— — —
Chapter 15: North
They had left the pharmacy on Kuhturmstra?e with two full bags and forty-two hours on the integration timer, Igor at Level 2 and the city outside exactly as dangerous as it had been when they went in.
— — —
I. IGOR
They made it back without contact.
Not luck — route selection. Igor had mapped three return paths before they left the building and taken the one with the fewest ground-floor windows and the most covered transitions between streets. Markus followed without asking why they were going the long way. He had stopped asking why Igor did things after the first day, which was the correct adaptation.
The building door opened on the second knock — Jana's knock pattern, two short and one long, established on Day One. Stefan let them in.
Igor checked the interface on the stairs. Actions logged: 67. Integration Period: 41:44 remaining.
Forty-one hours. He had burned forty-seven minutes in the pharmacy. He had expected sixty. He filed the saved time and kept moving.
Jana met them on the landing. She looked at the bags, looked at Igor's face, and said: "Benny hasn't moved from the window since he got back. Barbara's been building toward something all morning."
Igor nodded. He went into the flat, put the pharmacy bag on the kitchen table, and told the room what was in it — antiseptic, bandages, two types of painkillers, gut medication, one course of antibiotics that he gave directly to Stefan. Practical inventory, no editorialising. Stefan catalogued it in the notebook Jana had set aside for medical supplies.
He let them look for thirty seconds. Then: "We need to go out again. Today. Now."
— — —
The room had the reaction he had expected — not refusal, something more complicated. The particular resistance of people who had just received something and were not ready to hear that receiving it was not enough.
"You just got back," Jana said.
"Forty hours left on the timer. We don't know what happens when it closes. We need equipment before it does — not kitchen knives and steel pipes." He looked at Markus. "There's a Hornbach in Plagwitz. Nearly four kilometres." He paused. "And after — Gohlis. We pick up the gear, we come back, we drop it, and we go north."
Markus went still.
"Sternwartenstra?e," Igor said. "Third floor. We have bikes. The route is manageable."
The room was quiet. Markus looked at the table. He looked at his hands on the table. He looked at Igor.
"What kind of equipment," Horst said, from the table, because Horst understood that the conversation happening between Igor and Markus was not one that needed an audience.
"Machetes. Work overalls. Gloves. Rope. Whatever Markus decides we need in the tool section." Igor looked at the room. "Three people. Back before dark."
A silence. Outside the city did what the city did now — nothing audible, which was its own kind of noise.
Benny said, from the window: "I'm coming."
He had not turned around. He was still looking at the street, the notebook open on his knee, the shallow cut on his forearm visible below his pushed-up sleeve where Kathrin had dressed it with two strips of tape and a square of gauze.
"Four kilometres is different from the corner," Igor said.
"I know." Benny turned now. "I went out this morning with Kathrin and came back with seven encounters logged and a map that covers six blocks." He held up the notebook. "The Hornbach is in a different density zone entirely. The data I can gather at that range doesn't exist in these pages yet and we have forty hours to act on it."
Igor looked at him. He thought about the map — rough, drawn from memory, but structured in the way of a mind that organised things automatically. He thought about what Benny did with information once he had it.
"You carry your own weight," Igor said. "You stay in formation. If I say stop, you stop. If I say run, you run. If I say still, you are still. You don't engage unless something comes to you."
"Yes," Benny said.
"Get your coat."
— — —
II. BARBARA
The flat felt different the moment they turned the corner.
Barbara Geisler had been branch director of Allianz Leipzig-Süd for eleven years. She knew what a room felt like when the person running it was in it, and she knew what that same room felt like when he wasn't. It was not about respect — she respected competence, and the Croatian had shown competence, she was not stupid enough to deny that. It was about something else. Something that had been nagging at her since Wednesday morning and that she had not let herself fully name until now, standing at the kitchen window watching the street below and listening to the building settle around her.
Three days ago she had been managing seventeen people. She had performance reviews due. She had a conference in Frankfurt in two weeks, a panel on regional claims processing, a speech she had been revising on her laptop every evening. She had a life with structure and function and a clear account of who she was and what she was for.
The System had taken all of it in nine seconds.
What it had left her was this: a flat that wasn't hers, a group she hadn't chosen, and a plan being run by a man she didn't know. A man who was not from here. Who did not have family here, did not have roots here, who would — when the situation shifted, as situations always shifted — make the decisions that served him. That was not a character flaw. That was simply how people worked. You moved toward your own. You protected what was yours. A man whose own was somewhere else would, eventually, go somewhere else.
The group had been following him because there was no other structure. That was the only reason. And now, for the next five hours, there was no Igor, which meant there was a structure-shaped gap in the room, and Barbara had spent twenty years filling structure-shaped gaps.
She went to find Rolf.
— — —
She called the group together at the kitchen table. Not a confrontation — a conversation. She had done enough performance reviews to know the difference, and to know that most people didn't fight a conversation the way they'd fight a confrontation.
She did not attack Igor. She was careful about this. She said the plan had worked. She said they were alive. She said all of that, and she meant it, and she let it land before she said anything else.
"But we are also strangers," she said. "Most of us didn't know each other three days ago. We came together because we were in the same building when it happened, and we stayed together because it made sense to stay together. That is a good reason." She looked around the table. "It is not a permanent reason."
Horst had his hands flat on the table. He was listening with the specific quality of someone who had already been thinking the same thing.
"We each have lives outside this flat," Barbara said. "People. Places. Things that need us. The integration timer is at forty hours — whatever happens when it closes, we will be better placed if we are where we belong. With the people we belong with." She let this settle. "I am not telling anyone to leave. I am saying it is permitted to ask the question."
"The plan—" Jana started.
"Jana." Barbara turned to her, and here she chose her words with the precision of someone who had been choosing them since yesterday. "Your husband is here. Your daughter — wherever she is — is German. You have reasons to stay in this flat, in this building, in this street. Real ones." She looked at the others. Not at Jana. "Not everyone here has the same reasons."
The room had gone quiet in the way rooms went quiet when something true and uncomfortable had been said in a way that couldn't quite be argued with.
"Meaning what," Jana said. Her voice was level.
"Meaning that a man who came here from somewhere else, who has no family in this city, no history in this city — I'm sure his intentions are good." Barbara spread her hands. "But his priorities are not necessarily our priorities. When this is over — when the timer closes and the world reconfigures itself — he will go where he belongs. That is not a criticism. It is simply true. And I would rather we each make our own decisions about where we belong before that moment comes, rather than after."
She had not said Croatian. She had not said foreigner. She had not needed to.
Stefan looked at the floor. He said, quietly: "My mother lives on Brandvorwerkstra?e. She's seventy-one and she's alone."
Dieter from the third floor cleared his throat. "Margit's parents are in Gohlis-Süd."
Horst said nothing for a moment. Then: "My medication is at my flat. Two streets. Metformin and a statin. I've been without them for two days."
Barbara looked at Jana and said nothing further. She didn't need to. Jana understood exactly what had just happened — not an argument, which Jana could have won, but a permission structure, each person finding their own reason underneath it, the reasons making each other easier.
"The firearms," Barbara said, returning to practicalities with the efficiency of a woman closing out an agenda item. "I am going to look for a police vehicle. Rolf, Felix, Petra — with me." She stood. "Anyone else is welcome."
— — —
III. JANA
They left in stages, which was worse than if they had left all at once.
Barbara first, with Rolf and Felix and Petra — Petra moving carefully on the ankle Stefan had wrapped that morning, not looking back. Then Stefan, pulling his jacket on in the hallway with the focused attention of a man trying not to think too much about what he was doing. He stopped at the door and said "I'll come back when I've checked on her" and Jana said "I know" and he left and she did not think he would come back.
Dieter and Margit from the third floor. Margit had a bag already packed, which meant she had packed it this morning or possibly yesterday. They nodded at Jana on the way out and Dieter said something about making contact later that didn't mean anything.
Horst was last. He stood in the doorway with his jacket buttoned and the wind-up watch on his wrist — Markus's watch, which he had apparently borrowed without anyone noticing — and looked at Jana.
"Two streets," he said. "I'll come back before dark."
"I know," Jana said.
He nodded and left.
The door closed.
Thomas looked at the inventory notebook on the counter. He looked at Jana. His face had the expression of a man who had very recently understood something and was not sure what to do with the understanding.
"Fourteen people this morning," he said.
"Four now," Jana said. "Kathrin is in the back room. Dr. Pfeiffer is downstairs."
She went to the window. Outside: the street, the dead cars, the bicycle locked to the lamppost for a child who was not here. She looked north in the direction Igor had gone and then just at the street, which didn't change.
Under unknowns on the inventory, near the bottom: Mia — 42 hours remaining. She had written it herself. She could not look at it yet. She didn't.
— — —
IV. IGOR
The Baumarkt was in Plagwitz — a Hornbach, the large-format kind. Igor knew it from before. He had cycled past it on the way to training more than once, had noted the car park and the loading bays the way he noted most things, without deciding yet whether the information was useful.
It was useful now.
The distance from Jana's building was nearly four kilometres. On foot, moving carefully, avoiding creatures, taking detours around blocked streets — ninety minutes each way, minimum. Igor had told Jana this before they left.
On the way out they passed a sporting goods shop — an Intersport, on Industriestra?e, the sliding doors dead and standing open the width of someone's shoulder. Igor looked at it and stopped.
"Ten minutes," he said.
— — —
The bikes were in the ground floor cycling section — a row of hybrid city bikes, the kind ridden by Leipzig commuters who wanted to get from A to B without thinking about it. Igor walked the row and pulled out three. Tested each: brakes, gears, tyre pressure. The first was soft in the front tyre. He put it back and took the next.
Markus came down the aisle and looked at the bikes and said nothing.
"Cuts the transit time in half," Igor said. "Changes the encounter math — less time on any given street, faster route changes, more range."
"I know," Markus said. He was already pulling a bike out of the rack, squeezing the brakes, checking the chain.
— — —
Igor went upstairs. The archery section was at the back of the upper floor, between fishing and climbing. Three recurve bows on a rack — entry-level, the kind sold to people who wanted to try the sport before committing. He pulled the middle one, read the draw weight marked on the limb — twenty-eight pounds. He found the stringing instructions on a card attached to the rack, read them once, braced the bow against his shin and strung it. Drew it slowly, feeling where the resistance lived — across the back, not the arm. Held two seconds. Released.
He had never shot a bow before. But twenty-eight pounds was a weight he could manage, and silent was silent.
He took it and the one beside it — thirty pounds. He found the arrow stand: fibreglass shafts, field points, two dozen to a tube. He took three tubes. He looked at the broadheads on the shelf below — screw-on hunting tips, four-blade — and took two packets. Field points for practice. Broadheads for use.
Benny appeared at the top of the stairs, looked at the bow in Igor's hands, looked at the rack. Picked up the thirty-pound bow and turned it over.
"Neither of us knows how to use these," he said. Not a question.
"No," Igor said.
Benny looked at the bow for another moment. Put it under his arm and took a tube of arrows.
— — —
Igor went through the fishing and camping section on the way back down. He took braided fishing line — 50kg breaking strain, two hundred metres on a small reel, thin enough to be nearly invisible. He did not know yet what for. He took it anyway.
— — —
They were back outside in twelve minutes with three bikes, two bows, arrows, fishing line, and moved faster through the grey November streets than they had moved since Wednesday morning. Teddy was in Igor's backpack, the compartment half-open, head low, eyes moving across every roofline they passed.
— — —
The car park at the Hornbach was empty of people and full of the specific debris of interrupted commerce — a trolley on its side, contents spilled; a flatbed cart with two bags of cement still on it, going nowhere; a child's hand-drawn sign in crayon taped to the entrance doors that said BITTE KEINE MONSTER in large uneven letters, which had not worked but which Igor looked at for a moment before going inside.
The sliding doors were dead like everything else. He and Markus pulled them apart manually.
The interior was dim, lit by November daylight through the roof panels, enough to see by. The smell of the place was unchanged — timber, paint, machine oil, the specific industrial neutrality of a large hardware store that had been selling the same categories of product for thirty years. The shelves were intact. Nobody had been here yet, or nobody had thought to come.
"Right," Markus said, in the tone of a man who had spent a decade in construction and was finally in an environment that made complete sense to him.
"One hour," Igor said. "List."
They split. Markus went for tools — he knew exactly where they were, moved through the store with the navigational confidence of someone who had spent years in places like this, and Igor trusted him to make the right calls without oversight. Igor went for bladed tools and protective gear. Benny went for camping and survival supplies and had apparently been planning this in his head since the morning, because he was already moving.
— — —
The machete was in the garden section, between the pruning saws and the brush cutters. Not a weapon — a garden tool, marketed for clearing undergrowth, forty centimetres of steel with a rubberised grip and a weight that was honest without being impractical. He held it and made two slow practice swings in the aisle, reading the balance.
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Better than the knife for open engagement. The knife was still the right tool for close work, for precision, for the neck junction at range zero. The machete was for when precision was already gone and distance was the variable.
He took it. He found a second one and set it aside for Benny.
He found the work gloves and took six pairs — thick leather, rated for chainsaw work, covering the wrist. The creatures' limbs had hard leading edges. Bare hands against those edges was a fast way to lose the use of a hand.
The overalls he found in the workwear section. Three sets — Markus's size, his own, and one for Benny — heavy canvas, covering from ankle to collar. Not armour. But a layer between skin and whatever the creatures did, which was more than they'd had yesterday.
He looked at the steel-toed boots for a long moment.
He thought about every movement he had made in the last two days in which mobility had been the deciding variable — moving sideways into the space a limb had vacated, stepping under the angle of an attack, getting up fast from one knee. He thought about the weight of steel-toed boots and what that weight cost over an hour of movement through a city.
He left the boots. He took three pairs of thick wool socks instead.
He found a knife set in the workwear section — a roll of six fixed-blade utility knives in a canvas pouch, the kind sold to tradesmen. Not elegant but properly made, full tang, rubber handles. He took the whole roll. Extra blades for the group. Backups for when the primary was lost or broken, which was a question of when, not if.
— — —
He found Benny in the camping section with a frame backpack open on the floor, rope, a head torch, waterproof matches, two emergency foil blankets, and a folding saw already inside it.
Markus arrived at the same moment — a full head taller than Igor and built like a man who had spent ten years on actual construction sites, the kind of mass that came from decades of real work. He was carrying a fireman's axe over one shoulder — short-handled, single-head, the weight of it balanced for swing rather than leverage. In his other hand, two small camp axes, the kind sold for splitting kindling on hiking trips. He set them all down and looked at Benny.
Then he looked at Igor. Then at the camping aisle. He was calculating something.
"The boy is too light to take an impact and stay standing," Markus said. He was not being unkind — he was stating structural facts in the way of a man who assessed load-bearing problems for a living. Benny was 178cm but lean, 68kg at most, no physical training behind it. "He needs reach. Real reach."
"I know," Igor said.
"Then he doesn't need a machete. He needs a spear."
— — —
Markus went to the paint and cleaning aisle and came back with a two-metre aluminium extension pole — the kind sold for window squeegees and floor mops, threaded at both ends, lightweight, hollow, rated for repeated load. He weighed it in one hand and passed it to Benny.
Benny took it and immediately understood the principle: two metres of aluminium between himself and a creature was two metres that creature had to cross before it reached him.
"Cold chisel," Markus said. "Tool section. Ten minutes."
He came back with a 25mm cold chisel — hardened steel, pointed at one end, designed for splitting masonry and concrete. He drilled a pilot hole through the tip of the aluminium pole with a hand drill, pushed the chisel shank into the end until it seated, then ran a machine screw and nut through both, rattled tight with a socket wrench from the fastener display. He mixed a small amount of two-part epoxy from the adhesives section and packed it into the join.
"Five minutes for initial set. Don't use it until the epoxy's done."
He wrapped the grip end in rubber handlebar tape from the bike section — two full lengths, overlapping. He wrapped the join in three layers of fibreglass tape, compressing the epoxy, reinforcing the connection from the outside.
He handed it to Benny.
Benny held it at his side, tip forward. The chisel point came to just below Igor's eye level.
"Two-handed," Markus said. "Your back hand drives. Your front hand guides. You push through — commit the weight. If you're half-committed it'll deflect."
Benny adjusted his grip, back hand at the base, front hand at the midpoint. Made one slow push at the air. Got the feel of it.
Igor handed him the second machete. "When the distance closes and the spear is too long."
Benny put it through a belt loop without ceremony.
— — —
Igor put the knives from the workwear roll in his own pack, kept one on his belt. He looked at the store around him and thought about what was missing.
He was 70kg. Low centre of gravity, ten years of football balance — hard to knock down, fast to recover. He moved into gaps rather than creating them. What he had was not reach but footwork, and footwork worked best when there was something to work around. The machete extended him by forty centimetres. The knife was for when even that was too long.
He thought about fire.
"We need incendiaries," he said, to no one in particular.
Markus looked up from the axe he was checking. "How do you mean."
"Something we can throw. Swarm situation — too many to engage individually. Something that changes the geometry of the street."
Markus was quiet for a moment. He looked at the paint section. He looked at the camping section. Something moved behind his eyes — the calculation of a man who had spent years on building sites where flammable materials were everywhere and you learned early what happened when you got them wrong.
"Paint thinner," Markus said. "Glass bottle. Fuel-soaked wick. You light it, you throw it, the glass breaks and the fuel ignites on contact." He paused. "I saw it done once. A site in Connewitz, some idiots with a dispute. The principle is simple. The fuel on its own is too thin — it spreads and evaporates before the fire takes. You need something to thicken it."
"EPS foam," Benny said, from the camping aisle. He had been listening. "Expanded polystyrene — dissolve it in the solvent and it gels. It'll stick to whatever it hits." He appeared in the aisle entrance. "The ratio is roughly one part foam to three parts solvent. I read it somewhere. Home chemistry."
Igor looked at Markus.
"Nine," Markus said. "Three each. Twenty minutes."
"Do it."
— — —
They worked in the paint section, Markus directing. He sent Benny for the EPS foam from the building materials aisle — rigid insulation sheets — and Igor for glass containers: jars of wood stain and varnish from the finishing section, emptied and rinsed, and three original solvent bottles reduced to two-thirds full, leaving an air gap.
"The air gap matters," Markus said. "Without it the flame can't travel down the wick to the fuel. You need space for the vapour to move."
Benny poured solvent into the bucket. Broke foam over it. They watched it dissolve — faster than expected, softening into the liquid in long stringy threads, thickening as it absorbed until the mixture moved slowly, translucent and faintly yellowish, smelling of solvent and something synthetic underneath.
"More foam," Markus said, watching the viscosity. "It needs to behave like syrup, not water. You want it to cling when it hits."
Igor stirred with a length of dowel from the timber section. When Markus said stop, he stopped.
The wicks were cotton twine from the garden section — Benny's suggestion — doubled and twisted, pushed through a hole made in each cap with a nail and a rubber mallet. Tight enough to hold, loose enough to soak. Benny soaked each wick in leftover solvent before capping it, wrapped the neck in electrical tape.
Markus picked up a finished bottle. Held it at arm's length, reading the weight and balance.
"You throw it hard," he said. "Overarm. Like a stone into water. Aim for the pavement, not the creature — you want the bottle to shatter on impact. The burning fuel spreads. It changes the space they can move through, which is the point."
He set it down.
"You do not throw these unless you have a clear exit," he said. "Behind you, not through the fire."
They packed three each into the backpacks, upright, wrapped in dust cloths.
— — —
Benny was sealing the last Molotov when he stopped.
He looked at the cotton twine in his hand. He looked at his backpack, where the arrows from the Intersport were rolled in a tube beside the spear.
He did not say anything for a moment.
"The arrows," he said. "If we wrap cotton around the shaft behind the head and soak it in the leftover solvent — the bow is silent. The range is twenty metres. The fire travels with it."
Igor looked at him.
"How many arrows do we have," Igor said.
"Forty-eight field points. Twelve broadheads."
"Make six," Igor said. "Field points. Save the broadheads."
Benny nodded and went to find the cotton twine roll.
— — —
— — —
Markus had disappeared into the building materials section twenty minutes ago and had not come back.
Igor found him at the polycarbonate sheeting display — the kind sold for greenhouse glazing and patio roof panels, stacked in clear sheets of varying thickness. Markus had pulled out a 6mm sheet and was holding it at arm's length, reading the flex of it, tapping it with one knuckle.
"Makrolon," Markus said, without looking up. "Polycarbonate. We used it for site safety screens on the Lindenauer project — a worker took a full ricochet off one of these at three metres and walked away." He set it down and looked at Igor. "It is what they make riot shields from."
"How do you cut it."
"Score and snap for straight lines. Utility knife, steel rule, three passes. For curves you need a jigsaw but we don't need curves." He had already pulled a steel rule from his jacket pocket — it had been in there since the tool section, apparently — and had a utility knife in his other hand. "Sixty by fifty centimetres. That covers shoulder to hip when you hold it in front. Light enough to carry on the back of a pack."
He did not ask permission. He measured, scored three clean lines, and snapped the sheet along each one with a crack that echoed through the dim store. Then he did it once more — but the second sheet he cut larger. Eighty by sixty centimetres instead of sixty by fifty.
Two shields in fourteen minutes. The smaller one for Igor. The larger for himself.
He drilled the strap holes with a hand drill he had taken from the tool section — two holes near the top edge, two near the middle — and threaded rope through each pair. The upper pair formed the forearm strap, tied off with a knot he made without thinking. The lower pair formed the grip, a shorter loop sized for a closed fist.
"Pull it toward you," he said, handing the smaller one to Igor. "The angle matters — you want it slightly angled out at the bottom, not flat. Deflects better."
Igor put his arm through the forearm strap and gripped the lower loop. The shield was lighter than expected — perhaps eight hundred grams. It sat in front of his left forearm and left his right hand entirely free.
"The creatures lead with their front limbs," Igor said. "The edges."
"Yes," Markus said. "So you stop the edge with this and put the knife in with that." He fitted the larger shield onto his own forearm — the riot-shield size, covering from wrist to shoulder when raised. He pulled against the strap once. "Or the machete."
Benny looked at the remaining polycarbonate offcuts on the floor.
"Nothing for me?" he said.
"You have two hands on the spear," Markus said. "A shield means dropping it. The spear is your shield."
Benny considered this. He nodded once and did not mention it again.
— — —
The helmets were in the safety equipment aisle — white construction hard hats, the standard ratchet-adjustment type, stacked in a column of eight. Markus took three. He also took three face visors — the full polycarbonate shields sold for angle grinder work, clear, with the flip-down mechanism and the standard headband attachment.
"These clip directly onto the hard hat brim," he said, demonstrating: a slot on the visor's headband bracket engaged with the hard hat's brim channel with a click. "They're designed for it. Standard DIN fitting." He lowered the visor. His face disappeared behind clear polycarbonate. He raised it again. "You flip it down when you close. You flip it up to see distance."
Igor put his on. The hard hat sat well on the ratchet setting, the visor resting up above his sightline. He lowered it. The world went slightly amber — the polycarbonate had a faint tint — but his field of vision was full, better than he had expected.
"Neck," Markus said. He had already pulled a roll of fibreglass tape from the cart — left over from the Molotov preparations. He cut lengths of it and folded them into thick pads, then taped them around the collar of his overalls, bridging the gap between the overall collar and the hard hat's lower edge. Not comfortable. Not elegant. It covered the exposed skin at the throat and the back of the neck.
He looked at Igor.
Igor turned around and let Markus do his collar.
Benny stood still for the same process without being asked.
When Markus was done he stepped back and looked at the three of them — hard hats, visors up, overalls, machetes in hand, fibreglass at the collars.
"Right," he said, in a tone that had nothing else in it. He picked up his axe.
— — —
Portability: Igor's shield strapped flat against the back of his pack. Markus's riot shield was too large for that — he carried it on his forearm and did not put it down. The hard hats they wore. Visors up until they needed them down.
— — —
They were at the entrance loading the backpacks onto the bikes, Markus already outside, when Teddy went rigid in the backpack.
Not a sound — just the sudden absence of movement from something that had been moving. Igor felt it against his back. He looked at the cat. Teddy's eyes were fixed on the fire exit at the far end of the store, ears flat, every muscle locked.
Igor had the machete out before he looked at the exit himself.
The creatures came through it a second later.
Five of them. Not the small six-limbed type — the larger variant, iridescent, moving with the unhurried quality of creatures that had been inside a building for some time and had found nothing and were now resolving this. They spread as they entered. Not coordinated — but not entirely accidental. The gap between the outermost two was twelve metres.
"Bikes down," he said. "We pick them up after."
Markus came back through the entrance, riot shield on his left forearm, fireman's axe in his right hand. Benny pressed to the left wall where Igor had positioned him, spear forward in both hands, visor down.
Igor lowered his own visor. The world went faintly amber.
— — —
The first came straight at Igor. He let it come to four metres, stepped left, and found the neck junction on the first swing — the machete's reach doing what the knife never had, clean and decisive. It went down. The second went for Markus — the axe catching it across the front segment, staggering it, Markus following the momentum into a second blow before it recovered.
The third and fourth spread wide simultaneously, one left, one right. Igor understood immediately: the centre pair drawing attention while the edges found the angle. He had four seconds before the left one reached Benny.
"Benny — incoming left."
He did not watch. He committed to the right-side creature, which had oriented on him the moment he moved, closed the distance and hit it hard across the front joint to disrupt the balance, then found the junction on the follow-through.
From the left wall: a sound. Not a shout — something shorter, sharper. The involuntary exhale of a person doing something physically extreme for the first time. Then the sound of a machete finding its target.
Then silence.
He turned.
Benny was against the left wall where Igor had put him, one hand still braced on the shelving, breathing in the controlled way of a person managing a strong physiological response with the part of their brain that was still working. The creature was on the floor in front of him. The spear was on the floor too — he had dropped it when the distance closed and the machete was in his right hand. His eyes were moving — not panicked, the other thing. Cataloguing.
There was a fresh tear across the left sleeve of his jacket, the fabric parted cleanly. Not deep. The forearm underneath was unmarked. He had moved just enough.
He did not say anything. He looked back up.
The fifth had circled during the engagement and was moving along the back wall toward the gap between Igor and Markus.
Igor moved to close the angle, let it commit, and finished it.
He stood in the entrance and looked at five dead creatures and thought: yesterday this would have been a different story entirely.
Teddy had not moved during the fight. He was still in the backpack, still rigid, eyes tracking the last creature's position even after it stopped moving. He stayed that way for another ten seconds. Then something released in him and he sat back and began cleaning his face with one paw, which was either composure or indifference and Igor had not yet decided which.
The interface appeared without being called.
LEVEL 3
Actions logged: 89. Integration Period: 38:55 remaining.
Thirty-eight hours. He filed it and looked at the others.
Markus was standing with one hand flat against the wall, not leaning — just grounded, the way a man stood when something had moved through him and he was waiting for it to finish. His eyes were on the dead creatures. Then he blinked and looked at his own interface, which Igor could not see but could read in the quality of his stillness afterward.
"Level 2," Markus said, without inflection. He picked up the fireman's axe and checked the head.
Benny had his back against the left wall and was already writing in the small secondary notebook he had apparently been carrying in his jacket pocket all afternoon without mentioning it. He wrote for a moment, stopped, looked at something Igor couldn't see. His expression did not change exactly — it shifted. The way a calculation shifted when a new variable resolved.
"Level 2," he said, to the notebook more than to anyone. He kept writing.
"What are you writing," Igor said.
"The spread pattern on entry," Benny said, without looking up. "The two that went wide — thirty degrees from the centre axis, both times. Same angle as the pair Kathrin and I watched on Karl-Heine-Stra?e this morning." He looked up. "It's not random."
Igor looked at him. Thirty-eight hours left on the timer. Benny at Level 2 now, the threshold closing. He said nothing and picked up his bike.
— — —
V. RETURN
They came into Jana's street at pace and Igor saw the building from half a block out — door closed, windows intact — and registered this as neutral.
Jana opened the door before they reached it. She looked at the three of them, at the bags on the bikes, at the machetes, at Benny's expression.
She looked at Igor and said: "Barbara called a meeting after you left. Most of them are gone."
Igor came inside. He looked at the room — Thomas at the table, Kathrin in the back hallway, nobody else. He looked at Jana.
She told him the way she told things. Sequentially. No editorialising. The meeting. The structure of it — Barbara framing it as a question of belonging, of priorities, of who was fighting for what. Stefan's mother. Horst's medication. Dieter and Margit. The way each person leaving had made the next one easier.
She told him what Barbara had said about him. She used Barbara's words, not her own, because she had not yet found her own words for it that she could say out loud at a kitchen table.
When she finished, Igor was quiet for a moment.
"She's not wrong about the firearms," he said. "She doesn't know what she doesn't know yet."
He looked at the room. Thomas had the inventory notebook open and was not pretending to read it. Kathrin had appeared in the doorway at some point during Jana's account and had stayed there.
"We drop the gear and we go north," Igor said. He looked at Markus. "Twenty minutes."
Markus nodded once. He put his bag down and began unpacking it onto the table with the deliberate efficiency of a man who had been waiting all day for this part.
Jana looked at the window. The light outside had the quality of late November afternoon — not dark yet, but committed to getting there. An hour left at most.
"You're not coming back tonight," she said. Not a question.
"Probably not," Igor said. "Four kilometres there. We assess the building, find Helga, find a defensible position. If the building is clear we stay until morning." He paused. "Riding back in the dark is a different calculation. No street lights, no cars — the city is black. We'd be moving blind in a way the creatures aren't."
Jana nodded. She had already worked this out — Igor could see it in the way she asked, which was the way of someone confirming rather than discovering.
Markus had stopped unpacking. He was looking at the table.
"If we stay," he said, not quite to anyone, "we can bring Helga back in the morning. With whatever neighbours she has."
"Yes," Igor said.
Thomas said, from the table: "How many people can that building hold."
"We don't know yet," Igor said.
A silence. Thomas looked at Jana. Jana looked at the inventory on the counter — the two pages of supplies, the column Thomas had added that morning. The numbers were not comfortable for four people. They were considerably worse for eight or ten.
"We'll figure that out in the morning," Igor said. "Tonight we just find them."
Jana picked up the inventory notebook. She looked at Igor for a moment — the specific look of a woman running a calculation she had already finished and was choosing not to share.
"Go," she said. "Kathrin is here. Thomas and I have managed two nights already."
Igor looked at Kathrin in the doorway. She gave a small nod — not reassurance, just confirmation. She was still there. She was not going anywhere.
— — —
They left the building as the afternoon light was failing, the November sky the flat grey of a day that had never fully decided to be bright. Three bikes. Igor with the machete in the side strap, Teddy in the backpack, the compartment half-open. Markus with the axe. Benny with the notebook and the machete and the focused expression of a man who had killed something for the first time three hours ago and had not yet finished processing it but had decided to finish processing it later.
The city was quiet around them as they rode. North on Industriestra?e, then Karl-Heine-Kanal, then following the canal northeast toward the Elster and the bridges over it, the city opening up from the dense residential streets of Schleu?ig into wider roads and larger spaces. Leipzig in November, stripped of its noise, stripped of its movement — the bones of a city visible for the first time, the geometry underneath the life.
Markus rode ahead at the junction where Menckestra?e met the main road and turned right without needing to be told, the way a man turned onto a street he had turned onto a thousand times before.
Igor followed. He watched Markus's back — the set of his shoulders, the specific quality of a man riding toward something he had been not-riding-toward for two and a half days. He did not say anything.
The buildings on Sternwartenstra?e were Gründerzeit, four storeys, stone facades with the solid ornate plainness of late nineteenth century Leipzig. Markus stopped in front of one of them and stood with his bike and looked up at the third floor.
The window had a light in it. A candle, probably. It moved.
Markus looked at Igor.
"Third floor," Igor said. "We go up. We assess. If it's clear we knock — and if the building is manageable we stay until morning."
Markus looked at him. Something moved in his expression — not surprise, just the registering of a decision that had already been made for him in the best possible way.
They locked the bikes to the nearest lamppost and went in.
— — —
— — —