Chapter 235: The Walked To The North — Final
I nodded
I picked her up without answering. She settled against me with both arms around my neck and the bunny tucked under one arm, and I turned north and walked.
The fence was still standing on the north side— one of the only things that was, 18 feet of chain-link, intact.
I jumped it without breaking the pace and Shiori didn’t react at all. No startled sound, no grip tightening. She just rode the jump and landing with her face against my shoulder.
The jungle took us in the way it always did— dense overhead, the light breaking up through the canopy into moving pieces, roots pushing up through the ground, the smell of growing things that had been left alone too long.
I moved through it and Shiori talked, which was normal, except the normal wasn’t quite right.
She asked questions. Not the ones with the punchlines. Not the ones about birds getting married or bread having a different name.
Just questions, thrown into the air without the usual weight of someone building toward something.
Like... Did I think the vines grew fast or slow. Did I know the name of the trees we were passing. Did I prefer mornings or nights? Which, of course I prefer morning now.
She still laughed sometimes, when I answered. Small, genuine, the real kind. She still held tight.
But the timing was different. The rhythm of it. Like something that was doing an impression of itself from memory rather than doing it fresh.
I noticed it and said nothing.
Her forehead was warm. I noticed that too, first when she shifted position and her face pressed against the side of my neck for a moment.
Then warmer, five minutes later. Then noticeably burning, like a high fever.
"I can’t feel my fingers," she said.
I kept walking. "That’s normal. It’s cold."
"Mm." A pause. "Okay."
We crossed a section of the jungle where the undergrowth was thick enough that I had to push through it, and Shiori held the bunny up above the level of the leaves while I worked us through, which was so specifically her that I almost said something about it and then didn’t.
Ten minutes later: "I can’t feel my foot."
I stopped. Looked at her face. She was looking somewhere past my shoulder, eyes not quite tracking. "Which one?"
"...The right one. It’s just there. I’m telling it to move and it’s... not." She frowned, concentration on her face. "It feels like when your foot falls asleep, but it’s not going away."
"That happens sometimes," I said. "Circulation. Walking helps." I started moving again.
She nodded against my shoulder. "Okay."
She talked for a while after that— random things, the kind she usually deployed as comedy and was now just deploying as sound, filling the space between the trees with words the way water filled a container.
At some point she stopped mid-sentence.
Then she found the word again.
Then a few minutes later she lost it again, a different word this time, something simple, and I heard her working around it— describing the thing without the word for it.
"Hey," I said, carefully. "What’s going on?"
"I keep..." She paused. "Forgetting. Words. Memories. Like... I know I have them but when I reach for them they’re just... not there for a second." Her grip tightened around my neck. "Just hold me tighter, Ahjussi. Please."
I held her tighter.
My jaw was clenched hard enough to hurt. I noticed this and didn’t fix it.
We came out of the denser jungle into a section where the trees thinned and the black city was visible ahead... It’s so weird, because what is this... the buildings cycling through their collapse-and-rebuild in slow continuous motion, the rotting trees still growing.
I stepped through the border and nothing happened, the dark section taking us in without ceremony.
Shiori was quiet.
Not the comfortable quiet, it’s like one of those people who had stopped spending energy on things that weren’t essential.
No nonsense. No questions. No judgments on things that didn’t deserve to exist. Just her arms around me and her breath against my shoulder and the occasional small sound that might have been her [humming something] or might have been nothing.
"Ahjussi," she said.
"Yeah."
"Does it hurt? Becoming a zombie?"
My chest did something that I didn’t have a word for and didn’t try to find one. "Huh? W-what are you talking about?"
She didn’t answer right away. When she spoke again her voice was small and [effortful], like each word was being retrieved from somewhere further away than words should be. "Pull my socks down."
I stopped walking. Found a clear piece of ground, set her down sitting, and knelt in front of her.
Pulled her sock down.
And saw a wound... a Bite.
The bite was small. The kind of mark that barely registered as injury— more like a scratch than a wound, the kind of thing that in any other situation I would have cleaned and covered and moved on from.
Except the skin around it had gone dark, veins threading outward from the site, visible through the skin, pulsing with something that moved at its own rhythm separate from her heartbeat.
I pulled the sock back up.
Then I picked her up again and kept walking, because stopping wasn’t something I was going to do.
"Don’t worry," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "It’s nothing. It’s fine. I’m here, okay? Don’t worry."
She pressed her face into my shoulder. "Okay."
We kept walking. The black city moved around us, buildings cycling through their destruction and regeneration, the dark pressing at the edges of things without ever quite becoming full dark because there was some ambient light here that didn’t have an obvious source.
My footsteps. Her breathing. The occasional sound of something collapsing and rebuilding several blocks away.
"Ahjussi."
"Yeah."
She took a moment. "I wished... you and Noona were my parents instead."
I didn’t answer.
I held her tighter and kept walking and didn’t say anything, because there wasn’t anything to say that wasn’t worse than saying nothing, and she seemed to understand that, because she didn’t push for a response.
She just rested there with her face against my shoulder and her arms loose around me now— not tight the way they’d been, but there, holding on in the way you held on when the strength for more than that was mostly gone.
[Seconds. Minutes. Hours passed.] I stopped distinguishing between them.
The dark city was the dark city yea, haha... a choked sob escaped from me for no reason.
And toward the border was somewhere ahead and I kept walking toward it and Shiori kept breathing, shallower than before, her temperature going past warm into something that felt wrong to touch and I touched it anyway because I wasn’t letting go.
Then she flinched.
One sharp motion, her whole body tensing, and I looked down at her face and her eyes had gone red at the edges. Her nails were dark.
The bunny fell and she didn’t reach for it, which told me more than anything else had.
She turned her face toward my neck.
The part of my brain that was still doing threat assessment said a lot of things very quickly and I ignored all of them.
I took the back of her head in one hand and pressed it gently against my shoulder. And she bit down, and I winced, and I kept walking.
The sound she made was not a sound I’m going to describe. I just walked. She flailed, sometimes— short, reflexive motions, the body doing things the person inside wasn’t directing anymore— and I held on through each one and kept north.
The veins on my neck were probably doing something by now. I didn’t check.
The border appeared eventually, the way things appeared when you walked toward them long enough— out of the dark and into something I could see was the edge: a wall, featureless, stretching in both directions as far as I could track.
The middle of it was somewhere. The exit was at the middle. But I was looking at a section of it and there was nothing here— no door, no mechanism, no system window appearing to congratulate me.
"Im not in the middle probably," I said. To myself, mostly. "Okay."
I turned right and walked along the border, following it, Shiori still against me, the direction as good as any.
Night arrived without me noticing the transition— the dark that was already everywhere just getting darker, the ambient light dropping away, until I was moving mostly by the faint glow of the border wall beside me and whatever my eyes could do even with my [slight night vision.]
A light appeared.
Small. On my neck. On Shiori’s neck too, from the angle of it— both of us touched by the same pale faint source. I had maybe two seconds to be confused by it.
Then I was watching from a height I didn’t have a moment ago, looking down at a headless figure still standing in the dark holding a small girl, both of them lit by that same pale light, and the world went white and then went [nothing.]
***
I opened my eyes.
Tall grass. The smell of it, green and real, the morning light hitting everything sideways the way it did when the sun had just cleared the horizon and hadn’t figured out what angle to settle at yet.
I was standing, which was a kindness— sometimes the reset dropped you and sometimes it didn’t, and this one had decided to be gentle about the physical part at least.
Jisoo was beside me.
Crying. Sobbing furiously, her shoulders going with it, face down, both hands pressed over her mouth like she was trying to contain something that had run out of room to stay contained.
When she looked up and saw me her face went through several things very fast and landed somewhere that wasn’t relief and wasn’t grief but was both at the same time, sitting on top of each other.
"Fuck," she said. "Fuck, fuck— Si Hon... Mio! No... S-Shiori, I’m her favorite, she told me... she said I’m her favorite and I—" A sob cut through the middle of it. "I watched you. I was stuck there the whole time, watching, I watched you walk through that whole city carrying her while she was—" Her voice broke completely. "Fuck. Fuck."
I looked at my hands.
Clean. Reset. No bite on my neck, no blood, no evidence of any of it except the fact that both of us remembered every single second of it, and we were standing in a field of tall grass in the middle of a [Ruined Ever turned City.]
I sat down.
Just— down. Right there in the tall grass, the way my body made a decision my brain hadn’t voted on.
I pressed both hands over my face.
And I sat there.