The street turned into a battlefield.
One second it was a city block in chaos — people running, screaming, stumbling over each other trying to get anywhere that wasn't here — and the next it was something else entirely.
Tears split open faster than they had in any of my previous loops, and the Chitters came through in numbers that made my stomach tighten despite everything.
I moved forward anyway.
Ten years of this had done something to the part of my brain that handles fear. Burned it down, mostly. What lived there now wasn't bravery exactly — it was more like a kind of flat, tired focus.
See the problem. Solve the problem. Move to the next problem.
A Scout appeared on my left, scaling the side of a parked van.
Bang.
Dead before it cleared the roof.
Two more on the fire escape above the deli, crouched low, looking for a target.
Bang. Bang.
They dropped.
I kept walking.
Around me, people were making every mistake people always made in the first hour — running into open ground, splitting up, stopping to film on phones that no longer had internet access or functioned normally.
I wanted to shout directions at all of them. Get inside, get low, find something solid between you and the street. But there wasn't time, and I couldn't save everyone at once. I'd learned that lesson more times than I could stand to remember.
Save who you can. Move. Keep moving.
I turned a corner onto a narrower side street and heard screaming before I saw what was causing it.
A woman, maybe mid-twenties, had gotten herself backed up against the side of a crashed delivery truck. The truck had hit a light pole and folded in a way that left her cornered — not enough space to run left or right without going through whatever was in front of her.
Three Scouts had her surrounded.
They were doing that thing they sometimes did with cornered prey — circling, testing, taking their time. It wasn't cruelty exactly. More like instinct. They were built to chase, and when the chase stopped, they went slow.
I stopped walking.
I remembered this spot.
I had walked past this exact block three days into my first loop, back when I was still figuring out what had happened to the world.
The delivery truck had still been there, crumpled against the pole. There had been bodies nearby, half a dozen of them, and I hadn't looked too closely because I hadn't been able to afford to.
But I remembered thinking, briefly, that someone had died here badly. And now I was watching it about to happen.
The Scouts lunged.
I fired.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Three clean shots, one each, half a second apart. All three dropped mid-leap and hit the ground in a heap that the woman had to step back from to avoid.
She pressed herself against the truck and stared at me.
Her whole body was shaking — I could see it from fifteen feet away. She had on medical scrubs, pale blue, with a hospital ID badge still clipped to the front. Her dark hair had come most of the way out of a ponytail.
She was gripping a broken piece of metal pipe in both hands like she'd been planning to use it, and maybe she would have.
"You—" she started. Stopped. Then tried again. "Thanks for the help."
"Yeah. Are you hurt?"
She looked down at herself like she wasn't sure. Ran her hands along her arms and checked her sides.
"No," she said. "No, I don't think so."
"Good. Get up."
That came out harder than I meant it. She flinched a little.
"Sorry," I said, and made myself soften my voice. "You need to get moving. It's not safe here."
She pushed away from the truck on legs that clearly wanted to fold under her and somehow didn't.
"Thank you," she said. "I'm Kira."
Kira.
The name tug a memory.
I knew that name. I knew her face too, now that I was looking at it — I just hadn't placed it immediately through the scrubs and the fear and the bad light.
Kira Vasquez.
In my original timeline she had ended up at a refugee camp that formed in the parking structure of a collapsed mall about two miles north of here.
She'd worked as a medic there for eleven days straight before the camp got overrun in week two. I'd found out later. Secondhand, from someone who'd been there.
She'd been the kind of person people remembered. The kind who stayed calm when everyone else was falling apart, who gave up her food and her sleep without being asked. The kind the world could not afford to lose and lost anyway.
Standing here, alive, shaking slightly, still holding a piece of pipe — she looked exactly like someone who could become that person.
If she survived the next hour.
"Leo," I said.
A new tear split open maybe forty meters down the street. I heard the Scouts before I saw them — that skittering, clicking rush of too many limbs on pavement. Four came through, hit the ground running, and immediately locked onto movement.
I raised the gun and dealt with them in the time it took Kira to register the sound.
She stared.
"You-you didn't reload."
"No."
"You fired seven times and you didn't reload."
"Eight, actually. Don't worry about it."
She looked at the gun like it had personally confused her, which was fair.
"Is that—" she started.
"Later," I said, cutting her off. "Can you run?"
She snapped her attention back to me. Recalibrated. I could see her doing it — pushing the confusion aside and filing it somewhere to deal with when there was time.
"Yes," she said.
"Good."
I pointed west down the cross street.
"St. Ansgar's hospital. Three blocks that way. Head to the basement — there's a service corridor off the loading dock that connects to a stairwell, and the sub-basement has reinforced walls and no exterior windows. Go straight there. Tell anyone you find to get below ground."
She stared at me.
"How do you know that?"
Another screech could be heard, closer this time. I didn't have time for the question.
"Move," I said. "I'll explain later."
That was a partial lie. I was hoping she wouldn't actually push for an explanation, because what I had was not something that sounded like the truth.
We ran.
I kept a half-step ahead of her, clearing the path as we went. The gun fired and fired and kept firing like the rules didn't apply to it, which at this point I had mostly accepted.
A Scout dropped at the mouth of an alley. Two more that were tearing apart a group of people near an overturned food cart — I took them down without stopping, and the survivors scattered in four different directions. I couldn't corral them. I just had to hope some of them made smart choices.
Kira stayed close and she stayed quiet, which was more than I could say for most people in their first combat situation. She wasn't a soldier — I could tell that from how she moved, from the sharp intake of breath every time I fired — but she wasn't useless either. She watched where I was watching. She moved when I moved. She didn't freeze in fear.
"You don't seem to run out," she said, somewhere around the second block. Not a accusing mann, just stating it. Like she was trying to make a fact fit somewhere in her head.
"Looks that way. Or, maybe my hands are too fast for your eyes."
A beat and a thoughtful session later, she asked. "What are you?"
I glanced at her sideways while I scanned a rooftop.
"Right now? The person keeping you alive. Ask the other stuff later."
She made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh but wasn't nothing either.
We hit the hospital block at a run.
The front entrance was already a disaster — people crowding in, jammed in the doorways, staff trying to manage an impossible situation with no power and no information.