Chapter 227

Annie stepped through the Doorway and onto a quiet street in Argentum.

The morning air hit her first. Cool and damp, carrying the faint bite of a city that hadn’t fully woken up. Damp concrete, old trash, cheap exhaust, and fried oil from somewhere already open. It was the closest the Doorman could get her on such short notice.

She’d grown up breathing this air. A year away hadn’t changed what it tasted like.

What had changed was something else. Easily missed at first. Disguised among the usual.

She started walking, pulling the hood of her jacket up to hide her face. The doorway closed silently behind her, and the faint sensation of the Doorman’s power vanished, leaving her alone on a residential street lined with low-rise apartment buildings. A few cars sat parked along the curb. One had a cracked windshield, the spiderweb pattern centered on the driver’s side. A recycling bin lay on its side near the gutter, spilling cans across the sidewalk. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

Normal enough at first glance. This part of Argentum had never been the prettiest.

But the quiet was wrong. It was nearly ten in the morning on a weekday, and the street felt like Sunday. A handful of people moved along the sidewalk on the far side, bundled in jackets despite the mild temperature, walking with purpose and keeping their heads down. No one lingered. No one browsed their tablets.

Annie turned the corner onto a main road and the wrongness sharpened.

Half the storefronts on the block were shuttered. Not closed-for-the-morning shuttered. Boarded up. Plywood over glass, screwed in at the corners, some of it already tagged with graffiti. A laundromat she vaguely remembered had its front window replaced with a sheet of particle board, the edges sealed with strips of tape. The sign above still glowed, though, the neon humming and flickering, showing it was still open for business.

Further down, a section of sidewalk caught her eye. She slowed. The concrete was stained a shade darker than the surrounding surface, a roughly oval shape maybe four feet across. Faded, but unmistakable if you knew what you were looking at.

Annie knew what she was looking at.

“Hey, Ash. Long time no see, how’s it—” She stopped. Grimaced. “No. God, no. That’s terrible.”

A woman passing on the other side of the street glanced at her, then looked away fast. Annie didn’t blame her. Talking to yourself while walking through a city that had just survived a global vampire attack probably wasn’t the best look.

She tried again, quieter this time. “Ash. I’m here to take you home.” She chewed on that for a few steps. “What home? Oh, you know, the secret island lair in the Mediterranean I’ve lived at for the past six months while you were stuck in juvie. Yeah, that’ll go over great, Annie.”

The next intersection opened up to a wider commercial street, and Annie slowed to take it in.

A grocery store dominated the corner. One of the big chain ones, the kind with automatic doors and a parking lot that could hold a hundred cars. At ten in the morning, the lot was nearly full. People streamed in and out through the entrance in a steady flow, and every single person coming out pushed a cart loaded to the brim. Cases of water stacked on the bottom rack. Canned goods piled high. Bags of rice. Boxes of protein bars. One man had an entire cart of nothing but bottled water and batteries, heading toward his car with the urgency of someone running an errand they’d been putting off for too long.

No shoving. No arguments. No panic. But they were acting with purpose.

These people had seen the press conference. They’d heard the word cataclysm. And they were doing the only thing they could think to do about it. Trying to survive.

She turned away and kept moving.

The next few blocks blurred together. More boarded windows. A bus stop where a small cluster of people waited in silence, nobody looking at each other, most of them staring at their tablets with the glazed look of people consuming news they didn’t want to read.

She tried again. “So, funny story, I’m basically a superhero now and I live on a secret island with a bunch of weirdos and a couple of aliens. Oh, and a guy who might be a god. Want to come?” Annie winced. “Definitely not.”

She crossed another street. Two blocks to the right, something caught her attention.

A crowd. Hundreds of people, maybe more, moving away from her in a slow, dense mass that filled the width of the road. The tail end of it was just turning the corner onto a cross street, the last stragglers hurrying to keep up. Signs bobbed above heads, too far away to read at this distance, but the colors were angry. Red and black.

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Then the sound reached her. Tinny and distorted by distance, but clear enough to make out words.

“—failed us! AEGIS knew! The UEG knew! They let people die, and they did nothing!”

A cheer rose from the crowd. Ragged. Furious.

“We demand accountability! We demand answers! And we demand the immediate shut down of AEGIS and the removal of every UEG representative who voted to keep the truth from—”

The voice faded as the crowd turned the corner and disappeared behind a row of buildings. The echoes lingered for a few more seconds, then died.

Annie stood at the intersection and watched the empty street where they’d been. A few discarded leaflets skittered across the asphalt in the breeze.

She exhaled. “Well, Alex did say it was going to get ugly before it got better. And I’m still talking to myself.”

The walk took another fifteen minutes. The residential neighborhoods she passed through were quieter than the commercial strips, but the tension was the same. Curtains drawn in the middle of the morning. A man on a second-floor balcony watching the street below with his arms folded, not drinking his coffee, just watching. A dog barked somewhere and didn’t stop.

She rehearsed more greetings. Discarded all of them. The problem wasn’t finding the right words. The problem was that no combination of words could bridge a year of silence and a world that had changed underneath both of them while she wasn’t looking.

By the time she reached Whitmore, she’d mostly given up on planning and settled on winging it.

The Whitmore Youth Correctional Facility sat on a block by itself, separated from the nearest residential buildings by a strip of dead grass and a chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire. The main building was a squat, two-story rectangle of gray concrete block, functional and ugly. Narrow windows lined the upper floor, each one reinforced with wire mesh visible even from across the street. A flagpole stood near the entrance, the flag hanging limp in the still air.

It fit right in with everywhere else in this part of the city.

The parking lot held a dozen cars, clustered near the front entrance. A security booth sat at the gate, staffed by a guard who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else.

Annie stopped on the sidewalk across the street and stared at the building.

Ash was in there. Had been for a year now. Because she’d been caught up in the wake of her older sister’s problems, while Annie had left the city to chase something bigger than either of them.

She’d told herself it was the right call. Told herself Ash was safer in a structured environment than she would be anywhere near Grimnir. And for a while, that had probably been true.

But standing here now, looking at the razor wire and the mesh windows and the guard booth, the justification felt thinner than it ever had.

“Okay,” she said to nobody but herself. Again. “Here goes nothing.”

She crossed the street.

The security guard spotted her as she approached the booth. He stood, stepped out, and raised a hand.

“Sorry, ma’am, you’ll have to turn around. We’re not accepting visitors today on account of all the craziness.”

Annie stopped a polite distance away. “Yeah, I figured.” She reached up and pulled her hood back. Then she let the phase roll. MetaMetal rippled across her skin, spreading from her neck down her arms and across her face in a wave of liquid silver that caught the morning light.

The guard took a step back.

“You recognize me?” she asked.

He swallowed. Nodded. “Y-yes. You’re Grimnir.”

“Annie.” She pointed a metal finger at the building. “My sister is in there. I’m here to pick her up before things get worse.” She let the silence hang for a few heartbeats. “I don’t have an appointment, but my guild leader said I can do what’s needed to get her out.”

The guard looked at her. At the building. Then back at her. “Uh... I, um.”

Annie shrugged. “I can go through the fence if I have to. And the walls. And whoever’s behind them. But I really just want to grab my baby sister and bounce, okay?” She softened her voice. “Please?”

His gaze flicked back and forth a few more times. Then he nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, I get you.” He stepped back carefully, reached into the booth, and pressed something. A buzzer sounded, and the gate began sliding open.

Annie smiled. “Thanks.”

The guard shook his head. “Nah. Thank you. And your boss. For telling us about what’s coming.” He hesitated. “It’s all real, huh? I didn’t believe it at first, but then the vampires started and...”

“Yep.” Annie sighed. “Sorry. We just figured everyone deserved to know.”

The guard nodded. “Yeah. We do.” He glanced at the building. “Hey, uh... go easy on them in there, yeah? It’s a tough job, you know? And a lot of people didn’t come to work today.”

Annie headed toward the entrance. “Sure thing.”

The building looked worse up close. Cracks webbed through the reinforced glass of the front doors, the kind of glass with wire mesh embedded inside it. The windows on either side of the entrance were the same. Cracked, but holding, the wire doing its job even if the glass had given up.

She could see faces in some of the upper windows. Teenagers, pressing close to the mesh-reinforced panes, watching her approach. One was bouncing off the walls behind the glass, mouth open in a scream she could barely hear through the thick panels. Another gave her the finger with both hands. A third stuck their tongue out.

A fourth turned around and pressed their bare ass against the glass, then began moving with circular motions.

Annie snorted. “Classy.”

She tried the front door. Locked. Then she pressed a metal finger against the keyhole and let it flow into the mechanism, the MetaMetal thinning and reshaping as it slid inside. She adjusted slowly, feeling for the pins, sensing the subtle vibrations as each one found the right position. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

She turned her finger. The lock clicked open.

Annie pulled the door wide and stepped inside. Then she stopped, glanced back at the parking lot, pulled the door shut, and reached for the lock again. Her finger reshaped, slid back in, and relocked the mechanism.

Alexander told her to play nice.

Not contributing to an entire facility’s worth of juvenile delinquents getting loose on the streets probably counted.

As long as everyone inside played nice, too, of course.