Chapter 3 Wrong Turn

Ayana POV

The fire escape was rusted through in two places and I found both of them with my feet.

Half a storey above the alley, the fog came over the roof edge and stopped there, as though waiting on a decision.

I hit the ground running.

Empty. Not quiet-empty. Empty-empty. Twelve metres, the marker had said, and I stood on the mark with nothing there but wet tarmac and a dropped phone lying face down and still lit.

It pinged. Pointed at the phone.

I picked it up. Unlocked. Battery full. No calls. No messages. Nobody on the other end of anything.

Then it rerouted, lifted off the phone, and traced a route up Bellweather Row.

TUTORIAL: PROCEED TO SHELTER NODE.

DISTANCE: - CONDITION: - PENALTY: -

00:01:12

Four dashes.

I swiped back. The old objective slid up:

REACH A SHELTER NODE BEFORE THE COUNTDOWN ENDS. DISTANCE: 340M.

Reach. Three hundred and forty. A number I could argue with.

I swiped forward.

PROCEED TO SHELTER NODE. DISTANCE: -

I've read thousands of forms. The trap never sits in the line you're reading. It sits in the space where the answer should be.

Bellweather Row.

I know that street. I route vans along it four times a day. Narrow, floods, and there's a skip outside the launderette that has been there since before I moved to this city.

The arrow pointed into a street with no skip, no cars, no glass, no bodies.

It snapped into place at the mouth of it. Not drift. Not draw. Snap, like a piece of UI being dragged and dropped.

Two hundred people walked into the gap where the skip should have been.

They came out of the side roads and off the pavement in a crush, shoulder to shoulder, all following the same white arrow. A trolley went over and nobody stopped to right it. A woman carried a dog. A man carried nothing at all.

A man in a hi-vis jacket came past at a jog. I caught his arm.

"You've got no distance."

"There's a countdown."

"Look at the panel. Where the number should be. Look at the dash."

"There's a countdown," he said, pulled free, and went.

I stood at the mouth of Bellweather with my feet on the right side of the arrow and watched the countdown tick away over two hundred heads.

It hit zero at the far end.

The boundary came down. That's the only word for it - a wall of fog, no thicker than a door, dropping across the street from rooftop to tarmac in one clean movement.

The near end sealed too.

The street went grey. Not covered in fog - rendered in it, the way the alley had rendered when the city drew itself. For a moment I could see shapes. The trolley. The woman with the dog. The hi-vis jacket flat against the wall, both hands up.

Then the fog flattened and there was nothing to see at all.

The boundary held a moment. Then Bellweather was a street again, with the skip outside the launderette and nobody in it.

--

It rerouted.

Lifted off Bellweather, pulled a new route behind the shop, along the service corridor, and turned left.

Behind the shop. Where the fire escape came down.

I stood with the fog at my back and the empty street at my front, and the one thing I actually knew was that he'd told me not to follow it, and hadn't told me anything else.

You counted the intervals, his voice said. Nobody counts the intervals.

So I counted the dashes on the panel. Four. Then I went the wrong way.

Not that way. Not Bellweather. The service corridor behind the shop - the one the mini-map had shown me when it was still pretending to be my friend.

I walked it at a pace I could hold. Sprinting in a sealed zone is a way of dying tired.

The corridor ran between two buildings with nothing at either end but a door and a wall. I crossed the threshold at the far end.

ROUTE LOCKED. PATH SEALED. BOUNDARY STABLE.

The door behind me slammed.

Not closed. Slammed - the frame jumping, dust coming off the brick - and when I turned round there was no door. Fog, flat and grey, across the corridor where the doorway had been.

I put my hand on it. It didn't give. It didn't feel like weather. It felt like a wall that had been painted to look like fog.

The corridor had one direction left in it.

TUTORIAL: PROCEED TO SHELTER NODE.

NEW PATH AVAILABLE.

DISTANCE: - CONDITION: - PENALTY: -

00:03:40

The countdown had reset. The dashes hadn't moved.

The marker laid a line straight along the corridor, turned at the end, and pointed at a doorway I couldn't see from here.

I pushed the fog behind me. Nothing. I pushed lower, near the floor where the wall met the tarmac, and my fingers went in a quarter of an inch and stopped.

Boundary stable.

Stable is a word with an expiry.

I walked and counted my footfalls, because counting is what I do and it has kept me alive for two days.

On the twelfth step, the corridor light went out.

Not the lights. The corridor - from my feet to the corner, going dark in a wave, swallowing itself as it came.

I ran.

The marker kept pace beside me, drawing its little arrow, and it went where the marker wanted.

The fire escape was behind the wall. The street was behind the wall. The dashes were still on the panel, all of them, and I ran toward the doorway they were pointing at because it was the only open thing left.