Howling wind tore the door from the rain-slick hand. The handle punched a hole in the wall and stuck, the homey lamp glow spluttered. They sloshed into the stretch of hall, too grateful for solid ground and relief from the storm to notice the woman in the office chair at the end of the hall.

"Nice of you to join us," the woman spoke, looping a short length of soft, red tubing around her finger. Pink stained the white streak in her hair, a manic flush painted her pale cheeks.

"Otsana," they said, breathless from the climb, tracking the end of the tube burrowed in her arm to a mass dangling from the rafters. A bright red medic patch glared down at them.

"You know he made it eight weeks without any of us noticed he was deaf? Imagine if he'd been up here on his own, you could have snuck right past him." Otsana said, flickering a smile that held not a hint of amusement. She uprooted the needle from her arm and let it drop to drool a slow puddle on the vinyl.

"I have to ask." They gestured to the tubing. Their shovel dangled at their elbow, could they unclip it faster than she could close the gap? Darkness settled over Otsana, cleaving lines over her expression. She leaned closer, different now from the woman who'd stood over them in the empty house. Full of cracks, bits of her leaking out.

"Hrōkr told me all the way here to bash your brains in," she whispered. The unwelcome idea of Otsana hauling a Hrōkr backpack across the mountains, its feet dragging in the dirt until the skin peeled while it whispered in her ear from a cauliflower head-stump, swam through True's dizzy mind.

They heaved the pack off one shoulder, chasing the shovel half-blind. The motion smacked to a halt, cold arms clamping around them from behind. Fuck, for a split second a hideous irrational fear of a mostly headless blond creature winked in their head. The knife sliced their skin. Stinging, not deadly. True planted a boot on the wall, twisting hard. Their captor struck the wall. The knife glanced their shoulder and sank deep into their pack. Blood joined the rain drenching their body. Just a surface wound, but the pack's strap sagged, cut clean.

A sopping dead man with a face of mottled yellow floundered their abandoned pack. Jonesy had shed his flannel, beneath he wore a thick linen, a watercolour bloodstain had pooled around the quarter-sized slit over his heart.

"You," they sputtered, but damned if they weren't at a loss for words and breath.

He held up a crudely bandaged hand with a dull-eyed smug grin. "Did you honestly think you were the first git to try backstabbing me? I'm a damn survivor, I will always make it through."

"And you will always be alone." They didn't bother mirroring that smug grin back at him. Lightning bathed the hall in blinding relief. There were no passageways branching off from the entrance, no place to go except out or through.

"The Faction must have some impressive resources hidden up here for you to abandon your home like that." They said, stalling. Jonesy always had liked to chat.

He scoffed. "No secret resources, we're just getting rid of resource wasters. Like you."

That hadn't lasted as long as they'd hoped.

Thunder rattled the fishery, and Jonesy surged. True recoiled to the catwalk. Think, they demanded, stumbling on the wavering grates. The rush of rain blinded them, and in the space between one blink and the next, a weight smacked them into the railing. The rusted bars groaned and snapped. Their pounding heart lurched into their throat. For an instant all that mattered, all that existed, was the yawning pit beneath them. Nothing between them and it.

Fucking heights. Why did it have to be heights. Sucking their organs back inside, they reeled away from the ledge on their knees. Could they even stand anymore? They had to.

True's pack sprawled on the catwalk between them, shovel swinging free of the ledge, out of reach. Otsana chased them out into the open air, Jonesy at her elbow. He feigned submission. And Otsana, she burned.

True lunged for the broken bar. It hung on by a scrap of rusted metal. Tearing it free, they thrust the jagged end at her. It popped, slid. Heat hit their face, for once not their own.

They wiped it away, breath hitching, and at the other end of the pole, Jonesy shivered over the broken pipe jutting from his gut. The betrayer, betrayed. Blood bubbled at his lips. Otsana grinned, winding the arm she'd used to propel him in front of her tighter, and pushed Jonesy.

Into True.

Off the catwalk.