4. The Affection Bar

Sia’s POV

The dust hadn’t even settled when Skyler started giving orders.

“Marcus, get the truck. Jun, check everyone for cuts, anything that broke skin. Eli, where is it?”

I hadn’t heard any of their names until then, and the second I did, I knew all of them. Marcus was the big man. Jun, the thin one with glasses. Eli, the kid. Lena, the tall woman who had called me a princess. They were secondary characters in a book I’d finished just hours ago, and Lena had maybe nine lines in the whole thing.

The kid crouched at the curb with a battered tablet. “Still on the roof. It isn’t moving. I think it’s confused.”

“Day one,” Jun said quietly. “They always are, on day one.”

“It won’t stay that way.” Skyler jerked his chin toward the corner, where Marcus was already wrestling a battered military truck around the rubble. “Move.”

We moved.

The truck had a cracked windshield and smelled like engine oil and old coffee. When I dropped onto the bench in the back, I almost cried with relief, because my feet had started to bleed. I hadn’t had time to notice. Running barefoot out of a collapsing building will do that.

Skyler didn’t sit. He braced one hand against the roof and spoke to all of us, in the voice of a man who had already run the numbers.

“Halden Island sits at the very top of the continent. The nearest harbor with working boats is Brinemouth, on the far northern coast. That’s weeks of road from here, maybe months, through cities that went dark long ago. We cross the country, we find a boat, and we sail the last stretch.”

“And the wind-type?” Eli asked, still staring at the tablet.

“If it follows us, it burns out on day three, and then the gas goes looking for the nearest person.” His eyes flicked, very briefly, toward me. “So we don’t want to be the nearest person.”

“And if the island’s a lie?” Lena asked from the far corner of the bench.

“Then we’ll have lost a month and gained nothing, and I’ll know exactly who to blame.”

Nobody had anything to add to that. The truck lurched into motion.

Weeks. Maybe months. The system had given me thirty days, and the cure was a country away.

Nora had taken the seat farthest from mine. She sat with her hands curled into fists in her lap, and she turned toward the window so fast I thought she might hit the glass. Her knuckles had gone white. It wasn’t the posture of someone afraid of me. It was someone keeping a very careful arm’s length because she wasn’t sure what her hands would do if I got closer.

Marcus drove. Jun had been ordered to look at my feet, and he did it the way you’d defuse something, stiff and quick, with his face turned a little aside. He yanked the gauze tight enough to make me hiss, and when I flinched, he said, “Hold still,” and nothing else.

He tied it off, wiped his hands on his trousers as if I’d left something on them, and moved to the other end of the bench.

Okay. Nobody in here was going to be my friend. I could live with that.

I let my eyes unfocus and thought, as hard as I could, status.

The white text slid in over the dark, just like it had in the loop.

[Target: Skyler.]

[Affection: -100%.]

I stared at it.

Minus.

I had assumed zero. I had been so careful, in the dark, to assume it started at zero, because zero was a place you could climb from. But the number was one hundred below it, as though the system had looked at my situation and said, ‘oh, honey.’

[Note: the scale is not limited to 0% through 100%.]

“Great,” I whispered. “Just great.”

“What is?”

Skyler had come to sit across from me. I hadn’t even felt him move. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, watching me with that lock-picker’s patience, and the whole truck seemed to hold its breath.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“How did you know?”

He didn’t have to say what. The roof, the wall, the cold. All of it.

“I read a lot,” I replied.

He waited, his eyes narrowing.

“I’m serious. I read a lot of… things. About the lab, the research, how this kind of outbreak might go.”

“Try again.”

I could have kept lying. I’d done it for years, mostly to myself. But something about the way he sat there, so tired, so quiet, made it hard to push another lie through my teeth.

“I can’t tell you,” I murmured. “Not yet. But everything I’ve told you about the cure is true. That part, I swear.”

“So you’re keeping something from me.”

“Yes.”

He looked at me for a long time.

[Affection: -110%.]