Safehouse Quarantine

Emma's POV

The generator kicked on with a groan that sounded like the whole house was clearing its throat, and I flinched so hard I knocked my elbow against the kitchen counter.

"Easy," Noah said, not even looking up from the window he'd been watching for the last twenty minutes like it owed him money. "It's just the storm. Power's been flickering since we got here."

"I know what a generator sounds like." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to, but I didn't take it back. I was cold, and wired, and furious at how small this safehouse felt with just the two of us in it one bedroom, one couch, one door that Noah had triple-checked was bolted the second we'd walked in.

He didn't answer. That was somehow worse than if he had.

Outside, the wind off the peninsula threw rain against the glass in fistfuls, and somewhere past the dark tangle of tea trees and cliffside scrub, there were people looking for us. I didn't know their faces. I didn't know how many. I only knew that Noah's jaw had gone tight the moment the call came through, and that he'd driven the last forty minutes without saying a single unnecessary word, both hands locked on the wheel like letting go would cost us something.

"You should eat something," he said finally, nodding toward the tin of crackers on the counter like it was a peace offering. "You've had nothing since this morning."

"I'm not hungry."

"Emma."

"I said I'm not hungry." I hated how my voice cracked on his name, hated that he heard it too, hated the way his shoulders dropped half an inch like he wanted to cross the room and couldn't decide if he was allowed to.

We hadn't talked about the hallway. Three nights ago, outside my apartment, when he'd grabbed my wrist and pulled me back from a door I didn't know was wired to blow, and for one unbearable second his hand hadn't let go even after the danger had passed. We hadn't talked about that at all. It sat between us now the way the silence sat between us, thick and deliberate, something neither of us wanted to be the one to break.

"Come here," he said instead, low, and nodded at the window.

I didn't want to go near him. I went anyway.

He'd cracked the blind an inch, just enough to see the tree line where it met the cliff edge, black against a sky the color of a bruise. "Tell me what you see," he said.

"Trees. Rain. Nothing."

"Look again."

I did, and my stomach dropped somewhere past my knees. A light. Small, faint, moving not headlights, not the lighthouse two coves over that blinked steady and slow like it had all the time in the world. This one flickered erratic, deliberate, the kind of light a person carries when they don't want to be seen carrying it.

"That's not nothing," I whispered.

"No," Noah agreed, and for the first time all night, I heard something under his calm that sounded almost like fear. "It's not."

He reached past me to pull the blind fully shut, and for half a second his arm brushed mine, and I hated my own body for the way it responded to something so small in the middle of something this dangerous. I hated that even now, with a stranger's light bobbing through the dark outside a house with exactly one exit, some stubborn, reckless part of me was cataloguing the warmth of him instead of the danger.

"They can't have followed us," I said. "You checked the car. You checked twice."

"I know what I checked." He was already moving, already pulling the go-bag out from under the couch, already doing the math on our exits the way I imagined he did the math on everything fast, silent, no room for what-ifs. "Get your shoes."

"Noah"

"Get your shoes, Emma. Now."

I'd never heard him use that voice before. Not once, not even in the hallway with the wired door and the wrongness of it crawling up my spine. This was different. This was a voice that had decided something was coming and had already accepted the cost of being wrong.

I grabbed my boots with hands that wouldn't stop shaking and shoved my feet into them without bothering with the laces. Behind me, Noah killed the single lamp we'd allowed ourselves, and the safehouse dropped into a darkness so complete I lost him for a second, lost the shape of the room, lost everything except the sound of my own heartbeat slamming against my ribs.

"Stay behind me," he breathed, close enough now that I could feel it against my ear. "Whatever happens. Stay behind me."

I wanted to ask what he meant by *whatever happens*. I wanted to ask if he was scared, if this was the part where he told me everything was going to be fine, the way people did in movies right before it wasn't. I didn't get the chance.

The light outside the window went out.

All of it. At once. Not the flickering, wandering light in the trees the porch light too, the one on its own separate circuit that Noah had sworn was untouchable from outside. Gone, like something had reached out and closed a fist around the whole house.

And then, from somewhere very close to the back door, so close it might have been standing right against the wood, came three slow, deliberate knocks.