Chapter 30: Night Terror
Sleep was a shallow, fitful thing. It felt less like rest and more like dipping in and out of a frozen lake—momentary submersion into blackness, then a violent, gasping return to the surface of awareness. Each time Aria jerked awake, the events of the night slammed into her anew: the squeal of tires, the splintering wood of the front door, the flat, dead eyes of the man in the tactical helmet filling the panic room threshold.
And Levi’s voice. Take it. Prove you’re here.
She was here. Her body ached in a dozen different ways—the sharp, clean pain of the graze, the deeper throb between her legs, the stiffness in her muscles from hours of coiled tension. In the grey pre-dawn light leaking around the curtains, the cabin bedroom looked even more pathetic. The peeling wallpaper wasn’t just old; it was diseased. The gouges in the bedframe looked less like wear and more like something had been trying desperately to escape.
Levi wasn’t sleeping. She could feel the absolute wakefulness in the arm draped over her waist. He was on his back, eyes open, staring at the water-stained ceiling. His breathing was so slow and controlled it was unnatural.
Leo stirred in his drawer-crib with a soft, congested snuffle. The sound snapped both their heads toward him. Seeing him sleep, safe, was a physical relief that lasted about three seconds before the fear rushed back in to fill the space.
“If we somehow went back to Paradis,” Aria whispered, the question forming in the dark quiet before she could stop it, “do you think Leo would come with us?”
Levi didn’t move. He absorbed the question, his gaze still fixed upward. The fan of his dark lashes blinked once, slowly. When he finally spoke, his voice was a dry rustle. “We got brought into the future here and none of us disappeared.” A long pause. The logic was flimsy, a rope bridge over an abyss. “So maybe.”
The word hung there. Maybe. It was the most fragile hope imaginable.
“I don’t know if going back is even possible.” She turned onto her side, wincing, to face his profile. The stubble on his jaw was darker, the shadows under his eyes profound. “I miss it though. Titans were an issue but at least we weren’t being hunted.”
A harsh, almost silent sound escaped him. Not a laugh. Something bitter and worn thin. “We were always being hunted. Just by things we could see. Things we could kill.” His hand found hers under the rough blanket, his fingers lacing through hers, gripping tight. “Here, the monster is a spreadsheet. A satellite feed. A silent transfer of funds. You can’t cut its nape.”
The truth of it was a cold stone in her gut. She’d take a dozen pure titans over the sleek, anonymous horror of a Hyundai trailing them in the night. At least a titan screamed its intentions.
“I want my stupid pink rug,” she murmured, the admission childish and profound. “I want to hear you complain about the credit card bill for Leo’s ridiculously overpriced organic mashed bananas. I want to be bored.”
“I know.”
“I’m scared of the person I was in that pipe, Levi. I was so calm. I just… shut down and did what you said. And then after…” She trailed off, the memory of his hands in her hair, his command, both a shame and a sanctuary.
He turned his head to look at her. In the flat grey light, his eyes were bleak. “That person kept my son alive. That person is you. The pink rug and the panic… that’s you too. It all is.” He brought their clasped hands to his mouth, pressing her knuckles against his lips. It was a rough, desperate gesture. “I need all of it. I need you. However you come.”
A floorboard creaked in the hall. They both froze, the moment of vulnerability vaporizing into instant, coiled alertness. Levi’s hand slipped from hers and was under his pillow, closing around the grip of his pistol, in one fluid motion. He didn’t sit up. He just watched the door, his body a tense line beside her.
Three soft knocks. A pause. Two more. Mikasa’s code.
“Come in,” Levi called, his voice low but clear. The gun didn’t move from under the pillow.
The door opened. Mikasa looked like death warmed over. Her face was pale, waxen, but her grey eyes were clear and sharp. She’d changed into a clean, dark shirt that strained over the bulk of bandages wrapping her torso. She moved stiffly, but the weakness from the blood loss seemed to have been forced into submission by sheer will.
“He’s gone,” she said, leaning against the doorframe. Her voice was a dry husk. “The driver. Left fuel, enough non-perishable food for a week, a medical kit with actual antibiotics, and four burner phones. No names. No explanations.”
Levi slowly moved his hand from under the pillow, empty. “Can we trust it?”
“The food’s sealed. The medicine is legit. He also left this.” She held up a small, sleek black device, no larger than a matchbox. “Signal jammer. Short-range, but powerful. It’ll block everything within two hundred yards—cell, GPS, even military-grade LoJack. We’re a dead zone as long as it’s on.”
“So we’re in a cage,” Levi said, sitting up. The sheet pooled at his waist. “A safe, invisible cage.”
“A reprieve,” Mikasa corrected, though her tone suggested it was the same thing. “He said ‘twilight is the best cover.’ He was gone before I could ask what the hell that meant.”
Aria sat up, pulling the blanket to her chest. The cabin felt different now. Not a sanctuary, but a temporary blind. A place to lick wounds while the hunters passed by, just outside the jamming field. “How long can we stay?”
“A week, maybe less,” Levi said, his mind already clicking through variables. “After that, staying in one place is a risk. We’ll need new identities. Deep-cover ones. Not the flimsy shit we had before.”
“The baby…” Mikasa started, then stopped, a rare flicker of uncertainty crossing her features.
“He stays with us,” Levi’s words were final, leaving no atomic space for argument. “They want him. That means he’s leverage. We don’t leave leverage behind.”
Aria’s heart squeezed. Leo wasn’t leverage. He was a person. Their person. But in Levi’s strategic calculus, the terms were the same.
“We need a story,” Aria said, surprising herself. Both sets of intense eyes swung to her. “Not for them. For us. Right now. Today.” She gestured vaguely at the rotting room. “Or we’re just going to sit here vibrating apart. We need… routine.”
Levi looked at her like she’d suggested they plant a garden. “Routine.”
“Yeah. Like… we’re camping. A weird, shitty camping trip. We make breakfast. We clean Leo. We… I don’t know, play cards. We turn the jammer into a game. A ‘no-technology’ retreat.” The words sounded absurd even to her, but the alternative—sitting in the grim silence waiting for the axe to fall—was unthinkable.
Mikasa’s lips thinned. But she gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. “Discipline maintains morale. Even artificial discipline.”
Levi watched Aria for a long moment. He saw the frantic gleam in her eyes, the tremor she was trying to smother by proposing something normal. He nodded once, curtly. “Alright. Camping.”
The next few hours were surreal. They moved like ghosts through the dusty cabin. Levi started a fire in the big stone hearth, more for light and the illusion of warmth than heat. Mikasa, moving with deliberate care, inventoried the supplies. Aria changed Leo, singing a soft, off-key Taylor Swift song to him as she did. He stared up at her with his huge, dark Levi-eyes, gripping her thumb.
They ate bland oatmeal from dented camping bowls. The silence was heavy, but it was a shared silence, punctuated by the crackle of the fire and Leo banging a wooden spoon on the floor.
After eating, Mikasa retreated to a worn armchair by the fire, cleaning her handgun with a methodical focus that was its own form of meditation. Levi took first watch outside, a shadow merging with the trees.
Aria was left with Leo in the main room. The baby was crawling now, exploring the perimeter of the scratchy wool blanket she’d spread out. Every few seconds, she’d glance at the jammer, a little black monolith on the mantelpiece. Their bubble of safety. Their cage.
She pulled her knees to her chest, resting her chin on them. The fear was still there, a constant hum in her blood. But wrapped around it now was a fragile thread of something else. Not hope. Not quite. It was resolve, forged in the pipe, tempered in their bed. It was the look in Levi’s eyes when he said I need you. However you come.
Leo crawled to the edge of the blanket and reached a chubby hand toward the dusty floorboards. She scooped him up, breathing in his milky, sleepy scent. He squirmed, reaching instead for the cheap, plastic-beaded necklace she’d forgotten she was wearing.
“No, buddy, not for eating,” she murmured, pulling it gently from his grasp.
He let out a frustrated grunt, his face screwing up. She braced for a cry. But then his eyes caught the firelight, dancing orange and gold. His frustration vanished, replaced by wonder. He reached a hand toward the flames, making a soft, “Ooooh,” sound.
Aria held him, watching him watch the fire. A tiny, defiant smile touched her lips.
They were in a cage. They were being hunted by monsters they couldn’t see.
But inside the cage, for this moment, her son was marveling at the light.
But inside the cage, for this moment, her son was marveling at the light.
The cabin door opened, a slice of damp, grey morning slicing through the firelit gloom. Levi stepped back inside, his shoulders dusted with a fine, cold mist. He moved with a predatory quiet, scanning the room, his gaze lingering on Aria and Leo by the hearth before acknowledging Mikasa’s silent nod from the chair. He slid the deadbolt home with a solid, final thunk.
“Quiet out there,” he said, his voice rough from the cold. He shrugged out of his jacket, hanging it on a nail by the door. “Just birds. Too many damn birds here. Sounds like a fucking aviary.”
“No suspicious lack of birds, though,” Mikasa said, not looking up from reassembling her pistol. “That’s something.”
Aria watched him approach. His eyes were the color of the slate sky outside, all the warmth banked deep behind a wall of calculated vigilance. He knelt by the blanket, his knees popping, and held a finger out for Leo. The baby grabbed it, a wide, gummy smile breaking across his face.
“Hey, kid.” Levi’s voice softened, a fracture in the stone. For a second, just a second, the harsh lines of his face eased.
Then Leo yanked, trying to pull the finger into his mouth. Levi let him, a faint, almost invisible smirk touching his lips. “Still putting everything in your mouth. Idiot.”
“Takes after you,” Aria said, the words coming out before she could stop them. A weak joke, hanging in the tense air.
Levi’s smirk widened a fraction. He looked at her. “My aim’s better.”
The familiar, dry banter was a rope thrown across a chasm. She grabbed it.
“You eat a bug that one time in Trost and I never let you forget it,” she said, pulling Leo back into her lap. He fussed, reaching again for Levi.
“It was protein. Strategic.” He scooped Leo up, standing him on his wobbly legs on the floor. Leo bounced, delighted. “See? Strong legs. Built for survival. Unlike his mother, who thinks a Chai Tea Latte is a food group.”
“It has tea in the name, Levi. It’s basically a salad.” She hugged her knees, watching them. Levi’s large hands held their son securely, his thumbs brushing the tiny ankles. The contrast—those lethal, precise hands cradling such vulnerability—sent a complex ache through her chest.
Mikasa finished with her weapon, the soft click of the final piece seating home echoing in the quiet. “The jammer’s field is effective. I walked the perimeter. A vehicle passed on the forest service road a quarter mile out. The burner phone lost all signal at the tree line, just like the driver said.”
“So we’re blind, but we’re hidden,” Levi stated, guiding Leo’s stumbling steps toward the fire.
“We’re sitting ducks after a week,” Mikasa corrected, her tone devoid of panic. It was a simple logistical fact. “They’ll grid-search. Even old forestry cabins get checked.”
Aria’s scalp prickled. The oatmeal churned in her stomach. She focused on the feeling of the rough wool under her palms, the solidity of the floorboards. Name five things you can see. The fire. Levi’s boots. Mikasa’s bandages under her shirt. The black jammer box. Leo’s drool on Levi’s sleeve.
“We need a destination,” Levi said, lifting Leo and settling him against his shoulder. “Not just a route. A place to be someone else. Permanently.”
“I liked being Aria Reyes,” she whispered. The name felt like a costume she’d taken off.
“Aria Reyes had a pink rug and a Stanley cup collection and an Instagram full of baby pictures.” Levi’s voice was low, meant only for her. “She also had a target on her back the size of Montana. That identity is compost.”
The bluntness should have hurt. Instead, it was a cold splash of clarity. She nodded, swallowing hard. “So who do I get to be next?”
“Someone boring,” Mikasa offered from her chair. She was staring into the fire, her reflection wavering in the dark TV screen across the room. “A dental hygienist. A middle-school librarian. Something with a predictable schedule and a 401k.”
“A librarian.” Aria almost laughed. The image was so ludicrous. Her, with her history, shushing teenagers in a Ohio public library. “I’d probably recommend The Anarchist Cookbook to the wrong kid.”
Levi’s eyes met hers. For a fleeting second, she saw the ghost of the man who’d tease her about her music tastes, who’d roll his eyes at her online shopping sprees but would later find the parcels hidden in his workshop. The man who existed before the pipe, before the blood on her shoulder. “You’d have to learn the Dewey Decimal System. It’s brutal.”
“I can handle brutal.” She held his gaze, the challenge quiet but clear. I handled the pipe. I handled you.
He looked away first, shifting Leo to his other arm. “We need contacts. People who don’t exist on any server. Hange’s… associate got us this far. We need the next link.”
Mikasa stirred. “I have a name. From before. It’s old. Might be dead. Might be a trap.”
“Everything’s a trap,” Levi said. “We just need to spring the one we can survive. What’s the name?”
“Falco Grice.”
The name meant nothing to Aria. But Levi went very still. The only movement was the slow, rhythmic pat of his hand on Leo’s back. “Grice.” He tested the word. “He was just a kid. A good one.”
“He’s not a kid now,” Mikasa said. “He’s in Montreal. Supposedly clean. Owns a garage. Specializes in European imports.”
“A mechanic.” Levi’s brow furrowed. “Can we trust it?”
“The driver left the jammers, the medicine. He knew the codes from… before. I trust the source.” Mikasa’s voice was iron. “The contact is the risk.”
Levi was silent for a long minute, pacing slowly with Leo, who was now drowsing against his neck. Aria watched the calculation happening behind his eyes, the weighing of terrible options. The fire popped, sending a spiral of sparks upward.
“Montreal is a big city,” he said finally. “Lots of traffic. Lots of ways to disappear.” He stopped pacing and looked at Aria. “You’ll need French. Or a convincing excuse for not having any.”
The mundanity of it—language lessons, now, in the midst of this—was almost funny. “I’ll be a mute librarian.”
A faint sound escaped Mikasa. It might have been a snort. It might have been a pained exhale.
“We move at twilight,” Levi decided, his voice dropping into commander-mode. “The driver said it’s the best cover. We use the last of the daylight to prep. We travel light. Weapons, cash, the baby’s formula. Nothing else.”
The pink rug. Her Taylor Swift vinyl collection, still sealed in their moving boxes back in the glass house. All the silly, cherished artifacts of the life she’d tried to build. They were already gone. She felt their loss as a physical hollowing.
“Okay,” she said. The word was small, but it was agreement. It was a step forward.
Leo let out a sleepy sigh, his small body going limp against Levi’s chest. In his sleep, he grasped a handful of Levi’s shirt, holding on.
Levi looked down at the tiny fist clenched in the dark fabric. His own hand came up, covering it completely. He didn’t look at Aria or Mikasa. He looked at the fire, its light dancing in his unblinking eyes.
“We’ll need a car,” he said, his voice barely audible over the crackling logs. “Something common. Something that can handle the distance.”
“I’ll find us a car,” Mikasa said, pushing herself to her feet with a stifled grimace.
Outside, the grey light was deepening towards evening. The birds, as Levi had noted, were everywhere, their songs a chaotic, oblivious chorus. Inside their bubble of silenced signals, they began to pack for a life that wouldn’t exist by sunrise.
Inside their bubble of silenced signals, they began to pack for a life that wouldn’t exist by sunrise. Mikasa’s movements were stiff, pained, but methodical as she sorted through the driver’s cache. Levi folded the few items of their clothing—mostly his, dark and functional—with a soldier’s precision, his hands efficient and devoid of sentiment.
Aria’s task was Leo’s diaper bag. She filled it with formula cans, packages of wipes, the few rattles and soft books they’d grabbed in their frantic flight. Each brightly colored item felt like a artifact from a museum of a extinct civilization. She held a small, plush bear wearing a tiny denim jacket. Levi had won it at a county fair, scoffing at the game but determined.
“This can stay,” she said aloud, her voice too loud in the quiet cabin.
Levi glanced over, saw the bear in her hand. His expression didn’t change, but he gave a single, shallow nod. It wasn’t about the toy. It was about the weight, the space, the necessity of leaving anything non-essential behind. The bear went into the bag.
“Montreal is cold,” Mikasa said, not looking up from inspecting the seals on a bottle of water. “Colder than here. We’ll need proper coats before we cross the border.”
“We’ll get them,” Levi said. He zipped his duffel shut with a final, decisive sound. “We’ll get everything we need. From places that don’t ask questions.”
“And the car?” Aria asked, rubbing her thumb over the plush bear’s ear inside the bag.
“I’ll handle it,” Mikasa stated. She stood, wincing only slightly. “Two hours. Be ready to move the second I get back.” She pulled on a dark baseball cap, tucking her hair beneath it, and slipped out the back door. She melted into the gathering twilight without another sound.
The silence she left behind was different. It was waiting. Levi clicked on a battery-powered lantern, its harsh white light bleaching the room of the fire’s warmth. He spread a road atlas on the rough-hewn table, its pages crisp and unfamiliar in the digital age.
“We go north,” he said, his finger tracing a route through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “Less surveillance. More wilderness to get lost in. We cross at Sault Ste. Marie. It’s a truck crossing. Busy. Anonymous.”
Aria came to stand beside him, looking at the maze of lines. The world had shrunk to these paper roads. “How long?”
“Three days of driving. Maybe four. We’ll stop only when we have to. Sleep in shifts in the car.” His finger stopped at a point just over the Canadian border. “We contact Grice from a payphone outside Sudbury. If it feels wrong, we vanish into Ontario and figure out a Plan B.”
“Plan B,” she repeated, the words tasting hollow. There was no Plan B. There was only this desperate lunge toward a name from a past life.
Leo started fussing in his makeshift crib, a hungry, tired sound. Aria moved to pick him up, but Levi was faster. He lifted the baby, his large hands impossibly gentle. “I’ve got him. You finish.”
He walked to the far window, Leo against his shoulder, and swayed in a slow, small rhythm. He stared out at the darkening trees, humming something tuneless and low. It was a sound Aria had never heard from him. A lullaby from a man who’d grown up with no songs.
She watched them for a moment, the rigid line of his back, the complete vulnerability of the child he held. The two most important people in her world, silhouetted against the dying light. She finished packing the bag, her movements frantic suddenly, driven by a need to be done, to be moving, to be doing anything but standing still in this suffocating pause.
She opened the cabin’s rusty fridge. The driver had left blocky, military-style rations. She took out a foil pouch labeled ‘Chicken and Rice.’ “Do we eat now? Or wait for Mikasa?”
“Now,” Levi said, turning from the window. “You need the fuel. We don’t know when we’ll stop next.”
They ate the gloopy, lukewarm chicken substance straight from the pouch, spoons clinking against the foil. It tasted like salt and cardboard. Leo gummed a teething cracker on Aria’s lap, watching them with solemn interest. The ordinary act of a meal felt grotesque, a parody of domesticity.
“What if he doesn’t remember us?” Aria asked quietly, not looking up from her food. “Falco.”
Levi scooped a large bite, chewed, swallowed. “Then we thank him for his time and walk away.”
“And if he does?”
A long silence. Levi wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Then we see if the good kid stayed good.”
The headlights cut through the front windows first, twin spears of light sweeping across the wall. Levi was up in an instant, lamp extinguished, baby thrust into Aria’s arms, pistol in his hand. He pressed himself against the wall beside the door, his body coiled.
The engine died. A single door opened and closed. Footsteps, light and familiar, approached the porch. Three knocks. A pause. Two.
Levi lowered the gun, his breath leaving him in a controlled exhale. He opened the door. Mikasa stood there, the keys to a mud-splattered, dark green Subaru Forester dangling from her finger. “It’s six years old. Registered to a shell corporation in Delaware. Tinted windows. Full tank.”
Levi took the keys. “Clean?”
“As clean as I could make it in two hours.” She stepped inside, bringing the smell of cold night air and faint gasoline with her. “We should go. The predicted travel time to the first waypoint is five hours. I want to be there before first light.”
The finality of it landed in the room like a stone. This was it. The cabin, for all its dread, was a known quantity. The car was a vector into pure uncertainty.
Aria stood, Leo heavy on her hip. She did one last scan of the room—the empty oatmeal bowls, the rumpled blankets, the black jammer on the mantel now powerless. They were leaving nothing of themselves behind. She grabbed the diaper bag, slung it over her shoulder. It felt impossibly light.
Levi shouldered his duffel and the larger pack of supplies. He looked at them both, his eyes moving from Mikasa’s resolute face to Aria’s, to Leo’s sleepy head resting against her neck. “Stay behind me. To the car. Don’t look around. Just move.”
He opened the door. The forest night was utterly black, colder than before, the air sharp with pine and decay. The Subaru waited like a dormant beetle a dozen yards away. Levi went first, a shadow dissolving into shadow. Mikasa followed, her steps silent despite her injury.
Aria hesitated on the threshold, the warmth of the cabin at her back. She looked down at Leo. His eyes were open, reflecting the sliver of moonlight that pierced the clouds. He wasn’t smiling. He just looked, as if waiting for her to explain.
“Okay, little man,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “Let’s go for a ride.”
She stepped out into the dark, pulling the door shut behind her. It closed with a soft, final click. She didn’t look back. She walked quickly toward the car, her shoes crunching on the frost-stiffened grass. Levi already had the passenger door open, the dome light off.
She slid into the backseat, buckling Leo into his carrier beside her. Mikasa took the wheel, Levi the passenger seat. The engine turned over with a subdued purr. Mikasha flicked the headlights on, illuminating the narrow track leading away from the cabin.
No one spoke. Mikasa put the car in drive. They began to roll forward, leaving the hollow shell of safety behind. The trees swallowed the cabin whole within seconds.
Aria turned in her seat, watching through the tinted rear window as the world they’d known for a few desperate hours receded into absolute darkness. Then she faced forward, her hand finding Leo’s small fist in the near-dark. She held on tight.
The Subaru picked up speed, tires crunching on gravel, heading north into the hungry, waiting night.