10. Men in Gray

Sia’s POV

“Stop the truck.”

Marcus didn’t slow down. “We’ve got forty minutes before that wind-type finds us, and you want to stop?”

“Marcus. Please.”

It was the please that did it. He glanced at me in the mirror, swore under his breath, and eased the brakes until we rolled to a halt in the middle of the dead pines.

Every head in the truck turned. Skyler twisted in the passenger seat, his eyes narrowing.

“What now?”

I had a choice to make, and I’d been circling it for days.

The cold was sitting at the base of my skull, steady and unhurried. Someone out there was watching us, and they weren’t afraid, and they weren’t angry, and they weren’t grieving. Whoever it was had been standing perfectly still for a very long time.

I could say something vague and hope he trusted me. Or I could tell him the truth.

The system had told me what it wanted. How the host treats the people he cares about. It hadn’t said anything about how I treated him. But every instinct I had left from my old job whispered the same thing: people trust you when you stop hiding the thing they already suspect.

So I told him.

“I can feel the gas.”

Silence.

“It’s a cold. Right here.” I touched the back of my neck. “It gets stronger the closer the gas is, and it leans toward whoever is feeling the most. That’s how I knew about the wall, and Cedar Avenue, and the water-type at the crossroads. It isn’t from the cure. It isn’t from anything I read.” I swallowed. “I don’t know why I have it. But I do.”

Nobody moved. Jun had stopped breathing. Lena’s mouth hung slightly open.

Skyler stared at me for a long time.

“How long?” His voice had gone very quiet.

“Since the first morning.”

“You told me you were reading things.”

“I know.”

“You sat in that truck and looked me in the face and—” He cut himself off, jaw working. When he spoke again, the words came out slow and flat, like they were being forced through a very small door. “I told you. No secrets.”

“I know. I’m telling you now.”

“You should have told me then.”

[Affection: -145%.]

[Note: the target values the information. The target resents the delay.]

Fifteen points. Gone, just like that, for telling the truth a bit late.

I wanted to put my head against the dashboard and scream. I’d done the right thing, and it had cost me anyway, and the system wasn’t even pretending to be sorry about it.

“We can fight about this later,” I said through my teeth. “Right now, someone is watching us from the trees. They’re calm. Very calm. And they’re close.”

Skyler’s eyes flicked to the pines. For one second, I saw something in his face that I hadn’t seen before. Not belief, exactly. The beginning of a calculation.

“Marcus,” he murmured. “Engine off. Eli, keep your head down.”

The engine died. The silence rolled over us.

Then the trees moved.

They came out of the pines in a loose half-circle, ten of them, with no hurry at all. Gray coveralls. Black gas masks with round, glassy eyes. Rifles held low, relaxed, the way professionals hold them. No insignia. No names.

They stopped at fifty yards, all at the same time, like a single body.

And I felt nothing. Not fear, not anger, not even curiosity. The cold at the back of my neck had gone flat, like a pane of glass.

Ten people, and not one feeling. It was the creepiest thing I had ever felt.

“Dr. Skyler.” A woman stepped forward, her voice muffled by the mask, smooth as a recorded message. “We’ve been looking for you for some time.”

Skyler climbed out of the truck. Slowly. Hands visible.

“Who sent you?”

“Containment Directive Seven. All surviving personnel from the East District facility are to be taken into protective custody.” She tilted her head. “You’ve done remarkable work, Doctor. It would be a shame to waste it on the road.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“You’ll find that isn’t a request.”

Marcus had his rifle up before I even saw him move. “Over my dead body.”

“That,” the woman agreed pleasantly, “can be arranged.”

Ten rifles came up in perfect unison.

My heart had gone to ice. This wasn’t the book. I had read three hundred chapters, every single one, and not once had anyone in gray coveralls and gas masks stepped out of the trees. Skyler had died in a pink bedroom with the world burning around him. There had never been a Directive Seven.

He was alive. He was walking north. And the story had begun to bend around him.

I was out of book.

The woman’s mask turned, and her glassy eyes found me.

“And you,” she said. She studied me for a moment, from my bandaged feet to my tangled hair. “You’re the girl from the dormitory.”

“I’m…” My mouth had gone dry.

“No.” She turned away, dismissive as a door closing. “You don’t matter. You’re not on my list.”

I blinked.

In a world where everyone had hated me on sight, being ignored by the villains was a new experience.

And then I was furious. Not at her. At myself, for needing a moment to be insulted. Because the cold was moving again.

It had started small, at the edge of my senses. Far behind us, vast and gray and coming fast, was a wall of wind with a very familiar shape. Not forty minutes. Maybe fifteen. Maybe less.

“Eli,” I whispered. “How long?”

He had gone gray under his freckles. “Eleven minutes,” he mouthed.

Eleven minutes.

I stepped out of the truck.

“Looks like we’re all about to have a very bad day.” I kept my voice light. Casual. The voice I used to use on clients who were about to walk out. “There’s an infected wind-type about eleven minutes behind us, and it’s very big, and it’s very hungry.”

The woman in the mask didn’t turn around. “We’re aware.”

“Are you? Because you’ve got ten people standing in an open field, and none of you have a plan.”

“We have a plan.”

“I’m sure it’s a good one.” I smiled. “But your people are calm. We’re not. Do you know what that means, with a thing that hunts feelings? It means it goes through us first, and then it goes through you.”

She turned her head, finally, and I felt, for the first time, the faintest ripple behind the glass. A flicker of calculation.

“You’re bluffing.”

“You can find out the hard way.” I let the smile fall. “Or you can let us go north, and Dr. Skyler will send you every note he has when he’s done. You get your research. We get our road. Nobody gets blown across the county.”

A long, awful pause.

“Eight minutes,” Eli breathed.

The woman looked at Skyler. “This girl speaks for you?”

Skyler looked at me.

It was only for a moment. I couldn’t read it. It wasn’t trust, and it wasn’t gratitude, and it certainly wasn’t affection. But it wasn’t refusal.

“I’m not choosing her,” he said slowly. “I’m choosing the island.” He turned back to the woman in gray. “The cure is up north. You can come with us or you can stay here and be blown away. Those are your options.”

She didn’t answer. Then the ground began to hum under our feet.

The wind-type came over the ridge like a wall.

I have never seen anything so large. It filled the horizon, a spinning column of black and brown, roaring and flinging trees out of the earth like toothpicks. The gray soldiers broke formation in a single heartbeat. Rifles dropped. Boots pounded. Their calm shattered like glass, and what rushed out from behind it was pure, naked terror.

The cold hit them like a magnet.

The wind-type turned toward the soldiers.

“Go!” Skyler roared. “Get in! Now!”

We piled into the truck, and Marcus stamped on the pedal before the doors had even closed. We tore through the pines with branches whipping the windshield, and behind us the woman in the mask was shouting something I couldn’t hear.

Then I did hear it. Clearly, over the roar.

“Skyler! You’re making a mistake! We will find you!”

Skyler didn’t look back.

I did. Through the empty rear opening, I watched the gray figures scatter, fast and disciplined even in panic, and the wind-type tear across the field behind them. I couldn’t tell whether any of them had made it.

But one thing I knew. Even in a storm, even at the edge of death, their cold had stayed wrong. It hadn’t felt like fear. It had felt like a lid being closed over something very deep.

I sat back on the bench, shaking, and let the system speak.

[Affection: -145%.]

Nothing had changed. He had kept me from being shot, and he had chosen the island, and neither of those had been for me. The number didn’t care.

Beside me, Eli whispered, “What was that? Who were they?”

Nobody answered.

Skyler was staring through the windshield at the road ahead. I looked at the back of his head, at the stiff line of his shoulders, and tried to think of something to say.

Everything I knew about this world ended at the last page of a book. From here on, every road, every stranger, every storm was something nobody had ever written.

I was flying blind.