Chapter 183: Infected (4)
When the third night came, nobody was ready for it, because by then, Dorian’s group had convinced themselves they had finally found one reliable rule.
The forced sleep happened at six. It had happened the first night, and the second, which was apparently enough for the frightened people to build an entire survival plan around a clock. But at 5: 17, that theory died.
Misha remembered the exact time because she had been helping Carl straighten the blanket on his bed while he complained that Alaric had stolen one of the better pillows. She had been about to tell him that none of the bedding technically belonged to them when the heaviness dropped over her without warning, flattening thought before her body had time to react.
The last thing Misha heard before darkness swallowed the room was glass shattering in the corridor and somebody shouting a name she never managed to identify.
When she woke, the room smelled of dust, sweat, and the bitter tea they had left untouched on the table. Carl was curled where he had fallen with one arm tucked beneath his chest, and Misha’s pulse did not settle until she saw the rise and fall of his breathing.
The screaming started less than a minute later.
They all found Relva two rooms away. She had been one of the sixteen residents tied directly to the Floor, a broad-shouldered woman in her thirties who had spent the first two days arguing with anyone who suggested separating families at night.
She slept with both of her children because she had refused to let the quest turn fear into another reason to divide them, and that stubbornness had lasted until the night the Floor proved proximity meant nothing.
Her children were the ones who found her.
The younger boy could not have been older than eight. He sat against the wall with both knees pulled to his chest, repeating ’mama’ whenever anyone asked him a question, while his sister stood beside the bed with her hands clenched into the front of her shirt and stared at their mother like the body might still decide to move if she waited long enough.
Misha crouched beside Relva and forced herself into the narrow emotional tunnel that had gotten her through worse things before. Skin temperature, lividity, airway, pupils, external trauma, anything objective enough to keep the rest of the room from becoming relevant.
「 Mental focus sharpened. 」
The abrasions in Relva’s mouth matched the first corpse, although they were worse this time.
Raw lines extended along the back of the throat in several directions, longer and deeper than before, with tiny ruptures in the mucosa that looked less like blunt injury and more like something had moved through tissue not designed to accommodate it. There were no bite marks on the neck, no obvious wound on the face, and no defensive injuries on the hand.
Misha checked under the tongue, then along the inner cheeks, and found small traces of dried blood where something had irritated the tissue. She hated how familiar the pattern was beginning to look.
The six o’clock theory died with Relva, so did the comforting illusion that preparation mattered simply because they had identified one predictable behaviour.
By the afternoon of the fourth day, nobody trusted clocks anymore. They barely trusted one another... and that was when Pell died.
Pell had come with them from Exodus and survived the climb from Floor Thirteen, though calling him part of anyone’s inner circle would have been generous. He was quiet, thin, and perpetually uncomfortable in crowded rooms, with crooked teeth he tried to hide whenever he smiled and an awkward habit of apologizing whenever somebody bumped into him.
Misha was halfway through a piece of dry bread when shouting erupted from the corridor. A chair scraped violently across stone, somebody cursed, and the noise of an argument swelled quickly enough that every conversation in the hall died one after another.
Corren, a member of Blackthorn, appeared at the entrance with one fist twisted into Pell’s collar.
"Let go of me!"
Pell stumbled over the threshold, nearly losing one shoe as he tried to keep his balance. Corren shoved him forward anyway, and the smaller man caught himself against the edge of a table before he could fall.
Dorian stood immediately, the bench behind him scraping across the floor.
"What are you doing?" he demanded, though his voice stayed measured enough that the question sounded less like panic and more like an order waiting to biome explicit.
"I found this."
Corren seized Pell’s wrist before the man could retreat and yanked his hand upward for everyone to see. His grip was hard enough to blanch the skin around Pell’s wrist, and the dark reddish-brown residue beneath several fingernails became visible.
He held the hand toward the room like evidence at a trial. "This is blood."
Pell looked around at the gathering faces, his skin had gone pale.
"T-That isn’t blood!" He tried to pull his hand back, but Corren only tightened his grip. "It isn’t!"
Corren barked out a laugh. "Oh really? Then tell us where you got it."
𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢
"I-I was fixing the drain." Pell pointed frantically with his free hand. "The kitchen one. It backed up yesterday. Ask Senna!"
Senna pushed through the gathering crowd with visible irritation, brushing past one of the Blackthorn members before stopping beside another one of them. She looked first at Pell, then at Corren, and the fact that she did not immediately take either side made several people lean closer.
"Let me see."
Senna held out her hand, and after a second of hesitation, Corren allowed her closer without releasing Pell.
Pell pulled weakly against his grip. "Check it. Please. Just check it properly."
Senna scraped a little of the dried material from beneath his nail with her own and rubbed it between two fingers before bringing it toward her face.
Misha moved closer almost immediately, irritation sharpening through the fatigue when she saw what Senna was doing.
"Don’t contaminate it like that."
Senna glanced toward her while still studying the residue. She rubbed it again beneath the light, though uncertainty had already entered her face.
Pell shook his head so quickly that strands of hair fell across his forehead. "It’s just rust, I swear."
"It could be that too." Senna’s brows drew together as she looked toward the kitchen. "We don’t know for sure."
Corren let out a humorless laugh. "How convenient."
Misha turned his way. "Convenient isn’t evidence."
He faced her and spread his free hand. "Are you sure about that?"
She held his gaze through the mask. "Yes. I believe suspicion and proof are two different things. Mixing them up is how people end up accusing the wrong person."
A few people shifted uncomfortably.
Corren’s nostrils flared.
Misha ignored him and looked at Pell’s nails again. The material was compatible with dried blood, but it was also compatible with rust, old food residue, or half a dozen other contaminants depending on where he had been working.
"We need time," she said, and Pell immediately nodded as though the sentence itself had handed him something solid to hold.
Corren’s mouth tightened. "How much?"
"As much as it takes."
"That things kills people while we’re unconscious."
"And Pell might not be that thing."
Corren’s jaw tightened. "If we keep giving people time, they will keep dying. We have proof that it’s blood."
There, that was the real argument. They didn’t need actual evidence when fear was already clouding their judgement. Misha could see it across the entire room. People were tired. They had spent three nights waiting to lose consciousness. Nobody understood how people died, and that kind of uncertainty needed somewhere to go. Pell just happened to be standing in front of them.
Dorian stepped forward. "Let him go."
"But I found blood on him!" Corren argued.
"You found something dark beneath his nails." Dorian’s gaze dropped briefly toward Pell’s hand. "Those are not the same statement."
Corren’s face reddened. The accusation hit hard enough that his grip loosened for a second.
Pell felt it, so he tried to pull away... and that was the mistake. It was not because Pell had done anything wrong, it was all because fear translated movement into meaning faster than reason could catch up.
"He’s trying to escape!" Somebody shouted from behind the crowd.
The room had already begun moving around the accusation.
Pell had only backed away from the man threatening him, but it did not matter anymore.
Someone near the wall reached for a weapon while Senna told everyone to calm down, and some people began speaking over each other loudly enough that the words stopped being useful.
Dorian lifted one hand. "Corren, wait–"
Steel left the sheath, and the blade entered beneath Pell’s body.
For one suspended moment, nobody understood what had happened, not even Corren.
Pell looked down. The sword stood half-buried beneath his ribs at an upward angle, disappearing into his abdomen with a neatness that made the violence look unreal. His hands lifted slowly, one closing reflexively around the blade as though he could somehow hold the injury shut from the outside.
Then, his gaze rose toward Corren.
Corren stared back.
Pell opened his mouth, and no words came out. But blood did. Dark red spilled over his lower lip and traced a line down his chin.