Chapter 10: The Vigil
The single LED lamp painted the room in cool, clinical light, sharpening the edges of the solar panels taped to the window and deepening the shadows in the hollows of Rosa’s eyes. Sandy had left hours ago, the smell of antiseptic lingering like a ghost. The bandage on Rosa’s thigh was a stark white bulge against the faded green of her blankets.
“You should go to your own bed,” Rosa said, her voice gritty with exhaustion.She shifted, winced, and tried to hide it. “Seriously, Jason. I’m not going to bleed out in my sleep.”
Jason didn’t even look up from the frayed seam of the thin mattress he was dragging from the hallway closet. He maneuvered it through her cluttered door, shoving a low shelf of seedling trays aside with his foot. “Never said you were.”
“So go.”
“Nope.”
He unfurled the mattress on the floorboards right beside her bed, so close that if she hung her arm over the edge, her fingers would brush his hair. He fluffed a pathetically flat pillow and lay down, fully dressed, boots still on.He stared at the ceiling, hands folded on his chest.
Rosa let out a long, exasperated breath that ended in a sharp intake as her leg throbbed. “This is stupid.You need proper sleep. Roy needs you.”
From the corner of her desk, where he’d been a silent, curled shadow, Roy uncoiled. He was so small now, a fragile sketch of the man he’d been, but his movements were quiet and deliberate. He didn’t speak. He just slid off the desk, onto Jason’s offered hand, and moving him to his chest. Jason’s hand automatically, settling over his three-inch body.
The silent rebuttal was absolute.
“Ganging up on me,” Rosa muttered, but the fight was leaking out of her, replaced by a dull, helpless ache that had nothing to do with the wound.She watched them. Jason’s thumb stroked a slow arc between Roy’s shoulder blades. His eyes were still open, fixed on a water stain on the ceiling tiles that he’d probably memorized the shape of months ago.The room was too quiet. The usual hum of the air filter was dialed down to conserve power, leaving a ringing silence that seemed to amplify every rustle of cloth, every pained sigh.It was a silence that felt like a held breath.
“You remember,” Jason said, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through Roy and into the floor, “that shitty party at the Sigma house?Before everything?”
Rosa closed her eyes. “The one with the jungle juice that tasted like radiator fluid? Vaguely.”
“You pulled me into the kitchen.You had a kitchen knife. You weren’t even holding it in a threatening way, just… peeling an apple or some shit.And you said, ‘Roy’s different. He feels everything twice.You break him, I break you. Simple math.’”
A faint smile touched Rosa’s lips. “I believe I also said I knew places to hide a body where even the crows wouldn’t find it.”
“You did. And I believed you.” Jason turned his head on the thin pillow to look at her.His hazel eyes were dark in the low light. “That was the moment I knew I was in. Not just with him.With all of it. With you. That fucked-up, fierce loyalty.”
Rosa didn’t open her eyes. A hot, sudden pressure built behind them. “It’s a lot to carry.”
“Yeah,” Jason said softly. “It is.”
For a while, there was only the sound of their breathing, and the occasional distant creak of the old dorm settling. Roy’s breathing was the softest of all, a barely-there whisper against Jason’s shirt.
“The barricade on the west stairwell needs reinforcing,” Rosa mumbled into the quiet, the problem-solving part of her brain sparking feebly against the fatigue. “The metal’s buckling.”
“I’ll look at it tomorrow,” Jason said.
“You won’t. You’ll be here playing nursemaid.”
“Lee and Joan can handle it. They’ve got the diagrams I drew.”
“Diagrams.” She snorted. “You and your schematics.”
“Better than your ‘stab-the-soft-parts’ medical charts.”
Another silence, but this one was softer around the edges.
Rosa’s consciousness flickered, the pain in her leg merging with the leaden pull of sleep. She fought it, clinging to the sight of the two of them on the floor—Jason’s solid, stubborn form, Roy’s tiny figure rising and falling with his breath.A bastion. A impossible, fragile bastion in a world that had no use for such things.
Just as she was about to slip under, Jason spoke again, his voice so quiet it was almost lost in the fabric of his shirt.
“I can’t lose any more, Rosa.”
It wasn’t a plea. It was a statement of fact, stark and simple as the moon through the boarded window. The raw truth of it hung in the air, freezing her halfway to sleep.She opened her eyes. He was still looking at her, and the calm, logical architect was gone. In his place was just a man, hollowed out by fear, holding onto what was left with everything he had.She didn’t say You won’t. She didn’t say It’s okay.Both would be lies, and they were done with those.
Slowly, she let her hand fall over the side of the bed, her fingers stretching down. They didn’t quite reach his hair, but they hung there, an offering.
After a moment, Jason shifted.He unlaced one of his boots, kicked it off, then the other. The thuds were loud in the quiet.He didn’t get up. He just settled deeper into the thin mattress, turned onto his side facing her bed, and brought his own hand up. His warm, calloused fingers wrapped around hers.Anchor.And anchor.
“Go to sleep,” he murmured.
This time, she did.
The deep, rhythmic sound of her breathing finally evened out into sleep just after dawn. Jason waited another twenty minutes, his body stiff from the floor, until he was certain.
He moved with a careful, glacial slowness, disentangling his hand from Rosa’s and sitting up. Roy, curled in the hollow of his collarbone, stirred but didn’t protest. Jason stood, a single smooth motion, and padded silently from the room on socked feet.
The third-floor hallway was cold and dim, the only light a grey seep from the east-facing stairwell window. He took the steps up to the roof access two at a time, his free hand cradling Roy securely against the chill. The heavy door swung open with a familiar creak he’d been meaning to oil for weeks.
The rooftop air was a crisp, shocking slap after the stale medic-room closeness. Up here, the world opened into a quilt of pragmatic survival: humming solar panels, the gentle gurgle of Lee’s clay-and-gravel filter system, and rows of lettuce and kale in scavenged storage tubs. Jason walked to the eastern ledge, away from the door, and sat on a pallet of bagged soil, his back to the warming sun.
He settled Roy onto his knee, the denim providing a stable, familiar landscape. For a long moment, they just watched the mist burn off the ruined science building below, the aquaponics pond a dull silver gleam. The silence between them was a living thing, charged with everything left unsaid since the stairwell.
Roy finally spoke, his voice barely louder than the breeze snagging on the chicken wire. “I couldn’t do anything.”
Jason didn’t pretend to misunderstand. He kept his gaze on the horizon, on the familiar, grim topography of their campus. “You were there. That did something.”
“Don’t.” The word was sharp, a flint strike. Roy stood on his knee, tiny hands clenched at his sides. “Don’t do that. I was a spectator. A paperweight. She was bleeding out and I just… watched.”
He turned away, his small shoulders rigid. “I’m a set of eyes now, Jason. Maybe a decent set of ears. I can’t carry water, I can’t swing a hatchet, I can’t even help stem bleeding on my own sister.” His voice cracked. “I’m a drain on resources, even if it’s small amounts. A liability you have to remember to pick up off a desk.”
Jason let the words hang. He didn’t reach for him.
A crow cawed from the skeleton of the old library, a lonely sound. “You finished?”
Roy’s silence was fury and shame.
“Good.” Jason shifted, turning to face him fully. “Remember the west stairwell barricade? The one Rosa was nagging about last night?”
Roy gave a single, tight nod.
“Your idea. The cross-brace tension system. Joan and Lee would have just stacked more furniture. It would have collapsed in a week.” Jason’s voice was low, factual. “You looked at the buckling metal from my shoulder, pointed at the stress point, and said ‘triangulate the load.’ The Roy I fell for. Right there.”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You’re not just a set of eyes. You’re a mind. The best one we’ve got for seeing how things fit together. You got smaller, now you can see more than any of us. The problems didn’t. They just… changed scale.”
Roy didn’t turn around. “Scale is everything in engineering. You know that.”
“Yeah, I do. So we re-calibrate.” A hint of the old, practical spark entered Jason’s tone. “We get clever. We build you a rig. A little harness with tools. We can use bicycle cables for pulleys around the building so you can navigate on your own. Watch gears for fine mechanics. You could work on the solar connections we can’t reach. Check the filter pipes for micro-fractures.”
Finally, Roy glanced back, his expression skeptical but listening. “A harness.”
“Why not? Between the lot of us, You’ve got a better brain for materials. So we use it.” Jason offered a faint, lopsided smile. “We figure out the tech together. Like we always did. Just… smaller workshops.”
The wind picked up, ruffling Jason’s hair and making Roy brace himself. The quiet that settled now was different, the raw edge of panic sanded down to a manageable, exhausting fatigue.
Roy sank down onto the denim, pulling his knees to his chest. “I hate this.”
“I know.” Jason’s finger, careful and immense, came to rest gently against his back, a steady pressure. “But you’re not useless. You’re just Roy. Who fixes things.”
Down below, a door slammed. Ally’s voice, followed by Amie’s softer reply, floated up from the courtyard. The day was beginning. Roy took a deep, shuddering breath, the kind that tries to reset everything inside.
“The tension system on the barricade,” he said quietly, his voice steadying. “We used the wrong gauge of cable. It’ll fatigue faster. I saw it yesterday but…”
“But there was a crisis,” Jason finished. He stood, lifting Roy back to the safety of his shirt pocket. “So we go check it now. You can tell Joan what to look for. First lesson in the new workshop.”
He walked toward the roof door, the morning sun now casting their long, singular shadow across the neat rows of kale. The shadow of a man and his engineer, ready to fix the next thing.
The shadow of a man and his engineer, ready to fix the next thing.
Rosa slept for over twenty-four hours straight, a personal record for the unwilling early bird.
When she woke, the quality of light in the room had changed from the grey of dawn to the deep, amber gold of late afternoon. The air still smelled of antiseptic and dust, but underneath was the rich, savory scent of soup simmering somewhere down the hall. For a blessed moment, there was only the dull ache in her leg and the quiet.
Then she saw him.
Roy was sitting on the edge of her desk, legs hanging out over the edge of her mattress. His three-inch frame was a tense ball of nerves. He had his arms wrapped around his knees, and he was staring at her bandaged thigh with a focus so intense it felt physical.
“Hey,” she said, her voice a dry croak.
He flinched, then slowly turned his head. The relief in his tiny features was immediately swallowed by a fresh wave of anxious guilt. “You’re awake.”
“Observant.” She tried to push herself up on her elbows. A hot spike of pain made her gasp and abort the motion. “Okay. Not doing that yet.”
Roy was on his feet in an instant, a micro-expression of panic flashing across his face. “Don’t move. Sandy said not to. The stitches… I’ll get Jason.”
“You’ll stay right there.” The command in her voice was rusty but operational. She took a controlled breath, mastering the pain. “I just need a second. My mouth tastes like a walker’s foot. Is there water?”
He pointed a miniature hand toward the bedside shelf. A plastic cup with a bent straw sat next to a sputtering LED candle.
“Sandy left it. Jason’s been changing it every few hours so it’s cold.”
She managed to get the straw to her lips. The water was blessedly cool. She drank greedily, watching him over the rim of the cup. He was vibrating with unspoken words.
“Spit it out, Roy,” she said, lowering the cup. “Before you shake yourself off the desk.”
“It was my fault.” The words tumbled out in a rushed, quiet stream. “I was on your shoulder. You’ve been letting me ride there since I shrank. It threw off your balance. You stumbled because of me.”
Rosa blinked. She let the statement sit in the quiet, stale air. “You weigh less than a sparrow now. A stiff wind throws off my balance more than you do.”
“You know what I mean.” He looked away, shoulders hunched. “It’s a variable. An unpredictable one. I’m a variable in every fight, every supply run. I can’t… I can’t cover your blind side anymore. I just create one.”
There it was. The core of the rot. Rosa had seen that look before, on his face and others’—the moment a person started calculating their own net drain on the group. It was a dangerous, silent math.
She shifted again, slower this time, until she was propped at a slight angle. “Come here.”
He looked wary. “Why?”
“Because I can’t get over there, you idiot. Come. Here.”
He walked to the edge of the desk closest to her pillow. She lifted her hand, palm up, and laid it flat on the desk surface. After a heartbeat, he stepped onto her lifeline, his weight a ghost of a sensation. She brought her hand up, resting it on the pillow, beside her head so they were at eye level.
“Listen to me,” she said, her voice low and gravelly. “You didn’t get me injured. A rotting bastard in a maintenance uniform got a cheap shot on me. A man with a weird shrinking device injured my leg. That’s it!”
“But—”
“No. You’re not a variable, Roy. You’re intelligence. You are a second mind that is tuned to finding the details.” She tapped her own temple with her free hand. “Jason told me about the barricade. The triangulation thing. That was you seeing a problem we were all too big and dumb to notice.”
He scowled. “He shouldn’t have bothered you with that.”
“He should’ve.” She smiled, a thin, tired thing. “Reminded me why we keep your nerdy ass around.” Her smile faded. “The shoulder thing… we’ll find a way to make it less distracting for me or Jason. Jason mentioned a harness, tools. We’ll figure it out. But you do not get to decide you’re a liability. That’s my job. And my assessment says you’re still worth the extra calories.”
A faint, real smile touched his lips. “Your bedside manner is terrible.”
“I’m not a doctor yet. Just a pre-med with a sharp knife and a mean right hook.” She studied him. “You’ve been sitting here the whole time, haven’t you?”
“Some of it. Jason and I… we talked. On the roof.” He sat down cross-legged on her palm, the tension in his frame easing a fraction. “He sees it too. The need for a… a new operational design.”
“Good.” Rosa’s eyelids felt heavy again, but the fog was lifting. “So we redesign. But right now, my next operational design involves more soup than is currently in this room. You know where it’s coming from?”
“Sandy’s room. She’s using the hotplate. It’s goat and kale, I think.”
“Goat,” Rosa sighed, a dreamy sound. “Tell her I’m awake. And that if she doesn’t bring me a bucket of it, I’ll re-stitch my own leg with fishing line.”
Roy stood, his movement quick and sure now, a mission accepted. He stepped off her hand onto the desk. “She’ll probably bring the bucket. You scared the hell out of her, you know.”
“I scared the hell out of me.”
He paused at the edge of the desk, near the old textbooks she used as a step down. “Rosa?”
“Yeah?”
“Next time… just drop me. In a pocket, on the ground, I don’t care. Don’t sacrifice your footing for me.”
She met his gaze, her green eyes sharp. “Not a chance, little brother. Now go. Soup. The pathetic puppy eyes work better when you do them.”
He made a face but navigated down the book-staircase with practiced ease. She listened to the faint, almost imperceptible sound of him crossing the wooden floor, then the scrape of him sliding under the door.
Alone, she let her head fall back into the pillow. The pain was a deep, rhythmic thud in time with her heartbeat. But beneath it, a colder, more familiar alertness was taking hold. Roy’s fear was a real problem. A scared person made mistakes. A person who believed they were a burden took risks they shouldn’t.
They needed to give him a real job. Something only he could do. Jason’s harness idea wasn’t just kindness; it was tactical.
The door opened fully, scraping against the floor. Sandy appeared, holding a steaming metal bowl, her freckled face breaking into a wide, relieved grin. “The dead rises! And she demands tribute, I hear.”
“With extreme prejudice,” Rosa said, pushing herself up more determinedly this time. “Gimme. I dreamt about that smell.”
Sandy sat on the edge of the mattress, holding the bowl so Rosa could spoon it up. “Lee thickened it with some ground acorn flour. It’s not bad. How’s the leg?”
“Feels like it got used for walker dental practice.” Rosa took a greedy mouthful. It was rich, salty, and wonderful. “Roy was in here. Spiraling.”
Sandy’s expression softened. “Jason took him up to the roof earlier. I think it helped.”
“It did.” Rosa ate another spoonful. “We need to build him accommodation, Sandy. He needs things he can work with so he doesn’t feel useless or dependent.”
Sandy nodded, her sea-foam glasses slipping down her nose. “Lee and I were already talking. We think there’s some useful materials in the old home ec. building. Plus, there’s a climbing gym a few blocks down, we can work on securing materials for a harness.”
Sandy set the bowl aside and shifted, crossing her legs on the edge of the mattress. The lamp flickered, casting her shadow long across the room. "So, realistically, we've got three things we need. A harness that fits him properly. Something to secure him to one of us when he needs to move. And a way for him to work independently."
Rosa wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Break it down."
"Climbing harness. A real one, for a small child or a climbing gym's training rig. We can cut it down, sew in webbing, adjust the straps." Sandy ticked off on her fingers. "The climbing gym a few blocks past the old art building has a whole equipment room. Harnesses, rope, carabiners. It's a supply run, but it's low-risk. The space is enclosed, no walker traffic usually."
"Usually."
"Usually." Sandy's grin was thin. "Second thing. You know those ring phone holders? The little metal rings that stick to the back of a phone case?"
Rosa blinked. "The ones everyone used for selfies before the world ended?"
"Exactly. The campus bookstore had a display full of them. They're perfect. Little circular mounts. We can sew one to a harness plate on Roy's back, then link on a round carabiner so he can attach himself to the shoulder straps of your jacket. He's secure, you've got both hands free, and he can see what he needs to."
Rosa turned that over. A small metal ring on his back, it was elegant in its simplicity. "He could ride with me or Jason without being in the collar or pocket. In a fight, he's connected by the harness, not just his own grip."
"Exactly. And he can detach himself when he needs to. Low profile, no draw attention."
Rosa turned the idea over, feeling the shape of it. A small metal ring, sewn onto a harness plate, linking to a carabiner on her jacket strap. It was so simple it almost hurt. Roy riding in her collar, vulnerable to every stumble and swing, and the answer had been sitting in a campus bookstore display case this whole time.
"That's good," she said, her voice carrying a spark of genuine energy for the first time since the stairwell. "That's really good. The ring distributes the load. He could hang from a strap without me worrying about him falling."
Sandy nodded, already reaching for the notebook Rosa kept on the bedside desktop. The cover was scuffed leather, the pages filled with her cramped, practical handwriting: supply inventories, medical notes, the occasional half-baked diagram of a trap or a water filter. "Let's make a list. Climbing gym first, then the bookstore. Both are on the same stretch of campus, maybe a twenty-minute walk if we cut through the old quad."
She flipped to a fresh page and uncapped a pen. "Harnesses. We need at least two, incase something is wrong with one."
"Check the rope too," Rosa added, shifting to get more comfortable. "Even if we don't need it now, good rope is worth its weight in gold. And carabiners. Grab every one we can carry."
Sandy scribbled. "Phone rings. There was a display right by the checkout counter, I remember it. Little plastic stands with rows of them, different colors."
"Grab them all. They're tiny, no reason to be picky."
There was a comfortable rhythm to it, the two of them building the plan together. Sandy's pen scratched across the page, the sound nearly lost beneath the hum of the air filter. Rosa finished the soup, savoring the warmth spreading through her chest.
"Who's going?" Rosa asked, setting the bowl aside.
"Me and Lee. Maybe Ally if she wants out of the basement for a while." Sandy looked up, her eyes meeting Rosa's. "You stay here. Non-negotiable."
"I wasn't going to argue."
"Good. Because I wasn't going to listen anyway."
Rosa snorted. "That's what I'm counting on. You need someone who can run if it goes sideways. Lee's fast, but you're faster."
Sandy's expression flickered, a brief shadow of something real passing behind her glasses. "I'll be careful. No theatrics."
"See that you aren't. I've had enough excitement for a month."
Sandy finished the list and tore the page out, folding it into her pocket. "I'll show this to Lee tonight. We'll head out at first light, before the walkers get active. Should be back by mid-morning."
"And if it's not there?"
"Then we improvise. There's a hardware store two blocks past the gym, we can check for other materials. Webbing, buckles, anything that could work." Sandy stood, stretching her arms over her head with a soft groan. "We've built a whole fortress out of worse."
Rosa nodded, the exhaustion pulling at her again now that the food was settling. "Wake me before you go. I want to know you're heading out."
"Will do." Sandy paused at the door, looking back. "Roy's sleeping in Jason's room tonight. I checked. He seemed better after the roof talk. Lighter."
"Good."
Sandy slipped out, the door clicking shut behind her. The room settled back into its quiet, the LED lamp casting its steady pool of light. Rosa lay there, staring at the ceiling, running the plan through her mind. The climbing gym. The bookstore. The little rings that would give Roy back a piece of his independence.
It wasn't much. A harness, a carabiner, a circle of metal. But it was something. A step toward the world they were going to have to build for him now.
She closed her eyes, and let herself rest.