
They made it six more blocks before the street became impassable. Not the swarm, a building. Something had hit the upper floors of a glass tower on Fulton Street and the ground below it was a field of debris, shattered panels and structural steel and things he couldn't identify, still falling at intervals as the building continued its slow process of losing its upper third. They stopped at the edge of it and looked at the only alternatives: back, or through the lobby.
He went through the lobby.
Inside: desks overturned, screens still running, someone's lunch on a desk by the window. Desks overturned in the evacuation, screens still running on the walls, someone's lunch on a desk by the window. He moved through it quickly, checking angles. She was right behind him, stepping over the same things he stepped over, stopping when he stopped. They'd been doing this for forty minutes and hadn't needed to establish the protocol. It was just there.
He got to the building's far side and looked through the glass doors at the street beyond. Two of the soldiers were at the far end of the block, their backs turned, doing the same methodical infrastructure thing he'd seen on the rooftop, fixing something to the wall of the building opposite, a device he didn't have a reference for. Annexing. That was the word. They were annexing the city block by block.
He pulled back from the glass. "Two minutes."
She moved to the wall beside him. They stood in the lobby and waited. The street outside was wrong. The building around them had been full of people twenty minutes ago. He was aware of her shoulder against his. Neither of them moved away from it.
She said, quietly: "Are you scared?"
He looked at her. The question surprised him, not because it was personal, but because he'd been so focused on the geometry of getting them through the next block that he hadn't asked it of himself. He did now. The honest answer took a second.
"Yes," he said.
She nodded. Not surprised. "Me too." She paused. "I've done bad situations. A lot of them. I don't usually admit that."
"I know."
"I'm admitting it now because—" she stopped. She looked at the lobby ceiling for a moment, then back at him. "Because I think we're actually in trouble and I'd rather say true things while I can."
He looked at her. The July light coming through the glass doors made one side of her face bright and left the other in shadow. She was looking at him with no management at all, none of the composure she usually carried, just her face doing whatever her face did when she stopped controlling it. He'd seen glimpses of this. Not the whole thing, unguarded, straight at him, in a lobby in lower Manhattan with the city being dismantled outside.
"We're going to get through," he said. Not as reassurance. As a thing he believed and was saying because she'd said something true and he owed her something true back.
"I know," she said. "I'm not worried about getting through." She held his gaze. "I'm worried about what happens to you if we don't."
He was quiet for a moment. The weight of that landed somewhere that didn't have an operational response. He said: "Same."
She took his hand. Not the gesture of someone who needed steadying, she was steadier than he was, probably, but the gesture of someone who had decided to be honest about what was happening and this was part of the honesty. He held it. They stood like that in the lobby for another ninety seconds until the soldiers at the end of the street moved on and the block opened up.
"Go," he said.
They went. She let go of his hand at the door, both of them back in the working register without discussion. He went first, she covered the rear, they crossed the block in under a minute and cut south toward the bridge approach.
Above the city, at a scale that made the buildings look like a surface rather than a skyline, the real fight was running. He'd been catching fragments of it since Hudson Street. Lights in the upper air, moving at speeds the eye couldn't track. The Avengers, and whoever else had come, operating in the upper register of the air above Manhattan. Tony Stark's armor had passed overhead on Park Row moving at a speed that left a sound after it. A web line had snapped between buildings three blocks north, something large swinging on it, not stopping. The X-Men had a jet somewhere, he'd heard it twice and not seen it. The heroic tier was present and completely occupied with the heroic tier's version of this problem, not the version he and Felicia were solving.
Nobody was coming to help them specifically. He'd known this from the first minute. It didn't bother him. They were capable and they were moving and the warehouse was two miles away.
The Brooklyn Bridge approach came into view at the end of Frankfort Street. He stopped them at the corner and looked at it for a long time.
It was bad. Not as bad as the Manhattan Bridge, he'd been right about the geometry, but bad. The towers had soldiers on them, three or four per tower, doing the same work he'd seen on the rooftops. The walkway had soldiers moving through it and civilians trying to move around them, a large number of people trying to go one direction past a large number of things that weren't letting them. The roadway lanes were clearer. The roadway had cars abandoned mid-crossing, doors open, engines still running, but the swarm was thinner there than on the walkway.
"Roadway," he said.
She looked. Assessed it. "We'll be exposed for the full span."
"Yes."
She looked at him. He looked back. A mile of open bridge with soldiers on the towers above them and the East River below them and the warehouse on the other side. No cover, no alternative route, no way to make it a smaller problem than it was.
"Then we move fast," she said.
They moved fast.