Chapter 33: The Long Way Around
Chapter 33: The Long Way Around
Liora made me reconstruct three days of patrol movements from memory.
I drew the streets in ash on the floorboards: the reservoir road, the turns used by the trucks, the direction of each foot sweep, and the blocks I could see from the third-floor window. She asked the same questions twice in different orders. When my answers changed, she found out why.
"You keep saying that corner is a hundred metres away," she said.
"It looks like a hundred."
"It is closer to sixty. Distance matters when the person crossing it has a rifle."
She reinforced my barricade before leaving, wedging a chair beneath the wardrobe at an angle that transferred pressure into the wall. Then she scratched three short lines and a dot beside the door.
"This means mine and safe where I come from." She whistled two low notes. "If you hear that, answer once. If someone copies it and I do not answer your reply, use the back window."
"Comforting."
"Correct."
She disappeared into the night.
I used the wait to clean the room of anything that could reveal how long I had stayed. Ash went into a cold pot. Food scraps were wrapped for disposal away from the building. I dismantled the inner part of the barricade so it could be moved quietly when she returned.
Then I stood at the window and tried to map the city through sound. Eastbridge’s truck passed at the expected time. A second engine followed it seven minutes later, which had never happened during my watch. Either the patrol pattern had changed or the second vehicle was unrelated. I added both possibilities to the ash map.
Waiting for a scout was different from waiting alone. I knew she was moving through the same streets, close enough that a gunshot might be hers. Every engine on the reservoir road tightened my grip around the rifle.
Two hours later, the signal came from the yard. I answered. Liora climbed through the window with dust to her elbows and a shallow tear in one sleeve.
"There is a route," she said. "It is long, inconvenient, and therefore mostly empty."
She described collapsed backstreets, adjoining courtyards, holes through terrace walls, and two stretches where we would move inside buildings rather than across roads. The path avoided patrols and strong monster territories. Water lay along it, along with several buildings that could serve as temporary shelter. Every section led farther from Eastbridge.
"How long?"
"For me? Half a day. For you, if you listen? Nearly three."
Her honesty should have offended me. Mostly, it sounded accurate.
She had found three water sources. One was a stagnant tank we would use only after boiling. Another was a broken pipe that ran for perhaps an hour each morning. The third was the stream near the house at the route’s end. She also marked two monster territories in ash and crossed them out with enough force to scar the floor.
"This one has prints deeper than my hand," she said. "This one dragged half a vehicle into an alley. If we see either, we leave before it notices us. Levels are not permission to become stupid."
She inspected the rifle before we left. Liora’s world had firearms, though the design in her hands was unfamiliar. She found the safety, checked the chamber, and made me demonstrate loading and unloading. Then she corrected the way the stock met my shoulder.
"You have practiced the motions."
"For three days."
"Good. Practice teaches the hands where to go. It does not tell you what a gunshot feels like. Until we choose somewhere safe for that lesson, your finger stays outside the guard."
She made me pack while she watched. Dried clothing, bandages, salt, the sealed tins, rice, cookware, wire, ammunition, and every piece of meat that still smelled safe. The dead survivor’s blanket would have been useful, but it took too much space. I folded it back onto the mattress.
"Why leave it?" Liora asked.
"It was his."
"He is dead."
"I took everything else. Let me be irrational about one blanket."
She studied me, then nodded.
Before we moved the barricade, she checked the street from three different angles. The patrol truck had passed twenty minutes earlier. According to the pattern, we had at least an hour.
I expected her to put me on her back once we reached the yard. She did not.
"Walk," she said.
The route began through a gap in the rear wall, across a garden buried in weeds, and into a narrow lane between two rows of houses. Liora moved slowly enough for me to follow and fast enough that my breathing became work within ten minutes.
When my boot scraped a bottle, her hand caught it before it rolled.
Voices sounded from the road at the end of the lane.
Liora pushed me through an open window and followed. We crouched inside a sitting room while two Eastbridge workers crossed the far end carrying fuel cans between them. Grey bands circled their wrists. An armed guard walked behind.
The workers kept their eyes on the ground. One stumbled, received a shove between the shoulders, and continued without speaking.
Liora’s fingers tightened around a knife. I touched her wrist once.
She looked at me, then released the hilt.
We waited until the three figures disappeared. Choosing not to attack cost her something. She paid it without making me argue.
"Outside edge first," she whispered. "Feel the ground before you give it your weight."
She demonstrated. Her foot touched down along the outer edge and rolled inward without shifting a pebble.
I copied her and nearly fell into a fence.
"Again."
We repeated it until the motion stopped feeling like an imitation. She corrected my breathing next, forcing me to inhale low and release it slowly instead of holding it whenever a noise startled me.
At the first intersection, she stopped behind a broken wall.
"Tell me what you check."
"Both directions."
"And?"
I looked again. One side opened into a courtyard with a collapsed gate. The other narrowed between walls and vanished around a corner.
"Where I can retreat."
"First. Find the exit before the threat. Fear will make you stare at whatever wants to kill you."
We crossed safely and continued deeper into the ruins.
By dawn, Eastbridge’s floodlights had disappeared behind the buildings.