Episode 26 — Scattered
The drone’s shadow crossed the alley a full second before its rotor whine reached them, and James froze mid-stride on the rooftop ledge with one boot still hanging over open air.
“Down,” he breathed, and dropped flat against the gravel roofing, Celeste and Milo folding down beside him a heartbeat later, all three of them going still as the shadow slid slow and deliberate across the brick below.
It hunted the alley for a long ten seconds — camera housing rotating, searching — and then drifted on, unhurried, its whine fading toward the next block over. James let his breath go slowly, counting the silence the way his father had once taught him to count waves.
“Three days,” Milo whispered, checking his tablet’s dead battery indicator for the tenth time that morning out of pure habit. “Three days and they’re still running patrols this deep. They really want you back.”
“They want confirmation,” James said, low. “A body, alive or not. Doesn’t matter to them which.”
They’d been moving since the safehouse fell — rooftops when they could manage it, alleys when they couldn’t, sleeping in shifts, eating whatever Milo’s scavenged contacts could still spare. No clinic. No Naomi. No Ivy’s steady presence at their backs. Just the three of them, and a set of coordinates burned into James’s memory from a dead man’s data drive, and the plain, grinding discipline of not stopping long enough for anyone to catch up.
The rooftop ahead of them split into two routes — a narrow fire escape switchbacking down into a courtyard thick with cover, or an exposed ledge crossing directly toward a service bridge that would cut two full blocks off their route if it held their weight.
“Fire escape,” Milo said automatically. “Less exposure.”
“No.” Celeste was already studying the ledge, eyes narrowed, reading the angle of the morning light against the bridge’s rusted supports with a focus James hadn’t seen in her before this week. “That drone’s patrol loop just went east. It won’t circle back this way for at least four minutes. The ledge is faster, and faster matters more than cover right now.”
Milo looked to James, waiting for the tie-break that would have automatically gone to him a month ago.
James looked at Celeste instead, and something in her certainty — earned, reasoned, entirely her own — settled the decision before he’d even opened his mouth. “She’s right. Ledge. Move.”
They crossed it fast, low, and made the service bridge with a full minute to spare before the drone’s whine reappeared, distant, exactly where Celeste had predicted it would be. James didn’t say anything about it. He simply filed it away, the same way he filed everything worth remembering, and let the small, quiet fact of her being right settle into the growing shape of who she’d become.
They were three rooftops further on when the Weaver found them.
It came from below, not above, vaulting up a drainpipe with a speed that ate the distance before Milo’s warning shout finished leaving his throat, and James spun in time to meet it with a strike that bought them exactly enough space to run instead of fight.
“Go, go—” He shoved Milo toward the next rooftop gap, Celeste already moving ahead of them both, and the chase that followed had none of the standing brawls James had survived before — just motion, relentless and vertical, gaps leapt without time to measure them properly, fire escapes taken two rungs at a time with the Weaver’s claws scraping metal close behind at every turn.
“Left — the laundry line roof, there’s a gap we can make and it can’t—” Celeste’s voice, sharp and certain, cutting through the wind, and James trusted the call completely, adjusting mid-stride to follow her lead instead of his own instinct.
They hit the gap in a scattered sprint, clearing it by inches, and the Weaver launched after them without hesitation, closing the distance in the air itself, and James understood in the half-second before it landed that outrunning it across open roofline wasn’t going to work much longer.
“The fire escape ladder — kick it loose when I say,” he called to Milo, already calculating the angle, and Milo’s hands found the rusted bolts holding the nearest ladder to its housing, working them desperately as James turned to buy the last few seconds they needed.
The Weaver came down on the ladder rungs a step behind Celeste, claws finding purchase exactly where a hand should have been, and James swung his pack off his shoulder in one motion, hurling it directly into the thing’s face to buy the half-second Milo needed.
“NOW—”
Milo kicked the ladder’s mounting bolt free, and the whole structure groaned loose from the wall, swinging outward under the Weaver’s weight with James’s supply bag still tangled in its claws, and the thing went down with it in a shriek of tearing metal, crashing three stories into the alley below in a heap of rust and canvas and scattered, ruined supplies.
No blood. Just the bag, gone, and three sets of lungs burning as they scrambled the last stretch of rooftop to solid, unpursued ground.
“We lost the water filters,” Milo said, breathless, staring down at the wreckage. “And the last of the rations.”
“We lost a bag,” James said. “Not each other. I’ll take that trade every time.”
They found the coordinates an hour later, tucked into a quiet residential block that had clearly burned early in the outbreak and never been touched since — storefronts collapsed, ash still faintly visible in corners the rain hadn’t reached, and at the center of it, a sign, half-melted but still legible, hanging crooked over a doorway that had once led somewhere safe.
Free Clinic — Walk-Ins Welcome.
James stared at it, the plain, ordinary kindness of those old painted words sitting strange against the ruin surrounding them, and something in his chest tightened at the thought of what Kwame might have meant them to find here.
Then he saw the boot prints.
Fresh, pressed clean into the ash drifted across the threshold, leading in a single deliberate line through the collapsed doorway and into the dark beyond — recent, purposeful, and entirely unaccounted for.
“Someone’s already inside,” Celeste said quietly, coming to stand beside him.
James didn’t answer right away. He simply studied the prints, reading them the only way he knew how now — not with fear, not anymore, just the plain, watchful readiness of someone who had long since stopped expecting anything on this side of the world to be simple.
“Only one way to find out who,” he said, and stepped through the ruined doorway first.
