The Command Wing settled into a state of tense quiet. The main chamber was bathed in the soft, red glow of emergency lighting, a stark contrast to the sterile white of the day. The individual quarters, branching off from the central hub, offered a fragile illusion of privacy, but the silence was a shared burden.
In her assigned room, Rosa lay on the bunk, staring at the ceiling. The room was spartan but clean, a luxury she should have appreciated. But all she could see were the faces of the dead. Not the snarling, monstrous forms they had become, but the flickering echoes of the people they might have been. The Crawler she had killed in the tunnel, its face a mask of feral rage, kept superimposing itself over the memory of some random guy she might have passed in the street, a person whose life was stolen.
