A chill had settled into the air and a blanket of stars lit the sky and the thin spiral of smoke rising from a single house on the tiny block. True eyed it as they got closer, weighing the possibilities. Sleeping inside was safest, but that village was toy-sized and if they had to break in the noise would echo. They didn't want to attract attention from whoever was making camp.

The shadows welcomed them into the forest. Leaf-heavy branches blotting out the stars and the sliver of smoke. Twigs crunched underfoot, for once they cursed their steel toes. There really was no sneaking in these things.

Radio crept along to their right, a thing of shadows itself.

"What do you think?" They turned to Radio, who squinted at the coils of smoke. A shrug. "Helpful."

A light kick in the ankle.

"If you break my leg, I'll die in these mountains, and you'll have no one to hound."

An evil grin creeped over Radio's face, and it mimed eating a corncob. True's eyes widened a fraction.

"You wouldn't." But the look Radio gave them didn't fill them with confidence. Neither did the fact they hadn't seen it eat anything except licorice the entire hike. It caught them staring and licked its lips theatrically. Spooky little shit. They shot it a scowl and pulled ahead.

A wet squelch interrupted their less-than-silent sneaking. Gore splattered the underbrush, red dumped out on the earth from a cavernous open abdomen. Dark skin. A small pendant. True recognized the man from the gas station.

Damn, they wondered if the other two were nearby, too. Faint wisps of steam rose from the eviscerated man. He hadn't been dead long. True frowned at him, something wasn't right about that picture. They crouched to get a better look, running a finger over the slippery flayed abdominal skin. The cut was too smooth to be animal.

What the hell.

His guts had been turned into a soup bowl. All the thick tubes branching from purpled organs had been sliced open and sluiced the last remnants of his blood into a pool cupped between his hips and ribs. They were no doctor, but they were pretty sure organs weren't supposed to free float.

Radio tapped their shoulder. Brow furrowed, it waved its hand over its temple, then point to the dead man.

A fresh welt puffed up his face from the ridge of his brow to the corner of his eye. True squinted at it, tilting the man's chin to catch the gauzy moonlight better.

"Does that look like a lion to you?" Apprehension thrummed in their veins as they unclipped their shovel. Habitually, they jammed the tip into the soft red earth. The first scoop of dirt out of the thousands it took to dig a grave.

A piercing wail split the night air. True stopped dead. The scream could have belonged to a fox, or a coyote, except they knew the dead man had been travelling with a kid. They threw eyes first to the village where the scream had risen from, then to Radio.

The wailing had cut off by the time they reached the village. The crunch of metal striking wood led them to the one house in the entire village with smoke curling out of its chimney. The front door's lock had been mangled, someone banged around inside. True skirted the house, clomping into the backyard and straight into the path of a short woman with a heavy bat.

She cracked them between the eyes, knocking them back with a shower expletives. They had the good sense to keep peddling backwards in spite of the instant, blinding migraine. Got the shovel up, barricade. Blinked away the fireworks in the nick of time to see the bat careening down on them, Otsana's white streak glowing in the moonlight at the other end of it. Her bat struck their shovel but the blow glanced, ripped off its trajectory.

Radio slammed Otsana into the side of the house with an audible whud. With a quick twist she'd cracked the butt of her bat into its jaw. She was fast, they'd give her that. They flipped their shovel to fill the gap. For once the odds were in their favour despite the blood trickling down that face. Two against one, and Radio knew how to fight.

That thought came a second too soon. Cold hands shoved them from behind. Their forehead scraped off rough splintered fencing. They whirled, shovel whipping. The blade winged the shover, a narrow miss. And who stood before them but a greasy, quivering cook.

"Jonesy."' The snarl dropped out of them, blood running into their scar, over their teeth. They could practically see the chill run the course of Jonesy's spine. He hadn't expected to see them any more than they'd expect to see him. Blanching, he crammed his fingers into his pits, turned, bolted.

A crunch and the clink of glass shattering dragged True back to the original fight. They spit blood and returned to the backyard to see Otsana smashing her heel on a black lump and launching it through a basement window.

The clatter of Radio landing smothered their approach. They cracked her clean on the back of the head, returning that static she'd gifted them earlier. She crumpled, and they wasted no time whacking her again. Stripping the hem off her shirt, they looped it about her wrists and ankles. Shoddy workmanship, at best. They just needed it to stall her until they came back.

They ducked to peer into the basement. The narrow window sat too high on the basement wall, and the moonlight shone too soft to break the darkness inside.

"Are you dead?" True whispered.

The tips of Radio's fingers poked over the ledge.

"Meet me upstairs."

The back door was locked. No key under the doormat, but a rock solved that issue. A quick jiggle and slap in the dark and they were in.

It was as cool in the house as it was outdoors. A hum filled the air, but not the acrid sting of smoke. The ghostly spiral above the house wasn't from a fire, then. Mud marked a path on the kitchen tile from whoever had been stomping around earlier. The counters were clear, and the glass-faced cabinets had been stuffed full of red and white packets. True skimmed the labels.

Who the hell needed four thousand blood testing kits? The sink was spotless, suspiciously so.

The humming seemed louder on one side of the kitchen, and True crept toward it, hoping to find what, exactly, they weren't sure. A basement door would be nice. They clipped the edge od a dingy yellow fridge and stopped to shine their lighter over it. No graffiti, no paper, but smears of crusted brown decorated the handle.

What were the chances?

Squoosh.

Light. Now that was terrifying.

A single, bare bulb cast yellow light on the kitchen from the depths of a cold fridge. Unnatural and sickly, cold like the air all around it. Nothing like the oily light from the kerosene lamps or the warm flicker of firelight that True had grown accustomed to. It burned afterimages on their retinas. Talk about spooky. Nobody used electricity anymore, half the grids in the country had been shut down when the power companies ran out of employees, the other half were lost to damage and disuse.

"What the hell,"' they whispered.

Small coolers filled the bottom two shelves. All red and white. All marked with a letter and a plus or minus symbol. A tray sat on the top shelf, filled with tiny hollow plastic straws like the one Otsana had held their stolen blood in. Seized by a horrible curiosity, they popped one of the coolers and stared, lips pressed together, at the contents. Blood bags. They poked one, felt their stomach flop in time with the sloshing of the blood against the plastic.

Really? That's what got them? They pressed an annoyed arm to their belly.

Something hefty hit the floor down the hall, rocking their brain back into motion. Right, screaming kid, creepy factioneers, somebody in the house with them.

The hum of the fridge set their hackles on end as they crept down the hall, wiggling the handles of the doors. All locked. Except, as if they needed any more warning that they were not alone, the door at the end. That one hung half-open, a squat bulbous silhouette lay in wait beyond it.

Nerves drove them forward. They struck the door fast, shovel arcing.

Dark skin, cropped hair, glittering earrings. They recognized the lump an instant before their shovel connected. Luckily, she was fast. The collision of metal shovel with metal staff sent vibrations up their arm with a resounding clang.

Shovel dropped, both hands up. The civilian woman jabbed her staff across the cramped space and knocked True square in the chin. They staggered back.

"Wait, wait!" What the hell had the woman's name been? "Kiari's mom."

She gave them time to yank down their mask and spit out the blood pooling in their mouth.

"Scavenger." Sweat flecked her hard face, her breath came in shallow bursts. She didn't sound happy to see them. Given the staff in their face, the feeling was mutual. "Where the hell is my daughter?"

"I don't have her."

"Why should I believe you?"

"Do your eyes work?" Oh, real bright idea, smart mouth. The bathroom tile bounced back the echo of their teeth clacking shut. Silence followed, briefly. Skimming the empty hall behind True, the woman dropped her staff from their jaw. Her eyes did work after all. The empty hall must have dislodged all her panic from wherever she'd been stuffing it because her breath spasmed in in in but never out.

"Hey." They kicked her shin in hopes it would flip her exhale switch. It did. She snapped into motion, stalking past them.

"Check the basement, I'm checking upstairs. If you find her shout for me, for Suni. Suni Valdivia—Valdivia?" It all came out at once on the tail of her exhale. For approximately half a second her gaze skirted over True to make sure they were keeping up.

"Valdivia," they repeated, poking their head in to make sure everything was straight. "True Gallows."

"Gallows," she said, then vanished around the corner.

They rocked back on their heels, their skin prickling. The bathroom was spotless. An uneasy sensation settled in the pit of their stomach. No curtain on the tub, no flecks of dried water on the mirror, not a speck of dust. They got the idea that if they had a sense of smell this place would reek of old bleach. The only hint of dirt in the entire, white-tiled room was a thin brown line wedged into the cracked caulk at the lip of the tub and a splatter of searingly bright red blood on one of the tiles. Eye level. Like someone had been thrown against the wall.

They hoped that kid was in the basement. Radio probably wouldn't eat a child. Probably. It would definitely eat a kidnapper first.

A quick check under the sink revealed roughly eight thousand half-empty bottles of every cleaner imaginable jammed tight, stacked on top of each other. They glimpsed a candy blue slime trail leading from the cap of one bottle and warded off the sudden, strange urge to lick it.

A ghost tapped their elbow, ducking just in time to avoid a shovel to the head. The edge embedded in the wall, sending a reverberant clunk through the bones of the house.

"You'll never learn," True grumbled, prying the shovel free. Radio retreated, wraithlike, behind a newly open hall door.

A rusted butter knife lay discarded on the hardwood where Radio had jimmied the basement door. The hum of electricity rose from beyond shadowed stairs, warning them off.

The meager moonlight only braved the first couple steps before abandoning the rest to pitch dark. Too dark for their eyes to adjust, though they blinked a couple times before pulling out their lighter. The ring of light hit Radio and a scrawny pile of limbs armed with a knife that it was failing to coax from the bottom step. Every move it made resulted in a swipe from a pathetically small blade clutched in pathetically small hands. A long red tube snaked from one skinny arm and into the dark.

Okay, kid found. Rescue side quest over. Except nothing could ever be that simple. Radio's head ratcheted toward the basement depths, the rest of its body followed. Tense, it stood between the kid and whatever it had heard, and motioned True further down the steps.

The gun sat heavy in their waistband. For emergencies, they told themself. No need to go around wasting bullets. Valdivia's name was on their tongue. Let her come pry her spawn off the creepy basement steps of the creepy too-clean house. The minute she got down here they were getting the hell out of dodge.

Pale arms rose out of the cavernous black of the basement and plucked Radio from the steps.