They got out of the warehouse through the loading bay and the street hit them like a wall.

Not physically, just the scale of it. Standing inside the warehouse with the horde pressing against the walls had given the whole thing a contained quality, a problem with edges.

Out here on the street the edges were gone and the horde was everywhere, not the compressed mass that had been pushing through the loading bay but the scattered aftermath of it, Rotters drifting in every direction with the loose disconnected movement of things that had lost whatever had been pulling them and hadn’t found a new reason yet.

The pulse showed Michael a picture that was better than ten minutes ago and worse than he would have liked.

The signatures were thinning but thinning across a wide area meant they were still everywhere and the two block route back to the building had enough movement in it that straight through was not an option.

He stood at the loading bay entrance and mapped it in his head and felt eleven other people standing behind him waiting for something and tried not to think about the eleven part too hard.

"Let’s head north first," he said quietly. "One block up then cut west. The pulse shows the western route cleaner than straight south." 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

"How much cleaner," Sera said.

"Enough."

She accepted that and moved to the front position without being asked and Michael fell in behind her and the group sorted itself into a rough column, his four at the front then Anya and Rei and then Gareth’s five men with Gareth at the rear, and they moved.

---

The first thirty meters were the worst.

The horde had pushed through this block and the evidence of it was everywhere, Rotters that had been caught against buildings and couldn’t get free, others that were circling in tight confused loops, two that were pressed against a shop front glass doing nothing in particular with the dedicated purposelessness of things running on instinct with no input.

The pulse tracked all of it and Michael fed position updates to the squad tracker and moved the group through the gaps in a route that looked from the outside like a random walk and was actually very precisely mapped.

Nobody talked.

Gareth’s men were better at this than he had expected. They moved quietly and kept spacing and the chain man in particular moved with a care that said he understood exactly what the cost of noise was out here.

Whatever else Gareth’s group was they had been surviving for thirty days and survival had taught them the same things it taught everyone.

They made the first junction and cut west and the pulse opened up ahead of them and Michael felt the route back to the building clarify into something manageable.

Then Gareth moved up beside him.

He didn’t say anything for a few steps, just walked alongside Michael at the front of the column with his hand near the holster and his eyes on the street and the easy relaxed quality he carried like a second skin.

"Good call in there," he said quietly. "The crane."

Michael didn’t respond.

"Was it Anya’s idea to use it?"

"Mine," Michael said.

Gareth glanced at him sideways. "She knew how to operate it."

"She did."

"Useful woman." He said it like he was talking about an object or tool but Michael kept his eyes on the street and his voice flat.

"She is," he said.

A Rotter drifted across the street ahead of them and Sera tracked it and let it drift past the junction before moving the group forward and Gareth watched her work with the assessment expression he’d been wearing since the warehouse.

"Your people are good," he said.

"They are."

"The one with the axe especially." He paused. "She’s been trained."

"Yes."

"Where’d you find them."

Michael looked at the street ahead and ran the pulse and found the building two blocks south with its gate closed and its perimeter panel running and its generator humming and everything he’d spent thirty days building sitting exactly where he’d left it.

"They found me," he said.

Gareth was quiet for a moment. "You’ve got something back there." He nodded south toward the building. "I could see it from the lobby." Another pause. "How long did that take you."

"Thirty days."

Gareth looked at him. "Thirty days and you built all of that."

"Yes."

"How."

Michael looked at him steadily. "Carefully."

Gareth held his gaze for a second and the easy expression stayed in place and underneath it the arithmetic was running and Michael let it run because the answer Gareth arrived at on his own was going to be more durable than anything Michael told him directly.

They walked the rest of the block without talking.

---

The second block had a problem.

Four Rotters clustered at the junction they needed to cross, not moving, just standing in a loose group around an overturned delivery vehicle like they’d been there for days and had no intention of being anywhere else.

The pulse showed them clearly and showed the junction beyond them clearly and showed the building one block further south with equal clarity and the four Rotters were directly between here and there.

Michael stopped the group at the corner and looked at the junction.

Sera came up beside him. "Four. Tight spacing."

"The vehicle blocks the left approach."

"Right side has room." She looked at the angles. "If they split we handle it, if they don’t split it gets loud."

Loud meant drawing more from the surrounding area and the surrounding area still had enough signatures on the pulse that loud was a category of problem he wanted to avoid.

He looked at the chain man. The man looked back at him with the expression he’d been wearing since the warehouse, not hostile exactly, more like someone who had revised their position on something and hadn’t announced the revision yet.

"Can you use that without noise," Michael said, nodding at the chain.

The man looked at the four Rotters and then at his chain. "Depends what you mean by noise."

"I mean quiet."

He considered it. "Two of them. The ones on the right. If you take the other two at the same time."

Michael looked at Sera. She nodded.

"Shin," Michael said.

Shin was already moving to the position that covered the left approach and Maya had her back against the building wall watching the street behind them with the focused attention she’d developed over the last three hours of moving through a city with a horde in it, the architecture student’s spatial awareness turned entirely to threat mapping.

They moved on a count of three that nobody said out loud.

It went clean and probably the help of the experience she had been building up recently, four Rotters down in under twenty seconds with minimal sound and everyone still standing and the junction clear ahead of them.

[+30 SP x4.]

Michael was moving before the last one hit the ground and the group followed and they covered the last block in two minutes and he got the gate open and got everyone through and pulled it shut and the lock engaged.

The lobby was quiet and dim and it had never felt more like arriving somewhere.

He stood in it and counted. They were eleven people behind him plus himself. His four, Anya, Rei, Gareth and his five men, all standing in the space between the gate and the stairwell door with the particular energy of people who had been moving under pressure and had just stopped.

Anya was looking at the lobby walls. At the reinforced gate. At the perimeter panel pulsing amber. At the system built infrastructure that said someone had been here for thirty days doing something that wasn’t just surviving.

Rei was looking at the floor.

Gareth was looking at Michael.

"So," Gareth said, and the easy relaxed quality was back in full, rested and patient like it had been waiting for exactly this moment. "What happens now."

Michael looked at him. At his five men. At Anya and Rei standing slightly apart from the rest of Gareth’s group in a way that wasn’t dramatic but was present.

He looked at the stairwell door.

"Now we figure that out," he said.