I enter through the open doors of the conference room. The soft hum of monitoring equipment greeting me alongside the steady drip of IV fluid. The smell of antiseptic layered over something cleaner than the room had any right to be four and half hours ago.

  Sofia is bent over a makeshift workstation, my medical notes spread around her, scribbling something on a pad. She doesn't look up when I enter, too focused on whatever she is doing. The jaw-clenched silence of someone solving a problem they don't fully understand and yet all the more committed to the search for it. I drop off one of the oatmeal mugs as I pass her.

  Moving inward I find Lily.

  She’s.

  She’s awake.

  She's propped against pillows I only half recall sourcing. Her eyes are open, if barely but they look clear, at least to me. They even track me as I approach the bed. Her skin still retained that gray pallor and the fever flush beneath it, but she was getting better and I could hardly believe the sight of it.

  Her hands move, weak and trembling. Yet clearly purposeful, slowly she manages a sign.

  Big Brother.

  The sign she learned when she was four. Two fingers tapping her forehead, then her chin.

  I drop to kneel beside her cot. Take her hand in mine.

  She squeezes once. I hear you.

  I squeeze back three times. I love you.

  She squeezes back three times. I love you.

  Her lips curve, not quite a smile. The ghost of one, like the feeling of the shiver of memory down your back. Alongside a promise that a smile might come back someday if the treatment keeps working.

  "Her fever broke less than an hour ago." Sofia's clinical voice surfaces near the door. "One-oh-three point two, down from one-oh-nine point four. Her temperature is still dangerous, but it’s trending downward as expected."

  I don't turn around, not yet, I'm glued to watching Lily's face. The way her eyes keep finding mine. The way her breathing has steadied into something that doesn't sound like drowning.

  "The Meropenem?"

  "Partially." Sofia moves to stand beside me. She's holding a chart, it's hand-drawn, graph paper scavenged from one of the stockrooms. "But the timing is all off if we are strictly considering dosage."

  She holds it where I can see. A fever curve plotted across the night. “The expected pattern would be a sharp drop as core temperature lowered followed by a gradual decline over the course of a few days as antibiotics reached therapeutic levels. Instead, the line drops in steps. Sharp decreases at irregular intervals, then plateaus, then another drop.”

  "She stabilized in bursts," Sofia reiterates. "Not continuously though and I can’t find any reason why these data points matter. 01:47. 02:15. 02:34. 03:02." She taps each point. "Then again at 04:25, 04:41, 06:15, 06:41."

  Eight drops and eight timestamps, I twist away from her to act like I'm examining Lily but I don't do a good job of it.

  "You see it too." Sofia leans to the side, a better angle to watch my face. Reading me the way I read markets. "The pattern? I just don't understand what's causing it."

  Knowing I've been caught I pull up my combat log. Check the timestamps of my log against her chart.

  I find a match for every single one of them.

  The implications are uncomfortable... if the correlation is substantive, if my kills are somehow feeding into her recovery, then our analysis of this problem changes in ways I'm not ready to consider.

  So instead I look at this, the same way I look at everything else, with some attempt at forced objectivity. As speculation without a sufficient sample size is just hope with a spreadsheet, and I refuse to pin everything on just one solution. I file the thought away, a cold consideration I’ll only revisit when the body count grows large enough to draw conclusions I can no longer ignore.

  "Could be coincidental," I say. "Fever breaks happen in waves sometimes."

  "Not like this." She shakes her head. "I've treated dozens of System-induced fevers. They trend, sure. But they don't step down in discrete intervals like someone's flipping switches."

  I look at Lily, she's watching us. Following the conversation even if she can't participate. Her voice is absent for now on the account of acute laryngeal desiccation, her fever so severe that it cooked the tissue in her throat.

  "Keep tracking it," I say. "If it happens again, I want to know the exact time."

  Sofia nods, then hesitates. Glances at Lily, then back at me.

  "Can we speak? Outside?"

  The way she says it, is not urgent but it is pointed. The voice of someone who's been holding questions for five hours and can't hold them in much longer.

  "Give me a minute."

  I lean close to Lily and brush the hair back from her forehead. The fever is still there, I can feel it on her forehead but gentler.

  "I have to go for a bit," I say. "Talk to the doctor and figure out next steps."

  Her hand tightens on mine. Not quite a squeeze, more like a refusal to let go. I feel the exact same way.

  "I'll come back. I always come back."

  Big Brother.

  She signs again, weaker and slower this time. Her arms were already tired.

  I sign back,

  Little Sister.

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  Letting go of her hand takes more effort than it should.

  Turning, I rise and step into the conference room where Sofia is waiting.

  She's leaning against the table, arms crossed. She’s looking at me with a focused squint running calculations where she doesn't like the results.

  "Close the door," she says.

  I do.

  "I heard things, below."

  "And?"

  "And your sister's fever dropped eight times. In sync with sounds I'm fairly certain were…." She meets my eyes. "What exactly were you doing down there?"

  "I was fighting."

  No point in lying, she heard enough to piece it together anyway and besides this was one her leading questions, the one where she expects me to fill the void and somehow this time despite me not wanting too, I do.

  "The generator draws attention. During the day, that's manageable. Most System monsters are territorial, predictable. They hear noise, they investigate, they leave when it's not worth the effort." I lean against the door frame. "But night is different."

  "Different how?"

  "Something changes after dark. The monsters become more aggressive, more predatorial. Feral, almost, like the System flips a switch and everything with teeth decides tonight is the time to hunt." I shrug.

  Sofia processes this. I can see her running through a list of questions that she wants to ask but doesn’t. Even she can see the writing on the wall, that medical equipment requires power. Power requires the generator and the generator used at night requires someone willing to kill everything it attracts.

  "Lily needs monitoring," she says. "Continuous monitoring, if her fever spikes again and I don't catch it in time..."

  "Then we monitor during the day. Stockpile observations. Run the equipment in bursts at night if and when it must be done."

  "That's not how medicine works."

  "That's how survival works."

  Her jaw tightens. "You made me a promise, in that alley, you said when I tell you something will kill your sister, you listen. Even if it doesn't make sense. Even if it costs you something."

  My own terms, my own words thrown back at me.

  "This isn't simply about health," I say. "This is about risk management. One of the monsters downstairs was Level 17. If two had come at once, if I'd been slower on any of them, we'd all be dead, you and Lily included. We can't possibly afford the same level of security GW has."

  "And if her fever spikes at 3 AM and I can't see the readings, she's dead anyway." Sofia doesn't flinch. "You gave me authority on medical decisions. This is a medical decision."

  We are both silent then, two people who both have valid arguments and no way to reconcile them.

  Still when I treat it logically I know she's right. I hate that she's right.

  She turns to her notes. Shuffles through pages of observations, medication schedules, the accumulated data of a night spent keeping my sister alive.

  "There's something else," she says. "A rumor, probably nothing."

  "Tell me anyway."

  "At the GW, the nurses talked. Traded gossip for gossip. One of them mentioned a group holed up near Piedmont Park. The Driving Club, the old one on the western edge of the park." She pulls out a scrap of paper with an address scrawled on it and basic premise of a map. "From what I remember of the rumor they raided most of the pharmacies north of downtown. Ashley Park, Sherwood Forest, Brookwood Hills, Morningside and Lenox. Stockpiling everything they could get their hands on."

  "Criminals?"

  "They wouldn’t call themselves that. They're more like the lucky rich ones who gambled on prepping for the end, before the end even came and have been sitting on it since it all went down." She shrugs. "GW’s board knows about them but won't move. Not enough personnel to spare for a group that isn't actively threatening the perimeter."

  I know what that feels like at least.

  I take the route map she made me to The Driving Club. I remember the place, vaguely. Old money architecture behind older money gates. An establishment that charged five figures for membership and existed primarily so Atlanta's gentry could pretend they were landed English aristocracy. Defensible position, I suppose. A place like it would appeal to people who thought the apocalypse was temporary and wanted to wait it out over cocktails.

  "How reliable is this?"

  "Third-hand at best, could be nothing, could be exaggerated." She meets my eyes. "But if it's reliable, and they've been hitting pharmacies..."

  She doesn't finish and she doesn't have to.

  If they've been hitting pharmacies then they might have antibiotics, antivirals. Lily doesn't need them right now, not strictly, but reserves matter. Every dose of the premium trauma stuff that we don't burn through today is a dose we have when something worse comes tomorrow.

  On the other hand, it was third-hand intelligence. From an unverifiable source, with a probability of accuracy that sits somewhere between a coin flip and wishful thinking. A tip I'd have laughed off my desk six months ago.

  But less then a month ago I had Bloomberg terminals and real-time data feeds. Now I have rumors passed through doctors who probably traded gossip like currency.

  Still Lily's stable, her fever has broken. The human play would be to stay close, appreciate the moment, consolidate the momentum and wait for better information.

  Except I've watched enough traders blow up positions waiting for perfect data. The position that feels safe is almost always the one bleeding out slowly to market fluctuation while you convince yourself the fundamentals haven't changed. Antibiotics don't materialize from caution. Antivirals don't spawn from good intentions.

  If the rumor's wrong, I lose a few hours. If it's right and I wait, someone else clears out the inventory while I'm lying to myself about running probability models on stale information.

  I fold the paper, pocket it. "I'll check it out."

  I glance up, Sofia watches me, saying nothing. "Seriously, I'll check it out."

  But even I can tell from her look that she is trying to decide if she's allied herself with a monster or a pragmatist.

  "The park, Piedmont." she says slowly. "You'll have to walk alongside the west part of it to reach the club."

  "I know, I've seen it."

  The great lawn. Lily's ninth birthday, the two of us spreading a blanket near the Botanical Gardens while she catalogued every flower she could name. She got to seventeen before she ran out of vocabulary and started making names up. The memory of her and those Dragon-Tongues will stay with me forever.

  "I've been there."

  She waits for more, an explanation, maybe some kind of plan. Some indication that I've thought this through.

  "The route's straightforward," I say. "Tenth Street to Monroe, wrap around the west side of the park, make an external pass on the club. Then circle back so I enter from the north. If the rumor's wrong, I've lost a few hours. I’m sure there’s good hunting out there anyway."

  She nods, then, clearly understanding that arguing won't change anything and has decided to spend her energy elsewhere.

  "How long do you think it will take to get what we need from the club?"

  "Four hours total. Maybe five if the club is more fortified than expected. Of course fire always clears people out."

  "And if you're gone longer?"

  "Then something went wrong and you should assume the worst." I exit the conference room to go check my gear. Finding my spear, my knife, the looted revolver with six rounds. Sofia follows in after me so I hand her a sawed off shotgun I keep in the base with 3 shells racked and loaded. I then don the tactical vest from GW guards. “Should be enough to handle opportunists if they can get past the traps I’ll arm in the stairwell on my way out.”

  "But it shouldn’t be longer." I say casually.

  She almost smiles, almost. "You're very confident for someone walking into an unknown territory based on third-hand gossip."

  "Confidence is just preparation meeting opportunity." I move toward the door. "Keep Lily stable, track any changes. I'll be back before the light goes and if I’m not back before then, you cannot run the generator, no matter what."

  She nods accepting that she won the earlier argument and is willing to give me this concession. "Oh. One more thing…"

  I stop, hand on the frame of the fire door, looking back at her, waiting for the next part.

  "Good luck."

  Two words, a simple gesture. Said by people before the System, when wishing luck was a cordial pleasantry and not something that might actually determine whether you lived or died. Still I appreciate it.

  "Thanks."

  I leave, down the stairs, through the lobby and out into the Atlanta morning.