The street looked clear but it actually wasn’t.

Michael found out the moment they stepped out from the clothing store doorway, and he pushed the pulse to its full extension and felt the shape of the third block properly for the first time from ground level.

From behind the delivery van two blocks back, the signatures had looked manageable because they were looking like a scatter of movement he could map and route around.

Down here on the street, with buildings on both sides and the hospital visible at the far end, it felt completely different.

The two on the rooftop were still there. He could feel them on the pulse, directly above and slightly ahead, moving in a slow back-and-forth that said they hadn’t detected anything yet.

Crawlers on a rooftop in daylight were a specific kind of problem because they were fast on flat surfaces, and the drop from three floors was nothing to something that didn’t feel pain.

He kept that information in mind and moved.

They went single file along the west side of the street, tight to the buildings, moving in the gaps between the signature positions he was tracking on the pulse.

Sera went first reading his hand signals, then Shin, then Maya, who was doing everything right, and he was actively trying not to think about what would happen if something went wrong with her in their current situation.

First twenty meters, clean.

The Rotter in the middle of the street was facing away from them, shuffling north at the same pace they were moving, which was either convenient or about to become a problem depending on whether it turned.

Michael watched it on the pulse and kept the group’s pace just slow enough to maintain distance without closing it.

Thirty meters.

The restaurant cluster had drifted east the way he had predicted, but not as far as he’d hoped, and three of the four were still visible from the street, standing in a loose group outside the restaurant entrance with their backs to a car that had mounted the kerb.

One of them had its head tilted at an angle that looked almost attentive, and Michael slowed the group and they pressed against the building wall and waited.

It straightened after a moment and went back to nothing.

They kept moving.

Forty meters, and the hospital entrance was visible at the end of the block, the main doors dark and the ambulance bay on the left with two vehicles still sitting in it, and Michael let himself look at it for exactly one second before looking back at the pulse, because looking at the destination was how you stopped watching the space between you and it.

Which was when the pulse caught the signature coming out of the building doorway directly to their right.

He stopped the group with a closed fist, and they all froze against the wall, and the Rotter came out of the doorway two meters from where they were standing.

It was close enough that Michael could hear it breathing, the wet, irregular sound of lungs that were doing something they weren’t designed to do anymore. It stood in the doorway with its back to them, head turning slowly left and right, and nobody in the group moved or breathed, and the four of them, pressed against the wall in a line, were close enough that he could feel Sera’s shoulder against his arm, and Maya’s hand had found the back of his jacket and was holding a fistful of it without her seeming to notice she’d done it.

The Rotter turned right.

Away from them.

It shuffled out of the doorway and onto the street, heading east, and Michael waited until the pulse showed it moving away before he let out a breath and signalled the group forward.

Maya let go of his jacket with a slighty embarrassed expression but Michael decided not to say anything.

They were fifteen meters from the end of the block when the rooftop Crawlers suddenly moved.

He felt it on the pulse first, both signatures shifting from their back-and-forth pattern to something directed, and he looked up and caught movement at the rooftop edge directly above them, a humanoid figure with it’s joints bending in the wrong ways.

It was looking down at the street but not at them rather at the Rotter that had come out of the doorway and was now crossing the street thirty meters behind them.

Crawlers hunted any sign of movement, and the Rotter was moving, and they were still and pressed against the wall, and for one very long second the geometry of it was in their favour.

Then the second Crawler appeared at the rooftop edge beside the first.

And that one was looking at them.

Michael didn’t give it time to do anything with that information.

"Run," he said, and they ran.

The Crawler dropped off the rooftop from three floors down irt hit the street behind them with a sound like something large and wet and was up before the impact had finished echoing, moving on all fours at a speed that had no right to exist, already catching up to them which made Michael’s stomach turn, the hospital entrance was ten meters away, and the Crawler was closing the gap between them and it in seconds.

Sera went through the hospital entrance first. Shin went through second. Michael grabbed Maya’s arm and pulled, and they went through together, and he spun and got the door between them and the Crawler as it hit the door like a battering ram, and the impact shuddered through his arms but he held it and Sera was beside him instantly with her weight against the door but the Crawler aggressively hit it again, and the door frame cracked but held.

Then it went quiet.

All four of them held the door for ten seconds but at that moment it was the most longest time in their lives.

After not hearing anything for some time Michael pushed the pulse through the door and found the Crawler signature outside, circling and moving back and forth in front of the entrance with the frustrated energy of something that knew what it wanted and couldn’t get to it.

The second one was still on the rooftop.

He pulled back from the door slowly and looked at the others. Sera was breathing hard but tried to control it. Shin had her back against the wall beside the entrance with her axe raised and her eyes on the door.

Maya was two steps back from the door with both hands gripping the table leg and an expression on her face that was white around the edges but steady in the middle.

She caught him looking.

"I’m fine," she said before he asked.

He looked at her for a second, then nodded and turned to look at where they were.

The hospital lobby was large and dark and smelled like something that had been closed up for thirty days in ways that a hospital had no business smelling. The reception desk was overturned with chairs scattered across the floor in a pattern that showed the lobby had been full of people when things went wrong, and they had all left in the same direction at the same time.

Emergency lighting was still running somewhere deep in the building, a faint red tint at the far end of the lobby that was just enough to see by without a flashlight.

And it was quiet in a way that the street hadn’t been. A contained, heavy quiet that had weight to it.

Michael ran the pulse through the lobby.

He counted slowly and felt his jaw tighten.

"How many?" Sera said, reading his face.

"In the lobby, three." He paused. "In the building overall..." Another pause. "A lot."

Maya looked at the red-lit far end of the lobby. "Define a lot."

"Enough that we’re not going straight up," he said. "We can clear the lobby first. Then we find a route to the medical floors that doesn’t go through the east wing."

Maya straightened slightly at the east wing mention. "The structural damage."

"You said avoid it."

"I did." She looked at the lobby ceiling, reading it the way she read buildings, and pointed left toward a corridor that ran along the west side of the lobby. "Staff corridor. Hospitals always have them running parallel to the main routes. If this one is standard layout, it connects to the supply elevator bank on the west side and bypasses the main atrium completely."

Michael looked at the corridor. The pulse showed it clear for the first twenty meters.

He looked at Maya.

"Architecture student," she said simply.

He almost smiled. "Lead the way."