Chapter 2: The Warmth of a Giant
The yellowed S-Mart map crackled under Rosa’s finger as she traced a route only she could see. Roy stood on the faded blue square that represented the store itself, a speck on a continent of peeling laminate flooring. The map was spread on the ground, a vast, wrinkled parchment from his perspective. He’d been using a shard of pencil lead, taller than he was, as a pointer.
“So the Applied Sciences building has three main entrances,” Rosa murmured, her voice a low rumble above. “But the east entrance is permanently barricaded after the Chemistry fire. That leaves the north, from the quad, and the loading dock at the rear.”
“He’ll use the loading dock,” Roy said, his tiny voice nearly lost in the cavernous room.He tapped the pencil lead against the map’s representation of the building. “Private, shielded, probably where he’s been holed up. But the quad entrance… that’s our leverage. It’s more exposed, but it’s also closer to the old generator shed.”
“Which is where we could theoretically reroute power, if we wanted to draw attention,” Rosa finished, a grim smile in her tone. “Make a big, noisy light show somewhere he’s not.”
They fell into a comfortable silence, the kind that came from years of fitting ideas together. Roy paced the length of the ‘S-Mart’ text, his mind racing through circuits and conduits. He could almost see the wires, the breaker panels.
The problem was elegant. Isolate the variable. Control the environment. But the environment, right now, was bitterly cold.
The concrete floor leached heat from the air, and the manager’s office held the chill like a tomb. Roy’s thin cotton shirt was useless.
He hadn’t said anything. Complaining changed nothing. His new body burned through its minimal energy reserves fast, and the shivering started as a faint tremble in his hands.
He clenched his fists, crossed his arms, kept talking logistics. “The main power to the Applied Sciences building is probably fried, but the emergency systems would have their own dedicated power source. If Silas is powering his toy, he’s tapped into those. We find the battery room, we find his core infrastructure.”
The shivering worked its way up his arms, into his core. His teeth wanted to chatter. He clamped his jaw shut. It was fine. Just a thermal regulation issue. A design flaw in the human form, exaggerated by his current scale.
Rosa was sketching a rough diagram of the building’s basement level on the edge of the map. Her movements were smooth, deliberate. Then they stopped. Her giant hand, fingers stained with dust and old ink, descended. It didn’t search or hesitate this time. It simply opened, palm up, right in front of him. An unspoken command.
“Rosa, I’m fine, we need to—”
Her fingers closed around him, gentle but impossibly firm, cutting off his protest. The world swung dizzily. Before he could process it, she’d peeled back the collar of her shirt and tucked him into the space between it and the warm, solid line of her neck.
The shock of the transition was absolute. One second, a vast, chilling expanse. The next, a world reduced to an intimate, vertical strip of sublime warmth. The cold evaporated. Here, the temperature was her body’s own furnace. The scent of her skin—clean sweat, sunshine on skin, the faint, comforting smell of her soap—filled his senses, overwhelming the mildew of the office. Most profound was the sound. Not the thunderous boom of her voice from the outside, but the intimate, vital rhythm from within.
Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
Her heartbeat was a deep, steady drum against his back, a visceral testament that she was alive, she was here, she was his anchor.
The shivering stopped. A tightness in his chest, one he hadn’t even fully acknowledged, unclenched. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t need to. Her thumb brushed once, lightly, over his legs where they rested against her collarbone, a gesture so soft it was almost imperceptible. Then her hand returned to the map, her voice picking up exactly where they’d left off, as if nothing had happened. “Battery room. Usually marked. Basement level, west corner near the emergency stairwell.” Her finger tapped the map. “Lee could get us in there. He’s quiet.”
Roy let himself sink into the warmth. The plan crystallized, sharper now. He could think. “Lee’s good. But we need to get Lee first. Without alerting Silas.”
“We send a runner. Not us.” Rosa’s neck moved as she spoke, the muscle flexing against him. “Someone fast. Someone Silas wouldn’t look twice at.”
“Amie,” they said in unison, their old synergy clicking back into place. Amie was slight, could move through tight spaces like a ghost, and was fiercely loyal to Ally. If Ally asked, Amie would go.
“We get a message to Anderson Hall,” Rosa continued, her voice a resonant hum against his ear. “They send Amie to us here. Then we move on Applied Sciences with a team. You and Lee on tech. Me, Ally, and Jayden on security.”
“Jason will want to come,” Roy said quietly.
The heartbeat under his ear didn’t falter, but the muscle of her jaw tightened. “I know.”
“He can’t. Not for this.”
Roy stared at the fascinating landscape of her neck, the fine hairs, the pulse point. “He’s… he’s a fighter. But this isn’t a fight. It’s a precision strike. He’d charge in. For me.”
“I’ll handle Jason,” Rosa said, and the finality in her tone brooked no argument. It was the same tone she’d used when she’d told a twenty-year-old Roy he wasn’t hiding alone in his room just because he was scared to face Jason after confessing his feelings.
She protected what was hers. And he was, in every way that mattered, hers. “We tell him you’re injured, holed up safe, waiting for a clear path back. It’ll keep him at the hall, guarding the others.”
It was a good lie. It would work. It would also tear Jason apart with worry. Roy hated it. A sudden, sharp noise from the loading bay below froze them both. It wasn’t the mindless shuffle of a walker. It was a metallic clang. Like a foot kicking a loose pipe. Rosa went perfectly still. Roy held his breath, pressed against the pulse that was now hammering a frantic, staccato rhythm against his ribs.
Silence.
Then, a voice, raspy and unnervingly close, echoed up through the hollow building. “I know you’re in here.”
It was Silas.
Rosa’s breath stopped in her lungs. Her heartbeat, a steady drum against Roy’s back, became a frantic kick against him. In the utter silence of the office, the sound of a single footstep on the concrete floor below was as clear and definitive as a gunshot.
Crunch.
It was the deliberate, testing step of someone who knew the space was occupied.
“Change in plans, I guess,” Roy murmured quietly, his voice vibrating against her skin.
Rosa didn’t answer with words. Her hands moved with a silent, ruthless efficiency. She quietly stores her bag of medicinal supplies in a dark corner behind the overturned desk, folds the map, and tucks it under her shirt. Then, she does the zipper up all the way, sealing Roy snug against her neck.
He repositions so his back is to her neck and his legs stretch along the shoulder. The world became a tunnel of green tactical fabric and the scent of her skin, his view limited to a sliver of the room through the zipper’s teeth.
“Hold tight, little brother,” she breathed, the words a warm, almost inaudible rush against his head. “This is about to get hectic.”
Her weight shifted. He felt the powerful coils of her legs tense, then release as she rose smoothly from her crouch. No groaning floorboard, no scrape of a boot. She was a shadow detaching itself from the wall. The office had one other way out: a grimy, shoulder-width window looking onto a lower section of the rooftop.
Silas’s voice slithered up again, closer now. “The math is simple. You’re a variable. He’s a result. I need to observe the result.” A heavy, dragging sound followed. Something metallic.“You can’t hide him from me. Not now.”
Roy felt Rosa’s jaw tighten. Her hand came up, not to check on him, but to slowly, silently, push the window open. The rusted frame complained with a faint squeal.
She froze.
Downstairs, the dragging stopped. Then, a laugh. It was dry, cracking, utterly devoid of humor. “There you are.”
Rosa moved. She hooked one leg over the sill, her body twisting. Roy was pressed flat, the world tilting violently as she maneuvered herself through the narrow gap. The sweater fabric strained against his face. Then they were out, into the damp, cold evening air, perched on a narrow ledge three stories above a dumpster-strewn alley.
She didn’t hesitate. She jumped, not down, but across, to the adjacent roof of a defunct dry cleaner.
The impact was colossal. Roy’s teeth jarred together, a shockwave traveling up his spine. Rosa landed in a roll, absorbing the force with a grunt he felt more than heard, and came up running.
From his confined space, Roy’s universe was a jostling panorama of rushing sky, the jagged teeth of rooftops, and the thunderous rhythm of her sprint. The wind whipped a freezing gale through the zipper vent. He could see flashes of her braid, a whip of brown against the grey twilight.
A shout echoed from the S-Mart roof behind them. “Running just confirms the data!”
Rosa vaulted a low ventilation unit, her boots scraping on gravel. “He’s faster than he looks,” she panted, not for Roy’s benefit, but stating a cold fact to herself.
She dropped over the side of the dry cleaner’s roof, catching the edge with her hands and letting herself fall the last few feet into the alley below. Her knees bent deeply, the second impact softer but still dizzying for Roy. They were in a canyon of brick and overflowing dumpsters. The reek of rot was immediate and overwhelming.
She chose a direction and ran, not at a full sprint now, but a fast, distance-eating lope. They passed dark doorways and shattered windows. After two blocks, she ducked into the collapsed awning of a boarded-up pizzeria, pressing her back against the cold brick. Her chest heaved, each breath a hurricane in Roy’s tiny world.
She listened. The city was never silent. Wind whistled through broken glass. Something far away clattered. But no footsteps pursued them. Not yet.
After a full minute, she unzipped the top few inches of her shirt. Her giant finger entered the space, and she carefully extracted him, bringing him level with her face in the deep shadows of the awning. Her eyes were wide, the green almost black in the low light, scanning his form.
“You intact?” Her voice was rough from exertion.
“Still in one piece. That was a hell of a ride.”
“He was waiting for us. Or he tracked us.” She frowned, thinking. “The tech. It must have some kind of trace. A residue. Or he just guessed. He’s a rat. He knows all the holes.”
Roy, cradled in her immense hand, looked at the world outside their hiding spot. A discarded newspaper, bleached by sun and rain, was as large as a bed sheet. A single dandelion growing from a crack in the sidewalk was a towering yellow tree. The scale was still a gut-punch.
“We can’t go to Anderson. Not directly. He’ll expect that.” Roy followed the logic, piece by piece. “We need to draw him to a place of our choosing. Somewhere the advantage of his… whatever that thing is… is nullified.”
Rosa nodded slowly. A plan was forming behind her eyes, dark and dangerous. “The river. The old storm drain outflows under the chemistry wing. They’re narrow. Dark. No room for herding walkers. No clear line of sight for that beam.”
“You want to fight him in a sewer.”
“I want to trap a rat in a pipe.” She said it flatly. “We get Amie. We set the bait.”
Roy knew she was right. The cold certainty of it settled in his shrunken bones. To undo this, they needed the device, or the knowledge behind it. That meant getting close to Silas. Roy himself was the only lure he would chase.
“Okay,” Roy said, his tiny voice firm. “But we do it smart. We use the comms. The short-range ones from the campus security office.”
A real, sharp grin touched Rosa’s lips. “Now you’re talking. Let’s go get wired.”
She went to tuck him back into his warm niche, but paused. Her thumb, rough and calloused, stroked gently over the top of his head once. It was over in a second. Then she zipped him in, sealing him once more in the dark, rhythmic safety of her stride as she moved, a specter now, towards the university grounds.
The world became a cacophony of compressed sensation. Each footfall transmitted a complex shockwave through her body, a vibration he felt in his teeth. The scent of her skin, a familiar anchor of salt and effort, was now layered with the alley’s stench of wet brick and decay flooding through the zipper’s mesh. He was a passenger in a flesh-and-bone vehicle navigating a ruined city, its engine her heart, its navigational system a fierce, frightened love.
She moved not with brute speed, but with a predatory patience he’d always admired. He felt her pause, her body going still as stone against a wall. Heard the wet, shuffling drag of a walker thirty feet away, a sound like sandpaper on rotten meat. She waited, a statue, until it passed. Then she was moving again, a swift glide across an open service road, her boots making no sound on the asphalt.
The university’s iron perimeter fence appeared in his narrow view, a monstrous grid of vertical bars. She didn’t climb it. She slid through a gap where the post had rusted and pulled away from the concrete, her gear snagging for a heart-stopping second before she tugged free. They were on campus now. The geography shifted from alien cityscape to haunted familiarity. The looming shadow of the library, the skeletal remains of the student union’s glass façade.
It was a ghost town they knew every inch of.
She avoided the open quad, sticking to the architectural ribs of buildings—maintenance alleys, overgrown shrub lines, the covered walkways between faculties. Roy could almost map it by the sounds: the distinctive echo under the footbridge, the crunch of particular gravel near the math building, the sudden hush of sodden grass in the memorial courtyard.
Her breathing, a steady metronome for the first mile, began to change. The deep, even pulls grew shorter, sharper. The drum of her heart, his constant companion, wasn’t just fast from adrenaline anymore; it had a ragged, skipping quality. The powerful muscles in her neck and shoulders, pressed against him, were corded with a tension that spoke of deep exhaustion, not just alertness.
He felt the exact moment she saw their destination. Her stride hitched, then lengthened with a final, stubborn push. The University Centre was a brutalist slab of concrete, its main doors permanently sealed with welded barricades. She went around back, to the loading dock where delivery trucks once idled. A single service door, scarred and graffiti-tagged, stood slightly ajar.
She stopped, her hand coming up to cover the pocket, muffling the world. Her whisper was a strained gust. “Service entrance. One walker inside, I think. Distant.”
He felt her shift, the slight pressure as she drew a hatchet. A long minute passed. Then a single, solid thud vibrated through her frame. A soft, wet collapse followed. “Clear,” she breathed, and slipped inside.
The basement darkness was absolute, a thick velvety black that even her eyes struggled with. He felt her slow to a careful creep, one hand trailing along a damp concrete wall. The air turned cold and still, smelling of stale water and long-dead electronics. Her footsteps echoed differently now, a hollow, enclosed sound. She was counting doors.
Her exploring fingers found a metal handle, then a keyhole. “Security office,” she whispered, her voice thin with fatigue. From a pouch on her belt, he heard the faint jingle of her lock-pick case. The delicate scritch-scratch of metal on metal was absurdly loud in the silence.
It took too long. Her hands, usually so steady, fumbled. A pick clattered to the floor, the sound exploding in the darkness. She froze, her breath held. No other sound came. After a decade of seconds, she retrieved the tool. Her next attempts were more forceful, less precise. Finally, with a gritty, reluctant clunk, the bolt slid back.
She shouldered the door open, slid through, and immediately turned to lock it from the inside. The heavy deadbolt engaging was the most beautiful sound Roy had heard all day.
The room was pitch black.
Rosa sagged against the door, her entire body slumping with a finality that shook him. The adrenaline dump was immediate and total. Her lungs dragged in air like they were full of sand. For a full minute, she just stood there in the dark, trembling from sheer spent effort.
Then, with a groan that seemed to come from her bones, she pushed off. Her hands fumbled across a desk, knocking over something hollow and plastic. A curse, bitten off. A drawer rasped open. Finally, her fingers found a cylindrical object. A penlight. She clicked it on.
The weak beam cut through the gloom, revealing a tomb of bureaucracy. Desks piled with yellowing incident reports. Monitors coated in dust. A faded map of campus peppered with rusty pins. She swept the light, her movements sluggish, until it landed on a sturdy, grey metal door in the far wall marked ‘COMMUNICATIONS.’
“There,” she said, the word slurred.
She walked to it, each step heavy. This lock was simpler, a basic pin-tumbler. Her hands moved on muscle memory, but the picks shook. It took three tries. The door swung inward on stiff hinges. The comms room was a cramped closet of dead technology. A bank of dead radio sets, a switchboard, and on a lower shelf, a plastic crate labeled ‘SR UNITS.’ Short Range.
She dropped to her knees in front of the crate, a small collapse. The penlight clattered from her fingers, rolling away to cast crazy shadows. She didn’t retrieve it. She just stared at the crate lid, her shoulders slumped, her head bowed.
From his position, Roy could feel the profound weariness radiating from her. It was in the slow, labored rise and fall of her ribs, in the slight tremble in the hand that now came up to unzip him.
The light was faint, but he could see her face clearly as she brought him out. She was pale, her features drawn tight with a hollow-eyed exhaustion that went beyond physical. Dirt and dried sweat streaked her skin. A fresh, shallow cut gleamed on her jawline. Her green eyes, usually so sharp, were glazed and distant.
“Got ’em,” she said, her voice a dry rasp. She gestured weakly at the crate. “Enough for the gang.”
“Rosa,” Roy said, his tiny voice earnest in the dusty silence. “You need to stop. Just for a minute.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not. You’re swaying on your knees. Your hands are shaking. You’re no good to me if you pass out or make a mistake because you’re running on vapor.” He took a step forward on her palm, looking up at her vast, weary face. “Ten minutes. Sit against the wall. Drink some water. Eat a protein bar. Just… stop.”
She blinked slowly, as if processing his words took immense effort. The stubborn defiance he expected didn’t flash in her eyes. That was the most frightening part. She was too tired to argue.
“Silas…” she started, but the protest died.
“Is also running on fumes, probably. And he doesn’t know where we are. This room is a tomb. We’re locked in. It’s the safest we’ve been all day.” He softened his tone. “Please. For me. I can’t… I can’t help if you break.”
The word ‘break’ seemed to land. She let out a long, shuddering sigh, a release of willpower that seemed to shrink her. “Okay,” she whispered. “Okay, little brother.”
She didn’t move to the wall. She simply folded forward, resting her forehead on the edge of the metal shelving unit with a soft thunk. Her breathing, loud in the quiet room, began to even out into something less desperate. Her hand, the one cupping him, lowered slowly to the floor, letting him step off onto the cold linoleum.
“Water,” Roy insisted, a tiny foreman on the grimy floor.
With effort, she shrugged her thin pack off one shoulder, dug out her canteen, and drank. The sound was loud. She took a few gulps, then splashed some on her face, gasping at the cold. She found a protein bar, tore the wrapper with her teeth, and ate mechanically.
Roy watched her, a knot of fear and love tightening in his microscopic chest. He looked from her exhausted form to the crate of comms units, then to the locked door.
They had the tools. They had a plan, or the skeleton of one. But their most vital piece—her—was running on empty. The next move required stealth, speed, and precision. None of which were possible like this.
He walked over to her boot and placed a hand against the scarred leather. “We wait here until you can think straight,” he said, his voice firm. “Not a second less.”