JESSI.
Jessi slammed the door behind her and locked it with shaking hands.
She didn't mean to throw the mug, but it shattered anyway — porcelain splintering into sharp white stars against the concrete floor.
Her breath came fast. Too fast. Like she was drowning in air. Her heart galloped in her chest, trying to outrun something invisible. The walls felt too close. The lights too bright. The silence too loud.
She fell to her knees.
Something was wrong with her.
She knew it. She'd known it since that night in the hallway. When Ty had looked at her with those eyes that weren't quite his. When she'd seen a flicker of something buried deep behind the charm — something that didn't belong.
It wasn't just heartbreak.
It was everything.
The grief. The guilt. The fear. The horror of watching good people turn into monsters. The horror of becoming one.
It all pressed into her chest at once, like too many bodies crammed into a single space — her space — and none of it was hers, but she felt it anyway.
She curled into herself, gasping.
She couldn't stop shaking.
She didn't want to cry but her body betrayed her again, and the tears came hot and hard, like her soul was trying to burn its way out.
It felt like she was breaking.
Like something inside her was breaking open.
She couldn't tell where she ended and everyone else began. Like echoes of other people's terror were bleeding into her skin — like the memory of Ty's shame wasn't her own but somehow lived inside her anyway. The look in Josh's eyes. The cold logic in Jules's voice. The quiet despair in Boris's silence.
It was all in her.
She pressed her palms to the floor.
"Stop," she whispered. "Please just stop."
But the feelings only roared louder.
--
ROSIE.
The rain had thinned to a cold mist, slicking the broken pavement where Ty lay sprawled beneath a rusted fire escape. One arm bent awkwardly under him, blood crusted at the elbow where they'd injected something to knock him out. He stirred as a boot nudged his ribs—hard.
Rosie stood over him in her soaked jacket, arms crossed, expression unreadable.
"You did it?" she asked coldly.
Ty coughed, tried to sit up. His teeth chattered.
"I got in. Set it. In the duct above their med-bay where they held me, just like you said. You've got a clear signal path now, just pull the trigger." He tried to smile. "Told you I could do it."
Rosie leaned down slowly.
Then slapped him across the face.
Ty reeled. "What—?"
"You were supposed to get the doors open. All the way open," she hissed. "That was the deal."
"I tried. I had it after tampering with the panel —but they changed the codes. They locked down everything—"
"So you failed."
"No. No, I just—I got caught too fast, they moved quicker than we thought. They locked me out of the system and trapped me in that room before I could do anything else."
Rosie sighed and shook her head.
"Then your brother doesn't make it."
Ty froze. His mouth opened. Closed.
"You said—" he whispered.
"I said if you got the doors open, we'd go back for him. But you didn't." Her eyes were cold steel. "So we won't."
She stood and started walking off.
Ty struggled to his knees. "Wait—Rosie, please, just wait—he's still alive, right? You said—"
A shadow followed behind her: Eric, one of her stepbrothers, cigarette glowing as he trailed her.
He looked back down at Ty, then at Rosie's retreating form.
"Didn't his brother drown last week when the shipping yard went under?" he asked casually.
Rosie didn't stop walking.
"Yeah," she said. "But he doesn't know that."