novelraw Chapter 162: Reinforcement
Chapter 162: Reinforcement
They started from the stairwell and worked room by room, not because they liked the plan but because it was the only way to be sure.
The offices were still cold from Alexei’s ice and still sour from Zubair’s fire, and when the doors opened the air moved in slow, tired waves that carried the bite of ash and the clean sting of frost.
Meltwater collected along the baseboards and made a thin mirror across the linoleum. It turned the broken ceiling lights into a wavering gray ribbon under their boots.
"Left to right. No gaps," Zubair grunted. His voice was steady, not loud, and everyone adjusted without having to answer.
Lachlan pushed the first rolling cabinet into place with his shoulder and then set the brake with his heel.
He tested the wheels twice, as if a third check would make the metal heavier. "This one’s good," he murmured softly, and then glanced at the next door down the corridor. "You want shelves against the glass or the desks?"
"Shelves," Elias replied, already tearing tape and sealing the thin vents above the door frames. "Desks are too low. If anything tries the windows, it needs to meet weight. It might not discourage them, but it would slow them down."
Alexei walked the glass line with his gloved finger, looking for spiderweb cracks. He did not joke much this morning after the fight, which was its own kind of warning.
He lifted a shard that had fallen from a broken pane and held it flat on his palm as if he could read the building’s mood from the way it caught the light.
"No pressure marks," he announced, and then he set the shard back and pressed a fresh sheet of plastic over the gap, smoothing the wrinkles with the side of his wrist. "We still block them."
Sera kept the count in her head.
Doors checked.
Doors locked.
Windows covered.
Vents taped.
She tried to keep her steps even, but the soles of her boots made a sucking sound on the wet floor that set her teeth on edge. The smell of burnt protein and slowly thawing rubber filled her mouth as if she had bitten into the air.
The creature inside her liked that smell too much, and she could feel the hunger coming from it. She took a slow breath anyway and made herself look with her eyes, not her hunger.
They forced open the next office with a simple pry bar rather than the dead keycard system, because power had flickered off again and then stayed dead.
Inside, the room looked like every other small office built by a company that once believed meetings were more important than windows.
There were two desks, six chairs, a whiteboard that had lost its shine, and a copier that hummed softly even though nothing in the building should have been humming at all. Sera stepped close and listened with her head tilted.
The humming was not mechanical. It was the patter of clean meltwater dripping through a crack and landing inside the paper tray.
"Empty," Lachlan grunted from the doorway, keeping his body a shade to one side so that his outline did not frame the hall. "Next?"
"Not yet," Zubair replied, shaking his head.
He crouched by the baseboard heater and pressed two fingers against the slim slot along the top.
Frost had formed a thin lip of white across the metal, which told them the window seal here was worse than the others. He followed the seam to the corner where two walls met and found a hairline gap. "Draft. We block this," he said, and then he stood and pointed. "Desks here. Shelves there. Keep the walkway open."
They moved without argument.
Elias dragged the desks toward the wall.
Lachlan folded the room’s rolling chairs together and wedged them between the desk backs and the window, which gave their makeshift barricade a kind of spring.
Alexei pulled a low shelf with a cracked rib of wood and set it across the chairs at an angle that would catch a body and turn it aside.
Sera ran the tape along the baseboard seam and pressed her palm flat to smooth it. The tape made a soft rubbery sound against her glove. She liked that sound because it meant the seal would hold for at least a few days.
It took them another hour to do the whole floor in the same careful way.
The work was not complicated, but it demanded attention because mistakes in a quiet building become loud when trouble comes.
They pushed heavy things to cover fragile things. They left paths that were wide enough for fast movement and narrow enough to force anything else to slow down.
They marked each cleared room with a strip of cloth on the handle. Some rooms got two strips—the second strip meant a final sweep had already been done by another pair of eyes.
Only once did they find something that made them stop.
The sound came when Sera opened a supply closet and the metal handle knocked against the inner shelf.
It was not a loud sound, rather a sound so soft that even her creature had to strain to hear it.
She held still, and the others held still with her because that was what they did when one of them changed the air in the room.
The creature inside her raised its head and pressed close to her ribs. It wanted to move, but she refused.
Zubair reached across her body and pushed the door fully open.
The closet offered the usual tired shape: mops, buckets, a slumped box of printer paper, and a set of blue rags that someone had folded a very long time ago. But there was also a cardboard file box turned on its side with the lid half torn.
Something had dragged the box in from the hall at some point and then made a den of cheap brown paper in the shadow behind the bucket.
Elias lifted his hand for quiet and then crouched, fingers open. "Something alive," he said, his voice low and soft.
Alexei angled the flashlight beam into the nest without letting the beam hit the back wall. "Not one of ours," he said. "The smell is wrong."
Sera did not wait for anyone to tell her to look.
She slid two fingers into the paper and pinched a top sheet. She shifted it an inch and then another inch, slow enough that the movement would not read like a threat.
A small shape tucked itself further under the paper with a tiny, breathy sound that was not a growl and not a whine.
Her body knew that sound before her mind named it. The creature inside her went very quiet, as if it was listening to a story.
She pulled the paper back in one smooth motion and saw a pup, ribs too sharp under thick gray fur, ears still a little too large for the narrow skull.
Its eyes were dark and bright at the same time, the way young animals look when they are trying not to blink. It did not bare its teeth. It did not throw its head back to cry.
It only pressed itself down as flat as it could and watched the five of them in one long, tight stare.