“I can’t. The world ended and I have nightmares every night. I lost friends. Losing my family will destroy me more surely than anything.”

Rain wanted to reply. He remained silent instead.

Something in his expression conveyed what words couldn’t. Her expression changed.

She hit him in the chest, hard. She hit him again, drumming him with her fists. He didn’t resist.

She stopped, clutched his shirt, and pressed her face to his chest.

It was all he could do not to wrap his arms around her in a hug.

“This isn’t you,” he said. “It’s this place.”

She pulled away.

“You need to leave,” she said, with restrained anger. “If you say no to this, they’ll want to know why, and the reason why is that you aren’t loyal.”

She wasn’t wrong.

He stepped away. He approached the window, and he looked outside before creating his silver blades.

“I’d die for you,” he said. “But I can’t be Fallen.”

“Then fucking die, Rain.”

He cut into the bedroom window with his blades. With a strong tap, he let the glass fall to grass below.

If it hadn’t been his day, he wasn’t sure he’d have had the precision to cut like that, or the ability to so easily tap it out, without breaking the glass.

He hit the ground, and he started running.

⊙

Rain punched the numbers into the keypad. He was on the train, and he had no destination to travel to. He couldn’t go to the others. He couldn’t go back to the camp.

His finger traveled over the number pad. One, seven, four, six, nine, three, and M.

The numbers painted out a letter on a conventional number pad. He’d just drawn out ‘H’.

Nine, seven, four, six, four, one, three, and D. He’d drawn out ‘E’.

Seven, one, three, and N. ‘L’.

‘P’ was the last letter. One, seven, nine, six, four and S.

The letters were a code of their own. An incomplete word or phrase.

He sent the message, and he waited, staring at the phone.

He got his reply. A text: 9713A97139E17593S9746413Y

He translated it. ‘Come’. Letters: A, E, S, Y. Put together with his, ‘Madness’ and the stray Y.

In plain text, he asked ‘where’?

In code, he got his reply. It was lengthy enough it had to have been pre-prepared. An address.

It took him an hour to get there. A dark part of the city, where the power hadn’t been kept on.

A door as opened. Candles were lit within.

The woman who faced him was petite, and wore a rabbit mask with a uniform that looked like a soldier from the 1800s. A rapier dangled from her waist.

“March,” he said.

Wordless, she invited him to come in. He did. Further inside, he could see others. A trio of people. Another pair.

Other clusters.