Chapter 5- The Siren on Marlowe Hill

The headlights swept over the basement wall and stopped, and the engine outside cut off with a cough that sounded far too confident for a world that was ending.

Emilia pressed herself against the cold stone beneath the narrow window, where only a strip of the courtyard was visible, and she watched a black armored truck settle in the gravel with its beams pointed at the observatory doors. The Hollows had already turned toward it, dozens of pale shapes dragging themselves away from the entrance with that wet clicking rasp, drawn by the light and the noise like moths toward a lantern.

The truck doors opened. Two armed men in the stronghold's gray uniforms stepped out first and fanned across the courtyard, firing short, disciplined bursts that dropped the nearest Hollows to the gravel. Behind them Daniel climbed down from the passenger side with his jacket buttoned to the throat, one hand lifted to shield his eyes from the red glare of the sky, and Joss followed him with her blond hair tied back and a rifle slung across her chest that Emilia had never once seen her hold.

Emilia's fingers curled into the stone until her nails ached. Joss had never fired a gun in her life, and she carried that rifle now with the calm ease of someone who had been trained for months.

Kaelen crouched beside her and spoke without raising his voice. He said they had perhaps ninety seconds before the guards forced the hatch, and that the truck carried explosives he did not want to meet in a confined space. His eyes moved to the tracker disk still lying in her palm, and she felt the weight of the decision settle on her shoulders like a coat.

She had learned something in forty three days that no soldier could have taught her, and it came to her now with perfect clarity. The Hollows did not hunt by sight or by smell. They hunted by sound, and the louder and more rhythmic the noise, the more violently they converged on it.

She remembered the old emergency siren bolted to a pole at the back of the observatory grounds, because she had once surveyed this hill for a heritage mapping project, years before any of this began. She had stood beneath that pole in a gray drizzle with a clipboard in her hands, listening to a groundskeeper complain that the siren had been wired to a manual switch in the basement because the council refused to pay for a proper alarm.

She looked around the cellar, past the crates and the cot and the pump handle, and there in the corner behind a stack of rotting canvas she found a gray metal box with a lever the size of her forearm.

Emilia crossed the floor in four strides and threw her weight against the lever.

It resisted for a heartbeat, rusted and stubborn, and then it slammed downward with a shriek of old metal. For a moment nothing happened at all, and then the world above them split open with a sound so enormous that dust sifted from the ceiling in long gray ribbons.

The siren howled across Marlowe Hill, a rising and falling scream that carried over the valley and echoed from every stone wall. In the courtyard the guards flinched and spun toward the back of the grounds, and Emilia heard Daniel shout something furious that was swallowed by the noise.

Then the Hollows came.

They poured out of the trees and up the road and over the garden wall, hundreds of them now, an endless pale tide drawn toward that single piercing sound. The guards fired until their rifles clicked empty and then fell back toward the truck, but the creatures simply flowed around them, indifferent to the weapons, hungry for the noise behind them. One of the men stumbled into the headlights with a Hollow clinging to his shoulders, and his scream joined the siren in a terrible harmony.

Kaelen seized her wrist and pulled her toward the far wall, where a wooden panel hung slightly crooked in the shadows. Behind it a service tunnel opened into darkness, narrow and damp and smelling of old rainwater. He had known it was there, she realized, because he had hidden in it before, in one of the lives she had never seen.

They ducked inside, and Kaelen dragged the panel closed behind them just as the hatch above the stairs buckled under a blast that shook the entire cellar. Emilia heard boots on the iron steps and a man coughing in the smoke, and then Daniel's voice came down the stairwell, clear and strangely calm beneath the roar of the siren.

Emilia, I know you are in here. I know what you remember.

Her blood turned to ice.

She froze with her palm flat against the wet stone of the tunnel, and through a hairline crack in the wooden panel she could see a thin slice of the cellar. Daniel stood at the bottom of the stairs with his pistol raised and a smear of soot across his cheek, and he was looking directly at the corner where she had been standing a moment ago. Joss came down behind him, her face pale and tight, and she touched his arm with a gentleness that made Emilia's stomach twist.

Daniel said her name again, softly, the way he used to say it in the dark when he thought she was asleep. He said that he did not want to hurt her and that he never had, that he had only wanted to keep her safe in the only way the world would allow. He said that the version of her who died on the riverbed had understood that, and that the version who had returned would understand it too.

Emilia stopped breathing entirely.

There was only one way Daniel could have known about the riverbed. In this life she had not died on it, and she had told no one about the bridge but the man beside her. The only person who could possibly know how she had died was someone who had lived through that night, and who had stood on the wall and pointed her out with a smile.

Kaelen's hand closed gently over her mouth before she could make a sound, and she felt him tremble against her shoulder. His voice was barely a breath in her ear, and it carried a horror she had not heard from him before.

He said that in all seven lives he remembered, Daniel had never once spoken of the bridge.

Above them the siren wailed on, and the Hollows crashed against the observatory walls like a sea, and in the ruined cellar the man she had once planned to marry took a slow step toward the

hidden panel and smiled.