novelraw Chapter 114: Home Sweet Home
Chapter 114: Home Sweet Home
Above the thirtieth, the air became cleaner and colder.
The noise from below didn’t lessen so much as thin out. It became a constant, like blood in the ear. The concrete changed note underfoot—less vibration, more stiff. The stairwell lamps steadied, a line of dull coins running up a groove. The building’s core held its breath and counted with them.
At the thirty-third landing, Zubair checked the door. Locked. He didn’t bother the handle twice. At the thirty-fifth, Elias touched the jamb and frowned. "Shear line," he said softly, like he’d run his palm over a bruise. "Nothing critical."
"Not yet," Sera said.
They passed a fire hose cabinet with the glass cracked out, the canvas snake coiled and damp. The placard above it still wore instructions in neat block letters about pulling alarms and meeting at designated assembly points. Alexei tapped the placard once with a knuckle as if it might wake up and make its promises true. It didn’t.
At the thirty-seventh, the wall buckled outward a finger’s breadth where a service shaft had shifted. Sera placed her weight to the sound, measuring. It spoke stress, not surrender. She lifted her hand and continued.
"Water line’s stabilizing," Elias said after another ten floors. "It’s still rising in pulses, but the baseline—" He stopped, not because he didn’t have the numbers, but because numbers under this sky felt like disrespect.
Zubair slowed for half a step, listening to the roar with a soldier’s ear. "It’s not done yet."
"No," Sera sighed as she spotted a zombie bobbing in the waves. "And we’re not done either."
They reached the fortieth with the same economy of motion they’d held since the first flight. Zubair tried the door out of reflex. It opened to a dark corridor and the ghost of a carpet pattern that had once wanted to be expensive. Far down, a bay of windows gave a view of the river of the city. Sera let them look for five seconds and shut it again.
"Two more."
They went.
On the forty-first landing, the stairwell narrowed a fraction, the last dogleg toward the tower’s head. The concrete here wore fewer stains; the damp rings had broken and thinned. A single emergency light had failed entirely, leaving a small pocket of real black that their eyes ignored and their bodies did not. Lachlan’s shoulder brushed the wall intentionally as they passed it, making something solid where the darkness wanted to be a hole.
"Up," Sera said, and the word went through them like a pulse.
The forty-second landing greeted them with a door that had swollen into its frame. It stood proud by a quarter inch, the metal warped by the tower’s subtle contortions. Zubair set his palm against it, then his shoulder, and tested. It thudded and thought about moving.
Lachlan grinned, a flash of the old grin with no teeth in it. "On three?"
"On one," Zubair said. They hit together, twice, and the frame screamed in a single metallic note. The third strike popped the latch. The door tore free with a cough of dust and the smell of old carpet and cold air.
They stepped into the penthouse level’s lower hall: quiet, wide, the lights still burning in half the fixtures, casting long ribs over wood that had never been scratched by guests who would never come. At the end, a set of double doors opened into the two-story space Sera had known would be here—glass for walls, city for a painting.
They didn’t fan out. They moved as one to the glass.
The drowned city lay beneath them. The harbour inhaled. The harbour exhaled. The sky carried a low, grinding weather that wasn’t weather at all. A barge rode up onto a street and stopped, buoyed by a new depth that made the map a lie.
"Home sweet home," Sera announced, putting down her go bag. "This is where we are staying for a while."
Elias watched her reflection in the glass, then the water. "For how long?"
"For as long as ’below’ means ’dead,’" she shrugged, going into the kitchen and turning on the kettle.
Nobody argued. There was nothing to argue with. The floor under their boots felt honest in a way the ground hadn’t for hours.
Far below, the ocean drew breath again. From this height, they saw the horizon flex—the black rising just enough to make every light smear. The surge that followed wasn’t a wall so much as a lift, a heaving of a skin that threw cars like dice and cracked a building’s lower teeth. It pressed into streets that had thought themselves safe and proved them wrong.
Alexei tipped his head back and laughed once, thin and unbelieving. "City’s a bathtub. Someone pulled the plug, someone shoved it back in."
"And by someone, you mean the moon," Elias smirked as he rolled his eyes at Alexei.
"Someone as in the earth having a temper tantrum," Lachlan returned.
Zubair said nothing.
Sera watched the line where dark met darker. She counted the intervals in her head without looking like she was counting. The creature inside her watched too, a silent twin that loved maps more than mercy.
She turned from the glass. "Secure the stairwell door. We keep it closed unless we open it. No skylights, no open panes. We’re not advertising the fact that we are here."
Zubair nodded and went. Lachlan followed, knife already in hand to scavenge wedges and shims from the trim. Elias stayed a second longer at the window, face in profile against a city that had forgotten itself, then he, too, turned.
Sera stood alone at the glass long enough to see another skybridge fail in the distance—a slow, paralyzed fall, the glass releasing itself in bright confetti before the steel skeleton kissed the water and disappeared into its own reflection. The world rewrote a line and didn’t apologize.
"Forty-two," she said to the window, to the flood, to herself. "We stay."
Behind her, the stairwell door met wood and weight and settled into its new truth. The roar from below didn’t change. It only reminded everyone of its continued presence.
Luckily for them, they were above it.
For now.