The stairwell door buckled inward two inches and Priya Bhat was already moving.
She crossed the hallway in four steps. Fast. No hesitation. Spear up and angled, feet placed the way trained people place their feet. Weight low. Elbows in. She planted herself six feet from the door and the blue light from the Threshold gap lit her face in flashes.
"How many."
"I don't know." Milo was ten feet behind her. Left hand still dead at his side. Head pounding from Reach. "More than ten."
"The door."
"Won't close all the way. Frame's bent."
Another impact. The frame groaned. Something heavier than a Crawler. The gap widened another inch.
Priya adjusted her grip. "The walls kill things that come through."
"The Threshold. Yeah."
"So anything past the door dies anyway."
"Anything that touches the boundary. But the gap is getting wider."
She looked at the gap. Blue flash. Arm gone. "Has anything gotten through? Seven days."
"No."
"Then the door is backup. Not the real defense." Flat. Like reading a report. "Your walls are the real defense. The door just slows them down."
She'd been here thirty seconds and already understood his domain better than he did after a week.
"We still need the door," he said.
"Agreed. Not because they'll get through. Because the noise will drive your people insane." She tilted her head toward 2909. "The mother. And the girl."
Another hit. Five-inch gap. The metal bending, not breaking. Patient. Whatever was out there was patient.
Milo focused with Reach. Pulled. Left hand cramped. Gap narrowed to four. Three.
Something slammed it back to five.
"I can hold it," he said. "But I can't do that and other things at the same time."
"Then don't." She moved closer. Close enough that if the gap were an inch wider, something could reach her. She drove the spear into the gap at an angle, wedging the shaft into the bent metal.
It held. Not perfectly. But enough.
"That'll break," he said.
"Not tonight." She stepped back. Looked at him. Really looked. The sweatpants. The bare feet. The dead left hand. The way he stood like someone who'd forgotten how standing worked.
"When's the last time you ate."
"Two AM. Soup."
"And before that."
"Don't remember."
She walked past him to 2905. Cabinet sounds. Came back with two cans of tuna. Had a kitchen knife on her belt he hadn't noticed.
"Sit down before you fall down."
He sat. Right there in the hallway. Back against the wall between 2906 and 2907. She handed him an open can. He ate tuna with his fingers while something hammered on a door twenty feet away. Best thing he'd ever tasted and it was room temperature tuna from a can. His body didn't care. The protein hit his stomach and something in his brain went from grey to color.
"2907," he said between bites. "You had food in there."
She sat across from him. Cross-legged. Spear across her knees.
"Day 1. Building security guard. I was on shift when the fissures opened. Made it to 29 before the stairwell filled up. Found Crawlers in three apartments. Killed one with the fire extinguisher." She ate a piece of tuna. "Took twenty minutes. Extinguisher was dented in half by the end."
"The woman in 2909 said you told her to go away."
Priya stopped chewing. Looked at the floor. Then up.
"Day 4. She knocked. I had enough food for one person, maybe five more days rationed hard. She had a kid." She set the can down. "I did the math. Share and we all run out in two days. Don't share and I last five. Five versus two."
She picked the can back up.
"The math said don't open the door. So I didn't." Her face did a thing. Not the jaw-set from before. Worse than that. "Three more days. That's what my math bought me. And then the walls turned warm and a guy in sweatpants showed up with canned tuna."
"Your math kept you alive long enough for the walls to reach you."
"I know. The math was right and I let a five-year-old go hungry for three days and those two things are both true at the same time." She looked at the stairwell door. "I don't know what to do with that."
He didn't try to answer. Neither of them said anything for a while. The stairwell door rattled. They ate tuna.
The rattling slowed. Impacts further apart.
"Lena and the girl need a doctor," Priya said.
"Might be people on other floors. Domain only covers 29. I need Scrip to expand."
"Scrip."
"Currency. System gives it when things die near the domain. I use it to push the walls out."
That flat tactical look again. "The things dying at the door. That's income."
"Yeah."
"How much."
"Crawlers are ten to twenty-five. Stalker was two seventy-three."
Balance: 243. Next floor cost twelve hundred.
"It scales," he said.
Priya looked at the stairwell door. "How many Crawlers to cover that."
"At fifteen average. About sixty-four."
"We're not sitting here counting to sixty-four."
"No."
"So what's the plan."
The plan. The thing he should have because he had the magic walls and the blue boxes. The title. He should have a plan.
He didn't. He had sweatpants and a can of tuna and a dead hand and eleven months of not leaving a room.
But something in his head was moving. The old thing. The EMT thing. The part that looked at a highway pileup with six cars and not enough stretchers and said priority one, priority two, non-urgent, expectant. The part that sorted chaos into categories. It broke when the girl died. He thought it was gone. It wasn't gone. It was just. Waiting, or whatever broken things do when nobody's using them.
"We need to know what's below us," he said. "How many Crawlers. What floors have survivors. What's overrun."
"Recon."
"Yeah."
"I can go down."
"No." Too fast. He heard himself say it too hard and she heard it too.
"That wasn't a request."
"Threshold doesn't cover the stairs. You go down, no protection."
"I had no protection for seven days."
"With one Crawler kill and a dented fire extinguisher."
She stood up. Not angry. Professional. "I'm the only person on this floor who can hold a weapon. You can't leave the domain."
"Not tonight. Crawlers are still active. First light. One floor. Floor 28. Survivors and threats. Come back. Seven minutes."
"Ten."
"Seven."
She almost smiled. The muscles moved.
"Copy."
The stairwell faded to quiet. Not gone. Moving somewhere else.
From 2909, a sound. Small. Sadie coughing. Then a voice. Weak but clearer than before.
"Mommy. I'm hungry."
Priya looked at him.
"Good sign," he said. "Hungry means her body's working again. If she was critical she wouldn't want food."
"EMT."
"Was."
"You still talk like one."
He didn't answer. He was looking at 2904. Mrs. Kowalski's. Door still open. He could feel every object through the domain. Including something on the kitchen shelf behind the cereal boxes.
A radio.
He pushed himself up. Walked to 2904. Past the plastic lemons. Past the dark counter. To the shelf where a battery-powered AM radio sat behind a box of Honey Nut Cheerios.
Turned it on. Static.
Dial. Band by band. Static. Static.
He was about to give up when 1190 AM broke through. Not a voice. A pattern. Three clicks. Pause. Three clicks. Pause.
SOS.
Volume up. Clicks faded. Underneath, a voice. Male. Strained. Broken up.
"...east side... anyone on the east side of Harwick... this is... repeat... survivors at... bridge is down..."
Gone.
Someone alive. East side. Organized enough to broadcast SOS.
The compass arrow in his Ledger pointed west. Ruth.
The voice was east.
"What was that." Priya in the doorway.
"Someone else is alive. Asking for help."
"You can't leave this floor."
"I know."
"So how do we help them."
He opened the Ledger.
[PACT SYSTEM: NOTICE]
Skills: 3 of 6 unlocked
Warden's Mandate (Passive) Lv. 1
Warden's Ledger (Info) Lv. 1
Warden's Reach (Active) Lv. 1
Next: Warden's Watch (Surveillance) Lv. 1
Requirement: Domain Level 3 + Population 10
Three skills. Three more locked. Watch was next. Surveillance. Eyes beyond his walls.
He needed Level 3. More Scrip. More people. Four on the floor and 243 in the bank against an expansion bill of twelve hundred.
But under the list, greyed out, barely visible. The fifth skill. Most of it blocked. The System didn't want him seeing it yet.
Two letters. That was all he could read before the text went to static.
B. A.
Two letters. And twenty empty Deputy slots.
The stairwell went quiet.
Not gradually. Not the slow fade from before. All at once. The clicking. The arms in the gap. Everything. Gone.
Priya straightened. She heard it too.
"They stopped," she said.
"Yeah."
"All of them. At once."
She looked at the door. At the gap where blue light had been flashing every thirty seconds for the last hour. Nothing. Dark.
Then from below. Deep in the stairwell. Not clicking. Not the dragging. Something else.
Breathing.
Big. Whatever it was had been sitting on the other side of that door the whole time, waiting for the swarm to clear.
The Threshold hummed.
The breathing got closer.