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"Move."
Greywolf shoves me through the door before I can argue. I hit the ground hard, shoulder first, and the door slams behind me. Metal grinding metal. Locks clicking into place.
Then nothing.
No light. No phone because my phone's been dead since Zone Three. Just black.
Not the kind you get when you close your eyes. The kind that *presses*. I can feel it on my skin, cold and thick, and my lungs pull shallow because some animal part of my brain is screaming that I'm drowning.
I'm not drowning. I'm in Zone Four. Where Maya's last known position was three weeks ago. Where the council wants me dead bad enough to plaster my face on every working screen in the city.
I push to my feet. My hand throbs where I cut it for that solar panel. Blood dried sticky against my palm. I take one step forward and my boot hits something that crunches—glass, maybe bone—and I freeze.
Something moves in the dark ahead of me.
Not wind. Not a rat. Something *big*. I hear its weight shift, fabric dragging across concrete, breath pulling in slow and wrong.
Like it's tasting the air.
"Hey," I say. My voice cracks. I clear my throat. "I'm not here to—"
It moves fast.
I throw myself sideways, slam into a wall, scrape my shoulder raw on brick. Something rushes past close enough that I feel the air move, smell something sour and burnt. Claws scrape concrete where I was standing.
*Claws.*
My heart's trying to break my ribs. I press my back to the wall, slide left, hands out, feeling for a door or a gap or *anything*. My fingers find metal. A rail. I follow it, moving fast, and behind me the thing turns. I hear it sniff.
It's tracking me.
"Shit," I whisper. "Shit shit—"
My boot catches something and I go down hard. My cut palm slams into the ground and pain flares white-hot up my arm. I bite down on a yell because if I yell it'll know exactly where I am.
But the pain does something else.
My hand lights up.
Not bright. Not like a flare. Just a faint blue-white glow seeping out from under my skin, pooling in the blood smeared across my palm. Enough to see the floor. The rail. The thing ten feet away.
It's human-shaped. *Was* human, maybe. Now it's all wrong angles and too-long limbs and a face caved in on one side like something crushed it and it kept moving anyway. Its eyes are empty. Not blind. *Empty*. Like someone scooped out everything that used to be in there.
It sees the light in my hand.
It hisses.
I scramble backward, my hand flaring brighter, and the thing *flinches*. Its head snaps to the side and it makes a sound like metal scraping glass and then it's gone. Just—*gone*. Back into the black so fast I don't even see it move.
I'm breathing too hard. My hand's still glowing. I stare at it, at the light bleeding out from the cut, and I don't know if I should be relieved or terrified that the thing ran from *me*.
Behind me, something else moves.
I spin, hand up, light spilling out. There's a figure in the dark. Smaller. Human-sized. Standing still.
"Don't shoot." Young. Female. Shaking. "Please don't shoot I'm not—I'm not one of them."
I blink. My hand's not a gun. It's barely a flashlight. But she's holding up her hands like I've got her at gunpoint.
"I'm not gonna hurt you," I say. My voice sounds steadier than I feel. "Are you stuck here?"
She nods. Maybe sixteen. Seventeen. Her clothes are shredded and filthy and there's a lamp on her belt that's dead. Completely dead.
"How long?"
She swallows. "I don't know. A week? Two? Time's weird here. My lamp died yesterday. I thought—I thought I was done."
I look down at my hand. At the light still bleeding out, fainter now but steady. Then I look at her lamp.
"Give it here."
She doesn't move. Just stares.
"Your lamp," I say. "Give it to me."
She unclips it slow, hands shaking, and holds it out. Standard solar-rechargeable. The kind every scout carries. The kind that needs six hours of real sunlight to work.
I press my bleeding palm against the panel.
The light in my hand flares hot, bright enough that she gasps and steps back, and I feel it *pull*. Like something inside me is pouring out through the cut, through my skin, into the lamp. It hurts. Worse than the alley when Rachel shot at me. Like I'm burning from the inside and the only way to stop it is to let it out.
The lamp flickers. Once. Twice.
Then it glows.
Steady white light spills out, real and solid, and the girl makes a sound between a sob and a laugh. I let go, stumble back, my hand going dim. My head swims.
"Oh my god," she whispers. She's holding the lamp like it's the only thing keeping her alive. Maybe it is. "Oh my god you—how did you—"
"Don't tell anyone," I say. My voice sounds far away. "If anyone asks, you found a charge pack. Okay?"
She nods fast, clutching the lamp to her chest. "Okay. Okay I won't—thank you. Thank you so much."
I wave her off, lean against the rail, try to catch my breath. My hand's stopped glowing completely. Just a regular hand with a half-dried cut. I should wrap it. I should find water.
I should find Maya.
I should figure out why the dark pulled back when I bled light.
"Hey," the girl says. She's still there, hovering, lamp in hand. "There's—there's a group. Down in the old subway access. Maybe forty people. Kids, mostly. We've been trying to ration our lights but—" She stops. Swallows. "A lot of us are down to nothing. If you could—"
She doesn't finish. She doesn't have to.
I close my eyes. "How far?"
"Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. I can show you."
I should say no. I should tell her I'm here for my sister and I don't have time to play hero for forty strangers. But I think about that thing in the dark. About the way it flinched from my light. About the fact that if I don't help them, they're all gonna end up like that thing.
Or dead.
"Okay," I say. "Lead the way."
She does. We move fast, her lamp throwing shadows that twist and lurch on the walls. I keep my hand ready, the cut open just enough that if something jumps us I can make it bleed again. Nothing does. The things in the dark—I can *feel* them, hear them moving parallel to us, pacing us—but they stay back. Out of the light.
The subway access is exactly as bad as I thought it'd be. A gutted station with no power, no trains, just a platform full of people huddled around dying lamps and candles that won't last another day. When we come down the stairs they all look up. Forty faces. Maybe more. They see the girl's lamp, bright and full, and then they see me.
"Who's that?" someone asks.
"He can fix lights," the girl says.
A ripple goes through the crowd. Hope. Desperation. A couple of them start to stand. An older man, maybe fifty, steps forward.
"Is that true?"
I look at him. At all of them. At the kid in the back holding a lamp so dim it's basically a candle. At the woman next to him with a solar panel cracked clean in half.
I'm so tired. I don't know if I've got enough left in me to light one lamp, let alone forty.
But I think about Maya. About the fact that three weeks ago she was here, alive, moving through the dark. And if she was helping people, if she was doing this same stupid thing I'm about to do—
Maybe I can find her by following the trail of people she saved.
"Yeah," I say. "I can fix lights."
They bring me everything. Lamps, solar panels, phone batteries, flashlights. I sit down on the edge of the platform and start working. Cut my palm deeper. Press it to the first lamp. Feel the pull, the burn, the light pouring out of me and into the dead battery. It flares to life.
I move to the next one. Then the next.
It gets harder. Each one takes more. My hand shakes. My vision blurs. Somewhere around the tenth lamp I start seeing double and someone—the older man—brings me water. I drink it. Keep going.
The kid with the dying lamp is last. Maybe seven. Big eyes. Scared. He holds the lamp out to me like he's not sure I'm real.
"It's okay," I tell him. My voice sounds like gravel. "I've got you."
I press my hand to the lamp. It's almost empty. One flicker left. I push, feel the light rise, feel it start to flow—
And then it stops.
Nothing. My hand's on the lamp but the light won't come. I'm empty. Completely empty. The burn inside me is gone and there's just—nothing.
The kid's lamp flickers. Dies.
He looks at me. His chin trembles.
"I'm sorry," I whisper. "I don't—"
I don't have anything left.
But the dark is moving. I can hear it. Out past the platform, beyond the weak glow of the lamps I just charged, something big is shifting. Circling. The things in the dark know we're here. Know we're vulnerable. And when the lamps burn down again—
I look at the kid. At my hand. At the cut across my palm that's barely bleeding anymore.
Screw it.
I drag the knife across my palm again. Fresh blood wells up, hot and bright, and I press my hand flat against the lamp's panel. The pain is white-hot, blinding, but I push through it. I don't have light left to give.
So I give blood instead.
The lamp flickers.
I push harder. Feel something inside me crack open, something deeper than the light I've been using, something that feels wrong and right at the same time. My blood glows on the panel. Not blue-white. *Red-gold*. Hot.
The lamp blazes to life.
Not just a glow. A *flare*. Bright enough that people shout and cover their eyes. The kid yelps and almost drops it. And outside, in the tunnels, something screams.
I let go, stumble back, my hand dripping red-gold light. It fades fast, back to just blood, but the lamp stays bright. The kid's staring at it like it's a miracle.
Maybe it is.
The dark pulls back. I can feel it. Like a living thing recoiling. The things in the tunnels are gone. Not hiding. *Gone*.
And then I see it.
On the ground where the dark pulled away. Right at the edge of the platform where no one's been able to go for days because the black's too thick.
A badge.
I kneel down. Pick it up. It's filthy, half-melted on one side, but I can still read the ID number. Still see the name stamped underneath.
*M. Cross. Scout Division.*
Maya's badge.
I'm staring at it, at the proof that she was here, that she made it this far, when someone behind me says, "What the hell is that?"
I turn. The older man's looking past me. Past the badge. At something further down the tunnel.
I follow his gaze.
There's a figure standing in the dark. Just outside the lamplight. Tall. Still. Watching.
It doesn't move like the things that ran. Doesn't move like a survivor.
It moves like a scout.
I stand up, Maya's badge clutched in my fist. My heart's pounding so hard I can hear it in my ears.
"Maya?" I call.
The figure tilts its head.
And then it turns.
And walks back into the black.