I turn back to the bed just in time to see Ditzy strip off her shirt, her back to me.

I whip around with my face on fire. She's changing right here, in full view of the rest of us. Patrick is staring at a wall like his life depends on it. Calico J hears my sudden motion and looks up, sees the source of our consternation, and snickers. I throw my sweater at him. It hits him over the head, but that just makes him snicker harder. And then Patrick's eyes dart behind me, and a look of panic crawls over his face the moment before Ditzy's voice indicates she's turned around—still wearing nothing but a bra and pants.

"What's so funny?"

"Nothing!" I say, before I can stop my own mouth from blabbing on me. Calico J doubles over laughing. "J, shut up!"

"Your face!" There are tears in his eyes. "Oh my god!"

I swear I feel Ditzy's smirk as she realizes what's going on. Two terrifying steps later, her breath whispers close to my ear, making electricity shoot across every inch of my skin. "Should I take off the rest, too?"

My brain implodes. With no brain to rely on, I revert to instinct, which presents me with two options: turn around and kiss Ditzy, or flee the room. I opt for the latter.

My skin cools as the door falls shut behind me. I'm breathing like I've just run a half-marathon, trembling with exertion or fear or whatever it is I just went through. I was never a runner. Swimming has always been my sport of choice.

Ditzy and Calico J are both pissing themselves laughing in the room behind me. I can hear them from here.

I slump against the door and dig finger-claws into my hair. Teasing me is Ditzy's sport of choice, and it's going to be the death of me sooner or later. She wasn't like this until after I kissed her. It was an accident. Kind of. We were hiding from a Sleeper, trapped together in a shed while we waited for it to wear itself out and drop back to the ground to recharge. We weren't cuddling, strictly speaking. But I still remember the feel of our limbs tangled together, and the way we both grabbed each other when the Sleeper reached the door and scratched at it like some grotesque raccoon.

I'm pretty sure that's the only time I've seen Ditzy scared, though her reaction to Vix's body is a debatable second instance. The shed was worse. I was nearly ready to piss myself, to be honest. By the time the Sleeper left, we'd been in there for an hour, feeling each other's heartbeats and clinging to each other's arms. When Ditzy turned to me at the end of it and asked if I was okay, I could have responded like a normal human being.

I didn't.

Her whole body went stiff. I reeled back off of her, apologizing furiously, and escaped the shed before I had to see her response. She just pretended it never happened. Then, a week later, the teasing started.

"Meg?"

I whip my head up. Ember is standing in the hallway—I didn't hear her arrive—with a wary look on her face and an honest-to-god club slung over her shoulder. I swallow hard. My hockey stick is in the room behind me, lying beside me and Ditzy's bed. "Sorry," I say, and smile weakly. "I got ganged up on."

Her expression darkens. Panic electrifies my thoughts as her other hand moves to the club handle. "Ganged up how?"

"Teasing! Sorry. It's not a problem?" I'm not even sure what I'm saying. Just hoping something will stick and Ember will put the club down. My face heats again. Honesty might not be the worst way to go. The whole of Cape Morgan was pretty progressive when it was inhabited, and if this group isn't chill with queer guests, we'll have one more reason to leave.

"Keep talking," says Ember. "Sorry, rules are rules. You might have gotten away without a screening, but we don't take any weird behavior here."

"I have to share a bed with a cute girl. They think it's hilarious."

Ember makes a noise like a balloon losing air. I fumble for the door handle before the sound breaks and I realize she's laughing.

"You know what?" she says with a wheeze. "I'll let you off for that. She is a hottie. Wow, okay, that was not what I was expecting. Are you together?"

"No." I'm glad I'm the one wearing a headlamp here, because I'm sure my face is beet-red by now. Ember doesn't have a light. Then my brain runs away on me and adds, "But you can't have her."

Ember returns the club to her shoulder and holds up a hand and a half. "Relax, I'm not here to steal your girl. If you don't want to go back in, though, I'm free to talk about whatever your group came for. If you're comfortable doing that alone."

I give her a skeptical look. "You don't need to sleep?"

"Night watch. We have at least two people awake at all times. House protocol."

Between Ditzy's overtures and the scare of Ember's initial reaction, I'm now pretty sure I won't get any sleep tonight. Following a stranger into the depths of her group's headquarters is a pretty stupid idea no matter which way I dice it, but a few things give me pause. One is that the rest of the house is obviously sleeping. Two is that the sooner we trade information, the sooner we get out of here. And three is that, against all odds, I trust Ember more than Oreo in the grand scheme of things.

I warily pull away from the door. At least I still have my knife on me. "I'm free to talk."

Ember beckons me after her down the stairs. The house's ground floor is devoid of lights. The candles in the living room have been extinguished, and whoever was skulking around the kitchen has since gone to bed. Or is lying in wait to ambush me, but these floors all creak like a flock of rusty gates, and I hear absolutely no one else around us. Ember leads me to a room tucked away near the house's back entrance. She unlocks it with a key from one of her pockets, and pushes open the heavy wooden door.

The room beyond was an office once upon a time. An antique desk occupies its farther half, and sagging bookshelves line the walls. A single candle burns on the desk, which is spread with an array of notebooks, papers, maps, and a single phone plugged into a solar charger bigger than my own.

"Sorry about the mess," says Ember. She waves me to a second chair. I sit gingerly and scan the room for danger while she clears some of the papers. We're alone here. Better to make conversation, then, if Ember is true to her word.

"Resource planning?" I say, nodding to the papers.

"Some. Somewhere in here. Mostly Oreo's crackpot Eldritch theories." She taps a fat sheaf of papers to align it and drops it on a nearby shelf, finds more underneath, and rolls her eyes. "This is what I get for co-leading with a scientist."

For the first time, genuine curiosity dampens my nerves. "Did you know each other?"

"Before all this? No. Met out on Cape Morgan as he was coming off the Cape-point and I was pitching camp in the portlands out near Iptika. We came inland together."

Now that we're alone, her voice slips back into a softer, more musical lilt than her clipped tone of before. This feels more natural.

"Surprised to hear someone else ask about resource planning, though," she says. "Took us two weeks to convince this group we needed to be systematic about it when we had no idea how long this event would last. The number of early foraging trips that returned with pop and chip bags, Lord help me."

She clears the last of the papers with a sweep. Taped across the desk beneath is the thing I suspect she wanted to uncover: a map of Cape Morgan, from its ocean edge in the east to Fort Tucker in the west, then north and south for almost that distance. The Cape itself is shaped like a shark fin. It juts out into the ocean, hooked towards the south thanks to currents that have worn away its southern coastline over the millennia. Chesnet sits tucked into that curve. Right at the back of it, near the base of the Cape.

Swarms of annotations in red and black pen cover the map. Three markings catch my eye immediately. The first is a circle just northeast of Leomore, marking the region where this house sits. The second is a scribble-shaded patch in that bay beneath the Cape. The third is a series of concentric circles radiating out from the scribble. I almost mistake them for topographic lines: they grow farther apart as they expand, and bend in response to local geography. I spot sharp dips along the Baycord river, outgrowths around the hills south of the Cape, and a flattening of the curves to the north of it.

Ember taps the tip of the Cape. "Oreo was somewhere out here when the Sleeping Sickness started."

The name is a shock; in six weeks, I haven't stopped to think that other people might call the Redding by a different name.

"Studying things," continues Ember. "Hydrology, mostly. He was doing some kind of field research, and watching the weather for storms when this started. Those weather networks picked up on this." She spreads a hand over the concentric lines. "Strange weather patterns moving inland. Ada worked for a big internet provider, and she saw the network activity go the same way. They collaborated on this map before Ada... well, before we lost Ada. Now Oreo's been working on it alone."

I lean on the desk to better see the whole map. "Did the Red Rain spread in that pattern?"

Ember hums in confirmation. "On this part of the coast, at least. It came ashore in lots of places. All up and down the coastline. All over the world." She taps the scribble at the heart of the Red Rain's expansion. "But now you see why we don't trust Chesnet."

The skin all over my body tingles. Chesnet lies right at the coastal heart of the scribbled patch. Something about the area feels familiar, but I can't pin down why until Ember says, "It came in on the water."

A tidal map. I saw this same pattern in the materials for my geography and tourism course: it used a lot of local examples on the marine side of things. Chesnet sits at a confluence of currents and natural geography, which combine to push water inland and make the tides in the Baycord estuary rise higher than anywhere else in the region. Chesnet's spring tides are so powerful, they push a tidal bore up the Baycord river—a wave big enough that people like to surf on it.

The Redding came in on the water. I saw it at the bottom of the Baycord river when I rescued Patrick. I stare at the map as an obvious answer stares me back. We avoided the river, but Chesnet sits on a far bigger body of water than the Baycord. If the Redding came from the ocean and moved inland from there, of course Chesnet is where it would concentrate.

"Ada said the first signal that tripped system alarms came from the university right here," says Ember. She taps the north end of Chesnet with devastating accuracy. "Lots of people in a concentrated space. It was probably chaos."

"I was there," I say quietly. My mouth has gone dry.

Ember doesn't reply. I look up to find her watching me with an unreadable expression. "You realize what this means, right?" she says at last.

I swallow back against the feeling of not catching on to something that's obvious for everyone else. I'm all too familiar with that feeling. "No?"

"The sickness doesn't stop with the Sleepers." Ember's words hit me like a punch in the chest. "You've seen it already, if you saw Vix. If it can't put you to sleep, it kills you. And then preserves you like the rest. The last survivor we got from Chesnet found us four weeks ago, and he even got out of the town early. He didn't last two days."

There's a note of skepticism in her voice that only drives the feeling in my chest deeper. I should have known this, too. I have known this. I've just never put all the pieces together. Seeing it laid out on the map, I have to face what I've dreaded ever since Calico J and I first visited the university cafeteria. All those people, lying dead with the colour of Redding in their skin. Scattered survivors around the town, disappearing one by one even though most lived alone. Vix in the motel room.

We're pretty sure the four of us were the only human beings left alive in Chesnet by the time we left. Maybe the only living non-plant things at all. The birds were gone. Squirrels and rats, too. Some pets fell to the Redding as Sleepers, but most we found were dead, connected to threads of Redding. It wanted bodies, and it didn't discriminate.

"We've seen it," I say.

"So you know what I'm saying, right?" says Ember. "If you four are from Chesnet, it makes no sense that you're still alive." 

Like this chapter if you think Ember's cool  💕

Comment your hypotheses on what's up with the Chesnet group!