Page 120 of Stay Scared

None of us can move without dragging the others.

I start forward again.

My boot breaks through brittle plastic, sending a prize token skittering across the concrete. The sound travels much farther than it should.

Owen speaks quietly behind Cade. “Someone came through here recently.”

“How do you know?”

“The dust pattern changed before the waterline.”

“You can’t see the floor.”

“I can feel the disturbed layer under my boots.”

Cade shifts the rope away from his injured side. “Think it was Rook?”

“One person came through alone. I would assume it was him until we have evidence otherwise.”

We stop.

Four sets of breathing mix with water moving somewhere beneath the foundation.

Nothing else answers.

Ash lifts his mask. A faint click sounds behind me, and thin white lines come alive around its eyes.

“You had a light in that thing?” Cade asks.

“Independent battery.”

“And you waited this long?”

“It has less than twenty minutes of usable power.”

Ash puts the mask on.

The light catches only pieces of him: pale eyes around a black shell, bare throat beneath it, the man underneath no longer erased by the Voice because I know exactly what the mask hides.

A painted arrow appears on the floor.

Fresh white paint cuts across old dust and points north.

Cade looks down. “Very subtle.”

Ash studies it. “The arrow may be directing us away from structural damage.”

“He put Mark under a fire curtain.”

“That does not make the west passage safe.”

“It makes his directions worthless.”

I step past the arrow.

The rope tightens once as Ash follows.

The arcade basement opens around us. Dead machines stand beneath canvas covers, forming rows of hunched shapes in the weak spill from Ash’s mask.