Chapter 7: Collapse
Heaven made it exactly three steps from the fallen log. The world tipped sideways, the muted greens and greys of the forest floor rushing up to meet her. It wasn't a dramatic fall; it was a total systems shutdown. Her legs simply stopped receiving signals.
Killua moved before her knees fully buckled. He caught her under the arms, her weight slumping against his chest. "Hey. Hey, look at me."
Her vision was tunneling, dark at the edges. She could feel the violent, useless chattering of her own teeth, but the sound seemed far away. The deep, bone-ache of the cold was gone, replaced by a heavy, sleepy warmth. That was bad. She knew that was very bad.
"Stubborn bastard," he muttered, his voice tight against her ear. He eased her down, his hands rough as they patted her cheeks. "Celeste. Eyes open."
She forced them open. His face was pale, stark against the darkening pines. The playful mask was gone, stripped away by the relentless chill. What was left was raw calculation, and beneath it, a flicker of something she hadn't seen since the tarmac five years ago: fear. Not for himself. For her.
"'M fine," she slurred. The words felt thick and clumsy.
"Yeah, you're a picture of health." His fingers went to her neck, checking her pulse. His touch was clinical, but his thumb brushed the line of her jaw. "Pulse is thready. You're crashing. Can't stay here."
He shifted, turning his back to her. "Arms around my neck. Don't let go."
"What are you—"
"I'm carrying you. Don't argue. You'll just waste energy you don't have." He said it like he was commenting on the weather, but the tension in his shoulders was a live wire.
It was the final humiliation. To be hauled like a sack of gear. Yet the part of her that was still a strategist, the part that hadn't frozen solid, knew he was right. She had nothing left. Her arms felt like lead weights, but she managed to loop them loosely around his neck. He hooked his hands under her knees and stood in one smooth motion.
He was stronger than she remembered. Or maybe she was just lighter, hollowed out by the cold and the collapse of her mission. He adjusted his grip, his bare back warm against her forearms where his borrowed pants rode up. His skin was cold too, but alive with a humming energy she could feel even through her fading senses.
He started walking, not toward the distant city lights, but parallel to the river, keeping within the deeper shadows of the tree line. His steps were deliberate, silent. He carried her weight without a single grunt of effort, but his breathing was a controlled, measured rhythm in the quiet forest.
The world passed in a blur of shadows. The rhythmic sway of his gait was oddly soothing. Her head lolled against his shoulder. He smelled of river water, ozone, and sweat. A concrete, present smell. It anchored her.
"Should've... left me," she breathed into the fabric of his jacket. It was meant to be a taunt, a final flick of the knife. It came out as a sigh.
He didn't miss a step. "Tried that. Didn't take."
The ghost of a laugh, brittle and bloody, caught in her throat. It turned into a cough. He shifted her slightly, his grip tightening.
"Save your breath. You're going to need it to bitch at me later." His tone was flat, but there was an undercurrent to it. A promise. There would be a later.
He walked for what felt like hours. The light bled from grey to indigo. The sounds of the forest shifted—the daytime creatures going quiet, the night things beginning to stir. Once, he froze mid-stride, so still she could feel the coiled-spring tension in every muscle. She heard it then too: the distant, insectile whine of the drone, sweeping a grid farther down the valley. He waited, a statue in the gathering dark, until the sound faded completely. Then he moved again, faster.
Finally, he angled away from the river, climbing a slight rise. The undergrowth thickened, brambles catching at his legs. He turned sideways, shielding her from the worst of it. She felt a thorn rip across his bare calf. He didn't flinch.
The structure emerged from the gloom like a cave. It was an old, broken-backed utility shed, half-swallowed by a landslide of rock and roots. One wall had collapsed inward. The door hung from a single hinge, creaking softly in the evening breeze. It was a tomb, not a shelter.
"Home sweet home," Killua murmured, ducking through the low doorway.
Inside was a cave of damp shadows and the smell of rot and rodent droppings. But it was out of the wind. He lowered her gently into a corner where the wooden wall was mostly intact, propping her up. Her body immediately tried to curl in on itself, seeking warmth that wasn't there.
He was gone for a minute, moving through the dark space with an assassin's silence. She heard the rustle of old, dry leaves, the snap of a few branches. Then he was back, kneeling before her. He’d gathered an armful of debris—bone-dry leaves from under the collapsed roof, some brittle twigs, a pile of dusty insulation that had spilled from the wall.
"Fire's a risk," he said, more to himself than to her. "But hypothermia's a certainty." He arranged the materials with brisk efficiency. From a hidden pocket in his still-damp jacket, he produced a small, ferrocerium rod and a knife. A single, sharp scrape. A spark caught on the insulating fluff, flared, and settled into a tiny, desperate flame.
He nurtured it with focused intensity, his face lit by the growing light. The flame licked at the twigs, caught, and grew. A meager, smoky fire, but it cast a sphere of flickering, orange warmth. The light revealed the lines of exhaustion on his face, the grim set of his mouth.
He scooted over to her, his back to the fire. "Come here."
She was too far gone to protest. He pulled her forward, arranging her so she was leaning against his chest, his back blocking most of her from the fire's direct heat. He draped his damp jacket over her front like a blanket. It was a miserable approximation of warmth, but the heat from his body and the fire at her back began, slowly, to seep into the deep chill.
The shivering started in earnest then, violent, uncontrollable tremors that shook her entire frame.
"Good," he said quietly, his chin near her temple. "That's good. Means your body's fighting back. Just ride it out."
They sat like that for a long time. The only sounds were the crackle of the feeble fire, her chattering teeth, and the slow, steady thump of his heart against her spine. The shared memory from the facility—the cold rain, the weight of the Zoldyck seal—hung between them, more tangible than the smoke.
When her shivers subsided to a faint tremor, he spoke again, his voice low. "You asked me before. What now."
She didn't answer. Just listened to the fire.
"Now, we don't die tonight," he said, answering his own question. "Tomorrow, we figure out who's looking harder: your people or mine. Then we make them regret it."
The "we" landed differently this time. It wasn't a assumption. It was a choice, laid bare in the dark.
Outside, the night deepened. The drone did not return. For now, the crumbling shed held the darkness at bay. Killua didn't sleep. She could feel the alertness in him, a constant, low-grade current of Nen, like a predator sensing the perimeter. His hand rested on his knee, inches from her own bandaged one. Not touching. Just present.
Heaven's eyes drifted closed. The anger that had been her fuel for five years was ash, blown away on the river's current. What remained was a hollowed-out fatigue, and the unfamiliar, terrifying warmth at her back.
She was unconscious before she realized she’d finally, against every instinct, let her head rest fully against his shoulder.
The darkness behind her eyelids was total and velvet, a profound nothingness she sank into like a stone. It was blissfully empty of memory, of pain, of the cold knot of betrayal in her gut. For a handful of heartbeats, there was only the quiet.
Then a searing, bright agony lanced through the void, dragging her back.
It was a rough, scraping sensation on her right hand, followed by a chill so sharp it felt like a burn. She jerked, a gasp tearing from her throat. Her eyes flew open to the dim, firelit shed. Killua’s face was inches from hers, his expression laser-focused. He was holding her burned hand steady in his, dabbing at the ruined flesh with a wad of fabric soaked in clear liquid from a small, flat flask.
“Hold still,” he said, not looking up. His voice was all calm efficiency. “This is the shitty part.”
“What are you—?” The question dissolved into a hiss as the liquid found a fresh nerve ending. It felt like ice and fire welding together.
“Antiseptic. The high-proof, ‘screams-on-contact’ variety.” He didn’t stop. His movements were meticulous, cleaning out the grit and river filth from the torn blisters. “Found it in my jacket. Probably expires next year. Consider us lucky.”
Each dab was a miniature lightning bolt of pain. She clenched her jaw, her free hand digging into the dusty floorboards. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of crying out. She focused on his hands instead. The same hands that had manipulated puppet strings in the facility, that had broken a man’s neck with casual precision, were now performing first-aid with a surgeon’s care. The contradiction was infuriating.
“Could’ve warned me,” she ground out, her voice hoarse.
“You were out.” He finally glanced up. The firelight danced in his eyes, turning them molten. “And you’d have just tensed up. This way, only half the procedure hurts like hell.”
A short, surprised bark of laughter escaped her. It hurt her ribs. “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”
A ghost of his old smirk touched his lips. “It’s been mentioned.” He returned to his work. “The good news is, the cold from the river probably slowed any infection. The bad news is this looks like shredded prosciutto. You’re not using this hand for anything delicate for a while.”
“Like strangling you?”
“Like holding a spoon.” He finished with the antiseptic and recapped the flask. “Now comes the fun part.”
He produced a roll of actual, sterile gauze from another pocket. She stared.
“What, you think I go on walks without a full trauma kit?” He began wrapping her hand, his fingers deft. The gauze was cool and forgiving. “Old habits. Always have an exit strategy, and the supplies to get you there.”
The phrase ‘exit strategy’ landed between them with a tangible weight. He felt it too; his hands stilled for a fraction of a second before continuing. He finished the bandage, securing it with a clip. His thumb brushed lightly over the back of her wrapped fingers. A fleeting, unconscious gesture.
“Your family’s retrieval team,” he said, shifting topics with the sharpness of a blade. “Protocol. How do they operate?”
The shift back to logistics was a relief. It was ground she could stand on. “They’ll sat-com the last coordinates from my beacon, which died in the facility’s collapse. They’ll do a peripheral sweep first, looking for signs of engagement or flight. If they find nothing, they’ll go forensic. Pull security remnants from the rubble, look for body scans.” She took a shallow breath. “They’re thorough. They’ll find evidence of Reed’s project. And they’ll find evidence of you.”
He nodded, absorbing it. “Timeframe?”
“They’re already on the move. Could be on the ground by dawn. Maybe sooner.”
“And my family’s drone was a cleaner, not a scout. Sent to confirm the site was dust and erase any lingering traces.” He leaned back on his heels, the fire painting shadows across his bare torso. He looked at the crumbling wall, thinking. “They’ll assume I was erased in the collapse too. Standard deniability. If they get a hint I wasn’t…”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. The memory of his brother’s watching presence on that rain-slicked tarmac was a third occupant in the shed.
“So we have two sets of very motivated, very skilled people converging on this area,” Heaven summarized, the reality crystallizing. “Both thinking we’re probably dead. Both would be… inconvenienced to find us alive.”
“Inconvenienced is a soft word for what they’d do.” He met her gaze. “We can’t stay here. And we can’t just run. They’ll track a running target.”
“We need to give them a body.” The words came out flat, clinical. “Or the convincing illusion of one.”
He looked at her, a new respect glinting in his assessment. “Exactly. We need a narrative. A story they’ll believe so they stop looking.”
The fire popped, sending a spiral of sparks upward. Outside, the wind picked up, moaning through the cracks in the shed’s skeleton. They were quiet for a long moment, the plan taking shape in the space between them. It was a familiar dance, this strategic plotting. It felt disturbingly normal.
“Your people would need forensic proof,” Killua said slowly. “DNA. A personal effect. Something that can’t be faked.”
“Yours rely more on visual confirmation and signal intelligence. A terminated beacon. A final, chaotic energy signature.” She flexed her bandaged hand, testing the pain. It was a dull, grounding throb. “We’d need to stage a second incident. Something small, contained, and final. Away from here.”
“They’ll be watching the roads, the trains, the air.”
“Then we don’t use any of them.” A faint, determined light returned to her eyes. It wasn’t the anger from before. This was cleaner. Sharper. “We go through the Keding Tunnels. The old freight lines that run under the mountain range. They’ve been condemned for a decade. No surveillance. No patrols.”
He knew of them. A labyrinth of pitch-black concrete and rusted iron, famous for collapses. “That’s a vertical grave waiting to happen.”
“It’s a path no one will watch.” She pushed herself up straighter, wincing. “We get in, travel far enough to be outside the immediate search grid, and then we give them their tragedy. A tunnel collapse. Trace amounts of my DNA on a shred of fabric caught in the rubble. A burst of your Nen signature, then nothing.”
He studied her. The woman before him was not the hardened vengeance-seeker from the facility, nor the girl he’d left in the rain. This was the lethal, calculating Celeste operative, forged in the same fire as him. It should have been chilling. Instead, it felt like finding solid footing after years of sliding on loose rock.
“It’s reckless,” he said.
“It’s the only play we have.”
A slow smile, genuine and devoid of its usual sarcasm, touched his mouth. “You know, for a Celeste, you’ve got a decent head for chaos.”
“And for a Zoldyck, you’re a surprisingly good nurse.” She looked at her bandaged hand, then back at him. The truce, born of pure necessity, settled between them. It was fragile. It was temporary. But it was real. “We’ll need supplies. The tunnels are wet. Cold. And we’ll need materials for our… grand finale.”
Killua stood, his silhouette blocking the fire. He reached for his damp shirt, pulling it on over his head. “Then we move now. Before first light. Before the drones come back for a morning sweep.”
He offered her his good hand. Not her burned one. A small, deliberate courtesy.
She looked at it, this hand that had caused so much pain and was now offering a way out. The weight of the last five years felt suddenly like a physical object she could choose to set down, if only for the next few hours. Survival demanded it.
She took his hand. His grip was firm, pulling her to her feet with careful strength. The world swayed, then stabilized. He didn’t let go immediately.
“One condition,” he said, his voice low.
“What?”
“If we do this, we do it together. All the way. No more unilateral decisions. No more softer knives.” His gaze was unflinching. “You check out on me again, and I’m leaving you in a tunnel. For real this time.”
It was the closest he would come to an apology. Or a promise.
She held his gaze, her own resolve hardening. “Same goes. You revert to form and decide what’s best for me, I’ll make the tunnel collapse a reality. For both of us.”
He actually chuckled, a dry, rustling sound. “Deal.”
He kicked dirt over the fire, plunging them into a darkness that was instantly absolute. In the impenetrable black, his hand was the only anchor. He didn’t let go.
“Follow my steps,” his voice came, close by her ear. “It’s about thirty paces to the tree line. Then we run.”
Together, they stepped out of the false shelter and into the consuming night.
The night outside the shed was a physical entity, cold and damp and so utterly black it pressed against their eyes. Heaven’s world narrowed to the hard grip of Killua’s hand and the treacherous, uneven ground beneath her borrowed boots. Each step sent a jarring throb up from her wounded palm, a brutal metronome marking their flight.
“Thirty paces,” he whispered again, a ghost of sound in the dark.
She counted, her breath ragged in her throat. At twenty-eight, the inky silhouette of the pines materialized, a deeper black against the starless sky. He didn’t pause. He pulled her into the forest’s mouth, where the air grew closer, thick with the smell of rotting needles and wet bark. The sound of the river faded, replaced by the crush of their footfalls and the frantic drum of her own heart.
They moved in a harsh, wordless rhythm for an hour, maybe two. Time lost meaning in the blind slog. Killua was a phantom guide, avoiding pitfalls and low branches with an uncanny sense she attributed to his Nen, a subtle extension of his awareness painting the terrain in his mind. She focused only on not falling, not letting go, on pushing the numbness in her legs down.
A steep, shale-strewn incline finally forced a stop. Her lungs burned. Killua released her hand, the sudden absence of contact leaving her skin cold.
“We’re clear of the immediate sweep zone,” he said, his voice low and even. He wasn’t even breathing hard. “The tunnel access is another three klicks east, down in a ravine. We need to cross this ridge.”
Heaven leaned against a rough-barked tree, the world tilting. “I need a minute.”
“We don’t have minutes.” There was no cruelty in it. Just the same flat calculus from the shed. “The sun will be up in under ninety minutes. That’s when the drones get serious, and when your team’s ground assets will be doing their first visual passes from the ridges.”
She pushed off the tree, nausea swirling. “Then let’s move.”
He didn’t offer his hand again. He just turned and started picking a path up the slope, his movements deliberate to avoid dislodging stones. She followed, each step an act of will. The shale shifted treacherously underfoot. Halfway up, her boot slid out from under her.
She didn’t cry out. She just braced for the jarring slide, the tearing of her injuries on the sharp rock. It never came. Killua’s arm hooked around her waist, yanking her back against him with a force that knocked the air from her lungs. A cascade of pebbles she’d disturbed clattered down the darkness below.
They stood frozen on the slope, pressed together by necessity and momentum. His heart hammered against her back, a rapid counterpoint to his controlled breathing. His arm was a band of iron across her stomach.
“You good?” The question was a warm rush against her ear.
She gave a tight nod, unable to speak. The closeness was too much, a vivid echo of the shed’s forced intimacy. He held on a second longer than was strictly necessary before releasing her, his hand lingering at her side to ensure her balance.
“Watch your footing.” He turned back to the climb.
The memory of his arm around her, the solid panic in his heartbeat, stayed with her more clearly than the pain. It was proof of a fear he wouldn’t voice. She used it, let it fuel the next agonizing steps to the crest.
The view from the top was a reward of sorts. Below them, the land fell away into a deep, mist-clogged ravine. On the far side, the geometric lights of the distant city were a smear of dull gold. And directly below, at the base of a sheer rock face, she could just make out the darker black maw of an opening, half-obscured by a landslide of ancient debris.
The Keding East Access. It looked like a wound in the world.
“There,” she breathed.
“Yeah.” Killua’s gaze was already scanning the descent. “The fun part.”
The way down was worse. It was less a path and more a controlled fall, using wiry saplings and jutting rocks as anchors. Killua went first, testing each handhold. He’d find a stable perch, then look back, a faint outline in the pre-dawn gloom, waiting for her to mimic his movements. It was slow. It was excruciating. The bandage on her hand was soon dark with fresh blood.
By the time her boots hit the level ground of the ravine floor, a thin, grey light was leaching into the sky, turning the mist into a milky soup. The tunnel entrance yawned before them, a jagged rip in the concrete reinforcement, dripping with moisture and smelling of stagnant water and rust.
Killua approached the opening, peering inside. He pulled a small penlight from his pocket. The weak beam cut a pathetic swath into the absolute darkness, revealing a tunnel of dripping concrete, rails long gone, and black water shining dully on the floor.
“Charming,” he muttered.
Heaven joined him at the threshold, the cold emanating from the tunnel raising gooseblesh on her arms. “Five miles in, there’s a maintenance spur. We can stage our… incident there. Plenty of unstable ceiling supports.”
He glanced at her, the penlight casting strange shadows under his eyes. “You’ve actually been in here.”
“A reconnaissance op, four years ago. Different entry point.” She didn’t elaborate. The details were Celeste property, and old habits died hard.
A low, resonant hum began to vibrate in the air, rising from a sub-audible tremor to a distinct whine. They both looked up, their heads snapping toward the ridge they’d just descended. Against the lightening grey, a sleek, black shape cut silently through the mist, moving in a slow, predatory grid.
The drone was lower this time. Hunting.
“Go,” Killua said, his voice leaving no room for debate.
He didn’t wait for her agreement. He stepped into the tunnel’s mouth, the darkness swallowing the penlight’s beam. Heaven took one last look at the waking world, at the drone methodically painting the ravine with its sensors. Then she followed him into the earth.
The sound changed instantly. The distant hum of the drone vanished, replaced by the amplified plink of water droplets, the scuff of their boots, the labored echo of their breathing. The penlight was a useless toy in the vast, hungry dark, illuminating a tiny circle of damp wall and the oily water underfoot.
They walked in silence, the tunnel bending slightly, sealing them away from the world. The air grew colder, heavier. After fifteen minutes, Killua stopped. The light shut off.
“What are you doing?” Her voice was too loud in the enclosed space.
“Conserving battery. And our eyes will adjust. Sort of.” In the utter blackness, his presence was just a warmth and a sound. “We need to listen.”
They stood there, blind. The darkness was a pressure on her eyes. She heard him breathe, heard the slow drip-drip-drip from somewhere ahead. And then, another sound. A faint, grinding rumble, deep and fibrous, that seemed to come from the rock around them.
“Settlement,” he whispered. “Or a train on a line above us. This whole mountain is Swiss cheese.”
“Comforting.”
“Wasn’t trying to be.” She heard the rustle of his jacket. “Here.” His hand found her arm in the dark, guiding it. His fingers pressed a cold, cylindrical object into her palm. The penlight. “You take it. Your turn to point the way. I’ll watch the rear.”
It was a transfer of trust, small and practical. She flicked the light on, the beam startlingly bright. It illuminated his face, all sharp planes and guarded eyes. She nodded and turned, focusing the light on the treacherous floor. They moved on, the circle of illumination their entire world.
The tunnel began to decline. The water on the floor deepened, from a sheen to an inch, then two, icy cold soaking through her boots. The air grew fouler, tinged with the metallic tang of old iron and something organic and decayed.
“This is disgusting,” Killua said from behind her.
“You assassinate people for a living and you’re squeamish about tunnel water?”
“I have standards. This fails them.” A pause. “Watch your left, there’s a hole.”
She sidestepped a gap where the concrete had collapsed into a sinkhole of black water. Their dialogue was a brittle lifeline, a way to poke at the enormity of what they were doing without addressing it directly.
Another half hour. The beam of the penlight began to dim, yellowing at the edges. A new anxiety threaded into the mix. Being down here in the pitch dark was not an option.
Then the tunnel forked. The main artery continued straight, but a smaller, narrower passage branched off to the right, its arch lower and choked with cobwebs. Heaven aimed the dying light at the floor near the junction. Faint scrape marks in the silt, old and blurred, led into the smaller passage.
“The spur,” she said, relief thinning her voice. “This is it.”
The spur tunnel was claustrophobic, the ceiling so low Killua had to duck his head. It ran for fifty yards before opening into a slightly wider chamber. Rusted metal shelves, empty and sagging, lined one wall. A forgotten workbench was a silhouette of decay. And above, the ceiling was a nightmare of cracked concrete and exposed, rust-eaten rebar, bowing downward under the mountain’s weight.
“Home,” Killua said, his voice echoing flatly.
Heaven swept the weak light across the room. This was where they would die, on paper. The setting was perfect. She walked to the center, her boots sinking into soft, wet silt. She looked up at the crumbling ceiling.
“We need something of mine here. Something that will survive a collapse enough to yield DNA.” She pulled at the collar of her shirt, the fabric still damp and torn. With a grimace, she ripped a strip from the hem. The sound was loud in the quiet. “This. We can thread it through the rebar up there. When it goes, it’ll be shredded, but they’ll find fragments.”
“Smart.” Killua was already moving toward the unstable ceiling area. He jumped, catching a protruding, rusted bar with one hand. It groaned in protest, showering fine concrete dust. He hung there, studying the latticework. “Here. There’s a sharp edge. It’ll catch and tear.”
He dropped down, landing softly in the muck. “Give it.”
She handed him the fabric strip. He leapt again, this time with the material. She watched as his deft fingers wove the cloth around a jagged metal tooth. He was quick, efficient. A performance artist staging his own destruction.
He landed beside her, wiping his hands on his pants. “My turn.” He closed his eyes, concentration drawing his features tight. A faint crackle of energy, the scent of ozone, briefly overpowered the rot. He raised a hand, and a single, concentrated arc of electricity—no thicker than a thread—lanced from his fingertip to a specific point high on the wall. It didn’t explode. It seared a deep, black, carbon-scored scar into the concrete, a perfect signature of his Transmutation Nen.
The display lasted two seconds. He cut the power, staggering back a half-step. The afterimage of the lightning burned in her vision. In the sudden return to gloom, he was panting lightly, the expenditure real.
“A last, desperate defensive strike,” he explained, his voice strained. “Recorded by the residual energy in the rock. Then silence. They’ll read it as a final stand before the mountain fell.”
It was believable. It was a good plan. They stood in the near-dark, the evidence of their fake deaths hanging above them. The penlight guttered, the beam now a faint amber coin on the floor.
“Now we run,” Heaven said. But she didn’t move.
“Yeah.” Killua didn’t move either.
The momentum of their escape had crashed against the reality of this staged grave. Once they left this chamber and triggered the collapse behind them, the people they used to be—Killua the runaway heir, Heaven the vengeful operative—would officially cease to exist. They would be ghosts.
The faint light caught the tension in his jaw. “You ready to be dead?”
“I’ve been ready for years.” The truth of it hung in the foul air. She looked at him, really looked, in the failing light. “What about you?”
He was silent for a long moment. The only sound was the relentless drip of water. “I died on that tarmac,” he said finally, the words quiet and raw. “Everything since has just been… momentum. This is just making it official.”
It was the most honest thing he’d ever said to her. It echoed the hollow space she’d carried inside for so long. The penlight gave one final, valiant pulse and died, plunging them into a blackness so complete it felt solid.
In the absolute dark, his hand found hers. Not the bandaged one. The other. His fingers laced through hers, a firm, dry anchor.
“Your people or mine?” he asked, his voice a whisper in the ink.
“Does it matter?”
“No.” A beat. “East wall. There’s a run-off conduit, an old pipe. It’s how I scouted the way out while you were planning our funeral. It’s tight. It goes for about two hundred yards before it dumps into a storm drain near the old industrial park.”
“You scouted ahead? When?”
“When you were checking the ceiling stability. Told you I’d watch the rear. Didn’t say I wouldn’t look for an exit.” Even now, the sharp edge of his wit. “Can you crawl? Your hand.”
“I’ll manage.” She repeated her old mantra, but it felt different now. It felt shared.
He tugged her gently, guiding her through the black toward the east wall. Her free hand touched cold, slimy metal—a circular opening about three feet in diameter. The smell from within was overwhelmingly foul, a sewer stench.
“Ladies first,” he said, a grim humor in his tone.
She got on her knees, the icy water soaking through instantly. She released his hand, the loss of contact a sudden chill. She ducked into the pipe, the world reducing to the feel of slick metal under her palms and knees, the press of the circumference on her shoulders, and the overwhelming, gagging stench. She started crawling.
Behind her, she heard the scrape of his body entering the conduit. They moved like that, blind and single-file, through the bowels of the mountain. The pain in her hand was a white-hot fury with every movement. Her breath came in ragged, echoing gasps.
After an eternity, Killua’s voice echoed from behind, muffled by the pipe. “Almost there. Ten more meters. Get ready.”
Ready for what? The thought was drowned out by a new sound—a deep, shivering groan that ran through the metal around them. Not from ahead. From behind.
The tunnel chamber was collapsing.
The sound built like distant thunder, a rolling crush of rock and shearing metal. The pipe around them shuddered violently. A shockwave of compressed air roared through the conduit, hot and thick with dust, shoving her forward.
“Go!” Killua’s shout was swallowed by the avalanche.
She scrambled, panic overriding pain. Light appeared ahead—not daylight, but a grey, misty glow. The pipe mouth. She spilled out of it, falling several feet into a shallow, filthy stream of runoff in a cracked concrete drainage culvert. She landed on her side, the impact driving the air from her lungs.
Killua tumbled out behind her a second later, crashing into the fetid water beside her. He was instantly on his feet, pulling her up, both of them coated in slime and gasping.
They looked back. The hillside above the drainage culvert shuddered. A cloud of dust billowed from several hidden vents in the rock face. The deep, grinding roar subsided into a rumble, then silence.
It was done. The grave was sealed.
Grey, morning light filtered through the mist above the culvert. They were in a concrete channel behind derelict, graffiti-scrawled factories. The air smelled of chemical waste and damp moss. It was the most beautiful thing Heaven had ever seen.
Killua leaned against the slimy wall, his chest heaving. He looked at her, her hair matted with filth, her clothes ruined, her bandaged hand cradled against her. A slow, exhausted, utterly genuine smile spread across his face.
“Welcome to being dead,” he said, his voice rough.
She looked at him, at this impossible man she had hated and who had just carved a path out of the dark with her. The hollow space inside her wasn’t filled. But it was no longer echoing. Something new was there, fragile and raw and terrifyingly alive.
“What now?” she asked, echoing his question from the riverbank.
He pushed off the wall, offering her his dirty, unshaking hand once more. The city’ distant rumble was a promise and a threat.
“Now,” he said, “we get breakfast. And we find out who we are.”