Stay quiet, she mouthed, not even daring to speak out loud, then she was past the door and flying into the back quarters of her home.

This was the section she’d become lost in when learning her routes earlier that night. Remembering her path was harder in the dark. The light under her sleeve only revealed glimpses of the house. A flash of the stairwell banister as she passed it. The outline of paneled walls. An open doorway here, and she couldn’t for the life of her remember where it led, but when she moved through it, she entered a new hallway with more open doors.

She turned right and found herself in the laundry. The room only had one other exit. A curtain hung over the door’s small window, telling her it opened onto the porch.

A narrow closet stood at the room’s back, and Margot’s instincts told her to crawl up inside of it, to pull the doors closed behind herself, to hide. She repressed the thought with a shudder and instead came to a halt in the room’s center.

She felt vulnerable to a dangerous degree. Especially when she pushed her left arm into her chest, blotting out the light. She was exposed on all sides. Unable to see anything that might be approaching. Unable to even see the open doorway she’d come through.

Use your ears. They’re not quiet.

Margot forced her breathing to be low and slow. One arm clutched to her chest, the other stretched into the crushing darkness, she listened.

Echoes reverberated through the house. Footsteps, slow, moving toward her but not following the route she’d taken. They were at her back. Margot turned her head slowly, giving her ears a better angle. One of the bodies from the porch was coming around the side, approaching the laundry’s door.

Farther away, another set of feet dragged. She couldn’t identify whether it was the corpse inside the house or the third one on the outside.

They weren’t the only things she could hear, though. In the stillness of the laundry, there was a strangely rhythmic, rasping noise.

It was so quiet she could barely make it out, but it was unmistakable.

The sound of muffled breathing.

Margot clenched her teeth. The noise wasn’t coming from her. She tilted her head a fraction and was able to pinpoint its source. It echoed from the space just a few steps behind her right shoulder.

Rough breathing. Gasping. Stifled, as though the owner had covered their mouth with their hands.

Margot didn’t dare let herself breathe. Slowly, she brought her arm away from her chest, letting the dull light radiate around her. Dust motes danced in it. There was a glint of metal: a sink. The cold white of a washing machine. A shelf.

She rotated silently, turning her arm across the room. There was no one else there.