[h3][color=lightblue]The Alley[/color][/h3]
Silence weighed heavy in the narrow space, as if death clung to the air and devoured all sound and light. While Cedar and Iris discussed what to do about the corpse in the dust, the drone whirred idly overhead. The controller's screen offered a stagnant view of the other end of the alley, all empty dirt to the weedy edge of the sidewalk. Another armadillo hurried waddling into frame, then scrabbled at the edge of the wall before squeezing inside a crack in the foundation. It was the second such animal to hurry inside the same building, where a dim voice had just stopped singing.

[i][color=gray]uoy era how? tnaw uoy od tahw?[/color][/i] echoed the voice in Cedar's head, and he could hear the mocking grin in its hissing words.

Cedar's hand involuntarily twitched. It was almost imperceptible, perhaps a temporary tremble of nerves, but his fingers had moved toward Iris' pocket. An inexplicable desire burned in the back of his throat: a tingling curiosity to see the ring again.

That desire was foreign, and didn't belong to him at all.

An echo of Archer's voice shouted from the square, but Cedar and Iris wouldn't make out the words, only a tone of fierce warning.

[h3][color=lightblue]The Square[/color][/h3]
[color=C2EC2C]"Rose, don't go anywhere alone!"[/color] Archer snapped, but the faded door had already creaked shut behind Steel Rose. [color=C2EC2C]"Fer cripes' sake, am I the babysitter now? Listener! Stay here with Fluke and wait for Iris and Cedar. I'll bring Rose back in a minute, and we'll plan our next move, right?"[/color]

But Archer's voice rumbled like thunder in Listener's eardrums, her words almost unintelligible to Listener's heightened sensitivity to sound. By the time the painful noise faded and Listener could hear properly again, Archer had rushed inside the building in pursuit of Steel Rose.

To Listener, new sounds emerged out of the distance. She could hear Fluke breathing with his mouth open beneath his mask-- and then she could hear the slow thrum of his heart. She could hear the rustle of fabric and the quiet grunts of the healers as they moved Ruskali to a stretcher. She could hear Cedar and Iris, their movements and distant voices in the alley, as clearly as if they were next to her.

And she could hear a hissing chorus of snakelike voices, whispering almost imperceptible even to her sharp senses, murmuring together inside the building where Rose and Archer had gone:

[i][color=gray]gnimoc era sretsis ruo. thginot tseaf lliw ew. stiaw maglama. stiaw maglama.[/color][/i]

"Stiaw maglama..." Ruskali whispered as the healers suspended his stretcher between their hoverbikes and revved their engines. The roaring noise drowned out all other sound in Listener's ears.

She could smell smoke, and the distant pungent stench of burned flesh, billowing on the roof of the highrise.

[h3][color=lightblue]The Highrise[/color][/h3]
Inside the abandoned building, the air shifted and glimmered with curtains of dust. The wooden floor was twisted and cracked, scattered with trash and a film of greasy dirt, and the plaster walls were coming apart, darkened by swaths of mold and mildew beneath fresh graffiti painted on the wall that led to the stairwell: a perfect blue circle with a dot at its center.

Jay laughed hollowly in a hallway above.

Rose would not see nor hear anyone follow her. To her, the front door remained shut, and she remained alone in the building: alone with her thoughts, the thrash of her heart, the voice in the dust.

Upstairs she was faced with a long passage of doors: some of them hung brokenly open, inviting into sun-bleak rooms full of rotted furniture, twisted pipes and sagging walls; a few others were shut tight, and would open into rooms that were darker and stained cold, as if the windows looked out on a different time.

But in the hallway, a voice murmured softly behind an uneven section of wall where a door should be.

[color=59de3e][i]"I'm not sure where I am....Vern?....Where are you?"[/i][/color]