Chapter 16: Off
The footsteps were a deliberate, measured cadence on the old tile. Not the frantic skittering of something inhuman, but not the relaxed pace of a person, either. It was the sound of someone—or something—checking. Searching.
“Move, move, move,” Kai whispered, his voice frayed at the edges. He shoved Ren forward toward the head of the enormous, spiraling staircase.
They stumbled out onto a wide landing that circled a vast, cylindrical chasm. Below, the staircase corkscrewed down into utter blackness, disappearing into the guts of the academy. The air here was colder, smelling of damp concrete and ozone. Across the gaping open space, maybe thirty feet away, the staircase continued its descent on the opposite side. The landing they stood on was maybe ten feet wide, with a rusted iron railing that looked like a strong sneeze would send it spinning into the void.
Kai, in his frantic push, misjudged the edge. His foot slipped on a slick patch of moss growing between the stones. He windmilled his arms, a choked gasp escaping him as he stumbled backward toward the unprotected drop.
Ren’s hand shot out, grabbing a fistful of Kai’s jacket. He wrenched backward, pulling his friend off-balance, and they both crashed onto the cold stone in a heap. For a second, they just lay there, hearts hammering against their ribs, the enormity of the drop beside them humming in their bones.
“S-sorry,” Kai panted, his face ashen.
Luna didn’t look at them. She was a statue at the railing, peering down, then back the way they’d come. The footsteps were closer. “We can’t outrun it on these stairs. It’s too open. We’d be targets the whole way down.”
Ren pushed himself up, his palms scraped and stinging. His eyes, scanning the abyss for options, caught on something below. Not at the bottom, but maybe sixty feet down. A giant, industrial dumpster, its once-yellow paint now a scabrous brown, was nestled against the curved wall. It was positioned under a chute, likely for obsolete lab equipment or construction debris from some forgotten retrofit. It was half-full of what looked like amorphous, dark bags. From their vantage point, it created a wide, uneven platform.
“There,” Ren said, his voice quiet but firm.
Kai crawled to the edge and looked. “What? The trash? You’re crazy. We’d break every bone.”
“It’s softer than the floor,” Ren shot back, a familiar, stubborn heat cutting through his fear. It was the same heat that flared when the kids in his neighborhood mocked his family’s modest apartment, his careful, androgynous features. The need to do the thing they said couldn’t be done. “The fall to the next landing is what, fifteen feet? Then a jump and a slide down the side of the dumpster. It’s faster. We disappear.”
“It’s a death wish!”
The footsteps reached the corridor entrance behind them. A long shadow, distorted and thin, stretched across the landing.
Luna’s head snapped between the approaching shadow and the dumpster below. Her calculus was visible: the known threat behind, the fatal unknown below. Her eyes met Ren’s. In them, he saw no affection, no trust, but a cold assessment. She was weighing his idea not on friendship, but on tactical merit.
“You first,” she said to Ren.
It wasn’t a question. It was an order.
The shadow in the corridor shifted, a shape beginning to coalesce. A low, wet inhalation echoed off the stone.
Ren didn’t let himself think. Thinking meant hearing that breath. Thinking meant seeing the Stalker’s pit-eyes. He swung his legs over the railing, finding a toehold on a decorative gargoyle’s head that was mostly intact. He looked down at the next spiral landing, a tiny concrete ellipse far below. His stomach lurched.
“Ren, don’t!” Kai pleaded. But ren simply took a deep breathe.
(author note: ONLY THE academy is effected by the deadzone. Not the rest of Tokyo-1)