Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Chapter 1: Day One — “The Noise of Breathing”

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CATCO

Night had a way of making the glass look thinner. From Cat Grant’s corner office, the city was a bruise of sodium orange and ambulance blue, lights smearing in the rain. The bullpen below was a late-shift hum: keyboards, the rattle of the AC, the hollow chime of the elevator no one wanted to hear anymore.

Kara Danvers stared at the live feed on her monitor: a cell phone’s shiver of video outside National City Memorial. The reporter on-screen—Jared from Metro—was filming the sidewalk like it was a wildlife documentary. Police tape snapped in the wind. A body bag twitched.

“Don’t publish the twitch,” Cat said without looking up. “We’re journalists, not carnival barkers.”

Kara swallowed. “We’re verifying with the hospital—”

“Verify faster.” Cat’s eyes slid to Kara, scalpel-sharp. “And drink water. You’re buzzing.”

Nia Nal, hair scooped into a bun held by a pencil, leaned over the shared desk bank. “CDC posted an update—no, wait, they deleted it. Something about ‘nonstandard postmortem reflexes.’ I screenshotted before it vanished.”

“Good girl.” Cat’s phone pinged; she glanced, frowned. “Legal says we’re clear on the shelter-in-place bulletin. Run it top-of-site with the governor’s quote. No adjectives. I repeat: no adjectives.”

A cough hacked through the bullpen. Heads turned. The cough belonged to Jared.

Which wasn’t possible, because Jared was at the hospital.

Except Jared, face gray and sweaty, was stumbling out of the elevator cradling his camera against his ribs, security badge still clipped to his jacket. He waved off the nearest copy editor, coughed again, and went to one knee beside Kara’s desk.

“Kara,” he rasped. “Battery died. Had to—had to run.”

The camera strap slid from his fingers. He tipped forward, hard enough that his shoulder struck the side of Kara’s chair. Cat was already out of her office, already shouting for someone to call 911, for James to grab the first aid kit, for everyone else to give the man room.

Jared stopped coughing.

The newsroom held its breath.

Kara pressed the heel of her hand to Jared’s sternum. “Jared? Can you hear me?”

His mouth opened. Nothing came out. There was a dumb, dry sound like paper. Then there was nothing at all.

Cat’s voice went low. “Danvers.”

Kara looked up. Cat didn’t have to say it. She tilted her head once: do what you can.

Kara began chest compressions. James counted under his breath. Nia stood frozen, fingers white around the edge of a desk.

Thirty compressions. Two breaths. Repeat.

Jared didn’t come back.

The elevator chimed.

“Phones down,” Cat said, barely a whisper. The room obeyed her the way a skittish horse obeys the smallest shift of weight. “Back up, give them room.”

Security arrived with a stretcher that no one was sure they wanted.

Jared took a breath.

Kara’s pressed hands were still on his chest. She felt the breath, the wrongness of it—not a gasp, not a cough. A hitch. A hinge opening the wrong way.

His eyes opened—flat, unfocused.

“Kara,” Nia said, small. “He—”

Jared’s hand snapped up, fast as a mousetrap. His fingers closed on Kara’s wrist.

Everything went loud at once: the scream of someone who didn’t know they’d started screaming, James swearing, a chair skidding, Cat’s voice cutting across it all: “MOVE.”

James shoved his shoulder into Jared’s chest, breaking the grip. The world broke with it. Jared—Jared—rolled with an animal thrash, teeth bared, jaws working. Blood trickled from his nose. He made a sound too wet to be human.

“Back!” Cat snapped. “All of you—doors, now. Olsen, Danvers, you’re with me. Nal—”

Nia’s eyes were huge and shining. A younger intern near the coffee station—the one who always over-steeped the tea—had gone paper-white and was hyperventilating, hands clawed at his throat as if the air had turned to smoke.

“Nal,” Cat said, gentler. “Go to him. Slow your breathing. He’ll match you. You can do that.”

Nia swallowed hard. “Okay.” She moved, kneeling in front of the panicking intern, talking low and steady, making a metronome of her own lungs.

Jared lunged again.

James took the hit, drove him back into a desk. Wood splintered. Someone swung a metal trashcan; it clanged off Jared’s shoulder, useless. A copy editor—six months out of college, hero for exactly one second—took a wild swing and connected with James instead. James’s head snapped sideways. He grunted, staggered.

“Enough!” Cat’s voice cracked like a starter pistol. “We are leaving.” She pointed. “Stairs. Phones, bags, nothing else. Go.”

Kara grabbed Nia by the elbow. “We’ve got to go, come on—”

“I can’t just leave him!” Nia’s voice trembled; the intern’s breath hitched like a stalling engine.

Kara squeezed, soft but sure. “You’re not leaving him; you’re bringing him with you. That’s the assignment.”

Cat had already torn a fire axe out of the wall box. She met Jared’s blank stare with a look that said I made America listen to me; don’t think I won’t make you do it too. The axe came down. Wood, bone, a wet thunk.

“Move,” Cat said again, and the room finally listened.

They surged for the stairwell. Someone fumbled the crash-bar, and then the door banged open and the stairwell breathed back at them—dust, old gum, a handprint on the wall at shoulder height that hadn’t been there this morning.

On the landing below, a woman in a pencil skirt was crouched over a janitor in a green shirt, shaking him by the collar. The janitor’s arm jerked, puppet-fast.

Kara didn’t think; she put two fingers to her mouth and whistled. It was a clean, bright sound that cut the panic the way rain cuts smoke. Heads snapped toward her, including the woman’s.

“Upstairs,” Kara said, calm she didn’t feel. “We’re evacuating by the lobby. You can come with us.”

“What lobby?” the woman spat. “They’re—there are bodies—”

The janitor sat up.

“No time,” James said. He shouldered past, and the woman swung at him with a closed fist fueled by adrenaline and terror. It connected with his cheekbone so hard Kara felt it in her teeth.

James blinked at her, stunned but steady. “Okay,” he said mildly, “that’s your one.” He took her wrist—not cruelly—and steered her toward the stairs. “Come on.”

Behind them, somewhere deep in the building, an alarm finally remembered how to be an alarm. The sound galvanized everything dead and living. Below, doors banged; above, feet thudded. The janitor made a raw, wet sound and lurched to his feet.

The noise woke the dead.

Cat didn’t flinch. “Up. Now.”

They made the lobby with the kind of luck that feels like theft. Glass doors shuddered against a press of bodies outside—living, desperate. Inside, the building’s marble gleamed like a lie. Security guards yelled orders that sounded like prayers. Someone’s blood smeared the info desk in a single, petulant handprint.

“Service corridor,” James said, pointing. “It cuts to the alley.”

Cat nodded once. “Danvers, Nal, with me. Keep eyes up and voices down.”

Kara’s heart hammered. She looked at the glass—out to the city, where sirens were a constant line on the staff paper of the night—and then back at her people. Nia had the intern moving. The woman who’d punched James had gone silent, breathing like she’d run a marathon. Cat was all angles and decision.

It felt, stupidly, like a lead.

“Okay,” Kara said, more to herself than anyone else. “Okay. We go.”

They slid into the service corridor, lights flickering overhead. The world narrowed to concrete, to the stink of bleach and metal, to the drag of their shoes. At the end of the hall, a steel door with a push bar and a sign that said NO RE-ENTRY watched them like an eye.

Cat shoved the bar. The door gave, grudgingly, and the alley breathed cold on their faces.

They ran.

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L‑CORP

The night shift at L‑Corp tasted like coffee and static.

Sam Arias had three monitors open and a fourth she pretended not to notice. On one, a hospital intake spreadsheet with too many red flags. On the second, an email chain with subject lines that kept adding RE: until they looked like a fence. On the third, a magnified frame from a coronial video that had been pulled from the National Database two hours after it was uploaded. The fourth monitor—off—held her reflection, hair escaping its clip, mouth a determined line.

Lena Luthor stood in the doorway of Lab 3 in a lab coat that made her look like a surgeon about to tell someone the truth. Her name badge said L. LUTHOR / R&D – SPECIAL PROJECTS. Jeans, boots, a blouse that had survived two board meetings and a donor dinner without wrinkling. She’d rolled her sleeves up. The cuff creases looked like decisions.

“Walk me through it again,” she said.

Sam didn’t turn. “Initial onset reads like viral pneumonia, high fever, rapid decomp. Postmortem… anomalies.” Her fingertip traced the timeline across the screen. “Some patients experience postmortem movement. More than reflex. There’s coordinated muscular activity.”

“Coordinated,” Lena repeated. “As in goal-directed.”

“As in not random.” Sam exhaled. “CDC scrubbed their notice. Someone’s spooked.”

“Someone should be.” Lena moved closer, eyes knife-bright. “Signal pathways?”

Sam clicked open a second set of graphs. “There’s a spike here—postmortem—like a last gasp of electrical noise. Then… something else. Not brain, not heart. Peripheral. Almost like the body is listening for a different conductor.”

It was quiet enough to hear the building breathe: HVAC through ducts, the elevator whispering up and down somewhere outside their wing. The glass looked like it was waiting to be a mirror.

The lights flickered.

Sam and Lena looked at each other.

The lights went out.

In the dark, a door slammed down the hall. A long moment later, the emergency strips kindled red along the baseboards. The lab went submarine—everything in deep-water colors, the edges of the world too soft.

“Backup should have kicked in,” Sam said.

“It won’t.” Lena’s voice was too steady to be comforting. “Someone cut main power. Manual override prevents auto-start without a live check.”

“How do you know that?”

Lena’s half smile didn’t reach her eyes. “I designed it.”

Something thumped against the glass of Lab 2. Another thump. Another.

Sam moved to the door window and peered down the corridor. Figures in the red glow. Stumbling. One of them in a lab coat. One in night security gray. One barefoot, hospital gown flapping like a sail.

“Med transport from Memorial,” Sam said, throat tight. “We took three research cadavers tonight for comparative postmortem. Someone rushed a transfer.”

“Not cadavers,” Lena said softly.

On cue, the woman in the hospital gown found the glass. Her face slid over it, smearing, mouth working like a fish at the surface of a tank where the pump had broken. Her pupils ate the color of her eyes.

Sam’s hand went to Lena’s forearm without asking permission. Lena didn’t pull away. “Security?”

“Already called.” Lena’s voice sharpened. “We do this clean. First, we don’t panic. Second, we isolate. Third, we get survivors out.” She turned, raised her voice. “If you can hear me, this is Lena Luthor. All personnel: move to Lab 3. Calmly.”

Two shapes materialized from a side office. The first, a tall man in a black suit with a stoic face Sam had only ever seen at the periphery—J’onn, Head of Security, always too quiet, always exactly where he needed to be. The second, a woman with copper hair braided back, wearing a maintenance polo with a name patch that read MGANN.

“Power’s manual,” J’onn said, voice even. “We lost comms on floors two through nine. Stairwells are clear for now. North freight elevator’s dead.” He looked to Lena like a man reporting to a general he trusted. “Ma’am.”

“M’gann?” Lena asked.

“Basement cafe,” the woman said, mouth wry even now. “Late close. I know the tunnels.” She nodded at the floor. “Loading dock’s a warren. If you want people out, that’s your rabbit hole.”

Lena exhaled once, decision settling on her shoulders like a coat. “All right. J’onn, you’re with me and Sam. We collect who we can on this floor and move along the south corridor. M’gann, take a second team down through the service lift shaft; pry it if you have to. Meet us at Dock C. If we don’t make it in twenty minutes, you go without us.”

M’gann’s eyes flicked to the glass, to the mouths dragging wetly across it. “Copy.”

Lena pivoted to the whiteboard, uncapped a marker, and in three lines gave the building a spine: ASSEMBLE (Lab 3) → ARMORY (Sec. Annex) → DOCK C. She underlined the last point twice.

“Security annex?” Sam echoed.

“My brother was paranoid and I inherited the inventory,” Lena said. “Tasers, batons, a few sidearms, nonlethals. We’re not cowboys; we move quiet. Volunteers only.”

“I’ll go,” M’gann said immediately. “I know the dead zones.”

A lab tech in scrubs hugged herself, shaking. “I’ll go with her.”

“Good.” Lena’s nod was crisp. “You’re Team Two. J’onn—open the annex.”

He was already moving. The annex door chirped open under his card, revealing a narrow room with lockers and a metal cage full of security gear. The smell of gun oil sat metallic on the air.

Lena rolled up her sleeves all the way. “Take what you can actually use. A baton is as good as a bullet if you’re not practiced.” She caught Sam’s eye. “You okay?”

“No,” Sam said truthfully. Then she picked up a baton, tested the weight, and squared her shoulders. “But I’m good.”

The glass in Lab 2 spidered under a hit from outside. J’onn handed Lena a collapsible baton and a small flashlight; she clipped both at her waist.

“Move,” Lena said, and the room obeyed her.

They found three more survivors in the south corridor: a junior chemist missing a shoe, a clinical auditor with a crooked tie, and a night janitor bleeding from a cut on his scalp. The auditor flinched when J’onn touched his elbow to steady him, then looked embarrassed. The chemist cried silently and kept pace.

The first body reanimated behind them when someone dropped a tray.

It wasn’t the sound itself, Sam thought later, but the way sound stacked in a building like this—reflections and bass, a quarry of noise. The man on the floor hiccupped back into motion like a bad toy winding up. He clawed at the tile, teeth bared.

“Don’t engage,” J’onn said gently, as if telling a child not to wake a sleeping dog. “Eyes forward.”

They made Dock C in eighteen minutes with the kind of luck you don’t spend lightly. M’gann had the outer door propped with a toolbox, the alley slick with recent rain. Night air hit Sam’s face like swallowing cold water.

“Two vans,” M’gann said. “Keys in the office. I’ll hotwire if I have to.”

“We won’t have to,” Lena said, already moving. She ducked into the dock manager’s cubby, came up with a ring of keys long enough to be a necklace. “Everyone in. J’onn—rear guard.”

They packed the first van with eight, the second with six. Sam slid into the passenger seat of the lead van. Lena took the wheel like she would be offended if it tried anything clever. J’onn climbed into the back, braced, baton across his knees.

“Where?” Sam asked.

Lena’s jaw flexed once. “Not home. Not yet. There’s an interim site we can hold. Mid-city, good sightlines, backup generator on a private loop.”

“What is it?”

“A lab that doesn’t officially exist.”

Sam stared at her, then laughed once, bright and disbelieving. “Of course you have one of those.”

Lena didn’t quite smile. “Seatbelt.”

She drove. Behind them, Dock C breathed out, and the building exhaled something that wasn’t human.

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CATCO

They didn’t slow until two blocks and three alleys later, tucked under an awning that smelled like old cigarettes and rain. The city had a new sound—sirens like sewing machines gone feral, the chop of helicopter blades, the radio-scramble of a dozen agencies forgetting how to share.

Cat checked the street with a predator’s glance. “Phones. Inventory. Who’s got what?”

“Me,” James said, touching the pocket where his phone lived. “Battery at forty.”

“Twenty-three,” Nia said. “I screenshotted everything.”

Kara’s phone buzzed like a trapped fly. Alex: three missed calls. A text half-written and unsent. Kara’s throat tightened.

Cat caught the look. “Family?”

“My sister,” Kara said. “She—she’s CDC. Or FBI liaison to CDC now, I don’t—she changes her title when the world changes.” She tried to smile; it felt wrong on her face. “She’s in the thick of it.”

Cat’s eyes found the horizon, calculating. “Good. We’ll need her.” She looked at their little knot of survivors: the intern whose name none of them could remember right now, the woman who’d punched James and now wouldn’t meet his eye, a copy editor with a bloody knuckle and a stubborn jaw. “We are not equipped to babysit the apocalypse. We find authoritative logistics. That means CDC. That means your sister.”

Kara nodded, something like heat behind her eyes. She thumbed the call.

It rang once.

“—Kara?” Alex’s voice was breathless and too loud. Somewhere on her end, alarms chirped. “Can you hear me?”

“I’m here. I’m okay. We’re—Cat, James, Nia—we got out.” Kara swallowed. “Where are you?”

“In a hole,” Alex said, and Kara could hear her smile even over the noise. “Literally. CDC field office downtown moved into a basement to keep out of the way. Power is—spotty. We’re triaging bad data and worse rumors.” A clatter. “Listen to me: you need to shelter. Barricade. Do not try to cross town in the dark. We saw what happens when people start moving in packs. It attracts them.”

“Them,” Kara repeated.

“People who aren’t people anymore,” Alex said, voice gone iron. “We don’t have language yet and that’s half the problem.” A beat, softer. “Are you really okay?”

Kara looked at Cat, at Nia, at James with his already-bruising cheekbone, and at the little constellation of strangers who had become theirs by accident. “We’re okay.”

“Good. Then listen. Find a building with one way in and more than one way out. High floors. Water. Doors you can lock. Keep everyone quiet. You move at dawn—first light. Not before.”

“Where to?”

“To me,” Alex said. “I’ll send coordinates when the system stops eating texts.” A rough laugh. “Kara—tell Cat Grant I still have that photo of her yelling at a senator in the rain. It’s framed.”

Cat, who could hear everything, arched one eyebrow, pleased despite herself.

“We’ll come to you,” Kara said. “At first light.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

The call stuttered, then died.

Cat didn’t waste the moment. “There’s a storage facility two blocks east with climate control and terrible Yelp reviews. Thick doors. We hold there. Olsen, recon. Danvers, you’re on point with me. Nal—keep our breathing even.” She turned to the survivors, voice carrying like a lighthouse. “We are going to walk. We are going to be very boring about it. Boring people live longer. Ready?”

No one was ready. They went anyway.

Rain started up again, soft as a whisper. The city changed shape under it, edges blurred, streetlights halos. Kara stepped into the street and felt the day crack like ice under her heel.

They moved.

---

L‑CORP

The interim site turned out to be a square building with blacked-out windows and a barely-there sign that read FAULKNER LOGISTICS, which was a lie. Inside, the lobby smelled like dust and old printer toner. A stairwell yawned, promising concrete and echoes.

Lena killed the alarms with a keycard and a look that said try me. The generator thunked alive after a manual coax; the lights stuttered and held.

They triaged on instinct. Sam turned a conference room into a ward with bottled water and a first aid kit that belonged in a history museum. J’onn took a window and watched the street the way a man watches a chessboard. M’gann moved like a tide pool, finding what needed doing before it remembered to ask.

“Security sweep,” Lena said. “Two teams. No heroes, no solos.” She looked at Sam. “You’re with me.”

“You sure?”

“I am many things,” Lena said, something bleak and bright in her eyes. “I am very sure.”

They climbed. On the third floor, a row of offices waited with their chairs tucked under their desks like good students. On the fifth, a door had been propped with a binder clip and then forgotten, the clip bent like a broken promise.

“Listen,” Lena said.

Sam held her breath. Beneath the generator’s steady thrum, the city sang its new, wrong song. But up close, in this building—nothing. No shuffle, no breath.

“Clear,” Sam said.

“Clear,” Lena echoed.

They returned to the lobby to find M’gann doling out protein bars like communion and J’onn turning a whiteboard into a map. Sam felt her adrenaline start to ebb and hated the way her hands shook in the quiet.

Lena saw it and said nothing. She set her lab coat on the back of a chair and rolled her sleeves again, as if the ritual itself kept the panic obedient.

“Next,” Lena said. “We get eyes outside.”

“Scouting?” J’onn asked.

“Volunteers,” Lena confirmed. “We need to know what’s between us and the river. If power holds, we can hold. But we are not the only ones who’ll think so.”

“I’ll go,” M’gann said, soft and certain.

Sam lifted her hand. “Me too.” She met Lena’s gaze. “I know the data points we need.”

Lena considered, then nodded. “We go armored, not armed. Noise is a magnet.” She looked at J’onn. “You hold here. If we aren’t back in two hours…”

“You will be,” J’onn said. It wasn’t a hope. It was a fact he had decided.

Lena almost smiled. “We’ll try to live up to your expectations.”

She turned to the room—sixteen people with too many questions and not enough answers. She lifted her voice. “We are safe for now. We are not safe forever. We will act like both these things are true.” She paused, eyes moving over faces until they caught and held. “There will be a time for fear. This is not that time. This is the time for calm and work. Breathe.”

They breathed.

Outside, the rain wrote on the city.

---

CATCO

The storage facility had a front office that looked like it had been decorated by a man who loved laminate. Behind it, rows of units like little metal chapels. The clerk was gone. The cash drawer hung open, mouth emptied.

James found a unit with a roll-up door and a padlock still dangling open. Inside: someone’s life in boxes. A lamp with a jaunty shade. A crib they had meant to sell. A crate of books that smelled like college.

Cat stepped inside, looked once, and nodded. “We nest,” she said. “Olsen, makeshift barricade. Nal, inventory what we can eat without cooking. Danvers—call your sister again in an hour. If she doesn’t pick up, we still move at dawn.”

“First light,” Kara said, and the words felt like a handhold.

They worked. It looked nothing like TV. It looked like dragging boxes and taping paper over the strip of glass in the door and finding a bucket because someone always has to find the bucket. It looked like fear with a job.

Kara texted Alex their coordinates. Message failed. She tried again. Failed. She typed, We’re okay. We’ll come to you. First light. She didn’t hit send. She couldn’t stand to watch it fail again.

Cat sat with her back to the door, axe balanced across her knees. In the dim, with rain drumming steady, she looked less like a myth and more like a woman who had refused to learn the word retire.

Nia doled out protein bars and water, eyes still glassy but breath steady. The intern fell asleep with his head against a box labeled TAXES, 2018.

James pressed an ice pack made from frozen peas he’d stolen from the storage facility’s breakroom against his cheekbone. “I’ve had worse,” he told Kara when he caught her looking. He grinned. “I’ve had better, too.”

Kara’s laugh surprised her. It came out sounding like a person.

She thumbed open her phone one more time and found one bar of signal like a miracle.

She called.

Alex picked up on the second ring. “You holding?”

“We’re holding,” Kara said. “We’ll move at dawn.”

There was a pause on the line. Then Alex: “Good. That’s the smartest thing you’ve said all year.” The gentleness under the tease made Kara swallow wrong.

“Tell me where to go,” Kara said.

“I will. When the system behaves.” Alex exhaled. “Get what sleep you can.” She hesitated. “Kara—”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

Kara closed her eyes. “I love you too.”

The line clicked dead.

Cat’s voice, dry: “Was that my favorite Danvers?”

Kara wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “She says we move at dawn.”

Cat looked at the door like she could see the sun through it. “Of course she does.” She tapped the axe head against her boot, once. “All right, troops. First light.”

They made places to sit. They made a rotation for the door. They made a night out of a day that had gone wrong in slow motion and then all at once.

Kara didn’t sleep. She listened to the rain and to the breathing of people she’d chosen. She watched the thin line of light under the door and waited for it to thicken.

Somewhere across the city, a woman in a lab coat wrote a plan on a whiteboard and rolled up her sleeves. Somewhere under the city, a sister counted the minutes until she could send a text that wouldn’t vanish.

The night held.

At the edge of it, dawn began to lift its head.

---

End of Chapter

Next: Day Two – first light, first route, first losses

Chapter Text

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They all slept badly, and some not at all.

Dawn came as a thin thing, like the first scab of light. It threaded through the edges of the paper Cat had taped over the storage unit’s strip window and threw a weak rectangle on the floor. The generator hummed somewhere down the hall, an obedient insect. Rain kept making the same small noises against the corrugated roof: a metronome for a city that had forgotten how to keep time.

Kara woke with the memory of a mouthful of someone else’s fear and the sound of metal on bone. Her cheek still stung where James's fist had steadied her head against the stairwell tile; she rubbed it and didn’t feel foolish for the motion. She could feel the life of the unit: the slow, shallow breath of the intern folded into a box, the quickness beneath Nia’s lashes as she turned in another dream, Cat’s toe tapping once and still.

Her phone showed six percent.

She folded her hand around it like a benediction and read Alex’s last text again even though the words were the same as they had been in the dark: We’re at the labs. Don’t come through downtown. First light. It was a small island of sense in a world that had teeth. She’d tried to send coordinates last night; the failed send icon had been a nuisance at first and then a torrent of shame. She hadn’t tried again. Six percent was a promise she couldn’t spend on noise.

She watched people the way a journalist learns to watch: as a collection of facts that, when assembled, told a story. James—chin to his chest, pretending sleep, an arm bent under him like a guardrail. Nia—thin shoulders trembling under a sweat shirt, hands moving once in a rhythm that might be counting or might be prayer. The intern—eyes open to the ceiling, a hollow look of someone who had watched the world tilt and had not yet learned how to stand against the angle. The woman who’d punched James sat with her hands folded and kept saying “sorry” into her palms as if sound could stitch up the day.

Cat was awake, obviously—the queen of the room could never truly be not awake. She sat with her back against a stack of moving boxes, the axe within reach, hair done in a way that made the abruptness of an emergency look like a scheduled event. She caught Kara’s eye and lifted one brow. It was an invitation and a test.

Kara pushed herself upright, ankle stiff with pins and needles, and stepped toward Cat as though toward a podium. The movement felt ridiculous and enormous all at once.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Cat said, dry as lint. “Which in this city, I suppose, you have.”

“It’s been a night,” Kara said. She turned the phone over in her hands, memorizing the pattern of the cracked case. “Alex said we should move at first light.”

Cat smiled in a way that didn’t smooth anything.  “Remind me to send your sister flowers when this is over. She’s the only adult left in the room.”

Kara laughed, because the laugh was better than the thing in her chest.

They moved without ceremony to the small map that James had filched from the clerk’s desk. The paper was wet at the edge from someone’s spilled coffee and had a strip of the facility’s brochure attached at the bottom. Kara smoothed it on a box and traced the route with her finger: two blocks east, three streets north, cross at the old municipal bridge if it’s intact, otherwise loop around down by the river. Alex’s field office—University labs—sat like a smudge on the edge of the city, not far but far enough to matter.

Cat watched her map with the look of someone who had spent a life measuring margins and reassigning blame. She leaned forward, fingers steepled. “You know what I hate about mornings, Danvers?”

Kara blinked. “Everything?”

“Close.” Cat’s tone held that old newsroom cruelty that made politicians recoil. “It’s the light. It reveals what the night tries hard to keep buried. It shows you what you didn’t do and what you can’t fix.”

Kara’s mouth went dry. She thought of the body Jared had been, of the way his hand had snapped like a mouse trap on her wrist. “We did what we could,” she said.

“We did what we had time to do,” Cat corrected. “That’s sometimes worse.”

Kara looked at her and saw, under the sharp glamour, the thin edge of someone who had been awake and watching. “You saw the patterns,” she said softly. It had been Cat’s confession to the night: she’d mentioned, once, a week ago, an article she’d almost run and then had pulled at the last minute. She’d said something about clusters. Kara had assumed it was gossip. She hadn’t realized how much Cat had been looking.

Cat’s hand was steady when she folded it over Kara’s. It was a small movement, intimate in a way that journalistic relationships seldom were. “I saw it,” she said. “I saw the quiet edits, the ones that swallow footnotes. People didn’t want to be wrong. They didn’t want to be alarmist. Those redactions are public history’s secrets. They told me a story I didn’t have the power to fix.” Her voice went quieter than anyone who knew Cat was allowed to. “You will.”

Kara asked, before she could stop herself, “Why me?”

Cat’s laugh was a blade. “Because you wake up and you move toward the person shaking, not away. You make people follow because they think you know where the light is. That’s rarer than tenured scientists and speaker’s podiums, baby. It’s the muscle of keeping people alive.”

Kara felt the heat of embarrassment and something like permission. “I’m not—” she started.

“You’re not a general,” Cat said, “and you shouldn’t be. You’re… a face people trust when no one else will trust them. That’s a different kind of command. You’re nimble. You’re loud enough to be heard and soft enough for folks who are near the edge.”

Cat’s hand slid off Kara’s in a motion that might have been a release or an instruction. “You’re leading this group. Don’t argue about titles. Argue about logistics. You’ll make smarter calls than people expect—and if you fail, you’ll learn faster than anyone who’s built a career on committees.”

Kara felt the room tilt under the weight of the decision. This was not a handing over with the flash of a coronation. It was Cat choosing an heir because she saw the exact quality they needed to survive. It was less deference than anointing.

“I don’t know how,” Kara said.

“Then you’ll fake it until you do,” Cat said. “That’s what everyone with sense does. And if there’s one thing you should steal from me, it’s how to deliver a line people will believe. That’s your job now: keep sentences short and instructions shorter.”

Kara nodded. A laugh bubbled up and dissolved into a sob that she swallowed. She had never felt smaller and, at the same time, more necessary.

Cat watched her and, for a moment, dropped the flinty public mask. There was regret in her eyes—an odd, private thing. “I should have said something sooner,” she admitted. “I had fragments—a pattern of rising mortality in three clusters, suppressed lab notes, a whistleblower who then stopped returning my calls. I could have pressed harder. I didn’t. This is… part punishment, part atonement. I found a talent in you and I won’t waste it.”

Kara pressed the phone into her palm like a talisman. Six percent, one bar. It felt like a bead on a rosary.

“Your first act as leader,” Cat said, “is mundane: inventory and route. Your second act is harder: do not let panic make speeches.”

Kara moved. She started with water. She counted cans, protein bars, and what they could trade if they had to—names of radio stations that might broadcast local emergency information, the location of a Red Cross outpost three towns over, the nearest pharmacy with a working generator. She made notes on the back of a box, the movements crisp enough to keep panic from rising back up.

James came awake when she moved him, and she gave him rear guard—force of habit and because the man had the right, grounded bulk for it. Nia shook and then steadied, eyes focused on Kara as if there were a small hearth in her gaze. The intern, who’d been hollow a moment before, mimicked a task—stacking boxes, carrying a supply crate—with hands that trembled but obeyed.

Cat watched all of it like a director savoring cuts. She offered a single piece of advice as they packed: “If you have to make noise, make it purposeful. Loud instructions on the count. No improvisation unless the roof is falling.”

When the group moved out, it was with a rhythm Bowed down by fear but not owned by it. They threaded through back alleys, past a soda machine still perched on its ruined pedestal, past a storefront window where a mannequin had been pushed face first into glass and lay there like someone pretending to sleep. The city looked like a body that had been left too long in the sun—skin gone dull and fragile, clothes clinging where they should fall.

Kara’s lead was quiet but evident. She chose lines of sight where the buildings offered blind corners, kept people in her periphery so no one disappeared into their own panic. She kept her voice low, a thread that all of them clung to. “Left here. Keep your backs to the wall. James, check the alley.” Her instructions were practical and short. People moved as though they had all been waiting for permission to act.

At the bridge, they found their first tableau of abandonment. Cars lined the way with doors open, the occasional half-seat belt like a note. A toddler’s shoe—pink and scuffed—sat alone on the median like punctuation. A bus had stopped in the middle of the lane, doors swinging open, its interior bright with someone’s spilled purse and a single pair of headphones tangled in an aisle seat. Bodies lay scattered at the far side, the kind of scene that takes the breath out of the body like a physical force.

Kara’s fingers tightened around the phone. It buzzed once: a ghost of a message that trudged through the gridlock. Alex: University. Labs. Don’t go downtown. Use River Route. We have limited capacity. The message broke half through; the last line did not come.

“That’s a route change,” Kara said, out loud even though the words felt like desperate currency. She pointed. “We cut down through the subway access and come up under the old service stair. It adds steps but it keeps us off the main road.”

The first murmurs of panic came from a group of people dragging a collapsed body free from under the bus. A man, wild-eyed and raw, came toward them with a tire iron. He swung at James without giving thought to logic. James deflected with the heavy, efficient motion of someone who had once been a photographer and now used his body as if it were the thing he printed on.

Shouts went up. The struck man hit James back, blood and teeth, and the bus scene congealed into chaos. From a side doorway, a woman screamed; a dog barked, far off, a single thin sound that drew a crowd and, unpleasantly, an answer.

The shuffling started at the edges first—an arm, a foot. Then came the sound like a swallowed animal, a wet, thin groan that curled across concrete like steam. Where it landed, people stopped moving and stared, then screamed, then bolted.

Kara’s voice cut through the mess because she had learned to make words carry. “Line up! We move left! One at a time, quick—no heroics!” She reached for Nia’s hand because Nia had, for the moment, become the youngest, the easily lost. Nia found her grip and held it like a prayer.

James pushed back at the oncoming violence, swinging a length of pipe he had found. It connected with a face loud enough to sound like a bell. The man dropped. Someone screamed. The noise stacked and folded and then it began to answer.

They ran—a practiced, ugly run. The direction toward the service staircase slammed the city’s bone against the soles of their feet. Kara kept her head down, her breaths short, counting the people like a litany: one, Nia; two, intern; three, woman-who-punched; four, James; five, Cat.

The subterranean corridor they took was worse for bleach and humidity. It smelled like hospital floors and paint and a world trying to keep its skin together. Their footsteps echoed too loud. The sound had the terrible quality of an invitation.

A single wrong shuffle awoke what they had left sleeping. From the end of the tunnel came a sound like a body that had forgotten it was meant to be still. One figure lurched into motion, dragged by some ancient wiring of reflex. It was not pretty. It was not human as she learned humans to be—the mouth working and chin jerking, hands made for pulling and ripping. It loped because its logic had stopped at the need to move.

“Back,” Cat hissed, and for the first time that morning a tone like real command slipped over the group. Her axe flashed in a motion that made the hair on the back of Kara’s neck lift.

The thing in front of them smelled wrong and immediate. James did not hesitate; he swung. The connection thudded with a sound like wheat being cut. The thing’s head hit tile and did not go still. It flopped and got back up. Blood pooled. It turned, cheap and wrong, toward them.

Kara saw then that leadership wasn’t the tidy idea of barking orders on a TV stage. It was the soft mathematics of survival: where to place your body, where to take risks so that risk did not concentrate on the youngest. She stepped forward, putting herself between the creature and Nia, and that was the first small act that felt like the shape she was meant to be in this new world.

“Form up!” she shouted. “Make a line! Eyes on me—everybody, eyes on me.” She lifted the small flashlight Cat had given her like it was a baton. Its beam made a small sanctuary on the concrete.

They fought like people who’d known violence in theory and now had to make it truthful. Someone in a van down the way fired a shot because he had a gun and no training; the sound ricocheted like a warning. A cry, a shot, a hit. Nia was pushed back and Kara’s hand snagged hers and held firmly; she felt Nia’s breath hitch and she counted a long, steady beat to match it. Cat smashed a plate of something and used its jagged edge to keep one of the things at bay until James could get up behind it and finish it. The fight was quick and ugly and when it was over they stood in a small ring of bruised light and a smell like iron and laundry gone wrong.

They moved again, slower this time. It felt as if the ground had been changed and would remain changed under their shoes forever. Kara looked up and swore softly to herself—a reflex of something more private than prayer. Her phone read three percent.

She thought of Alex and of the line in Alex’s last half-message—we have limited capacity. She packed the phone away like a secret and pushed forward. There was no plan except to go to the University labs where, she thought, Alex knew things that mattered. There would be questions later about how they’d get in, whether Alex could take them, whether Winn would be alive and cursing and waving a soldering tool like it was a flag. For now there was only forward.

On the other side of the city, at Faulkner Logistics, Lena Luthor woke to the hum of a generator and the thin, efficient smell of antiseptic. The off-record lab had a convincing air of normalcy: blood bags counted and labeled, a board with circled times, a pile of personal effects someone had abandoned. The building had been wrested into order by the kind of hands that could fail but would not confess it aloud.

Sam tipped a mug of coffee into a thermos the way one would feed a child. “It’s not hot,” she said, as if to apologize.

“It’s delivery,” Lena replied, and the small levity was a rope thrown between them. Sam was the sister Lena had chosen in a life of bought alliances. She was also the firewall Lena kept in place between her and panic.

Lena moved to the whiteboard, uncapped a marker like a ritual. There was a half diagram left over from the night: a spike in admissions in three clusters, a faded note about postmortem activity. Her handwriting was blunt. She took a breath and wrote a new line: ASSESS → SECURE → RETRIEVE SAMPLES → FIND CDC.

Sam watched her and then stepped in, reorganizing a pile of vials. “We shouldn’t be hasty,” Sam said. “We should be methodical.”

“We will be both,” Lena answered. “There’s no time for sacredness.”

Sam’s jaw tightened in a way Lena understood as fear translated into problem-solving. “You got a signal last night,” Sam said. “From the field? Alex?”

“A fragment,” Lena admitted. “She sent: Convergence near university sector. Keep samples secure. And then we lost the line. She’s the most… informed person I have at the front. If she is still there, we find her.”

Sam’s face shifted into that blend of worry and stubborn loyalty Lena had come to rely on. “Then we go. I’ll load what we can carry safely.”

J’onn stood in the doorway, the ghost of his military poise folded over his frame. M’gann was practical, blunt, and already preparing a list of what they’d need: fuel canisters, med kits, the largest battery clusters they had. There was a geometry to moving through this new world that Lena had always understood—a line drawn from cause to effect. She worked it out on the whiteboard in clean strokes and then turned to J’onn.

“We’ll take two vans,” she said. “Secure routes. No downtown. We’ll move along the peripheral corridors. M’gann, you and Sam take the north lane. J’onn, you secure the loading dock long enough for us to get out. I’ll lead.”

Sam’s mouth opened in a protest, small and sharp. “You can’t lead and—”

“Yes I can,” Lena said. The sentence landed with the cold truth of a decision maker. “I will go because we need someone who can adapt on the fly and won’t risk samples for sentiment. I will be the one to say no. But Sam is coming with me. I’m not leaving you behind.”

Sam’s face wet with something that might have been fear or relief or both. She gathered the medkits and a small kit of drugs Lena had authorized for research staff—experimental things that had never had the opportunity to be tried. They had become precious now: potential keys to an unknown lock.

They moved out of Faulkner with the clinical efficiency of people who had practiced drills. Lena’s voice, when she spoke, was small in a way that made people listen. “We do this for the work. We do this for the samples. If there’s an answer, it’s in what we can verify. Keep your eyes open and your instincts on the small things—loops in behavior, things that don’t fit.”

The vans slipped through streets that had emptied like carved shells. Lena studied the city through the windshield—a lesson in the geography of absence. Stores had their doors hanging open like mouths; traffic lights blinked at nobody. She thought of Alex—not as a sister or a lover or a colleague, but as a node of real knowledge. Alex had been the one to push data to L-Corp’s private channel in a series of cryptic messages and Lena had, in turn, sent back parsed results and suppressed findings. They had never met face-to-face. Their relationship had lived in headers and timestamps and a hundred small code words.

Lena’s thumb brushed the edge of an envelope where Sam had left a scribbled note. It was near the steering wheel, worn soft. She refused to let the sentimental interrupt the calculus of motion. The city moved past them like a film reel of what had been normal: a dog tied to a post and still there as if waiting for an owner who would never return, a child’s backpack hanging on a bench like a flag of forgotten intent. She kept her eyes forward.

The vans took different arteries and then reconverged at a prearranged corner. Lena watched the skyline and calculated the University’s sector by the angle of smoke. There was movement where the labs were—barriers, the flash of a rooftop tarp in the wind. She felt the same quick, precise pull that had guided her through R&D crunches—if the samples existed and if Alex had them, then they were now a node of survival.

“We’ll move as a unit,” Lena said. “We do not stop to rescue unless it’s a clear gain. We go in and we get the samples. Then we find out what the CDC knows. If Alex is there, we coordinate. If she is not, we get evidence back to a secure node.”

Sam grabbed Lena’s sleeve. “And if she’s hurt?”

Lena felt something like a valve open for a second—a flash of private fear. “Then we bring her back. But we do it methodically.”

They prepared to descend into a city that had lost its agreed-upon rules. Lena’s leadership was an axis around which people pivoted, trusting her math even when their nerves wanted the comfort of catharsis. On her face was the same careful neutrality she had perfected in boardrooms; behind it, there was a woman who could be roused to tenderness or fury by the right lever.

Back underground, Kara’s group crawled through a service stair that smelled of grease and old cigarettes. The light at the tunnel’s end was washed in the orange bruise of morning and through it rose a skyline that looked like a crown of ruined glass. The University was ahead, black windows and barricades, an edifice of knowledge that felt suddenly like the last safe word.

“University,” James muttered. The word was a prayer and a curse.

Kara’s phone blinked. One percent.

Her hands went cold in a way that reached past fear and into the practical. One percent meant one thing: they had to be careful. She tucked the phone deep into her jacket, a miser hiding the last coin. She counted the breaths of the people around her again—Nia’s small one, the intern’s hollow one, James’s slow, controlled one. The counting steadied her in the way that the newsroom’s deadlines had once steadied her. In crisis, people did better when they were given small, concrete things to hold.

Ahead, a long line of barricades came into view and, beyond them, figures moving in a pattern Lena had recognized in files and not yet had the gall to name aloud: small teams with radios and cots and the fragile armor of people who had been trained to think about contamination. Someone had painted “CDC FIELD” on a sandwich board and leaned it against a broken planter like an offering.

Kara breathed and felt the first honest version of hope in a long while. “Alex,” she said into the thin air, and it came out like a benediction. “We’re coming.”

For a second, the city caught its breath with her. In the distance, the vans that'll carry Lena’s team rose over a hill in a parallel shot that would make memory later: Lena’s hands flat at ten and two on the wheel, the skyline in her windshield like a promise or an accusation. The reflection of the same University building stood in her glass: a dark block of the world’s last questions.

They did not yet know how small the space between their choices was. They did not yet know that their routes would braid and knot and pull them face-to-face. For now there was only movement and that fragile, necessary decision: to go.

Kara stepped forward into the light with the rest of them behind her, shoulders set in a quiet line. The phone pressed into her pocket like a secret and the city pressed in like a wound. She kept moving.

Behind her, Cat walked with the cadence of a woman who had played many roles and decided this one might be worth playing again. At her shoulder, Cat’s comments were sharp as ever and softer when she meant them: “Don’t forget to look for water spigots, you moron. People die of small things before they die of big ones. And Danvers—never let them turn speech into panic. The moment people speak too much is the moment control walks away.”

Kara answered with a brief, efficient smile. She felt smaller and larger the same time. The job was not glory. It was teeth in concrete and breath counting and the careful distribution of hope. She felt, somehow, both welcome and terrified by the responsibility.

They reached the University gates as a group of technicians and two men with improvised shotguns watched the horizon like priests. One of them—thin and white-bearded—met Kara’s eye and nodded the way someone nods to a fellow father in a catastrophe. Winn would be here, she thought, like an old friend’s joke: cursing because something broke and smiling when something worked. The thought steadied her enough for another breath.

She took out the phone one last time and thumbed a message she wrote as if it were a headline: “We’re outside. We’re coming in. Low battery.” It sent. The send icon blinked and held and then, finally, the small confirmation came: delivered.

She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding and then said, soft and steady into a sky that felt like a question thrown back at them, “Alex. We’re coming.”

Across the city, in a van with the Faulkner logo faded into a different light, Lena’s face reflected in the windshield like a statue. She kept her gaze on the University and on the route that would deliver them there. She felt a small, unreadable, dangerous thing in her chest—something close to hope and something close to terror. She tucked it away with the thought that if there were an answer, it was time to be the people to chase it.

The city, for a moment, held its breath.

And then it exhaled. The day began.

Chapter Text

---

KARA — DAY TWO

The gate smelled of wet metal and burnt paper. Kara had expected cordons and men with rifles, but not the way the air tasted like old wire and something chemical—like antiseptic left in the sun too long. Halcyon’s tall fence stood like a crown of bent teeth. Beyond it, the research towers rose, glass blacked out, one wing wreathed in a thin cigarette of smoke.

Cat moved with her, sleeves rolled, axe at her side like a ridiculous accessory and a weapon both. James walked near the rear, hands on a crowbar and a pocket full of blunt instruments. Nia carried the intern’s backpack. The woman who had punched James walked with her head down, palms bleeding from earlier scrabbling. They smelled of the night: rain, coffee, fear.

Kara stopped at the barricade and watched the ordered chaos. Wheels on armored carts ground against asphalt. Men in CDC vests kept people away from an undignified mound of belongings that might once have been a triage heap. Metal detritus—chairs, an overturned copier—had been piled into makeshift barriers. Someone had daubed spray paint on a board: QUARANTINE — DO NOT ENTER. Someone else had added a crooked heart.

A guard at the gate leveled a rifle without looking at them and barked, “Identification.”

Kara swallowed and pushed forward into the light anyway. “We need in,” she said. Her voice wasn’t the fluted one that read headlines; it was the one that had been telling strangers where to shelter all night. It had the same small authority as the map she could fold in her head.

Cat put her hand to Kara’s shoulder—brief, proprietary. “Cat Grant,” she said like a badge and a dare. “National media. We’re following a story.”

The man didn’t laugh. “Name the reporter.”

“Kara Danvers,” Kara said. “Danvers—CatCo. We have survivors.” She gestured backward; the faces behind her were answered by a dozen small gestures that said we are alive.

The rifle lowered just a fraction.

“You got friends inside?” the guard asked.

Kara felt the battery percentage on her phone ping at her—three bars left, critical. Her thumb hovered without texting. She wanted to call Alex, to tell her they’d arrived, to hear the sound of Alex’s voice and not the static and the lies the city hummed. She had promised first light; first light had been a promise kept by a world that had forgotten how to keep other promises.

“Alex — Alex Danvers,” Cat said before Kara could speak. “She’s my favorite Danvers.” The guard’s face flickered with recognition; Cat had that effect. She’d always had it: a single sentence, and the world arranged itself. The guard pressed a palm to his radio. “Hold.”

A secondary fence unzipped; a volunteer with a bandage on his forearm waved them through. Someone handed Kara a paper bracelet. “ID. Simple screening. No sudden movements.”

They filed in like a small, shameful parade, unwilling to meet the eyes of people who had arms full of dead and who still had something like serenity about them—professional calm that had been built for bad nights like this. Inside, Halcyon smelled cleaner as if a building could pretend hygiene was still a thing.

The world narrowed to light and sound — gunfire, shouting, the thud of boots on concrete.

Kara’s group ducked behind a scorched barricade as the University gates buckled under pressure.

The air smelled of metal and fire.

Then — a voice. Sharp. Familiar. Cutting through the noise.

“Hold your line! No one fires unless I say so!”

Kara’s heart stopped.

She knew that voice.

Her head snapped toward the source — through smoke, through chaos, a figure in dark tactical gear was barking orders, directing survivors, weapon steady.

The stance. The focus. The certainty in the middle of collapse.

“Alex?”

Alex Danvers froze mid-command, scanning the crowd.

When her eyes found Kara’s, the rest of the world fell away.

Kara moved before she knew she’d moved.

The gate creaked open, Alex shouting something — warning? order? — but it didn’t matter.

Kara ran straight through the noise, dodging hands and debris, her lungs burning.

Then she was there.

They collided, all breath and disbelief, Kara’s hands fisting in Alex’s jacket, Alex’s arm slamming around her shoulders with enough force to bruise.

No words at first. Just breathing.

Hard, broken, human.

Alex pulled back half an inch, eyes glassy but fierce, scanning Kara’s face like she was memorizing it.

“You’re real,” Alex said hoarsely. “You’re actually—”

Her voice cracked; she shook her head. “I thought I lost you.”

Kara swallowed, fingers still locked in Alex’s sleeve. “You almost did.”

For a heartbeat, neither moved.

Around them, the noise of survival went on — shouting, gunfire, someone calling for help.

Then Kara looked past her, toward the gates and the chaos beyond.

The journalist in her was gone; what remained was command.

“Where do you need us?” she asked.

Alex blinked — then nodded once, soldier-fast. “Inside. We hold the lab perimeter and regroup.”

Kara turned, calling to James, Cat, and Nia. “Move!”

Alex fell in beside her, weapon raised.

The two Danvers sisters entered Halcyon Labs together — breath for breath, heartbeat for heartbeat — and for the first time since the world ended, neither of them was alone.

Winn saw her next.

He was huddled near a generator with a tangle of cables, messenger bag slung across his chest, glasses askew. For a blink he looked like the Winn she used to know: too-smart, the kind of guy who could make a satellite sneeze and then apologize politely to the hardware. Then the recognition cut across his face, something like joy that had to be hedged with disbelief.

“Kara?” He said it like a question and a prayer at once. He was up before Kara could move, knocking a tool down in his haste.

“Kell’s little genius,” James said under his breath—an observation, the kind James made when he didn’t want to add noise.

Winn reached her like he could close distance with feeling. He grabbed her forearm and then stared at her, memorizing angles as if to prove she was real. “You’re here. I—God, you’re here.”

It was all relief and breaking at once. Kara’s cheeks flooded with something she tried not to have a name for. Winn’s hand on her arm steadied a tide she had been keeping at bay. They were friends; they had been kids on campus; now they were two people who had chosen, at different times of their lives, to show up.

“Winn,” she said, and her voice was small with gratitude. “Thank you for being here.”

He made a low, embarrassed noise. “I’m not sure I had a choice. Who leaves Halcyon alone? Also, you have a really terrible sense of timing—” he started, then stopped, and then—because this was the right place for humor—“—but you know that, so.”

Alex cut through the reunion with the efficiency of an operating room’s light. “We do a quick intake,” she said. “Bring them through decon. Winn, you and Brainy help triage. Kelly on medical, Maggie on perimeter.” Her eyes flicked to Kara for a half-second. “You did… well.”

Kara brushed it off. “We got people here.”

That mattered. Alex nodded and the command tent turned into a slower, steadier machine: names, ages, wounds catalogued. The Halcyon team moved on a choreography that had made armies and saving-graces of ordinary people for decades. People who had been trained to do the humane thing in the face of everything else failed them.

A lab tech wheeled in a refrigerated crate stamped with a L-Corp courier sticker. Someone had tried to keep science intact. Brainy—exactly as clever and slightly colder than remembered—tinkered with a power bus to supply the microscope array. He and Winn fell into a private, practical orbit around equipment like sailors around a mast.

Then the containment alarm chimed: a thin, acid sound that had no business in a place that smelled of ethanol and sweat. Lights stuttered. Someone’s note—MONEY, NOT FOOD—fell from a clipboard and skittered on the table like a dead insect.

“Specimen breach—Lab 4,” Brainy said, already moving with apparatus in hand.

Kara’s chest clenched. Lab 4 was the cohort bay. Lab 4 was where they had worried about the curve and plotted its slope and had little else to offer the world now but terrified notes and exhausted men to carry them.

They moved like a team not because they had trained for it together but because training is a language. Alex barked instructions that were precise and spare. Kara followed. Cat stayed near the periphery and watched the shape of action like someone studying a lead. She didn’t intrude; she filed the images like footage to be used later when the world made sense again.

The specimen was not a thing that made noise before it began to move. It was a taut thing in a cover that suddenly had too much will. When the cover was ripped back—someone’s glove sliding off in a panic—the face they saw was less human than human-shaped. Blood sprayed the sterile tile with clean, wet arcs. The creature’s jaw worked in the wrong direction, a disease of motion.

The lab erupted in sound the way a heart erupted into arrhythmia. Someone screamed and then there was only the guttural, animal press of bodies trying to make walls where there were only people. Brainy shoved a rolling cart between the thing and the door. Jabs, a wrench—improvised lodges of survival. Winn threw a computer monitor with the desperation of a man who had once flung notebooks and accidentally created a trebuchet when undergrad frustration called.

Blood came fast and close. A senior tech’s arm was bitten cleanly, bone visible and wet. The sound of the bone was a punctuation mark in the air—sharp, impossible to forget. The tech didn’t die right away. He convulsed, his body angling toward the thing before someone else struck the instrument home. The room stank of metal and a new, chemical fear.

Kara moved. She moved because a group of people were doing the right thing poorly and because there was a place to put herself that would be useful. She pushed through the melee, hands steady, voice cutting through panic in a way that surprised her.

“Hold the door! Winn—monitor the back hallway. Brainy, give me a tourniquet.” She took the wrench someone held out and braced it between her knees. When the thing lunged, she swung with the kind of force born of everything she’d done: shoving doors for deadlines, pushing people into safe rooms, dragging a coworker out of an implosion. The wrench connected. The thing fell. For a second everything felt like it might stop.

Someone else screamed behind them. Two others were biting at each other like wolves. Screams ricocheted off stainless steel and were cut by Alex’s practiced orders.

Kara felt the newness of blood on her sleeve and did not flinch. She felt the surge of something else—an odd clarity beneath panic, like a quiet center in a storm. Cat’s eyes were on her and, for a fast breath, Kara saw a small and private approval in that look as if Cat had been waiting to see whether Kara’s chosen voice could hold when the acoustics turned wrong.

When the breach finally stopped—corpses bundled into body bags with hands that still curled—the lab tasted like something that had been used and cleansed too quickly. Winn wiped his forehead and looked at Kara, eyes unnerved but proud. “How you doing?” he asked; he would have been the sort to make a joke, but there was mapping in the way he watched her. He was measuring distance between what she had been and what she’d become.

Kara’s hands shook when she breathed. She met Alex’s eye and felt both gratitude and a strange responsibility widen like ground beneath a house. She had led by instinct and a particular, terrible competence. People around her had looked, obeyed, and survived. That was what leadership did in the most humble terms: it kept people breathing.

She would not realize, not yet, how small those breaths might become.

---

LENA — DAY TWO

Lena’s windshield framed the world like a photograph she refused to let go of. The convoy drove with the cautious cadence of a funeral procession—two vans, lights low, the van engines muttering like two tired beasts. Faulkner had been a refuge; the decision to go to Halcyon had felt like a rational gamble and also a personal demand. Alex’s last fractured message—“Convergence near university sector. Keep samples secure”—had been half of an equation Lena couldn’t ignore.

The west wing of Halcyon looked less like a hospital and more like a place a thousand people had tried to keep from collapsing. The buildings were ringed in barriers and bodies; smoke denounced windows. Lena’s hands on the steering wheel were steady but cold. Sam sat beside her, braid threaded with silver from a sleepless night. Sam’s jaw looked like it had been ironed.

“We cut through the north service road,” Lena said. “M’gann, J’onn, you'll clear ahead. Sam—check the drives as soon as we have power. If I find anything that’s named K.D., you find me the thread.”

Sam’s breath made a small white in the warm cab. “You and your initials,” she muttered, but her eyes were attentive and fierce. They had been sisters at harder problems; Lena had learned to listen to the small worried noises Sam made because they were indicators and not catharsis.

They rolled up to a secondary entrance and M’gann slid out with an easy, practiced motion. The maintenance doors were dented and streaked. J’onn’s presence was a tether—an unspoken promise that they’d have a man between them and something worse. He moved with that quiet certainty of people who wore service like armor.

They found corpses on the grounds—human shapes that folded into themselves, chairs overturned, a bicycle half-buried under a makeshift banner. In the grass a body lay face down, a bloody line running along the scalp. Lena turned her face away from it and kept moving because she had learned that the alternative to moving was being trapped by the smell of what had been.

In the secondary corridors they found more than that. In one office a server rack still hummed with a stubborn little life; a monitor blinked with text in a format Lena knew too well. She moved with a scientist’s immediacy—an instinct that sometimes made her forget breath—and Sam watched it in the same way one watches someone with a fever.

Smoke clawed at the corridor ceiling, turning the emergency lights into a flicker of orange and blood.

Lena’s pulse roared in her ears, sharp and bright. She wasn’t sure which noise came first — the sound of the infected slamming into the glass, or Sam’s scream.

“Sam!”

Lena’s voice tore itself out of her before she could think. She rounded the corner, boots skidding through spilled disinfectant, and saw her best friend pinned under a body that had once been a man in a lab coat. The thing’s mouth worked against Sam’s forearm, teeth scraping fabric, trying to find skin.

M’gann was there first, yanking the creature off with a feral grunt. J’onn swung his baton once, hard, and the thing went down, twitching.

Sam was already on her feet — wild-eyed, shaking, blood streaking her sleeve but not her skin. She was alive.

Lena didn’t think; she grabbed her, one hand on her face, the other gripping her shoulder.

For a second, neither spoke.

Sam’s breathing was ragged. Lena’s hands were trembling, not from fear but from the aftershock of nearly losing her.

“You’re okay,” Lena said finally, voice low, command turning into plea.

Sam’s lips parted — half a laugh, half a sob. “You yell like my mother when you’re scared.”

Lena exhaled, a sound that might have been a laugh if there were still room in the world for one.

“Then don’t make me prove it again,” she said, and released her — but not completely.

Behind them, J’onn’s voice: “We need to move. Noise draws them.”

Lena nodded, composure snapping back like armor.

But as they started forward, she felt Sam’s hand brush hers — a silent reassurance.

And in that brief touch, Lena understood something she hadn’t wanted to name:

that leadership wasn’t about commanding from the front — it was about who you’d risk becoming if the person beside you didn’t make it.

Somewhere across the city, someone else was learning the same truth — in a different lab, under the same sky.

And though Lena didn’t know it yet, their stories were already pulling toward each other — breath for breath, heartbeat for heartbeat.

---

After they regroup, Lena and Sam access Alex’s terminal.

She plugged a drive into a terminal and the screen spat up a file labeled with a title that made her chest hollow: SUBJECT_0_KD. It was an innocuous line that should have been a file name and not a prophecy.

Lena read fast, fingers precise. “Aberrant genome markers,” she said. “Non-reactive cellular necrosis observed; postmortem motor function inconsistent with expected reflexive decay. Subject: K.D. Early containment failed.” Her mouth said the words; Sam’s exhale came out like a small animal.

“Who is K.D.?” Sam asked.

Lena’s thumb hovered over the keyboard. She could send a query into Halcyon’s network and have them trace the tag, but the network was chewed up and full of static ghosts. She downloaded everything to a drive instead—duplicating the tiny admonition that science is a ledger, and ledger should be preserved.

“It’s a patient tag,” Lena said. “Initials. Whoever labeled it early labeled it wrong.” Her voice had a thread of anger she could not keep from threading through. Alex had passed her fragments before—encrypted messages and circumspect jargon. They had shared data by the dozen, by the late-night text, through a pipeline of trust that had never involved faces. Now that she was close enough to see the lab building’s facade, the science felt both like a map and a verdict.

J’onn moved at the doorway and his hand was on the baton at his belt. “We need to consolidate with the medical team inside,” he said. “Now.”

“Yes,” Lena said. She wanted to stay; she wanted to trace the data to whoever K.D. had been. But the science had to be useful, or it was just a curiosity. “Sam—bring the drive. We go meet the command tent. We give them numbers, and then we dig. We’ll see what K.D. is.”

Sam’s look at her was an oath and a worry. “You’re not alone.”

Lena felt the weight of that. She had been alone in boardrooms and scientific corridors for long enough that the presence of other people felt like both relief and complication. She stuffed her obsession into a tactical pocket—do the thing that keeps people alive, and then untie the rest.

They moved with the convoy into the compound’s shadow. The place had a perimeter compound that looked like a collapsed festival—medical tents, clusters of people with faces sharpened by recent grief. Alex’s voice on a distant radio was clipped; Lena’s team fell into the current.

When the alarms rang and the walkway into the lab shook with the thud of boots, Lena’s jaw clenched. She was not there yet to meet Kara, not that she knew Kara’s name, but when she finally saw the woman—short, hair pulled back, shoulders set—she felt the current of recognition that comes from two paths tracing the same need. They were both heading toward the same heart of a different catastrophe.

---

KARA — DAY TWO

Inside the command tent things had gotten worse before they could get better. The first reanimated specimen in the containment bay had been only the beginning. The labs had been trying to extract data even as they were losing humanity. Machines rattled like maracas on someone else’s floor.

Kara saw it in Winn’s hands: the way he kept the cable steady, the slight tremor that belied his attempts at jokes. He had always turned toward the complicated and stayed with it. In Halcyon’s chaos he was, improbably, giving orders to volunteers, finding sockets that worked, routing power to a freezer that still had test vials.

They moved people into a triage tent and did what science and love and panic could cobble together—bandages, compresses, triage tags tied like small flags. Alex organized teams with a cadence she had learned under pressure. Kara followed and did the small things: hold a lamp while Brainy cleaned a wound, fetch saline, talk to the intern who had seen too much for his age.

When the scream came, it came from the corridor they’d just secured. A guard had been checking the back hall, and something had found the glint of movement and used it like a key.

The corridor was a narrow throat. The first thing they saw was a body slumped against an instrument cart. It was a man with a name tag that read VOLUNTEER: PETE. He was not dead in the way the word had been used earlier. His eyes were transparent, bone showing through a torn sleeve. He was already moving, jerking with a terrible purpose. The guard at the mouth of the corridor fired a warning shot. The reanimated turned toward the sound and lunged.

It was messy. It was urgent. It was worse because it was so human: a person who had once handed out water now became a funnel for disaster. Men and women who had trained for triage suddenly found themselves fighting for triage’s life with instruments that were never meant to be weapons. Blood pasted the painted brackets on the corridor walls; the noise was a mechanical rending that tightened the breath in Kara’s throat.

Kara ran.

She found herself behind the guard, wrench in hand. She swung. Muscle memory took over: push, aim for the base of the skull, but this was not a clean strike. Flesh yielded and blood sprayed like a broken sprinkler. Someone else fell; another volunteer was bitten in a frantic tangle. The smell of iron filled the lab’s narrow passages and it was the same smell she had after she hit the wrench in the lab earlier, but heavier, because now the bodies seemed to be everywhere in the world and the world was not finishing with them.

Winn caught Kara’s eye and there was something raw in it. “We have to close the service door!” he shouted. Brainy and J’onn threw themselves into the breach—bodies and logic—a kind of ugly ballet. Alex worked the radio and the whiteboard with equal ferocity. Kara felt the impossible lift of all of them working like muscle fibers in a fist.

When the corridor quieted it was only because the living had broken their will against the thing. A volunteer’s arm had been lost; someone cried like a child and no one scolded them. The lab smelled like new decay and cleaning solution, like two separate eras layered into a single terror.

Kara bent and touched a palm to the volunteer’s shoulder. “You’re here,” she told him, voice gentle. “You’re—” He looked at her and blinked and for a second he was a person again and then he wasn’t. She pressed a cloth to the wound and did the unthinkable, because sometimes leadership puts you where mercy and necessity meet: she helped the volunteer breathe out so he wouldn’t alarm those still alive with the noise of failing lungs. It was a small, private mercy and also a lesson she would carry with her like a knife.

Cat was close when she straightened, voice low. “You held it,” she said. It was praise and assessment and something like relief condensed into one sentence.

Kara thought of Alex in some inner room—of a sister who had called and asked them to wait until first light. She pulled out her phone (2% battery) and hovered—but she obeyed the cadence they had agreed on. She tucked it away; the battery was a talisman best used when the world demanded it.

She had held the corridor. People had survived. That had become part of the ledger she carried now. And she could count the cost.

---

LENA — DAY TWO

Lena’s team moved through a different kind of battlefield—one of corridors that smelled less like medical and more like a civic hospital that had been trying to be a city’s life preserver. Sam carried the drive with the K.D. file like a relic. J’onn checked corners with priestly, patient motions. M’gann’s hands were steady and efficient and her eyes watched thresholds like a radar.

They met the aftermath of the lab fight as they converged into a central corridor—overflowing stretchers, the echo of someone who had lost a scream. Lena saw the volunteer who had been bitten, the ragged bandage, the way people moved in and out like a tide.

“We need to secure a refrigeration line for sample storage,” Lena said. Her voice had the stiffness of someone who sliced her emotions thin to make edges fit together. “If the samples degrade, all of this—what we could learn—loses value.”

Sam’s hand found Lena’s wrist for a second like a lifeline. “Then we secure it. But not before we make sure survivors have shelter. You don’t get to bury us in data, Lena.”

Her sisterly friend’s words cut as kindly as they could.

Lena wanted to argue that the data was the only way out of the fold—an answer hidden in a genome that would save people and return them to names. She had wanted to be the person who could do that for years. But now there were children with bandaged knees and a man crying into his palms. Her notebooks were suddenly a poor substitute for someone’s warmth.

She stooped to help secure a tarp over a freezer unit and then took the drive Sam offered. The K.D. file glowed on the screen in a way that felt like a wink at something sacred and awful. For the first time in a long time she felt the vertigo she had only ever felt when standing at the lip of the sea: a dangerous, sharp awe.

She tucked the drive into a pocket and then, because she also had the habit of action, she joined the makeshift crew stacking triage tags and moving people. Her hands were not unskilled. She could button a wound with the same efficiency she could decide to pivot a research protocol. Her mind pried at the K.D. file like a safe; she promised herself she’d open it later with reason and care. For now, there was noise and people who must be guided.

---

INTERCUT — THE CITY HOLDS ITS BREATH

Two sets of boots echoed on the same concrete that had once been indifferent to the tiny things that mattered to people—like a bag of schoolbooks or a photograph in a wallet. Halcyon’s towers stood in the distance and the sky broke light over them like spilled milk.

Kara stepped out into the compound and saw Lena for the first time up close: a woman with a scientist’s posture walking like a soldier. They were a mirror and a foil—both exhausted, both holding remedies they did not yet know how to administer to the same wound.

Their meeting was not cinematic. There was no slow music, no poetic lightning. There was only the practical geometry of surprise: people with weapons, a door slamming, a shout, and then two sets of hands mid-motion to lower and hold.

A volunteer shouted, “Who are you?” and everyone pointed rifles first and asked later. The scientists and the survivors all sharpened to a point of suspicion. For a second the corridor was an instrument, plucked on the edge of a fray.

Kara stepped forward with palms visible; then Lena did the same, and in the same moment both of them lowered their weapons—not because they trusted the other but because they both needed the same thing: more hands, more knowledge, more ways to make people breathe.

“We’re not infected,” Kara said flatly.

“Neither are we,” Lena replied.

The words were practical truth and also a key. They unlocked a small, weary relief.

Winn saw Kara and then saw Lena near her, and something unreadable flickered—surprise, curiosity. He had known her campus friend; he did not recognize the woman who had put systems together and who now stood with a drive that could be a map to salvation or the start of obsession.

Alex stepped forward between them, a line formed from necessity. “We consolidate,” she said. “We share triage. We secure samples. No heroics.” Her voice held the weight of her role.

Cat looked between Kara and Lena with the amused, knowing air of someone who had manufactured reputations and understood the alchemy of it. She put an arm around Kara’s shoulder like she was moving a prop at a photo shoot. “Remind me to send your sister flowers when this is over,” she said to Kara, loud enough for Lena to hear. “She’s the only adult left in the room.”

Lena watched the exchange with an expression that folded something like humor into its edges. She had been alone with numbers and data for so long that the sight of a hand grasping a personal life was a small, disarming thing. It humanized the war a little.

There was a knot in the corridor then—people, machines, blood, and lists. Lena offered the drive she had saved. Alex took it with hands that trembled slightly and then steadied like someone who had learned to set their pulse into work.

“We look at it together,” Lena said. It was not an offer and it was not a threat. It was a posture.

Kara’s group exhaled into the hollowness. They had reached sanctuary and found it already contested by grief. Lena had found a ledger and a hope and she had not yet figured out whether she would curl it into herself or share it like a lamp.

Outside, Halcyon’s alarms cut across the compound and there was a sound that was not entirely human: a low, wet chorus that had learned the shape of noise and how to answer it.

For the first time since the world had folded in on itself, two people who had not known each other well stood with their hands stained and steady and looked at each other. They measured. They recognized. They understood the cost.

Kara had brought survivors who had trusted her to a place that might keep them. Lena had brought data that might keep more alive. Both of them had started a kind of work that would not end with a single chapter.

Alex spoke, voice small but urgent. “We have to seal off the west wing. There are samples in Storage B that need refrigeration now. If we lose them, we lose a thread.”

Lena nodded. “We’ll secure refrigeration. We’ll staff triage. Tell me where the samples are and I will ask no questions until they are safe.”

And so they began, in the sterile way of people building a fragile cathedral out of necessity: the living moved to protect their things—the vials, the drives, the scraps of knowledge—while the dead kept trying to find the sound that would call them home. The corridor became a makeshift congregation.

Kara felt exhaustion seep into her joints like winter. She also felt something else—an allocation of resolve she had not given herself permission to have before. She was not sure if this would make her a leader or a litigator for the dead, but for now she had people to keep breathing.

Lena watched a child gag on dust and felt 7th the old fix-it urge, sharp and useless and suddenly necessary. She had the drive in her coat like an accusation and a promise.

Outside, Halcyon stood as an absurd monument: a place that had thought it could stop extinction and now only stopped people from being entirely alone. The morning that had brought them here had started with the simplest of decisions: go, find the sister, find the science. It had turned into something both larger and smaller—human beings deciding not to give up on each other.

They arranged teams. Alex spoke with Lena and with Kara in a cadence that sliced the chaos into tasks. Doctors and scientists worked like nurses and knights. Winn kept a calm across his part of the wires. Brainy and M’gann danced across logistics and muscle.

By the time the sun sat higher and the smell of burnt hair and sanitiser had mixed into a thin fog, Halcyon was working on two fronts: to hide what it could not yet protect and to find what might yet be saved.

Kara watched Lena move among the volunteers and was struck by an unsettled recognition: here was someone who did not yet know whether she would save the world or lose herself to the attempt. Kara’s hands flexed and she thought of the wrench and the way it had tasted like survival.

“Then we work,” Kara said, because someone had to keep them all on the small path away from oblivion.

Lena’s answer was a tight nod. “We work.”

Outside the compound, the city breathed and held its breath in the same uneven rhythm as the survivors inside. The day had begun in earnest. The living gathered their numbers, and the dead learned to answer them. The cost would be paid in ways neither woman could yet calculate.

For now, they traded their first currency: trust.

Chapter Text

---

KARA — DAY TWO

After the smoke, the world smelled like copper and bleach and the slow aftertaste of adrenaline. The common room at Halcyon was a patchwork of donated cots, overturned tables weighted with radios, and a scattering of flattened boxes that served for makeshift shelving. Someone had hung a string of battery-powered lights along the far wall; it made everything look like a small, impossible holiday.

Kara sat on the edge of a cot and let the quiet close around her. The reunion with Alex still thrummed under her skin—fierce and raw and the kind of relief that makes your knees go soft. She replayed the contact in tiny, private loops: Alex’s weapon lowering, the way Alex’s arms lifted and folded around her. Not a question; an answer. Not a ceremony—just the thing two sisters do when they remember they are allowed to touch.

“Danvers.” A voice folded into the space beside her.

She didn’t need to look to know it was Winn. He had that same hesitant, too-bright cadence he always carried, as if conversation was a joke he’d been forced into early and decided to keep. He’d found a way into the room without making a racket—Winn’s speciality: appearing where needed, like a cheerful ghost.

“You look like a wet headline,” he said softly, and the corners of his mouth tipped.

Kara laughed, exhaled a sound that was equal parts grief and something that passed for humor. “And you look like you raided a thrift store for lab coats.”

“Vintage is in,” Winn said, tapping his chest as if the fabric were a medal. “Also, I’ve missed you. It’s weird—hugging at Halcyon is probably against policy, but…hugs.” He trailed off, eyes wavering toward Alex who was barking instructions at the far wall, already back to soldier mode.

James clattered in with a stack of water bottles and collapsed into the chair across from them. He grinned at Winn with a lopsided relief. “You’re alive.”

“Barely,” Winn deadpanned. “You’re as handsome as ever, Olsen.”

They tumbled into small, ordinary conversation the way people do when the big things keep failing to be used up; their language was stitches—things that patch the gash enough to be useful for a while.

Kara watched them, the way she’d watched everyone since the storage unit: cataloguing strengths and weak points. James was sleep-toughened and ready; he had the lean lines of someone who still knew how to fight. Winn had a jittery endurance that would be useful in the labs. Alex—Alex was sharper than she’d ever seen her, a blade of purpose and pain.

Cat drifted through the room like a storm front, every movement a measured weather pattern. She gave Winn a look that was almost approving and then found Kara’s eyes. Cat’s smile was small and private for a second.

"Your sister handled that breach like someone who’s been running CDC command for twenty years. If we survive this, remind me to nominate her for something shiny—preferably something she won’t refuse out of stubborn pride,"” she said, loud enough for no one but Kara to hear. “She’s the only adult left in the room.”

Kara blinked, heat blooming in her chest. She didn’t answer; she let the comment rest in the room as a barometer—Cat’s way of marking who mattered.

They were assigned bunks in a quiet wing of the compound—lab benches repurposed into trays of sleeping space, lockers bolted to the walls. People moved with the efficiency of teams that had learned to build momentum and then hold it; places were claimed and names were parceled out. Nia was given a cot near a window where the dawn bled thin and helpless; she curled into it as if sleep were a prayer.

Halcyon felt small in the way a world feels small when it’s been reduced to a handful of rooms and rules. But there was a raw, practical kindness here too—people who had once measured experiments now measured rations.

Alex appeared by Kara in the corridor when Kara was gathering a small pile of scavenged supplies. Her face was exhausted, the edges of her smile frayed, but she stayed close, still the sentinel even when the threat was paused.

“You okay?” Alex asked.

Kara thought of all the things she might say—about guilt, about leading people into a place that smelled of science and sorrow. Instead she shrugged, a single, small gesture. “I’m here.”

Alex’s hand brushed the back of her neck—brief, tactile, a grounding that said more than any list of emergency protocols. It was private and public at the same time, the way small truths are when spoken in corridors.

“We need people on the west annex sweep in an hour,” Alex said, voice pulled down to business. “Winn, can you help me with power nodes? We need to try to stabilize the lab core—if we get the HVAC back on at 40 percent, we can stop the microjerks in containment.”

Winn saluted with a grin that didn’t reach his eyes. “On it.”

Kara catalogued the people she had in front of her and began making mental lists. Who could hold a shotgun? Who could patch a wound? Who would break first? She could mark answers with surprising speed now. It wasn’t a talent she’d chosen—maybe it was the side-effect of being a journalist, of always knowing which detail would make a story hold together. But now the story was flesh.

She found herself watching Lena across the common room. Lena had claimed a corner table that doubled as a makeshift office; she’d placed a small stack of research notes and an unremarkable tablet face-up. Sam was beside her, sorting through medical kits with a steady hand. Lena’s jaw worked when she read—concentration thin as a wire. There was a hardness to her that hadn’t frayed at the edges yet.

There was already chemistry braided between them, a quiet tension that asked for observation rather than commentary. Kara noticed, privately, that when Lena’s eyes lifted from the tablet and crossed hers, there was that same careful calculation—only now it was focused on a living person instead of a variable. Lena’s gaze slid away quickly as if embarrassed, and Kara felt the thin, sudden burn of being seen.

It was ridiculous to feel seen in a bunker, surrounded by the smell of bleach and the clatter of ration tins. But then, nothing about this felt sensible.

---

LENA — DAY TWO

Halcyon’s research annex smelled like ozone and old paper. The power was a conspiracy of generators humming under duress, whispering promises in circuits and timers. Lena worked in a room that had once been a clean space; now a bad print of life—clipped samples, open notebooks, a whiteboard with half-formed equations. She held a pen the way some people hold rosaries.

The Subject 0 – K.D. folder had been downloaded to a scrap drive the night before, corrupt in places but usable. Now with Winn and Brainy scouring the system for salvage, she’d managed to unlock more of it—fragments of lab notes, a damaged electrophoresis readout, a line of clinical notation that had the word “post-bite viability” scrawled near it.

She read the new lines again, aloud to break him into the air between them.

“‘Limited cellular decay post-bite simulation.’ That’s not a phrasing anyone uses unless they mean to measure survival.”

Sam’s eyes looked up from her work. “So either whoever the subject was didn’t rot like the others, or they were treated in a way to slow the cascade. Either is bad.”

“Both,” Lena said. She pinched the bridge of her nose and tried to focus. Her hands moved faster than her throat could order them. “If they didn’t react the way a normal cadaver would—if they retained function after controlled necrosis—that means someone was either experimenting with a stabilizer or with a trait.”

“Meaning?” Sam asked.

“Meaning: there may be a biological basis for resistance. Or there may be a lab protocol we can replicate. Or both.” Lena’s eyes were lit with that predatory gleam she always got when a problem was solvable. “If we can find a gene sequence, we can analyze it. If we can analyze it, we can try to reproduce—” She stopped. The noise of the annex faded; it was the shape of possibility that had quieted the rest.

Sam watched her with a gentle patience. “You look at it like it’s a puzzle where people are the pieces.”

Lena managed a small, humorless smile. “Because sometimes they are.”

Sam’s hand touched hers briefly—an anchor. “Don’t lose yourself to it.”

Lena didn’t answer. The word lose felt heavier than she liked to admit.

She catalogued what they had: fragmentary genomes, partial log files, a handful of blood samples that had been preserved just long enough to make a difference. If someone had been immune—if Subject K.D. had shown anomalous post-bite viability—then somewhere inside those corrupted files was a sliver of hope. Lena’s mouth tightened around the thought.

She didn’t want hope to be another thing to fail.

---

KARA — DAY TWO

The cafeteria smelled of instant coffee and burnt toast. Conversation was sparse—doctor’s tones, the flatness of people who had been awake for too long. Kara moved through it like a needle, listening.

A heated debate unfurled at one table between two CDC volunteers. Data interpretation had become a kind of religion here—models were the new scripture, each analyst a preacher. Their argument was sharp: reanimation windows, the variability of symptom onset, whether the virus responded to heat.

Alex intercepted Kara, leaning in close so their shoulders brushed. “We can’t rely on HVAC mechanics,” she said. “There’s chatter about micro-vents acting as amplifiers for motion sensors. If something’s pinging in the sub-basement—”

“Then we sweep it,” Kara said. She surprised herself by volunteering before she’d thought it through. “I’ll go.”

Alex’s mouth thinned. “You don’t have to.”

Kara looked at her sister—at the way Alex’s jaw worked when she gave orders, the way she wanted to shield people from the world by pushing itself between them and the worst of it. “I brought them here,” Kara said. “If they get taken because I brought them—”

“You did the right thing,” Alex interrupted, soft and fierce. “You got them in. You kept them breathing. You need to remember that.”

Kara’s throat tightened. “I need you to stop telling me what I need.”

Alex bristled. For a moment the room shrank to only them—two people who loved each other in the thinest of suspended spaces. “Kara—”

“Then fight with me,” Kara said, heat flaring. “Not over me.”

Alex’s eyes sharpened. “I fight with you, Danvers. I always have.”

They stood there, two shadows against the hum of the cafeteria. Winn mouthed something into a walkie-worn console and then met Kara’s eyes, amused, relieved, and steady.

“Fine,” Alex said finally. “We sweep the sub-basement. Lena will be on the west access—she volunteered.” She hesitated, then added in a voice that wasn’t meant to be soft but almost was, “Be careful.”

Kara nodded. She watched Alex move off, brain already tilting into route maps and formations. Of all the people in the room, Alex was the one who trusted her enough to give a weapon rather than a sermon. That trust settled on Kara like responsibility.

---

INTERCUT — NIGHT / HALCYON BASE

Power gestures in tentative pulses. Halcyon held its breath like a creature deciding whether to roar.

They moved in teams—a low, efficient choreography of people who had applied themselves to the work of survival. Lights were dimmed. Radios kept to whisper. Winn and Brainy stayed two levels up, fingers working the panels; Alex, James, and a squad of CDC volunteers took the lead. Lena and Sam took point from the west access.

The sub-basement smelled like concrete and old machinery. Vents ran along the ceiling like ribcages. Motion sensors clicked in a rhythm that was almost human.

“Check your corners,” Alex said. “Two-man teams. Keep lines of sight.”

Kara’s heart banged a steady rhythm—listen, move, listen. It was like dancing with a partner you hadn’t chosen but learned to trust.

They moved down into the belly of Halcyon: a long, narrow corridor whose walls had once been used to channel air in measured currents. The lights here were emergency strips, a watercolor of red and white and black.

At the third junction, Lena’s teams met them—sandwiched between science and security. She glanced at Kara with something like appraisal—then something sharper—interest.

“You ready?” she asked, voice low.

Kara met her eyes—lids narrowing, the air between them thick with unsaid things. “I was born ready,” Kara said. It came out partly as a joke, partly as a dare.

Lena’s lips twitched. “Good. Then don’t die in the first five minutes.”

They exchanged an almost smirk and the teams fanned—left, right, slow steps, a sound like a measured heartbeat.

It happened like the wrong kind of dream. A grate sagged under a dead weight, the metal forgiving under strain and then surrendering with a sharp metallic cry. Something heavy thumped and then the grate fell with a wet finality.

They had a second—three seconds—where the air changed. A small, animal sound that had been trapped in the vents exhaled into the corridor: a rasp like someone forcing breath through cloth.

The first infected came out of the gloom like a wrong shadow. It moved fast and ugly—muscles still warm, mouth working in a blank, eager way. It lunged at the nearest cadet, who had the reflexes of someone trained and then betrayed by circumstance. The cadet tried to swing a baton; his hand slipped. The creature’s teeth found skin.

Blood sprayed on concrete. The first visceral, honest taste of it was metallic and immediate. The cadet’s scream cut like a torn tape and then something else happened—the creature’s shoulders convulsed and it rolled, momentarily stunned, then its head snapped up and its eyes—if you could call them that—found Kara.

Kara ran.

She did not think. Running was a thing memory gave her, a motion she could do as if her body remembered before her brain had time to sign affidavits. She slid past a fallen pipe and shoulder-charged the creature away from a pressed-back volunteer. It stumbled, flailed; Lena closed in, precise and bright, a scalpel where Kara was flame.

Lena’s baton made a hard, sickening sound when it met skull. The infected slumped—then twitched. Someone screamed. Another infected came out of the darkness, a cluster pressed into the grate like larvae emerging. They moved with a terrible, impossible impetus, a small tidal wave of wrongness.

They fought like people who had been told the rules of violence and now had to invent them on the spot.

In the chaos of the sub-basement, a sudden roar echoed down the eastern hallway—three, maybe four infected barreling toward them in a tight, ravenous cluster.

Kara spun, too far from the others, too exposed. One infected lunged, fingers scraping the air where her shoulder had been a second before.

“Danvers!” Lena’s voice sliced through the noise.

Kara didn’t have time to turn before a hand—Lena’s—fisted in the back of her jacket and yanked her hard into a darkened office. They stumbled inside, the door half off its hinge, and before Kara could react, Lena slammed her gently but firmly against the wall.

Lena pressed close, one hand braced beside Kara’s head, the other gripping her waist to hold her steady. Her breath was hot against Kara’s cheek.

“Quiet,” Lena whispered, mouth inches from Kara’s. Her eyes flicked down to Kara’s lips—unmistakable—then snapped back up.

The infected thundered past the doorway, snarling, clawing at the walls, unaware of the two women hidden in the darkness.

Only when the hallway fell silent did Lena slowly release her.

“You’re going to get yourself killed if you keep charging in like that,” Lena murmured, voice low, a mixture of fear and anger and something warmer.

Kara swallowed, pulse wild. “You pulled me in.”

Lena’s gaze lingered, heat threading through the air. “Someone had to.” Kara ducked and shoved, pushing someone out of a bite. Lena was a metronome of efficacy—drive, rest, strike—her body measuring angles and impact. James swung a pipe that broke on bone. M’gann fought with an animal grace that was terrifyingly graceful, pulling an infected into a hold and cracking its skull against a cement support.

The sub-basement became a smear of action and blood. The ventilation system roared, throwing dust and pressure at them. Vents tore away—the sound of metal surrendering to the night. Alex’s voice cut through the scene, sharp: “Fallback line! Fallback to the access ladder!”

They bled and they yelled and they fell. There was a moment when Kara felt a hot sting at her calf—her hand flew to the wound and came away red. She tasted iron in her mouth and gritted her teeth. Lena saw it and reached for her, fingers quick and sure.

“Hold,” Lena said, voice steady. She tore a strip from her sleeve and pressed it hard, turning the wound into a promise. Kara’s breath hitched—pain sharp and alive and then contained. Lena’s eyes were very, very close to hers.

For half a heartbeat, the world became nothing but the two of them—two women in a corridor of ruin, hands sticky with blood, breathing hard. Lena’s gaze tracked Kara’s mouth—just briefly—and Kara felt the world pivot on that small attention. Her own eyes slid toward Lena’s, reflexive, and she thought of lips and how suddenly they seemed to have a history their mouths hadn’t yet earned.

They broke contact the way people break a dangerous silence—because someone else was screaming and because survival refused to be opined about.

“Lena!” Alex screamed, voice edged with panic. “We’ve got a pack on the north grate.”

They moved again, back-to-back now, an unplanned choreography. Lena’s precision paired with Kara’s reckless measuredness. They closed a gap, pulled a strap, slammed a grate back into place. The infected slammed into metal on the other side, teeth scrabbling. Someone drove a bolt home. The grate held.

But the victory felt brittle. They could hear the scrape of more things in the ducts—movement like a tide under the building. The containment was successful only for a minute, and then another wave rose and beat the bars like something desperate for oxygen.

Kara and Lena fought on until muscles trembled and the air tasted like rust. At one point Lena had to jam an elbow into a creature’s throat while Kara drove a pipe through its skull with a clean, practiced blow. The sound was horrifying and necessary and everyone felt it in their bodies—this was survival, unedited.

When the sweep was over, when the last creature on that level lay still and mute, the group counted scars. One volunteer had gone—eyes blank, neck a broken thing. Winn sobbed for him without shame; the sound tore quiet in the corridor.

Kara slid down against the wall and breathed like someone learning to swim.

Lena crouched beside her, breathing the same staggered rhythm.

Across the corridor, Sam watched them—eyes narrowing, mouth twitching between smirk and concern. When Lena finally stood, Sam leaned in and whispered just loud enough:

“So… you two planning to tell the rest of us when the apocalypse romance kicks off, or do we just guess?”

Lena shot her a sharp look. “Not now, Sam.”

Sam grinned. “That wasn’t a no.”

On the opposite end, Alex was wrapping a bandage around Kara’s arm, glancing between her sister and Lena with a knowing arch of her brow.

“You getting friendly with Luthor over there?” Alex asked under her breath.

Kara choked on her own spit. “Alex!”

Alex shrugged. “What? She dragged you into a closet-sized office to ‘keep you quiet.’ I saw the whole thing. Not subtle.”

Kara turned scarlet. “We were hiding from the infected!”

Alex gave her a soft, teasing pat. “Uh‑huh. Sure.” For a long moment neither spoke.

“Are you okay?” Kara finally asked, voice small.

Lena’s laugh was an odd, trilling thing, shock wrapped in breath. “No,” she said. “But I’m still standing.”

Kara’s hand found Lena’s wrist again, and she didn’t let go. The contact was not romantic theater—it was steadying. Lena’s fingers curled against Kara’s knuckles, a quiet claim or a promise; the reader could decide which.

Outside, the compound hummed and the vents tried to keep the world from smelling like death. Inside, for the first time since they’d met, Kara and Lena went quiet together and let the click of settling metal be the conversation.

---

KARA — DAY TWO (EPILOGUE)

They sealed the breach with bolted steel and a jury-rigged alarm system that Winn promised would at least give them five minutes warning next time. Brainy rigged the temp sensors to the node and set them to a loud, ugly chime that would wake anyone within three rooms of sleep.

They gathered to take stock. Sam patched wounds with a quick, efficient hand. J’onn and M’gann checked the perimeter. Winn slept in the control room on a bundle of jackets, breathing like a man who had finally let himself fall.

Cat found Kara as the group disbanded. She stood in the corridor where the lights were still buzzing and looked at Kara like someone who’d come to appraisal.

“You did well,” Cat said, voice low.

Kara felt the fatigue at the edges of her voice. “We did well.”

Cat rolled her eyes. “Fine. You did better than my high standards predicted. But you almost died twice, so there’s that.”

Kara snorted. “Thanks for the confidence.”

Cat’s expression softened in a way that had little to do with pity and more to do with assessment. “Keep Lena close,” she said, and then, as if the thought amused her, “but do try not to get her underfoot. Luthor women have dangerous hobbies.”

Kara almost laughed. “I’ll try.”

She walked back to the small cot she'd claimed and sat down, breathing in the sterile air. Lena’s profile was a silhouette across the room, and for once Kara didn’t feel the urgent need to turn it into a headline. She sat with the quiet instead, aware of the palm ached lightly where Lena had held her bandage.

She turned her face to the ceiling and watched the crooked light string. In the distance a chime warbled—a sound that meant the sensors were still alive. For the first time since the world changed, Kara allowed herself a small, ridiculous hope: that breathing, like everything else, was something they could learn to do again.

---

Chapter Text

---

KARA — DAY THREE

Morning at Halcyon moved like a clock trying to remember how to keep time. Sunlight leaked through the slats of repurposed security glass and dust became its own constellation. The common room was a choreography of mundane things that mattered: ration distribution, bedding rotation, the quiet politics of who took the interior cot versus the corner with the small window.

Kara kept lists in her head the way other people prayed. Who could stand a watch. Who had steady hands for sutures. Who could speak when someone needed grounding. The lists kept her from looking at Lena; they were practical, and that was a good reason to avoid the danger of a glance that stretched too long.

Lena sat at her island of paper and tablet, sleeves rolled, jaw set. She had the look of someone who believed problems were solvable if you met them with enough precision. That look tightened something in Kara every time Lena leaned forward over a printout. Kara watched the small ways Lena’s face softened when Sam passed her something, the gentle crease that made Lena look less like the Luthor that ran algorithms and more like someone who defended people like a private policy.

Winn found Kara near the supply stacks, balancing a crate of sterile gloves on one hip and giving the world his best attempt at normal. “You okay?” he asked, as if he’d rehearsed the question in a dozen permutations and finally landed on this one.

Kara breathed out a laugh that wasn’t entirely humor. “I’m okay,” she said, and the word held because she decided it did. Winn’s eyes were warm in the way only old friends know how to be: private and steady beneath the world’s noise.

“And Lena?” he said, with an arch that meant he’d noticed.

Kara looked up and saw Lena’s profile when she moved—focused, luminous in that clinical way that made Kara’s chest ripple. She thought of the cramped office in the sub-basement and how Lena’s hands had felt when they’d been pressed against her to keep her quiet.

“She’s not subtle,” Kara admitted.

Winn grinned. “Community bulletin noted.” He thumped the crate like a small drum. “Be careful, Danvers. Halcyon is a place of many things, and romantic tension is not one of its amenities—unless you want the facilities to explode.”

Kara smiled, grateful for the absurdity. It held things together like tape.

Alex moved through the alcove like someone surveying a map and finding both the scars and the routes. She handed Kara a sweep schedule, fingers brushing Kara’s knuckles in a small, grounding gesture. It was private, and it meant more than either of them said.

“Keep the radios off in the ducts,” Alex said quietly. “And keep breathing low. Lena’s taking west; we’re doing the south stair. Winn and Brainy will babysit the HVAC nodes. If we get a ping, we blink the alarm twice and hold.”

Kara nodded. “We’ll run quiet, two-man stacks.”

Alex looked at her—close, sharp, a person who’d held the worst and refused to let it define them. “Keep her close,” Alex said suddenly, soft as if it was something she needed Kara to remember more than an instruction.

Kara nodded, less because she needed the reminder than because promises were the only currency that felt solid in a world where everything else slid.

---

LENA — DAY THREE

Lena preferred frictionless systems. A variable was a wound you could understand and, with enough patient dissection, fix. The Subject 0 — K.D. fragments had bared a new strand overnight: a small, recurring anomaly in apoptosis markers before and after exposure, like a whisper that a cascade had been slowed—just enough.

If it was a trait, it was quiet and stubborn. If it was a protocol, it was clever and surgical. Either way, it was something to study. Lena hunched over the tablet, cross-referencing graphs and sample notes until the world sounded like a single, urgent instrument.

Sam watched her with the kind of practical intimacy that was built on years of being tethered to the same ship. “You look like you’re trying to make the sequence tell you a secret,” Sam said.

“Sometimes sequences answer if you ask them clearly enough,” Lena replied. Her eyes flicked up when Kara caught her looking. For a sliver of time the routine arrhythmia of the lab broke; Lena felt—unexpectedly—seen.

Sam’s hand slid to the edge of Lena’s sleeve, a tether. “Don’t lose yourself to it,” she warned.

“I don’t plan to,” Lena said, but the admission tasted like a vow she hadn’t quite meant to make. If there was a way to turn a genetic oddity into a lifeline, Lena would find it. She was the sort of person who thought in microscopes and timelines; her comfort was the work itself. But she could not deny the way her gaze sought Kara and found a quick answer in the pattern of her face.

She scheduled the west-access sweep with J’onn and M’gann and pinned a window for lab processing if they secured the corridor. She did not plan for the thorn in her chest when Kara’s eyes met hers across the common room—an interruption she neither expected nor wanted, and that only made it sharper.

---

KARA — DAY THREE (CAFETERIA / COMMAND)

Brainy and Nia strolled into the alcove with the awkward optimism of two people who’d learned to pack hope like a spare battery. Brainy had a makeshift schematic he’d been tinkering with; Nia carried ration slips and a grin that failed to vanish even in a world falling apart.

They settled into a conversation that was small and precise—about a radio patch, about language protocols, about how to make a chipped antenna find signal. Kara watched them and felt that warm, small approval that comes when something fragile seems likely to keep living.

Alex called the brief. Winn hunched over a panel with a knot of wiring; Brainy fed him schematics and muttered equations that sounded like lullabies to him and like spells to everyone else.

“West corridor sweep at nineteen hundred,” Alex announced. “Two-person stacks. Radios off. Lena and Sam take west. Kara, you have the south stair with me. Winn, Brainy—monitor HVAC nodes. If sensors ping twice, blink the alarm and hold.”

Kara swallowed and felt that familiar swivel of responsibility. She’d been the one to get her people here. She’d promised Alex she’d keep them safe. The lists in her head aligned into a working shape and she felt useful in a way that steadied her.

Alex pulled her aside, hands on a suppressor magazine but eyes on Kara as if the thing she wanted to give was less metal than time. “You okay?” she asked.

Kara looked into Alex’s face and, for a moment, the rest of the world simplified. “I am, for now.”

Alex breathed out like someone closing a hard file. “I’m tired of being in this world of noise,” she admitted. “So be careful. Don’t bring me regrets I can’t fix.”

Kara bristled, because bristles still meant she was alive. “I don’t need you to do my bravery for me,” she said, heat and humor tangled.

Alex’s eyes softened. “Save me one breath when you’re back,” she murmured.

Kara nodded, but she was already scanning the room. Lena caught her looking. Their eyes met. For half a second, the whole command alcove shrank to that single contact—an electric thread between two people too tired and too raw to be careful in a new way.

“Be careful,” Lena said, a line that was at once clinical and intimate.

Kara promised silently and then turned toward a night that smelled like old machinery and blood.

---

INTERCUT — NIGHT / WEST & SOUTH SWEEPS

Halcyon’s underbelly was a different city at night: strips of emergency light drew clean, hard lines and shadows pooled in the spaces between. Sound was a language that could betray you. The teams moved like they’d practiced the choreography in their heads, two-person stacks, eyes up, breaths measured.

Winn’s monitor chirped: micro-vent activity at service stair B. Brainy leaned in, fingers darting over a console. “Movement in the ducts,” he said quietly. “Not a single body—multiple signatures. Something is converging.”

At the third junction, the corridor surrendered a noise like metal tearing. A grate gave and something heavy fell through, and then three—maybe four—infected poured into the hall like a bad tide. The first surge took one volunteer in a merciless arc; the cadet’s baton slid from his hands as his shoulder was ripped open. Red painted the concrete in a clean, awful spatter.

Kara’s voice cut through the chaos: “Stack! Eyes up!”

They moved as training allowed: shove, pivot, strike. But it wasn’t a single body to neutralize; it was momentum, animal and wrong. The infected came with the force of a small explosion.

At the narrowest point, two infected converged on Lena. One hit a volunteer on the flank, another lunged toward the exposed center. Kara saw Lena—too close, too vulnerable—and the calculus of her body simplified into a single motion.

“Kara—!” Alex’s warning was a breath too late.

Kara dove, shoulder-first, slamming into Lena and knocking her clean out of the infected’s path. They tumbled through a doorway. The door banged; a desk toppled with them, landing as a jagged barricade between the women and the approaching hoard.

Lena reacted like someone born for threat and response—swift, precise. She rolled, braced a hand against Kara’s chest, and pressed her firmly into the wall. Her breath was hot against Kara’s cheek.

“Don’t move,” Lena whispered, barely audible. “And don’t make a sound.”

Kara froze. Lena’s hand slid up, covering Kara’s mouth, palm warm and steady. Their bodies were close—too close—and Kara felt Lena’s heartbeat hammer in sync with hers.

The infected slammed against the fallen duct just beyond the doorway, snarling and clawing. Metal screamed but held. Dust drifted down in dull, drifting motes.

Kara dared a glance upward. Lena’s eyes were locked on the barricade—sharp, calculating—but for a fleeting second they flicked to Kara’s lips. Kara’s breath caught. She couldn’t help the small shift of her head, answering the spark.

Lena noticed.

Her fingers tightened just slightly over Kara’s mouth—an unspoken not now.

When the hall finally quieted and the infected moved on, Lena slowly withdrew her hand.

“If we keep ending up like this,” Lena murmured, voice low and edged with exhaustion and something warmer, “I’m going to start thinking you’re throwing yourself at me on purpose.”

Kara blinked, flustered heat rushing up her neck. “I’m— I was trying to save your life.”

Lena’s mouth tilted into a dangerous half-smile. “And I appreciate the enthusiasm.”

Sam, watching from the rear with J’onn, caught up just in time to see Lena helping Kara to her feet.

“So…” Sam drawled, unable to resist. “Are we all just pretending this isn’t developing into something delightfully messy?’”

Lena shot her a glare. “Not now, Sam.”

Sam grinned wider. “Again—not a no.”

On the opposite side, Alex approached Kara with a med kit, expression torn between relief and I told you so. She rewrapped the bandage on Kara’s arm with unnecessary firmness.

“Making friends in collapsing ductwork now?” Alex murmured.

Kara glared. “We were hiding from infected!”

Alex snorted. “Right. Very intimate hiding.”

Kara flushed crimson.

Cat, passing by with a clipboard, cut in dryly: “Your sister handled that breach like someone who’s been running CDC command for twenty years. If we make it through this, remind me to nominate her for something shiny—preferably something she won’t refuse out of sheer stubborn pride.”

Kara laughed despite herself, breathless and shaking. Humor helped. Humor kept breath in their bodies.

The breach continued deeper into the sub-basement, and the fighting resumed in brutal, rolling waves.

They survived it, but barely.

---

LENA — DAY THREE (AFTERMATH / DATA)

They sealed the breach with bolts and jury-rigged alarms that screamed and then sputtered into silence. The dust settled in a thin, defeated layer across the concrete. People moved with a shell-shocked precision—counting breaths, counting losses, counting the number of times their hands still shook.

Lena retreated to the annex with Sam at her shoulder. Winn had salvaged a fragment of corrupted data from a damaged drive and Brainy had coaxed the pieces into semi-coherence. The screen lit with a pulse of blue—timestamp aligned with the breach.

“This is the sample from the containment tray,” Winn said. His tone was steady, but the tremor in his hand betrayed adrenaline’s echo. “It matches what you were studying earlier.”

Lena traced the readout with two fingers. “There’s a spike here.”

The graph displayed a narrow ridge of metabolic activity—pre-bite simulation—followed by an anomalously shallow dip in apoptosis markers.

“Someone tuned down the cascade,” Lena murmured. “On purpose.”

Sam folded her arms, the gesture more protective than skeptical. “Sounds like someone had more answers than the rest of us.”

“If it’s genetic and replicable,” Lena whispered, thinking aloud, “it could slow the transformation. Maybe even delay reanimation. It’s not a cure, but it’s something.”

Sam watched her with the kind of affection that had teeth. “You’re making hope out of scraps, Lena.”

“And that’s more than anyone else has,” Lena replied.

Her eyes drifted—traitorously—to the memory of Kara pressed beneath her in the dim of that office, breath warm, eyes bright. The moment had been born from panic—but something in it lingered like a pulse she couldn’t unfeel.

Sam noticed.

“You going to talk about it?” she asked lightly.

“No,” Lena said sharply.

Sam smirked. “Thought so.”

Lena turned back to the data, but the ghost of the moment stayed with her, threading through her chest with quiet, irritating persistence.

---

KARA — DAY THREE (EPILOGUE)

Halcyon settled into a tense quiet—not peace, not safety, just the kind of silence that builds after adrenaline collapses under its own weight.

Winn slept with his face pressed into a schematic printout. Brainy and Nia bickered softly over radio protocols. J’onn kept watch with a solemn patience Kara had come to trust instinctively.

Kara found Lena by the locker bay, the lights humming a soft, warm glow over her face. She looked exhausted and brilliant and entirely too composed for someone who had nearly died twice in one night.

“You’re going to be the death of me,” Lena said, half-joking, half not.

Kara smiled—soft, small, true. “I’d rather keep you occupied.”

Lena huffed a quiet laugh. “You do that already.”

Her gaze dropped to Kara’s bandaged arm. Without asking, Lena reached out and smoothed the edge of the gauze. It was a simple touch—practical, gentle—but it felt like more.

“Don’t push yourself tomorrow,” Lena murmured.

Kara lied the way people lie when they intend to survive. “I won’t.”

Then, quieter: “Not without you.”

Lena’s eyes lifted, green and sharp and unexpectedly soft. Something unspoken passed between them—too early, too dangerous, too undeniable.

“Stay close,” Lena said.

“Always,” Kara replied.

They stood like that for a moment—two people suspended in a fragile breath—before turning back toward the sleeping compound.

Halcyon held its breath.

And for tonight, at least, they breathed with it.

---

End of Chapter 5 — Day Three: Halcyon Holds Its Breath

Chapter Text

---

CHAPTER 6 — Day Three: Pressure Points

Scene 1 — “Recalibration”

Kara POV

Morning returned to Halcyon like a body remembering pain before it remembers breath.

The vents rattled—weak, uneven, complaining under their own weight. Someone had fixed the emergency lights so they glowed softer now, a washed-out amber instead of the frantic stutter they’d had during the breach. But the air hadn’t forgotten anything. It carried the metallic tang of dried blood, the ghost of burned circuitry, the whisper of boot scuffs from people who hadn’t slept.

Kara woke with every bruise announcing itself in sequence.

Shoulder, ribs, that sharp shock along her calf where she’d twisted too hard in the stampede. It wasn’t the worst night she’d lived through, but it was the one she could still feel under her skin, like a phantom heartbeat. She sat up slowly, biting back the sound that wanted to escape her throat.

Across the room, J’onn and M’gann slipped through the north service door without a word. They moved like shadow and purpose, checking the perimeter before the rest of Halcyon was fully awake. Kara watched them go, appreciating the certainty they carried with them. The rest of them—humans—had cracks that widened in silence.

Alex found her five minutes later, already armed, already carrying a map someone had annotated until the ink smudged.

“Kara,” she said softly. Too softly.

That tone meant I saw you get thrown into a wall last night. That tone meant Stop pretending you’re okay.

Kara scrubbed a hand over her face. “Morning.”

Alex held out the map. “Not great news. The infected… their movement patterns shifted again overnight.”

Kara’s stomach tightened. “Shifted how?”

Alex tapped the ventilation path between two storage wings. “They’re learning the building’s vibration map. They’re not getting smarter—don’t panic—but they’re adapting. Faster than we predicted.”

Kara swallowed the fear, pushed it somewhere deep where it wouldn’t cloud the next decision. “So containment will fail again.”

“Soon,” Alex confirmed. “Unless we change how we run sweeps.”

Something in Kara wilted, just a little. They’d barely survived the last breach. She could still feel the echo of Lena’s body pressed against hers, the fierce whisper against her lips—Don’t move—and the way Lena’s heartbeat had hammered through the space between them.

Kara shoved that memory down too. Not now. Not useful.

She stood, stretching stiff muscles. “Okay. We reorganize. I’ll start reassessing rotations.”

“Wait.” Alex caught her wrist. “You need rest. Ten minutes, at least.”

“I’ll rest later.”

“You said that yesterday.”

Kara pulled away gently. “People need me.”

Alex's jaw clenched. “…I know. But I need you intact.”

Before Kara could answer, Cat Grant swept into the common room like she had always owned it. Clipboard under one arm, sweater immaculate, hair perfect in a way that defied the apocalypse.

Her eyes narrowed at Kara immediately.

“Danvers.” She gestured at her with the clipboard. “You look like a building fell on you.”

“Metal duct,” Kara corrected automatically.

Cat’s expression didn’t change. “Don’t burn yourself down before we have something resembling a plan. I need you lucid, not heroic.”

Kara wanted to argue. Instead she nodded once, because Cat didn’t give praise easily, and she didn’t give warnings without cause.

Cat moved on, issuing orders like a general with a pen instead of a weapon.

As the room filled with movement, Kara tried to focus—on inventory, on rations, on anything but the fact that every time Lena’s name passed someone’s lips, something in Kara’s chest stuttered.

It wasn’t helpful. It wasn’t logical. It certainly wasn’t survivable.

But when Kara saw Lena across the room—hair slightly mussed, fingers flying across a tablet, eyes sharp despite exhaustion—something in her body betrayed her.

Her breath caught. Her face flushed. And she pivoted sharply toward a stack of inventory charts like they had suddenly become the most fascinating objects on Earth.

Winn materialized beside her with a half-eaten protein bar. “So,” he said. “You’re looking awfully invested in those dates of expiration.”

“They matter,” Kara said too quickly.

“Uh-huh.” Winn leaned in. “Is this the ‘I can’t look at Lena Luthor without combusting’ face, or the ‘I’m thinking about ductwork trauma’ face? I can’t always tell.”

Kara glared. Winn raised his hands in surrender.

“I’m just saying,” he whispered, “I know the signs. Also, Sam has this… presence around Lena. Like they share a Netflix password. So if you think—”

Kara choked on air. “Winn!”

“What? I’m helping.”

“You’re not.”

He grinned and wandered off.

Kara pressed her hands to her face. She didn’t have time for this. Not for feelings. Not for interpreting Lena’s glances—or the way Lena had looked at her mouth last night like it meant something.

She forced her breathing steady, forced her attention onto rotations, supplies, radio schedules.

Halcyon needed structure.

Kara needed distance.

But when Lena finally lifted her head, eyes scanning the room until they found Kara—bright, assessing, softening just a fraction—Kara looked away so fast she nearly dropped the clipboard.

She was surviving.

She didn’t know if she could survive that.

The next hour dissolved into the soft clatter of ration tins, murmured triage reports, and the thump of boots from the vents overhead—too soft to be a breach, too rhythmic to be human comfort. Halcyon was learning to sound like something alive again, even if that life was nervous and thin.

Kara made herself useful, moving between bunks, checking that people had water and blankets, rotating volunteers into rest shifts. She pushed herself into the rhythm until her muscles remembered how to move without trembling.

But every time Kara turned, Lena was already in her peripheral vision.

At the far end of the room, Lena stood over a row of notes, her hair pulled back, jaw set in that determined way that always made something in Kara’s stomach do a small, private flip. The morning light caught the edge of Lena’s cheekbone; a halo for someone who absolutely did not believe in miracles.

Kara looked away too fast—so fast she knocked a box of gauze off the table.

Smooth, Danvers. Real smooth.

She bent to pick it up, cheeks hot, telling herself she was fine, that she could be fine, that she did not need to think about the way Lena had pressed her hand to Kara’s mouth last night or the way their bodies had fit together too well for chance.

Cat approached, crisp steps, holding a clipboard she probably took just so she could look extra authoritative.

“Kara,” Cat said, one brow arched. “You’re limping.”

“I’m walking,” Kara corrected.

“That was not an answer,” Cat countered. “Nor was it a convincing attempt at one.”

Kara held the box of gauze tighter. “I’m fine.”

Cat tilted her head. “And stress is a vitamin?”

Kara let out a breath. “Just… bruises. Nothing worth worrying about.”

Cat considered this. Then: “You don’t get to decide what’s worth worrying about. That’s my job.” A beat. “Also Alex’s job. And apparently Lena’s, judging by how she’s staring at you like you’re a piece of equipment she wants to take apart and fix.”

Kara dropped the gauze again.

Cat smirked without apology. “Don’t burn yourself down before any of us have something resembling a plan.”

With that, she pivoted on her heel and strode off to terrorize Nia into drinking more water.

Kara rubbed her temples. “I’m not burning,” she muttered under her breath.

But she was lying to herself, and she knew it. The ache in her shoulder had sharpened overnight. Her calf throbbed where she’d taken a glancing bite—just skin, not broken, but close enough that Lena had nearly dragged her to medical by the ear.

And that was the problem.

Kara couldn’t let anyone worry. If she was one more person to be patched, that meant someone else wasn’t being covered. Leadership didn’t allow for fragility. The lists in her head didn’t have a column for her own needs.

So she squared her shoulders, inhaled carefully, and turned back to the tasks that kept her from thinking too long or too deeply.

But when she glanced sideways—just a flicker—she found Lena watching her again.

Not with suspicion.

With concern.

And something else she didn’t have the courage to name.

Kara pushed the last crate of alcohol swabs into place and exhaled a breath she’d been pretending wasn’t shaky. The injury above her hip—hidden under her shirt, something she’d brushed off in front of Alex—burned every time she twisted, but she was committed to the lie. Everyone was bruised. Everyone hurt. She wasn’t special.

She wasn’t going to be the reason Alex lost focus.

Still… she hated how her body was starting to feel like a map of things she couldn’t explain. The bruises cleared too fast. The cuts never reddened. This newest gash—someone else would’ve needed stitches. Kara had covered it with gauze and hoped no one would look closely.

Especially not Lena.

Kara shifted her weight, biting her lip. She could feel Lena somewhere behind her in the room, like heat under a closed door.

A voice drifted over her shoulder.

“Your labeling system is… passionately chaotic.”

Kara almost dropped the marker.

Lena stood there with her tablet tucked under her arm, a hint of a smirk ghosting her mouth—too exhausted to fully form it, but still lethal. Her hair was pulled back messily, strands escaping like they’d staged a rebellion. She looked brilliant, infuriating, and dangerous to Kara’s ability to breathe.

Kara cleared her throat. “It’s efficient.”

“It’s bleeding,” Lena said.

Kara blinked.

Then realized Lena wasn’t talking about the inventory.

Crap.

She straightened too fast. “It’s—fine. Just a scratch.”

Lena stepped closer. “A scratch doesn’t soak through gauze.”

Kara instinctively placed her hand over it. “Really, I’m okay.”

Lena’s eyes flicked to Kara’s hand, then up—sharp, simmering, unconvinced.

“You said that last night,” Lena murmured. “Right before you almost got flattened by an HVAC duct.”

Kara felt heat crawl up her cheeks. “Well… technically you were under me that time—”

Lena’s breath hitched—a subtle, barely-there sound that hit Kara harder than any infected had.

“We’re not discussing that,” Lena said quickly, but her voice had gone soft around the edges.

Kara nodded without meaning to and then immediately regretted it because the motion pulled her wound. She inhaled sharply through her teeth.

Lena froze.

“Kara.”

Her voice changed—clinical, alarmed, tender. Too tender.

“Sit. Now.”

Kara opened her mouth to object—Lena’s eyes narrowed and that was the end of that.

Kara sat.

Lena knelt in front of her—not dramatically, not theatrically, just with the unthinking authority of someone who had decided she would take care of this and dared the universe to interfere.

“Lift your shirt.”

Kara squeaked. “What—now?”

“Yes, now,” Lena said, already tugging gloves from her pocket. “Unless you’d prefer we do this in the middle of the cafeteria so Alex can supervise.”

Kara shut up instantly.

She lifted the fabric, heart pounding.

Lena’s breath left her in a slow, horrified rush.

“Kara…”

The cut was jagged, angry, the edges pulled more than they should be.

Except—

Except it wasn’t infected.

At all.

No redness. No heat.

Just damaged skin trying to heal… too fast.

Lena reached out, then seemed to catch herself and switched to gloved fingers.

“This should look worse,” she whispered. “Why doesn’t it look worse?”

Kara swallowed. “Good genetics?”

Lena gave her a flat, scientific look. “Don’t joke.”

Kara looked away. “It’s just healing fast. Maybe it missed anything important.”

“You were hit by debris, Kara. Metal debris.”

Lena dabbed gently.

Kara hissed.

Lena softened, voice dipping. “Sorry.”

Kara shook her head. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I do,” Lena said quietly. “Because you terrify me when you pretend you’re fine.”

Kara’s chest tightened. “I don’t want to be a problem.”

“You’re a person,” Lena said. “People aren’t problems. Wounds are.”

That did something catastrophic to Kara’s composure.

Lena applied clean gauze, fingers steady, movements practiced but gentle in a way Kara wasn’t prepared for. Their knees brushed. Kara didn’t move. Neither did Lena.

“You need rest,” Lena said.

Kara shook her head. “Alex needs me. Everyone needs bodies for shifts.”

Lena tied off the bandage, eyes flicking up—soft, frustrated, burning with some truth she wasn’t ready to speak.

“You don’t have to collapse for the sake of everyone else,” Lena murmured. “Not while I’m here.”

Kara forgot how lungs worked.

Lena stood, collecting her kit.

Before she turned away, she reached out and touched Kara’s cheek—brief, soft, almost instinctive.

“I’m not losing you to bravado,” she said.

Kara stared up at her, stunned. “Then stay close.”

Lena’s jaw tightened—but not with anger.

With something far more dangerous.

“I wasn’t planning on being anywhere else.”

She walked away before Kara could combust on the spot.

Kara didn’t answer. Not because she didn’t have one — but because the weight in her ribs had settled into something she didn’t quite know how to name. Shame? Fear? The reflexive instinct to make herself smaller so no one could see she was shaking?

Maybe all three.

She busied herself with inventory to avoid Alex’s eyes. She counted masks, gauze strips, the dwindling antibiotics. She checked the carbines that had been distributed among the volunteers. She pretended her shoulder didn’t sting when she lifted anything above waist height.

Because if she admitted that pain, she’d have to admit that she wasn’t fine. And she couldn’t afford that — not when people were looking to her for steadiness she was only good at faking.

Across the room, Lena leaned over a supply cart, conferring quietly with Sam. Lena’s profile was severe, concentrated — beautiful in a way that made something in Kara’s stomach flip traitorously. When Lena pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, Kara looked away so fast she nearly fumbled the clipboard.

“Smooth,” Winn muttered behind her, appearing like an exhausted little gremlin with a tablet under one arm.

Kara shot him a flat look. “I wasn’t—”

“Please,” he snorted. “Your eyes have subtitles. Even Brainy could read them.”

Kara elbowed him — gently, because Winn bruised easier than most — and forced her gaze back to the supply list.

But it was impossible to ignore the gravitational pull of Lena’s presence.

Every time Kara’s attention drifted, it found its way back: the way Lena’s hands moved in tight, efficient gestures; the faint crease between her brows when she concentrated; the way her voice dropped when Sam whispered something that made her shake her head.

She’s with Sam, Kara reminded herself fiercely.

Of course she is. They make sense. They’re brilliant together. And I don’t—

She cut the thought off before her brain wrapped words around it.

Feelings were luxuries. And luxuries got people killed.

Still, every time Lena glanced her way — quick, sharp, assessing — Kara felt like she was being mapped with a precision instrument.

She wasn’t sure she hated it.

Or that she wanted it to stop.

---

---

LENA — DAY THREE (SCENE 2: “Fragments of a Pattern”)

Sleep had become a negotiation she kept losing.

Lena stood in the west annex lab with a half-finished protein model glowing on the tablet, the world narrowed to a chamber of flickering LEDs, paper stacks, and the metallic hum of generators choking on exhaustion. Her hair was scraped back in a tight knot she didn’t remember tying. The sleeves of her shirt were rolled unevenly — one crisp, one crushed. She looked like someone who’d been thinking instead of breathing.

Sam appeared in the doorway the way she always did when she was worried: silent first, judgment second. She set a thermos in front of Lena with the kind of forceful gentleness only Sam Arias could manage.

“Drink,” Sam said.

Lena didn’t move. “It’s just caffeine and powdered milk pretending to be sustenance.”

“Exactly,” Sam replied. “Drink.”

Lena sighed and took a small sip — enough to placate, not enough to hydrate. She set it aside, eyes locking back onto the anomaly graph. “The cascade curve shouldn’t look like this. Not unless the subject had—”

Sam pinched the bridge of her nose. “Lena.”

Which meant: you are spiraling.

Which also meant: I know why.

Lena ignored both meanings and dragged another window across the screen. The data from Subject 0 — K.D. scrolled in corrupted fragments, jagged edges of truth stitched through broken code. But the pattern had sharpened overnight.

Delayed apoptosis. Anomalous viral spread. Post-bite cellular stability.

And now, with the new file reconstruction from Brainy’s interface —

elevated metabolic baseline since childhood.

That last line crawled beneath her ribs.

“You’re seeing ghosts in numbers,” Sam said quietly.

“I’m seeing a biological refusal to die,” Lena countered. “And I’m seeing it before any simulated exposure. This wasn’t triggered by the virus — something predated it.”

Sam stepped closer, eyes softening. “Patterns aren’t people, Lena. Don’t forget which one you’re trying to save.”

Lena flinched at that — not visibly, but in the kind of internal way Sam could read anyway.

Because Lena had drifted. Not into obsession, not fully — but into something sharp and dangerous at the edges. Something pulsing just beneath her logic like a whisper telling her she didn’t have the full picture.

And because when she closed her eyes, she didn’t see graphs.

She saw ductwork.

She saw Kara’s body pressed beneath hers, breath hot, heartbeat a frantic metronome against her palm.

She saw brown eyes wide enough to swallow the dark.

She felt the moment — the stupid, reckless, terrifying moment — where Kara shifted just slightly toward her and Lena had to shut it down with a whisper and a hand over her mouth.

Not now.

Not here.

Not when she could still taste dust and adrenaline and something achingly human in the shape of Kara’s silence.

Lena shut the image out and tapped the screen harder than necessary.

“I need access to the older Halcyon logs,” she said. “The ones from the deep storage arrays. They were removed during the first breach. Someone must have relocated the servers to a lower bay.”

Sam exhaled. “You mean the lower labs. Near HVAC 6. Where the walls look like peeled skin and the vents scream at night.”

“Yes,” Lena said without missing a beat. “Those.”

Sam gave her a flat look. “Of course you do.”

Lena gathered the printouts, cross-checked timestamps, circled a missing block of data with red pen. “If the pre-exposure markers match the metabolic anomalies we saw from yesterday’s tray specimen, then there’s a common origin point. Something we’re not seeing.”

Sam watched her for a long moment — the way Sam watched when she was trying to decide whether to argue or to protect.

“You’re going down there with backup,” Sam said finally. “And not the half-asleep kind.”

Lena opened her mouth to protest.

Sam raised a hand. “No. I’m serious. You nearly got your arm ripped off yesterday. And Kara—”

Lena froze.

Sam’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, so that has your attention.”

Lena’s jaw tightened. “Nothing happened.”

Sam gave a slow, silent nod. “Sure. Nothing. Except the very obvious way you two have started orbiting like magnets trapped under glass.”

Lena shot her a glare sharp enough to sterilize equipment.

Sam only smiled.

“Fine,” Lena said, voice clipped. “I’ll take backup.”

“Good,” Sam replied, softer. “Because the last thing this place needs is to lose its best scientist to flirtation and duct monsters.”

Lena pretended she didn’t hear the first half of that sentence.

But the problem was — she did.

And it echoed with the same, unwanted warmth as Kara’s whispered breath against her fingers the night before.

“Let’s go retrieve the logs,” Lena said.

And if the words sounded steadier than she felt, neither of them mentioned it.

---

Halcyon’s annex felt colder in the morning, as if the breach had leeched the heat out of the walls. Lena stood at the center of her improvised war room — papers taped in geometric clusters, data lines highlighted into constellations, a dry-erase marker abandoned with its cap missing like a forgotten limb. The air hummed with the low, mechanical vibration of generators below, a sound the building had begun to wear like a pulse.

She hadn’t slept. She’d tried—Sam had shoved a protein bar into her hand and pushed her toward a cot—but the moment she’d closed her eyes she’d seen the duct collapse again. The metal screaming, the dust plume, Kara’s weight slamming into her, the thud of bodies on the other side of the barricade.

Her pulse flickered just remembering it. Irritating.

Lena adjusted her glasses and forced her attention back to the data. One monitor displayed a heat map of apoptosis markers; another, a corrupted log file Brainy had resurrected overnight. She dragged a graph window over both and paused when a pattern repeated—not identical, but rhythmically similar.

A delayed cascade.

A slowed viral spread.

A phenomenon that should not be possible.

Sam appeared in the doorway with two mugs of coffee and one raised eyebrow. “You look like someone who’s been trying to bribe a gene sequence into talking.”

Lena didn’t look away from her screen. “…It’s being stubborn.”

“Uh-huh,” Sam said, stepping into the room. “And when’s the last time you ate something that wasn’t brainwaves and hubris?”

Lena reached for a printout. “Sam, look—This correlation wasn’t present in the first data dump. Meaning either the breach disrupted the cascade in early specimens… or someone intentionally modified the sample before containment. See this? These dips shouldn’t be this shallow.”

Sam leaned over her shoulder, eyes narrowing. “Are we talking engineered resistance again or something more unnatural?”

Lena pressed two fingers against the graph’s dip. “If it were environmental, I’d expect noise across the sample range. But these markers are precise. Surgical.”

“Someone tampered with it,” Sam said.

“Not someone incompetent,” Lena corrected. “Someone meticulous.”

That silence between them stretched—uneasy, prickling.

Then Sam nudged her shoulder gently. “You’re spiraling.”

“I am not spiraling.”

“You have four graphs taped to the ceiling, Lena.”

Lena glanced up. She did. She scowled. “That is called vertical utilization of space.”

Sam barked out a laugh — exhausted but fond. “You’re impossible.”

Lena turned back to her monitors. “We need the older Halcyon servers. The ones from before the university consolidated into the east tower.”

“You think there’s more K.D. data in there?”

“I think there’s everything.” Her voice went thin with intensity. “Notes, pre-exposure logs, baseline readings, maybe even original environmental conditions. Brainy said the subnetwork’s corrupted, but corruption isn’t destruction. It’s just… unreadable until you know where to push.”

Sam studied her — really studied her — and Lena felt the weight of it like a hand between her shoulder blades.

“You’re not doing this alone,” Sam said quietly.

“I’m not trying to.”

But she was. And Sam knew it.

Sam’s gaze softened, then sharpened, cutting directly to the thing Lena was keeping in the periphery. “You’ve been thinking about her.”

Lena froze. “No.”

“Lena.” Sam’s tone was surgical. “You nearly died. Twice. And both times, Kara—”

“That was coincidence.”

“That was karma,” Sam countered. “Or lesbian magnetism.”

Lena closed her eyes. “Sam.”

“What? It’s true. You two have been orbiting each other like charged particles since the morgue corridor.”

Lena swallowed hard, throat tightening. She hadn’t meant to think about Kara, not now, not when she was elbow-deep in anomalies and half-corrupted science. But her mind treacherously replayed the moment in the darkened office — Kara’s breath under her palm, her heartbeat syncing with Lena’s, the near-impossible urge Lena had felt to lean in just a little closer—

No.

Not now.

Lena pushed the thought aside with a force that bordered on violent. “We have work to do. Halcyon is losing temperature in the north wing and the samples won’t survive another breach.”

“And what about you?” Sam asked softly.

“I’m functioning.”

Sam didn’t argue. She didn’t need to. Her silence said everything.

A soft chime from the console broke the moment. Lena snapped toward it.

“New data point unlocked,” Brainy’s voice crackled through the comm. “Recovered from Sector 6B. The file label matches your working thread, Lena.”

Her heart kicked into a faster rhythm.

Sector 6B.

Old servers.

The exact place she needed.

The exact place she and Kara had sweep duty in an hour.

Lena exhaled slowly — a controlled breath, a calculated reset.

“Good,” she said. “Notify Alex I’ll be retrieving it after the next sweep.”

Sam muttered, “And here we go again.”

Lena shot her a glare she absolutely did not mean. “Don’t start.”

Sam lifted her hands in surrender. “Fine. But if Kara ends up patching your wounds again, I’m telling her she’s allowed to flirt back.”

Lena flushed before she could stop it.

“Sam. Please.”

Sam grinned. “Just saying. Life’s short. Undead are plentiful. Kiss the hot girl.”

Lena pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“No you’re not.”

“No. I’m not.”

And the admission sat in the air like a spark waiting for its fuel.

---

---

CHAPTER 6 — Scene 3: “Fault Lines”

(Kara → Alex POV)

KARA — SOUTH STAIR BASE / PRE-SWEEP

Kara tightened the strap on her makeshift shoulder guard, pretending the motion didn’t send a hot pulse of pain down her arm. The cut wasn’t deep, but it was angry — swollen, stiff, and absolutely something she should have let Lena finish treating.

She hadn’t.

Because admitting pain meant slowing down, and slowing down meant thinking.

And thinking meant remembering the way Lena had looked at her in that collapsed duct: fierce, furious, breath warm against Kara’s cheek… too close, too much.

So Kara pushed the pain away the same way she pushed emotions she didn’t understand — into a mental closet marked LATER.

Alex caught the wince anyway.

Of course she did.

“Stop.” Alex’s voice was flat. “What’s that face?”

“What face?” Kara replied, attempting innocence.

“The I-am-in-pain-but-lying-about-it face,” Alex said. “Your classic.”

Kara straightened. “I’m fine.”

“You’re limping.”

“I’m limping fine.”

Alex stared at her like she was a particularly disappointing lab result. “You nearly got dragged into a vent yesterday, Kara. Maybe don’t pretend you’re bulletproof?”

“Not bulletproof,” Kara muttered. “Just… needed.”

Alex’s shoulders softened, the battle-ready tension in her frame flickering. “You are needed,” she said quietly. “But not dead.”

Before Kara could respond, Winn jogged up, waving a sensor tablet.

“Uh—hey, small crisis? The HVAC under Lab 6 is throwing rhythmic motion spikes. Not random. Not wind. Not standard shuffling.”

Alex took the tablet, eyes narrowing.

The readings drew a pattern — repeating intervals. Almost coordinated.

Kara felt her stomach drop.

“They’re grouping?”

Winn nodded grimly. “Or following a vibration map. Brainy thinks the duct resonance is acting like a guide rail. Like… a highway.”

Kara ran a hand through her hair. “Alex, we need to investigate that. Right now.”

“Yeah,” Alex said, jaw tightening. “But not with you running on adrenaline and denial.”

Kara bristled. “I’m not—”

“You are,” Alex said, cutting her off. “And I’m not losing you because you can’t admit you’re hurt.”

Kara’s voice cracked more than she wanted it to. “I can’t sit out. If I sit out, someone else gets hurt instead.”

Alex exhaled sharply, looking suddenly older, suddenly tired. “That is not your job.”

“It’s the one I gave myself,” Kara said. “The world’s on fire, Alex. Everyone’s doing what they’re not qualified for.”

Alex’s mouth twitched. “Since when do you get the last word?”

Kara almost smiled.

Almost.

But then the tablet chirped again — the signal pulsing faster.

Time was up.

Alex snapped into command mode. “Fine. You’re coming. But my terms.”

Kara raised a brow. “Which are?”

“You stay on the inner triangle. No lone-wolf heroics. No sprinting ahead like your legs don’t belong to you.”

Kara folded her arms. “And Lena?”

“Lena’s on the Lab 6 corridor with J’onn,” Alex said. “Sam insisted.”

A flicker of heat zipped through Kara’s stomach — unwanted, irrational.

“Good,” she said too quickly.

Alex caught it. Of course she did.

“Oh my God.”

She rubbed her face. “You like her.”

Kara’s entire soul seized. “What? No. I— absolutely not.”

Alex’s expression turned very sibling. Very smug. “You’re so obvious.”

“I’m literally bleeding,” Kara hissed. “Can we focus?”

Alex clapped her on the shoulder — her good shoulder.

“Later. I’m putting a pin in this.”

Kara groaned, mortified.

“Let’s move,” Alex said, voice snapping back to tactical. “Triangle formation. And stay behind me unless you want me to duct-tape you to a cot.”

“Try it,” Kara muttered.

Alex almost smiled. “Don’t tempt me.”

They headed toward the lower labs, the hum of Halcyon tightening around them like a held breath.

A storm brewing below.

A reckoning brewing between them.

A danger neither had yet named.

---

---

CHAPTER 6 — Scene 3: Fault Lines

KARA — DAY THREE (PREP ROOM / SOUTH STAIR ACCESS)

Kara tugged her jacket higher on her shoulders, hoping the motion would hide how stiff her left arm still was. The cut along her upper shoulder burned in that pulsing, warning way that told her she should have rested it. She had absolutely no intention of listening to that warning.

The prep alcove smelled like metal and rubbing alcohol—sharp, efficient, unforgiving. Volunteers moved around her gathering suppressors, flashlights, and radios they weren’t supposed to use. Every sound echoed. Every footstep felt like it had weight.

Alex noticed it all.

Of course she did.

“Danvers.”

The command in Alex’s voice was soft, but it still hooked Kara in the spine.

Kara kept her eyes on the duct map pinned to the wall. “Yeah?”

“You’re limping.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re favoring your left side.”

“No, I’m not.”

Alex stepped in close—too close, in that big-sister-who-will-not-be-dodged way—and angled her body so Kara had no choice but to face her.

“Kara,” Alex said quietly, “you need rest.”

Kara kept her gaze hard. “People need me.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Feels like it.”

A muscle in Alex’s jaw twitched. Kara recognized that look—half frustration, half grief. It was the look Alex wore whenever she felt responsible for holding the line between Kara and the world’s worst impulses.

“You nearly died in the ducts,” Alex said. “Twice.”

“I learned from it.”

“You got lucky.”

Kara’s breath flared. “Luck isn’t what kept those volunteers alive.”

“No,” Alex said, voice sharp with affection and fury. “You did. And that’s exactly why you’re scaring the hell out of me.”

Kara froze.

Alex didn’t let the silence linger. “I’m putting you in the rear position of the formation today. That’s final.”

“You can’t side-line me—”

“I’m not. I’m keeping you from making a widow out of someone you haven’t even admitted you like yet.”

Kara’s face went hot. “ALEX.”

Alex folded her arms. “You’re telegraphing it. Everyone can see it.”

“I literally don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure,” Alex said. “And those staring contests with Lena are just… data analysis?”

Kara inhaled through her teeth. “We don’t do staring contests.”

“You’re doing one right now,” Alex muttered.

Kara blinked. “She’s not even in this room!”

“Exactly.”

Kara groaned and scrubbed a hand down her face. “Can we please focus on the sweep?”

Alex’s expression softened—barely. “I just want you to survive the day.”

Kara swallowed. “I will.”

“Promise?”

Kara hesitated, then nodded. “…Promise.”

Alex squeezed her shoulder—right above the injury—and Kara almost hissed. Alex caught it immediately.

“Kara.”

Her voice broke on the syllable.

Kara looked away. “It’s just a scrape.”

“You lied to me.”

“It’s not dangerous—”

“That’s not the point.”

Kara exhaled. “If you knew how deep it actually was, you wouldn’t let me on this sweep.”

Alex stared at her for a long, painful beat.

Then she whispered, “You’re going to break something in me one day.”

Kara’s breath trembled. “Please don’t make me sit out.”

Alex’s eyes closed once—long, exhausted.

Then she opened them and said, “Rear guard only. No heroics. If you push yourself, I drag you out of the corridor myself.”

Kara nodded, relieved and ashamed in equal measure.

Alex reached for her radio, voice snapping back into command mode. “Prep in two minutes! Eyes sharp!”

Kara turned away before Alex could read the guilt in her face.

But she should’ve known—

Alex always read her anyway.

---

ALEX — SAME MOMENT (SPLIT POV)

Alex watched Kara move back into formation.

She wasn’t fooled for a second.

Her sister’s stride was off by a fraction—too careful, too slow on the left side. Kara’s breathing sounded shallow even under the hum of the emergency lights. And worse: Kara looked scared of slowing down.

This was how Kara broke—

Not loudly.

Quietly.

By trying too hard to be enough for everybody else.

J’onn appeared beside her, silent as a shadow. “She’s hurt.”

Alex didn’t bother pretending otherwise. “She lied about how badly.”

J’onn hummed, ancient and sad. “She leads because she loves.”

“I know.”

“And that is her greatest strength.”

A pause.

“And her eventual breaking point.”

Alex swallowed that down like medicine she didn’t want to taste.

“We need a new sweep formation,” she said, forcing her voice steady. “If the infected are grouping—if they’re learning the building’s vibration map—we need triangulation. No more straight lines.”

“Agreed,” J’onn said.

Alex glanced at Kara across the room—shoulders tight, jaw clenched, pretending not to exist.

She loved her sister more fiercely than she loved oxygen.

And she had no idea how to keep her alive.

“J’onn?” Alex asked quietly.

“Yes?”

“…If she falls behind today, you grab her. You don’t wait for her to argue.”

J’onn nodded.

And in his silence, Alex heard everything she feared reflected back at her.

---

---

CHAPTER 6 — SCENE 4

LAB 6 DESCENT

POV: Split — Kara → Lena

---

KARA — LAB 6 ACCESS HALL

The hallway outside Lab 6 was wrong in that soft, needling way Kara had begun to recognize: too still, too cold, too silent. The kind of silence that didn’t mean safety — it meant the infected had already learned to walk quietly.

Alex’s plan had been clean and logical: triangular sweep formation so they wouldn’t get boxed in; Kara paired with J’onn originally… until Sam “accidentally” rearranged the roster, and now Kara was staring at Lena tightening her gloves with surgical precision.

Kara was certain Sam had done that on purpose.

She was less certain why her stomach had reacted the way it did.

“Ready?” Lena asked, voice low, clipped, controlled.

Kara nodded, even though her shoulder ached and her ribs felt like someone had pressed a boot-print into them.

“Yeah. Let’s, uh— do this.”

Lena looked at her for one lingering second too long. Not judgment. Something more… clinical. Concern dressed as analysis.

“Don’t lie to me,” Lena murmured. “You’re hurting.”

Kara swallowed.

Denied it.

“Just stiff. I’m fine.”

Lena’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t argue — but she didn’t believe it, either.

They stepped into the corridor.

It was a thin throat of concrete: narrow, humming with cooled air, smeared with streaks of something dark and dried. Emergency lights flickered overhead in tired pulses. HVAC pipes ran the length of the ceiling like exposed ribs.

Kara took point by instinct.

Lena followed, close enough that Kara could feel the pull of her breath whenever they paused, evaluating the dark.

They rounded a bend — and Kara froze.

Across the floor: drag marks.

No bodies.

No blood pool.

Just long, uneven grooves leading toward a ventilation grate that now sagged open like a broken jaw.

“They’re being pulled upward,” Kara whispered.

“Or pushed,” Lena murmured. “Either way — not random.”

The chill that ran down Kara’s spine was bone-deep.

---

LENA — LAB 6 LOWER CORRIDOR

It smelled like dust, ozone, and something older — something sickly-sweet, lingering in the metal.

Lena’s brain clicked into separate compartments:

One: The fear — sharp, immediate.

Two: Kara’s breathing — too shallow, too quick. Pain-disguising.

Three: The corridor’s physics — tracks suggesting at least two bodies dragged, irregular spacing, not fresh, but not old either.

“This is where the older servers should be,” Lena murmured. “If Halcyon’s primary database corrupted K.D.’s pre-exposure footage, the backups would be—”

Kara’s quiet voice cut in: “Then we find them fast.”

Lena almost smiled. Almost.

Because Kara said it like she wasn’t terrified. Like her ribs weren’t bruised, her shoulder wasn’t bleeding through the bandage beneath her jacket, and like she hadn’t nearly been killed less than twelve hours ago.

Stubborn girl.

They advanced deeper until Lena spotted the door: a heavy metal panel half-melted, its lock eaten away by heat or chemicals. Inside the room beyond: a lonely, half-functioning server tower still humming with the sad determination of old machinery.

“There it is,” Lena whispered, stepping toward it, excitement flickering bright and sharp in her chest. “If the drive bay survived, I can—”

Something thudded above them.

Kara’s hand shot out instinctively, grabbing Lena’s elbow and pulling her back beside her.

“Don’t move.”

The duct above them groaned.

Metal bent.

And then—

Slam.

Two infected dropped from the ceiling like sacks of wet meat.

One hit the ground dead-on; the other half-mangled, twisting, shoulders cracking as it writhed and dragged itself toward them with a crooked, animal determination.

Lena stumbled, heart jolting up into her throat, but Kara was already stepping into its path.

“Kara—!” Lena warned, but Kara didn’t hesitate.

She kicked the crawling infected square in the face, bone crunching beneath her boot, sending it rolling backward. The second one lurched upright with a gnarled, jerking motion.

Kara swung a pry bar from her belt and cracked it across the jaw with a brutal, messy efficiency that Lena never would have believed possible two days ago.

The creature gurgled, staggered—

Then launched itself.

Kara took the hit to her already-injured shoulder.

Her grimace was silent — but Lena saw it.

Saw too much of it.

“Kara!” Lena surged forward, grabbing a piece of broken duct metal, swinging it like a surgical extension of her arm. She drove it into the infected’s temple with a frightening, precise force.

The creature dropped.

Hard.

Still.

The silence afterward rang like a struck bell.

Kara’s breath rasped — too fast.

“Kara.” Lena reached for her shoulder. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s nothing,” Kara panted.

“It’s not nothing,” Lena snapped.

Her fingers brushed the torn fabric, and Kara flinched despite trying not to.

That small reaction made something inside Lena tighten, then burn.

“You terrify me when you do that,” Lena whispered. “When you throw yourself at danger like you have something to prove.”

Kara swallowed hard.

“When I keep you alive?” she asked quietly.

And Lena — who never lost her words, who never hesitated — had nothing to say to that.

Not because Kara was wrong.

But because she was right in a way Lena was not prepared to examine.

Not here.

Not now.

Not with blood on the walls and something bigger hunting them from the ducts.

Lena exhaled, fierce and unsteady.

“Let me look at your shoulder,” she said, voice softening despite herself.

Kara shook her head. “Later. We need that drive.”

Lena clenched her jaw.

But she didn’t argue.

Not yet.

She would, though.

She would absolutely fight Kara on this — later — when they weren’t in a death corridor.

For now, she steadied Kara with one hand on her arm and helped her to the server.

They pulled the battered drive core free — heavy, warm, humming faintly.

Kara held it in the crook of her uninjured arm.

“You okay?” Lena asked.

Kara nodded.

“Yeah.”

Lena gave her a look full of scientific skepticism and something more intimate than she meant to reveal.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Lena said quietly.

Kara’s cheeks flushed.

And for one breath — just one —

the apocalypse around them faded.

Then the pipes overhead vibrated.

A metallic scream echoed from deeper in the ductwork.

Something was moving toward them.

Fast.

Kara’s voice dropped to a whisper:

“We need to go. Now.”

Lena nodded, stepping closer than necessary in the narrow corridor.

“Stay with me,” she murmured.

Kara didn’t hesitate.

“Always.”

---

---

CHAPTER 6 — SCENE 5

“What the Data Remembers”

Lena — POV

The lab annex was quiet in the way grief is quiet—too still, too focused, too aware of every breath. The breach hours earlier had scoured the hallways clean of all illusion. Halcyon wasn’t safe. It wasn’t even stable. It was simply the place where they were trying the hardest to survive.

Lena stood over the small, scorched server core she and Kara had dragged out of Lab 6. The casing was warped where heat had chewed at it. It looked like something that should’ve been useless.

But the moment Brainy connected it through his jury-rigged interface, data shivered onto the screen in pale, resurrected lines.

Winn hovered beside her, chewing the inside of his cheek. Sam leaned against the counter, arms folded, watching Lena more than the monitor. And Brainy tapped at the holographic keys with the muted intensity of a man praying.

The first file blinked open.

A partially corrupted video frame. A log timestamp. Static. Then—

> SUBJECT 0 — K.D.

Pre-Exposure Clinical Notes

“Resilient markers advanced.”

“Non-standard cell repair response.”

“Unusually high metabolic baseline.”

Lena inhaled sharply.

Not pain. Not fear.

Recognition.

Not of the subject—she didn’t know them. Not yet.

But of the pattern.

She rewound the log frame by frame. The lines weren’t written like medical notes. They had a different cadence—clinical, yes, but with the obsessive precision of someone measuring something extraordinary.

She traced a finger along the ridges of the words on the screen. “This isn’t describing a patient,” she murmured. “This is describing a physiology.”

Winn frowned. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning,” Lena said slowly, “Subject K.D. didn’t respond to the virus the way any other body does. Look here—” She tapped the cascading graph. “Apoptosis decelerated. Not halted but… slowed. The viral replication curve dips, then flattens, then rises again. It’s like the cells fought back.”

Brainy’s brows rose. “A resistance pattern?”

Lena nodded, breath catching. “Or the beginning of one.”

Sam straightened at that, eyes narrowing. “You’re saying someone—some person—was showing resistance to the infection before reanimation?”

Lena’s throat felt tight. “A trait. A mutation. A… something.” She exhaled. “It’s not random. It wasn’t environmental. The baseline markers were elevated since childhood.”

There was a very small silence.

The kind that only happens when the world shifts a fraction of an inch, and no one is ready for it.

Winn broke it, voice low. “So… this subject was… stronger? Different?”

Lena swallowed. “Different enough that Halcyon tracked them obsessively.”

Brainy pulled up another corrupted string. A single phrase flickered through the distortion:

> “Pre-bite resilience exceeds projections.”

Lena went still.

Sam must’ve felt the shift because her voice softened. “Lena… what does that mean?”

“It means,” Lena whispered, “whoever K.D. was, they could survive a bite simulation longer than the models predicted. They shouldn’t have. But they did.”

Her pulse surged—in triumph, in fear. She didn’t know.

“Brainy,” she said, sharper than she intended, “recover everything tied to K.D. Every log, every file, every image. I don’t care how corrupted. I want all of it.”

Sam’s gaze slid sideways. “You’re spiraling.”

“I’m working,” Lena snapped back—then winced, pressing fingertips to her temples. “Sorry. I just… this could be the closest thing to an answer we’ve seen since this started.”

“Or it could be another dead end,” Sam countered softly. “Don’t let hope eat you alive.”

Lena didn’t respond. Her attention was welded to the screen, to the tiny, blinking tag at the top of the directory:

> SUBJECT_0

K.D.

STATUS: CLASSIFIED

Her eyes lingered on those initials.

K.D.

K.D.

Something in her chest tightened—an uninvited, irrational pulse. She didn’t know why. She had no reason to.

She pushed past it.

She had work. And the world didn’t have time for intuition without proof.

“One thing is clear,” she finally said. “This person was important to Halcyon. Important to the research. If there’s even a chance their biology holds a clue, I need to follow it.”

Sam sighed. “Then I’m following you.”

Lena allowed the smallest smile, grateful for it even if she didn’t say so.

But as she turned back to the screen, her mind betrayed her—sending up a ghost of an image she hadn’t asked for.

Kara.

Pressed under her in the dark.

Breathing unevenly.

Heart racing like it was trying to crack its ribs.

Warm. Alive.

Too alive.

Lena shut the thought down violently.

Ridiculous. Impossible. Irrelevant.

But the heartbeat she’d felt against her palm in the ductwork…

the one that had hammered far too strong for someone who’d been bleeding and fighting and running…

A shiver crawled down her spine.

She pushed it away.

Focus.

This was science.

This was survival.

This was bigger than whatever mistake her brain was trying to make.

She cleared her throat and straightened her shoulders.

“Let’s get to work.”

And with that, she dove back into the data—

even as a question she refused to acknowledge hovered at the edge of her mind, waiting for its moment to break her world open.

---

End of Chapter 6

Chapter Text

---

CHAPTER 7 — Scene 1

“The Spiral Tightens”

POV: Alex → Kara

Morning arrived without alarms, and that was the first sign something was wrong.

Halcyon had grown used to noise — the hum of vents, the clatter of boots, the distant, muffled groans of infected dragging themselves along outer corridors. But today… the building felt like someone had pressed a hand over its mouth. Too still. Too watchful. The kind of quiet that comes before a storm knows its name.

Alex stood at the central console staring at the sensor map Brainy projected an hour earlier. The red clusters didn't blink or drift like usual. They had tightened, drawn inwards, forming a slow spiral — unmistakable, deliberate, wrong.

They were coming.

Not wandering. Not dispersing. Coming.

J’onn stood beside her, arms folded behind his back, expression unreadable. “It is behavior,” he murmured. “Not instinct.”

Alex’s skin prickled. “We need everyone.”

Within minutes the core team filtered into the command alcove — bleary, bruised, trying to look steadier than they were.

Sam with coffee she forgot to drink.

M’gann quiet and protective.

Brainy already typing equations none of them could follow.

Nia wrapping her arms around herself like she was preserving heat from a nightmare.

Kara… standing too straight, pretending her shoulder didn’t throb.

Lena directly across from Kara, eyes sharp enough to diagnose a lie from across the room.

Cat crossed her arms. “All right. Explain to those of us who don’t speak apocalypse geometry.”

Alex tapped the spiral. “They’re clustering. Inward. Toward us.”

A low ripple moved through the room.

Then Nia stepped forward — hesitating only once before finding her voice.

“I… had a dream,” she said.

Kara blinked. “Nia—”

“It wasn’t like my usual nightmares,” Nia continued. “This one—” She swallowed hard. “There was a shadow breaking through light. And dust… falling through my hands. Like someone just… vanished.”

Sam frowned. “Symbolic or literal?”

Nia’s voice went small. “It was Kara.”

Kara flinched. “Nia—”

“And I know dreams aren’t prophecies,” Nia said, louder now, “but it felt like a warning.”

For a heartbeat, no one spoke.

Then Kara smiled — soft but stretched thin. “Hey… we’ve all had awful dreams lately. I promise I’m not going anywhere.”

Nia stared at her like she could see straight through the reassurance.

Lena stared too — but her gaze was different. Sharper. Terrified in a way she refused to let reach her mouth.

Alex cleared her throat. “All right. This doesn’t change logistics, but it changes tone. We assume breach conditions today. We assume the spiral tightens. We assume we are running out of time.”

As everyone dispersed into assignments, Nia tugged Kara aside into the shadowed corner between lockers.

“Are you actually okay?” Nia whispered.

Kara gave a laugh that hurt to hear. “Define okay.”

Nia didn’t smile. “You’re pale. Your breathing’s off. And you’re doing that thing again.”

“What thing?” Kara blinked.

“The thing where the building is literally on fire and you say you’re ‘fine’ while actively burning.”

Kara sighed, leaning back against the wall. “I’m scared, Ni.”

Nia’s eyes softened — not pity, but recognition. “Me too.”

Kara nudged her shoulder gently. “But we do it anyway, right?”

“Yeah,” Nia whispered. “We do.”

Behind them, Lena watched Kara with the precision of a scientist and the fear of someone who had nearly lost her the night before.

Alex caught it.

Cat caught it.

Sam absolutely caught it.

Kara didn’t.

She pushed the fear down, smiled like it didn’t hurt, and headed toward her sweep team.

The spiral on the sensor map pulsed once.

Twice.

Tightening.

And Halcyon braced for the day the world began to tilt wrong.

---

---

CHAPTER 7 — SCENE 2

“The Protocol Debate”

POV: Lena

Halcyon’s east lab hummed with a low, sickly light—flickering in that uneven rhythm that made Lena’s nerves prickle. She stood over the console as Brainy patched the recovered Lab 6 core into the larger Halcyon system.

More fragments of K.D.’s file populated the screen—graphs, corrupted notes, half-renders of cellular scans.

Sam leaned against the counter, arms crossed. Nia hovered just behind her, still unsettled from the dream she refused to describe fully.

Brainy cleared his throat.

“I’ve isolated a few more viable patterns from the recovered data.”

Lena stepped forward. “Show me.”

Lines of biochemical readouts blinked onto the interface:

delayed apoptosis curves

inconsistent viral load drop-offs

metabolic spikes pre-exposure

Sam whispered, “That’s not normal even for engineered pathogens.”

Lena didn’t answer. She couldn’t—not with the way her pulse skittered under her skin.

Brainy tapped another window. “Additionally… I logged unusual post-adrenal recovery times in one of our personnel yesterday.”

Lena’s head snapped up.

“What personnel?”

“A volunteer,” Brainy said. “Their vitals normalized extremely quickly after the duct fight. It’s not conclusive—there were adrenaline spikes, trauma responses, confusion—”

Lena inhaled sharply, but quietly.

Her stomach twisted.

Too fast recovery after trauma wasn’t medically impossible.

It just… wasn’t likely.

Sam frowned. “Which volunteer?”

“I didn’t attach names,” Brainy replied. “It was ambient vitals through Kara’s sweeps—her team was clustered, so the readings could be cross-signal contamination.”

Lena froze.

He said Kara’s name casually, not like an accusation. But something inside Lena lurched anyway—hard enough that she had to grip the console edge.

Nia noticed.

Her voice was soft. “Hey. You okay?”

Lena forced steadiness into her tone.

“We don’t have enough data to draw conclusions.”

“You’re scared,” Nia said gently—not an accusation, not even a question.

Lena’s jaw clicked. “I’m focused.”

“That’s not what I said.”

The room seemed too small. Too warm. Too close.

Brainy—ever literal—continued, unaware of the emotional quake he’d sparked:

“Regardless, we should adjust sweep protocols. If infected patterns are shifting, we can’t send anyone alone.”

Lena seized the distraction with relief.

“Yes. Agreed. And I want access to Sector 5A—the partial archives. There may be older K.D. datapoints we missed.”

Sam blinked.

“You’re going down there?”

“Of course,” Lena said. “I need to confirm a hypothesis.”

“Which is?” Nia asked.

Lena’s eyes flicked toward the door Kara had disappeared through minutes earlier.

“I don’t know yet,” she admitted quietly.

“It’s… a feeling.”

Nia stepped closer, lowering her voice even further.

“Then trust that. Feelings don’t always lie.”

Lena looked at her sharply—startled in a way she didn’t show aloud.

Nia held her gaze.

“I’m not guessing,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong. But something is.”

That landed.

Painfully.

Truthfully.

Lena closed her eyes for half a heartbeat.

Then she opened them, and her voice was once again clinical steel.

“I’ll go on the next sweep.”

Sam raised a brow. “Is that protocol?”

“No,” Lena said.

“It’s necessity.”

---

---

**CHAPTER 7 — SCENE 3

“Old Machines, New Monsters”**

POV: Kara → Nia

The lower-generator wing always felt like a dead place — too many metal edges, too many corners something could hide behind, too much silence pretending to be harmless.

Kara moved point, her flashlight sweeping slow arcs across walls coated with soot and grease. Behind her, Nia walked close enough that Kara could feel the heat of her, the steady presence that always reminded her of late nights at CatCo, of takeout boxes and deadlines and the soft comfort of a friend who saw her before the world went dark.

J’onn followed several steps back, steady and quiet, one hand resting on the worn strap of his rifle. He scanned the shadows the way a man does when he’s survived too many firefights — not with instinctive fear, but with learned caution. Two volunteers rounded out the stack, nervous but competent.

Nia nudged Kara lightly with her elbow.

“You’re pretending you’re okay again.”

Kara didn’t look away from the corridor. “You can’t dream your way into my medical file.”

Nia snorted softly. “You’d be surprised what I can feel when someone I care about is lying through their teeth.”

Kara’s breath stuttered. “Nia…”

“I’m not asking for a confession.” Nia’s voice gentled. “But you don’t have to be steel all the time.”

Kara swallowed. “I just… need today to go right.”

Nia didn’t push. But she didn’t look convinced, either.

They reached the bend where the generator hall opened into a wide mechanical chamber — one catwalk overhead, dead turbines below, and the skeletal remains of backup power stations that hadn’t worked since day one of the outbreak.

J’onn lifted a hand, signaling stop.

“Sensor sweep reads clear,” he murmured, checking the handheld device strapped to his wrist. “No heat signatures. No motion.”

“Not reassuring,” Kara muttered.

“Never is,” J’onn agreed.

A draft slithered through the hall, cold enough to cut through Kara’s jacket. Dust drifted like ash. The door ahead flickered under the weak emergency light.

Nia’s breath hitched.

Kara turned. “What is it?”

Nia didn’t answer immediately — her eyes had gone slightly unfocused, brows drawn tight, like she was hearing something Kara couldn’t.

“It’s like my dream,” Nia whispered. “Not the images — the feeling.”

She touched her ribs lightly. “Like… pressure. Like something’s about to break through.”

Kara didn’t dismiss it. Not after everything Nia had described that morning.

She adjusted her formation with a nod to J’onn.

“Nia stays beside me,” Kara said. “Volunteers guard rear. J’onn takes flank.”

J’onn didn’t question her.

“Copy.”

They moved as a tighter unit now, every footstep landing softer, more deliberate.

The hall widened, swallowing their flashlight beams. Machinery loomed like rusted giants. The overhead lights buzzed with a dying filament whine.

Kara exhaled slowly.

“Nothing about this feels right.”

The generator nearest the far wall gave a low, sputtering cough.

Nia’s hand shot out, gripping Kara’s sleeve.

“Kara—”

A metallic groan rolled across the room.

Then—

The lights died.

Instant, suffocating black.

A gasp behind them. A choked sound from one of the volunteers.

Kara’s pulse slammed against her ribs.

“Nobody move,” she whispered.

Their breaths filled the dark — uneven, ragged.

Something scraped against metal somewhere in the hall.

Slow.

Deliberate.

“Kara?” Nia breathed, voice shaking. “That wasn’t in my dream.”

Kara tightened her grip on her flashlight, thumb switching to the backup battery.

She clicked it on.

A pale circle of light trembled in front of her.

The beam caught an overturned toolbox.

Then a smear of something wet on the floor.

Then—

Nothing.

But the scrape came again.

Closer.

Kara raised her weapon, heart pounding.

“Nia,” she said quietly.

“Yeah?”

“Stay right behind me.”

Nia swallowed. “Not planning to go anywhere else.”

J’onn stepped forward, steady voice anchoring all of them.

“We fall back on my mark. Three… two—”

A shadow moved in the dark beyond Kara’s beam.

Low.

Fast.

Crawling.

Kara’s breath froze.

“—one,” J’onn finished.

They started to retreat—

And the darkness answered with movement.

Not one shape.

Not two.

Several.

Silent.

Pouring out from behind dead machinery.

Kara’s stomach dropped.

“Nia,” she whispered.

“I know.”

J’onn’s voice snapped like a command whip: “Form up!”

Kara pivoted, backing them toward the reinforced pillars—

Just as the infected surged into the flashlight beam.

Not screaming.

Not snarling.

Silent.

Kara’s pulse spiked.

“Oh God. They’ve learned.”

Then something slammed into her side—

A hit she didn’t see coming.

A hit too strong.

A hit that sent her flying—

Over the railing.

Down into the dark.

Nia screamed her name.

“KARA!”

The world went black.

---

**CHAPTER 7 — Scene 4

“The Near-Death”**

POV: Kara → Lena (late entry)

Kara hit the lower level hard.

The air punched out of her lungs; metal met bone; the world turned into a ringing haze. For a second—one eternal, awful second—she couldn’t tell up from down. All she could process was the hot rip of pain along her ribs and the white flash behind her eyes.

Her ears were still ringing when she heard it—

Nia, somewhere above, screaming her name.

“KARA!”

Kara tried to push herself up. Her arms shook. Her vision doubled. She tasted copper. Her breath rattled in her chest like something had come loose.

Focus. Breathe.

She forced her eyes open.

The lower floor wasn’t empty.

Shadows shifted behind dead machinery. Metal groaned. Something scraped, claws dragging against steel. And then—movement, fast and wrong—from behind the collapsed generator.

Infected.

More than one.

Maybe three.

Maybe five.

Maybe more.

Kara’s heart kicked hard against bruised ribs. She crawled backward until her shoulder struck a pillar, breath slicing out in a soft whimper she immediately tried to hide.

Not now. Not like this. Not with Nia screaming, not with the others above her, not—

A shape dropped from the upper walkway.

J’onn.

Not superhuman. Not alien. Just J’onn J’onzz, the kind of man who moved through a crisis like he had been architected for it. He hit the ground beside her with a grunt, rolling his shoulder before grabbing her under the arm.

“Kara. Talk to me.”

“I’m—” A lie caught in her throat. “—fine.”

“You’re not fine,” he said, voice steady but tight. “Can you stand?”

“Yeah,” she rasped, even though she wasn’t sure it was true.

He helped her up. Her legs trembled.

Then the infected stepped into view.

Not rushing.

Not screaming.

Just appearing from the dark, their bodies jerking like broken marionettes pulled toward noise, heat, breath.

“KARA!” Nia screamed again from above.

“Don’t come down!” Kara yelled, voice cracking. “Nia, stay up there!”

A metal panel clattered. A ladder screeched. Nia didn’t listen.

Of course she didn’t.

She slid down the emergency ladder like she’d trained for it her whole life, nearly losing her grip halfway before catching herself with wide-eyed terror and a muttered, “OH GOD—OKAY—OKAY—"

Her boots hit the ground. She stumbled, caught herself, and sprinted toward Kara just as an infected lurched sideways, groping blindly toward her.

Kara surged forward—every nerve screaming—but J’onn grabbed her arm.

“I’ve got her!” he barked.

He tore a piece of metal pipe free from a broken fixture and swung it with practiced force, knocking the creature into a heap.

“Kara, behind you!” Nia cried.

Kara spun too slow—her ribs exploding with pain—and barely dodged a reaching hand. Her foot slipped on old oil streaks. She hit the ground on her bad side and choked on the pain that lanced sharp and deep through her chest.

The infected lunged.

And then—

A gunshot.

Sharp. Surgical.

The creature’s head snapped back and it collapsed.

Kara blinked through the haze, searching for the source.

Boots thudding.

Breath ragged.

A figure running full-speed through the darkened corridor—

Lena.

If she had been afraid, it didn’t show. Not in her face. Not in her stride. Not in the way she held the pistol steady in both hands like someone who had decided the universe would bend to her will or she would break it doing so.

She saw Kara—crumpled, bleeding, leaning against the pillar—and the sound that escaped her wasn’t a scream or a gasp.

It was worse.

It was a broken exhale, like her ribcage had forgotten how to function.

“Move!” she barked, and the rest of the world obeyed.

Another infected lurched out from behind the machinery.

Lena didn’t hesitate.

She pivoted, raised the gun, fired—one shot, center skull. The creature dropped mid-step.

“Nia, get behind her!” J’onn ordered, pushing the last infected back with the pipe.

Nia scrambled behind Lena, trembling but steady.

Lena reached Kara—

—and the fury hit first.

“What the hell were you thinking?” she snapped, grabbing Kara’s chin with gloved fingers and forcing her eyes up. “You said you were staying behind Alex!”

Kara coughed, breath hitching. “I—I slipped.”

“You fell two floors,” Lena shot back, shaking. “You shouldn’t even be conscious!”

“I’m okay.”

“Stop saying that!”

The words came out so raw Kara flinched.

Then Lena’s hands were on her—racing over her ribs, her shoulders, her arm—checking for breaks, bleeding, anything catastrophic. She found the blood on Kara’s shirt and her face went white.

“Kara… oh God—”

“It’s just—just bruised…” Kara gasped.

“No,” Lena said, voice splintering. “You don’t get to downplay this. Not this. Not with me.”

Another infected screeched somewhere deeper in the dark.

J’onn swung the pipe again.

Nia fired a shot from her handgun, her hands trembling but resolute.

Lena didn’t look away from Kara.

“Can you stand?” she whispered, fear tearing at the edges of her control.

Kara nodded.

Barely.

Lena slid an arm around her waist and pulled her against her.

“We’re getting you out,” she said. “Stay with me.”

Kara’s head dropped to Lena’s shoulder.

“I always do,” she breathed.

Then the machinery behind them shuddered—

A dozen eyes gleamed in the dark.

More infected.

Too many.

Lena swore under her breath, tightening her grip.

“Kara—run.”

Kara swallowed, pain blazing through her ribs as she forced her body upright.

She moved.

For Lena.

For Nia.

For all of them.

Even as the world swayed.

Even as another scream tore through the dark.

Even as her knees buckled.

She didn’t stop.

Because Lena’s hand was still on her waist—

—and Kara Danvers would crawl through fire before she let go.

---

---

CHAPTER 7 — Scene 5

“The Shake in Her Hands”

POV: Lena

Lena didn’t remember crossing the last stretch of the generator hall.

She remembered the scream — Nia’s — sharp enough to slice through metal.

She remembered the sickening sound of impact when Kara went over the railing.

And she remembered the cold bloom of terror that burst open in her chest when Kara didn’t get up.

But the space between that moment and reaching her now was a blur.

Kara was alive.

Barely.

Slumped against the warped lower-level support beam, breath thin, skin pale beneath the smears of dust and rust. She blinked up in that dazed, not-all-there way Lena had only seen once before — inside that half-collapsed office, right before she’d shoved her hand over Kara’s mouth to keep her quiet.

Except this time, Kara wasn’t leaning into Lena for silence.

She was leaning because her legs wouldn’t hold her.

“Don’t move,” Lena ordered, dropping to her knees so fast the impact bit through bone. “Don’t even try.”

Kara attempted half a smile. It came out crooked. “Hey…”

“Don’t ‘hey’ me.” Lena’s voice cracked. She didn’t care.

Her hands were already on Kara—one braced against her cheek, the other sliding to her throat, feeling for rhythm, for warmth, for anything that would tell her this wasn’t the moment everything broke.

Kara’s pulse thudded—weak, unsteady, but solid.

Relief hit so hard Lena swayed.

“You could have died.” The words came out raw. “You should have died.”

“I missed the landing,” Kara whispered, still dazed. “Little off-balance.”

Lena’s vision blurred for half a second, not with tears—she refused that—but with the sheer violence of emotion burning through her.

“Stop saying that.” Her voice was low, furious, terrified. “Stop pretending this is normal.”

Kara blinked up at her slowly, like she was trying to return to her body. “I’m okay.”

“You fell two stories,” Lena hissed. “Onto metal.” Her fingers dug into Kara’s jaw, not roughly, but as if anchoring both of them. “You are not okay.”

Something in Kara’s expression faltered—just enough to show truth bleeding through her walls.

“I’m… trying,” she admitted softly.

Lena exhaled shakily. Her hands were still shaking. She could feel it now—the tremor running from palm to fingertips as she traced Kara’s pulse again, needing to feel it, needing to know.

“Don’t apologize,” Lena whispered when Kara’s lips shaped the start of one. “Don’t you dare apologize. Not for almost dying. Not to me.”

Kara’s brow softened. “I wouldn’t. Not with you here.”

The words hit Lena with surgical precision—clean, deep, impossible to ignore.

Nia’s voice cut through the dark above them.

“Kara?! Lena?! Report!”

Lena didn’t look away from Kara. “We’re—” She had to swallow. “—we’re here!”

Nia slid down the ladder shaft with the kind of instinctive agility that had saved a volunteer minutes ago. She landed with a thump and a gasp when she saw Kara slumped against Lena’s shoulder.

“Oh my god.” Nia dropped beside them. “You disappeared in my dream. You were—dust. I thought—”

“Not dust,” Kara croaked.

Lena tightened her hold on her. “She needs to stay seated,” Lena said sharply. “Don’t let her stand.”

Kara made a sound of protest. Lena pressed her thumb gently but firmly to Kara’s cheek.

“No. Stay down. Please.”

Kara stilled.

Nia nodded quickly and moved to cover the upper level with her flashlight, her voice still shaking. “J’onn’s circling back. There are more coming.”

Lena leaned in closer, forehead almost touching Kara’s.

“When we get out of this,” Lena whispered, “we’re going to have a conversation about what you think your limits are.”

Kara huffed something like a laugh—breathy, pained, fond.

“Do I get a vote?”

“No,” Lena said. “Absolutely not.”

She slid Kara’s arm over her shoulders, preparing to help her stand when Nia signaled the path was clear.

And when Kara’s weight settled against her—heavy, warm, alive—Lena’s breath broke again.

She was shaking.

Not with exhaustion.

But with the terrible, undeniable truth:

Losing Kara wasn’t an option.

Not anymore.

---

CHAPTER 7 — SCENE 6

“Dream Logic, Scientific Fear”

POV: Nia

The walk back to Halcyon should have been ten minutes.

It felt like crossing a collapsing world on foot.

Nia kept close to Kara’s right side—close enough to catch her if the dizzy spells hit again. Kara kept insisting she didn’t need support, but her feet kept snagging on uneven concrete, her breath kept hitching too shallow, and her pupils kept dilating like her body couldn’t choose one signal to obey.

Every few steps, Kara stumbled.

Every few steps, Nia’s heart climbed into her throat.

“You’re fading,” Nia said quietly.

Kara tried for a smile—thin, pale. “Just tired.”

“Liar.”

Kara blinked at her, surprised at the bluntness.

Nia didn’t soften it. “You were dust,” she whispered. “In my dream last night. I heard you screaming and then—nothing. I thought it meant you’d disappear today.”

Kara’s expression flickered—fear, then apology, then something like gratitude wrapped in exhaustion. “Nia… your dreams are just dreams.”

“Sometimes.” Nia’s voice shook. “And sometimes they’re not.”

The hallway ceiling hissed above them as a broken vent exhaled stale, sour air. Kara swayed at the change in pressure and Nia darted forward, catching her elbow before her knees could buckle.

“Kara,” Nia said, breath uneven, “stop pretending you’re fine. You’re pale. You’re bleeding. You’re barely breathing right.”

Kara swallowed, throat working visibly. “If I slow down—people worry. Alex worries.”

“I’m not people,” Nia said. “And I’m already worried.”

That broke something in Kara—just a little. Enough for the façade to slip at the edges.

They made it to the north stairwell, and Kara paused—leaned into the wall for just a second, head bowed. Sweat beaded along her brow. Her lips had gone bloodless.

Nia stepped directly in front of her. “You need to sit.”

“I just need a minute,” Kara whispered. “Just—one minute.”

“You’re not getting a minute,” Nia snapped, fear sharpening her voice. “You’re getting a medic.”

Kara tried to push off the wall.

Her leg buckled.

Nia lunged—got her arms under Kara’s shoulders just in time, though Kara’s weight nearly took them both down.

“Okay, yep, that’s it—you’re done pretending,” Nia gasped, adjusting her hold and half-carrying her toward the emergency door. “You’re getting looked at. No arguments.”

Kara’s voice was faint. “Nia… don’t tell Alex yet.”

“Oh my God,” Nia muttered, “you’re literally collapsing and you’re still trying to manage your sister’s emotional labor.”

Kara huffed something that might’ve been a laugh.

Then her eyes rolled slightly out of focus.

“Kara?” Nia’s voice cracked. “HEY—KARA—stay with me—!”

They pushed through the door into Halcyon’s central hall—and everything happened at once.

A flash of movement.

A gasp.

A sound like a choked sob—

Lena.

She reached them before Nia could shout her name—sliding across the room, wild-eyed, grief and fury knitted together in a single expression that vibrated with barely-controlled panic.

“KARA—!” Lena grabbed her, hands flying to Kara’s face, her pulse, her shoulder, her wound. “What happened? Kara, look at me. LOOK at me—”

Kara sagged fully into Lena’s arms.

Lena’s voice broke. “No… no, no, no—Kara, stay with me—”

Nia stepped back automatically—because Lena wasn’t just scared.

She was terrified in a way Nia had never seen.

“Nia—what happened?” Alex arrived a heartbeat later, scanning Kara with frantic, clinical precision. “What—why is she bleeding—why is she—”

“She fell,” Nia said, voice shaking. “Two stories. She tried to get back up. She kept pushing—she wouldn’t stop—”

Alex’s face twisted with raw fear. “Kara—Kara—hey—hey—stay awake—look at me—”

Kara tried.

She really did.

But her eyes fluttered.

Her body slumped sideways.

Lena caught her—full weight, full panic, full heartbreak—and pulled her against her chest like she could anchor her there by will alone.

“No,” Lena whispered, voice trembling. “Not like this. Not now. Kara, don’t you dare—”

Alex’s voice cut through the rising din:

“MED BAY—NOW!”

Nia moved to help—

—but Lena was already lifting Kara herself, one arm under her shoulders, one around her waist.

She wasn’t letting anyone else carry her.

Not tonight.

---

CHAPTER 7 — SCENE 7

“What Breaks Us”

POV: Alex → Kara → Lena

Alex ran beside Lena through Halcyon’s north hall, the world narrowing into a frantic tunnel lit by trembling emergency strips. Kara was half-conscious in Lena’s arms, her boots dragging, breath thin and irregular.

Every instinct Alex had screamed.

Every fear she’d held since the outbreak sharpened until breathing hurt.

They burst into the med bay.

“Clear a table!” Alex snapped.

Winn jumped back. Nia held the door open with shaking hands. Sam shoved supplies aside. Brainy scrambled to activate the battery lamps.

Lena laid Kara down so gently it bordered on reverence.

“Kara? Hey—hey, I’m right here—” Lena whispered, brushing hair back from Kara’s forehead. Her hands were trembling uncontrollably.

Alex grabbed gauze, scissors, antiseptic—anything—and began cutting away Kara’s jacket. “We need to see the wound. We need—Kara, keep your eyes open.”

Kara tried. God, she tried.

“Al…ex…” she breathed.

Alex froze.

Kara never used that voice unless she was terrified.

“I’m here,” Alex whispered, face cracking. “I’m right here, little sister. Stay with me.”

Behind her, Lena hovered like a taut wire pulled too tight, her fists clenched white at her sides.

Alex’s breath hitched when she uncovered the injury:

The gash was deep. Worse than Kara admitted.

But—it wasn’t infected.

It wasn’t even inflamed.

It was… healing.

Too fast.

Alex’s heart dropped into a cold pit. “This—this doesn’t make sense.”

Lena made a tiny, strangled sound behind her.

Kara groaned, eyes fluttering.

Alex leaned close. “Don’t you even think about blacking out. You hear me?”

Kara’s hand twitched, seeking hers.

Alex grabbed it instantly.

“I just—need…” Kara whispered, “…a minute.”

Alex lowered her head. “God, Kara, you can’t keep doing this. You can’t keep breaking yourself open like this. I can’t—” Her voice cracked. “I can’t lose you too.”

Kara blinked slowly, pain clouding her expression. “Didn’t… mean to…”

Alex pressed her forehead to Kara’s for one trembling second. “I know.”

Nia stepped forward, voice small. “Alex… sensors are—uh—acting weird.”

Alex didn’t look away from Kara. “What kind of weird?”

“The clusters. The infected. They—they aren’t spiraling anymore.” Nia swallowed. “They’re… moving.”

Alex’s blood ran cold. “Moving how?”

Before Nia could answer, a shrill alarm detonated overhead.

Red strobes ignited the room.

A low, rising wail rattled the vents.

Brainy’s voice cracked through the radio:

> “ALEX! THEY’RE CONVERGING! Multiple signatures, closing fast! They’re coming straight for HALCYON!”

Alex cursed under her breath. “We don’t have time for this—”

Kara tensed on the table, the alarm slicing through her haze.

Lena reached for her instantly, cupping her face with both hands, forcing Kara’s drifting gaze to anchor on hers.

“Kara,” Lena whispered, voice shaking. “Look at me.”

Kara blinked, breath trembling. “Lena?”

“I’m here,” Lena said, leaning closer, forehead nearly touching hers. “I’m right here.”

Another alarm blared—closer, angrier.

Brainy shouted again from the hall:

> “They’re converging on the north wall! We have minutes—maybe less!”

Kara swallowed hard, forcing herself upright even as Lena tried to steady her.

“Lena…” Kara murmured, voice thin but clear. “They’re coming.”

Lena’s eyes widened—fear, anger, love, all tangled into one devastating expression.

“I know,” she whispered. “And I’m not letting you face them alone.”

Alex turned, face pale and set, adrenaline twisting through every muscle.

“Everybody—positions NOW! This is it!”

Kara tried to stand.

Her knees buckled.

Lena caught her instantly, pulling her close, her voice a raw, terrified whisper against Kara’s hair:

“Don’t you dare fall. Not tonight.”

Kara nodded weakly and leaned her forehead against Lena’s collarbone for half a second—one fragile heartbeat of honesty—before the world outside Halcyon shook with the first impact.

The floor vibrated.

The alarms wailed.

The infected hit the walls in a single, terrible wave.

"And Chapter Seven ended with Lena gripping Kara’s trembling hands as the doors shuddered under the weight of the dead." 

---

Chapter Text

---

**CHAPTER 8 — SCENE 1

“The Walls Remember We Are Prey”

POV: Lena → Kara → Alex**

Halcyon did not ease into chaos.

It lurched.

The moment Kara’s forehead pressed into Lena’s collarbone—one tiny, trembling point of contact Lena felt all the way through her spine—the world outside answered with violence.

A deep, subsonic boom shuddered through the concrete.

Then another.

Then the alarms.

Red lights bled across the corridors like a pulse. The air vibrated. Dust drifted from the ceiling in thin, tired ribbons.

Kara stiffened against Lena—every muscle going tense, instinctual—then winced, breath collapsing into a quiet gasp of pain.

“Kara—hey—stay with me,” Lena breathed, hands tightening around hers. Kara’s palms were ice-cold and shaking.

“I’m okay,” Kara whispered.

She wasn’t. Lena knew it. Kara knew Lena knew it. Neither addressed it.

Alex was already moving.

Her voice cut through the hallway like a blade:

“Positions! Seal the south doors! J’onn—get me numbers on the seismic feed!”

(And God—Alex looked terrified. Not panicked. Terrified. For Kara.)

The walls trembled again—harder this time—and a hollow metallic groan echoed through the west wing ductwork.

That sound was unmistakable.

“Pressure breach,” Kara rasped, breath thin. “They’re massing. Outside the main doors.”

Lena slid an arm around Kara’s waist automatically, steadying her as Kara’s knees buckled when the ground shook again.

Too much adrenaline. Too much blood loss. Too much stubbornness holding her upright.

Kara sagged into her side—just for a second. Just long enough for Lena to feel the faint, fast hammer of her pulse beneath the bruises.

“Kara,” Lena whispered urgently, “you shouldn’t be standing.”

Kara forced a weak, crooked smile. “Someone has to.”

Lena’s stomach turned. “Not like this. Not when you can barely—”

A violent impact against the north wall interrupted her.

Then another.

A wet, scraping chorus followed—hands, claws, nails dragging across metal and concrete in a single, hungry wave.

The infected had found Halcyon.

And they weren’t testing the walls.

They were coming through them.

Kara straightened, trembling. She looked at Lena—not with bravado, not even with fear, but with a quiet resignation Lena hated more than anything she had felt since the world fell apart.

“I need to help,” Kara said softly. “Please… don’t stop me.”

Lena’s throat closed.

Because she wanted to.

She wanted to stop her.

She wanted to lock her in a room and bar the door and keep her from disappearing like everyone else Lena had ever lost.

But Kara, swaying on her feet, eyes glassy with pain, still looked more ready to run toward danger than away from it.

Lena cupped the side of her face gently—steadying her, grounding her.

“Kara,” she whispered, “you’re not dying on me tonight.”

Kara swallowed. The motion was shaky.

“Then stay close,” Kara whispered back.

The alarms screamed.

The walls buckled.

Alex shouted from down the hall:

“BREACH POINT IDENTIFIED—MAIN DOORS—EVERYBODY MOVE!”

Kara tried to push off the wall—

—and would have gone straight to the floor if Lena hadn’t caught her.

Lena’s breath stuttered. “You are not doing this alone.”

Kara blinked, dizzy. “Never said I wanted to.”

Another boom. Louder. Closer.

The infected hit the wall like a tidal wave.

Lena grabbed Kara’s hand.

Kara squeezed back.

They ran.

Together.

Straight toward whatever was breaking through the world.

---

---

**CHAPTER 8 — SCENE 2

“Impact Zone”

POV: Kara → Lena (split)**

KARA — HALLWAY OUTSIDE MED BAY

The world didn’t fall apart all at once — it tore open in pulses.

The first impact rattled the steel beams overhead. Dust sifted down like shaken snow. The emergency lights flickered, stuttered, then steadied in a sickly red wash that made everyone look like bloodless ghosts.

Kara felt the vibration come up through Lena’s arms before she heard it in the walls.

Lena tightened her hold on her instinctively, one hand sliding to Kara’s ribs to keep her upright. “Kara—focus on me.”

Kara tried.

Her vision swam, edges bending like overheated glass. She clung weakly to Lena’s sleeve as another impact struck — a deep, concussive BOOM that sent hairline fractures racing through the west wall.

Voices erupted behind them.

“Move!”

“Get everyone away from the doors!”

“Reinforce east storage!”

“Don’t let them flank—!”

Alex was suddenly in front of them, eyes wild, pupils blown wide with fear and adrenaline. “They’re hitting every exterior point simultaneously. Nia and J’onn are redirecting people to secondary barricades. Kara—can you walk?”

“I’m—fine—” Kara tried to say, but her voice came out thin, scraped raw.

Lena’s hand cupped her jaw sharply. “Don’t lie. Not now.”

Another quake hit — harder. Kara’s knees buckled. Alex lunged to help, but Lena already had Kara anchored against her chest, arm locked around her waist with a fierceness that bordered on desperate.

Kara felt her own heartbeat misfire.

The infected were in the walls. And Halcyon was groaning like an animal about to break.

A metal panel sheared off the far ceiling with a shriek, smashing onto the floor. Sparks spat. Someone screamed.

Alex shouted orders over the chaos:

“Everyone to fallback stations!

Move now! MOVE!”

Kara forced her eyes open, forced her body upright — even as her head swayed, even as her shoulder screamed, even as black spots blossomed at the edges of her sight.

She couldn’t fall apart. Not now. Not when people were watching. Not when Halcyon was coming apart at the seams.

Then—

BOOM.

A deep, hollow reverberation that felt aimed at her bones.

The western wall bowed inward.

Cracks raced like lightning across concrete.

Someone yelled, “BREACH IN TEN SECONDS!”

Lena whipped her head toward Alex. “We need shelter—now!”

Alex nodded sharply. “Storage corridor D! Reinforced beams! GO!”

Lena didn’t wait — she hooked her arm tighter under Kara’s, pulling her with strength Kara wasn’t sure she had. Kara stumbled, feet sliding, breath ragged.

“I’m slowing you down,” Kara whispered.

“You’re alive,” Lena shot back. “That’s all that matters.”

“You should leave me—”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence.”

Kara swallowed hard and kept moving.

They were halfway down the corridor when the west wall finally gave.

The sound was monstrous — concrete exploding outward, metal screaming, the air itself being torn in half.

Cold night wind howled through the collapsing structure.

And then the infected poured in.

Not shuffling.

Not moaning.

Stampeding.

“NIA, COVER THE LEFT!” Alex shouted. “ J’ONN, HOLD THE FRONT! LENA, WATCH YOUR RIGHT—KARA, KEEP MOVING!”

Kara forced herself forward, each step a battle. The world tilted, the hallway swaying like a ship in a storm.

She blinked hard — Lena’s hand slid to her cheek again, grounding her.

“Stay with me,” Lena whispered, voice trembling despite her control. “Kara — look at me. Look at me.”

A shadow lunged from the broken wall.

Kara barely processed the movement before Lena spun, slammed Kara behind her, and drove a metal rod into the infected’s throat with technologist precision and animal fear.

Blood sprayed. Lena didn’t flinch.

“Don’t touch her,” Lena snarled at the swarm.

Kara had never heard her sound like that — fierce, guttural, protective in a way that burned straight through the haze in Kara’s chest.

But another impact from the side sent Kara staggering sideways into the wall.

Her shoulder flared white-hot.

Her vision snapped out for an instant.

“KARA!” Lena’s voice tore through the hallway like a blade. She lunged to catch Kara again — barely managing before Kara hit the ground.

Kara tried to stand.

Her body refused.

“Lena—” Kara choked out, dizzy. “I’m—trying—”

“I know,” Lena said, voice cracking, “I know — just hold on.”

Alex sprinted toward them, panting, blood on her forehead. “We’re losing the corridor!”

“We won’t make the fallback point!” Nia shouted from behind, blasting a support beam with a fire extinguisher to knock it onto oncoming infected.

Alex made a snap decision.

“STORAGE LAB A! NOW! CLOSEST REINFORCEMENT!”

“But it’s not fully sealed!” Sam shouted from the end of the hall.

“IT WILL BE IF WE HOLD THE DOOR!” Alex countered.

Lena pulled Kara toward the lab door, fighting through the vibrating floor and storm of bodies.

Kara tried to help — pushing off the wall, lungs tearing for air — but her legs kept giving out, strength bleeding from her muscles like water down a drain.

The infected surged faster behind them.

Hands reached.

Claws scraped concrete.

A scream echoed so sharply it didn’t sound human.

They reached the door.

Alex shoved it open.

“INSIDE!” she ordered.

Lena dragged Kara in first.

J’onn, Sam, and two volunteers slammed the door shut just as bodies hit the outer wall.

The steel buckled inward.

Dust rained from the overhead piping.

Nia slid a heavy cart in front of the door. Sam added a shelf. J’onn braced his full weight against it.

Kara collapsed to her knees.

Lena dropped with her instantly, cupping Kara’s face with shaking hands.

“Kara—Kara—look at me—look at me—stay awake—please—”

Kara blinked slowly, vision wavering, breath struggling.

The room shook with the weight of the dead outside.

Kara forced a whisper:

“Lena…

don’t…

let go.”

Lena’s breath broke.

“I won’t,” she said fiercely. “Never.”

Another earth-shaking impact hit the door.

Screams echoed.

The lights flickered.

Kara’s fingers curled weakly into Lena’s jacket.

And the world held its breath —

waiting

for the next

break.

---

“Breaching Point”

POV: Kara → Lena → Alex (split-action, tightly intercut)

The second impact hit harder than the first.

Kara felt it through Lena’s shoulder before she felt it in her own bones — a deep, concussive shudder that rippled through the metal plating beneath their boots. The emergency lights flickered, sputtered, then steadied into a dim, red warning glow.

“Positions!” Alex’s voice cut through the hall like a blade. “Everyone ON ME!”

Volunteers snapped into formation, hands trembling on weapons they had barely learned to use. J’onn and the University security remnants took the front line; Sam hustled civilians toward the far barricade. Nia pulled a kid back from the walkway just as another tremor rattled dust from the vents.

Kara stood on her own only because Lena’s arm was wrapped tight around her waist, holding her upright with a strength that didn’t match her slight frame.

Another slam.

Another scream of metal.

The wall buckled inward.

“They’re trying to break through,” Nia whispered, fear sharpening her voice but not shaking her stance.

“No,” Kara rasped, swallowing pain. “They’re stampeding.”

The hallway vibrated again—this time in a low, rolling wave, like dozens of bodies slamming forward in a single, horrifying rhythm. Kara’s ears rang. The sound was wrong. Too coordinated. Too focused.

They weren’t wandering.

They were aiming.

Lena tightened her grip on Kara’s waist. “You’re not going anywhere near that wall.”

Kara drew a breath, steadying herself. “Lena—”

“No. Absolutely not.”

Before Kara could argue, Brainy’s voice burst over comms:

“WEST WALL BREACH IMMINENT — FIVE SECONDS.”

Alex swore under her breath. “Everyone BACK! MOVE!”

Kara staggered as the group surged. She grabbed Lena’s hand—reflex, instinct—and Lena didn’t let go.

Then the wall exploded inward.

Concrete cracked. Metal screamed. A shockwave blasted dust down the corridor. People screamed, scrambled. A volunteer went flying. An emergency cart toppled, smashing into the floor.

The infected poured in like floodwater.

Not shambling.

Charging.

Eyes wide, jaws stretched, limbs contorting with terrible force as they rammed themselves through the collapsed gap.

Kara instinctively stepped forward.

Lena yanked her backward so hard Kara gasped. “You’re not throwing yourself into that—”

But Kara could see the breach widening—could see J’onn staggering, could see the barricade starting to slip—

She tore free from Lena’s grip.

“KARA—!” Lena lunged, but Kara was already moving.

Her legs nearly buckled on the first step.

She forced them to hold.

Just for a moment.

Just long enough.

She seized a metal pole from the wrecked cart and drove it into the floor like a lever, flipping the rolling frame toward the opening. It slammed into the first wave of infected, knocking them into each other—just enough of a choke point to buy seconds.

Not minutes.

Seconds.

“Fall back!” Kara yelled, staggering as a spike of dizziness knifed up her spine.

“KARA, MOVE!” Alex shouted from behind her. “Lena—get her OUT of there!”

But Lena didn’t hesitate or retreat.

She sprinted toward Kara instead.

“Kara—down!” Lena grabbed her shoulder and shoved her into a crouch just as an infected vaulted through the breach, jaws snapping where Kara’s throat had been.

Lena drove a wrench into its skull without a second thought.

It fell.

She didn’t even flinch.

“Stay behind me!” she snapped.

Kara barked a humorless laugh. “You’re delusional if you think I’m letting you—”

A second infected lunged.

Kara swung the pole. Hard. Too hard. The world tilted. Pain flared white behind her eyes. Her knees buckled—

Lena caught her under the arms before she hit the ground.

“Kara, you’re collapsing—”

“I’m not—” Kara gasped, pushing upright, brain swimming. “We need to close the breach—now!”

Alex sprinted into view, firing controlled bursts toward the hole. “J’onn! Nia! I need suppressive fire!”

Nia dragged a volunteer behind a turnstile, then planted her feet, hands shaking but jaw set. “Okay, okay—okay—focus—”

She grabbed a broken signpost and used it like a staff, striking an infected that got too close.

“Dream told me nothing about THIS!” she shouted.

“Join the club,” Kara muttered.

More infected slammed into the breach, climbing over each other like a living ladder.

A pair forced through.

Alex shot the first one clean between the eyes.

Lena smashed a toolbox into the second, panting with fury.

“Kara,” Alex yelled, “backline, NOW!”

“She’s not stable!” Lena snapped, lunging forward to block another infected reaching for Kara’s leg.

Kara shoved Lena out of the way. “I AM stable!”

“You can barely stand!”

“I don’t need to stand—I need to keep you alive!”

They froze—just for a heartbeat—breathing hard, inches apart, dust settling on both of them like snowfall.

Then the wall cracked again.

A massive, reinforced slab shifted—tilting inward.

They both moved at once.

“GO!” Alex roared.

Kara grabbed Lena’s shirt and yanked her down as the slab collapsed in a thunderous crash, flattening half a dozen infected beneath it.

Kara’s vision went black at the edges.

Lena’s hands were suddenly on her face, steadying her. “Kara. Kara, stay with me.”

Kara blinked hard. “I’m here.”

Another impact hit the far wall — louder, heavier, closer.

Alex inhaled sharply. “That’s not the breach collapsing.”

Kara’s stomach dropped.

“They’re hitting another wall.”

Nia’s eyes widened in fear. “They’re… circling us.”

Kara lifted her head, dizzy but certain.

“No,” she whispered.

“They’re surrounding us.”

Lena grabbed her hand again—tight, desperate.

And Kara didn’t let go.

Not this time.

Not ever.

---

---

CHAPTER 8 — SCENE 3

“Absolute Thresholds”

POV: Kara → Lena → Alex

---

KARA — SOUTH PERIMETER BARRICADE

Kara was not holding herself together.

She was standing. She was breathing. She was moving in the pattern Alex barked out. But none of it felt connected. Her ribs felt like they’d been tied with barbed wire. Her shoulder burned deep and wrong. Her vision pulsed at the edges every time a light flickered in the corridor.

If Lena hadn’t been gripping her hand, she wasn’t entirely sure she’d still be upright.

The second wave hit the outer wall with a sickening, concussive thud that rattled through Halcyon’s bones. Dust poured from the ceiling in a soft gray rain. Something cracked above them—a pipe, a support beam, maybe the world itself.

Alex’s voice cut through the panic:

“Positions! Reinforce left! J’onn, take six volunteers to the upper landing! DO NOT let them break the stairwell!”

Kara tried to push forward to cover the left flank—her job, her responsibility—but Lena yanked her back sharply.

“No,” Lena snapped. “You stay right beside me.”

Kara blinked at her. “Lena— I can still—”

“You nearly died an hour ago.” Lena’s voice was low, trembling with fury she didn’t have words for. “You’re not leaving my sight.”

The barricade shook again. Several volunteers stumbled; one lost his grip on a metal gate panel and Kara lunged to catch it—too slow, too off-balance—

The panel slammed into the floor.

Kara staggered, breath choking.

Lena moved instantly, both hands on Kara’s waist, steadying her, pulling her back from the tilt of collapse.

“Kara,” Lena breathed, terrified under her anger, “you’re bleeding again.”

Kara looked down. The edge of her shirt was darkening. “It’s fine.”

“No,” Lena growled, nearly shaking. “It is not.”

The hallway lights flickered.

Screams rose from the far corridor.

The infected slammed the next gate.

Alex shouted: “BRACE!”

Kara forced herself upright, planting her feet even as Lena’s hand stayed on her hip like she could anchor her by force of will alone.

Kara whispered, “I can fight.”

Lena whispered back, “Then stay in reach.”

And then the walls shook again.

---

LENA — MED BAY CORRIDOR / FRONT BARRICADE

She’d thought she’d known fear.

She’d been wrong.

This—

Kara pale, trembling, unfocused, leaning into her like the only thing keeping her upright—

This terror was new.

And it was ripping her apart.

A heavy ventilation grate burst outward twenty feet ahead of them, metal shrieking as infected poured through the opening like a spill of broken-limbed shadows.

Alex shouted: “LEFT FLANK — HOLD THE LINE!”

Volunteers surged. J’onn and two others slammed a steel cabinet against the wall breach.

Lena didn’t think—she reacted. She shoved Kara behind her with a brutal, instinctive motion and lifted a broken pipe like a weapon.

“Lena—!” Kara tried to pull her back.

“No! Stay down!”

An infected lunged at them, jaw split, fingers clawing for Kara’s collarbone.

Lena swung the pipe with surgical precision, cracking its skull with a sickening snap. It slumped, twitching. Another lunged. Lena pivoted, rammed the pipe through its eye socket, braced her weight, twisted—

The creature dropped.

She heard Kara suck in a sharp breath, half pain, half awe.

“Lena— that was—”

“Efficient,” Lena snapped, shaking the gore off the pipe. “And I can do it again. Stay low.”

Kara stared at her like she’d never seen her before.

Or like she was seeing her too clearly.

The barricade shuddered again. A hinge tore loose and clanged across the floor.

“WE’RE LOSING THE LEFT!” someone shouted.

Lena grabbed Kara’s face between her hands, forcing eye contact.

“Listen to me. You do not run ahead. You do not fight alone. You stay where I can reach you or I swear, Kara, I will drag you back by your hair.”

Kara’s breath caught, emotion punching through the haze.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. I’m here.”

“Good.” Lena turned toward the next breach. “Don’t make me watch you fall again.”

---

ALEX — CENTRAL CORRIDOR / COMMAND STRIKE

Alex Danvers had no bandwidth left for panic.

She was running on tactics, rage, and the tight, cold coil of sister-terror she kept stomping down before it could crack her.

“KARA!” she shouted over the alarms, voice slicing through everything.

Kara jerked her head up—sluggish, unfocused—and Alex’s heart nearly stopped.

Her baby sister looked like she was about to drop.

But she was still on her feet. Still braced. Still fighting.

Still holding Lena’s hand.

Alex processed that part last.

And filed it away for later.

“J’ONN!” she yelled. “MOVE THE SECONDARY BARRIER!”

The older man obeyed instantly, driving metal into place as another infected slammed against it.

Alex practically flew across the gap between them, caught Kara’s other arm, bracketing her between herself and Lena.

“How bad?” Alex demanded. “Kara—talk to me—how bad is it?”

Kara tried to shrug. It came out as a shiver. “Just tired.”

“Bullshit,” Alex hissed.

Before she could say more, the hallway behind them thundered under another hit.

Brainy skidded into view, panting, glasses fogging. “THIRD WAVE INBOUND. And, uh—fourth wave pending! Possibly a fifth!”

“Fifth?!” Nia yelled. “Since when do zombies have shifts?!”

“They don’t,” Brainy shouted. “Unless something is driving them!”

The walls trembled.

Dust rained from the vents.

The dead screamed—high, violent, hungry.

Alex shoved Kara back toward Lena. “Keep her upright!”

Lena didn’t let go for a single heartbeat.

Kara’s fingers tightened around hers in silent answer.

Alex drew her weapon, set her stance, jaw tightening.

“All right,” she growled. “Round two.”

The third wave hit like a freight train.

And Halcyon screamed with it.

---

---

CHAPTER 8 — SCENE 4

“Shatterpoint”

POV: Split — Kara → Lena → Kara

The breach roared like a living thing.

Concrete shook under Kara’s boots as she and Alex pushed into the north access hall, Lena tight at Kara’s side, one hand firm on her back as if she could keep her standing through force of will alone.

The lights strobed.

Screams echoed from the far wing.

The infected hammered on steel, the sound denting the air with each impact.

Kara braced a hand against the wall, swallowing hard when her vision flickered.

The fall from the generator hall still rattled inside her bones. Every step felt borrowed.

“Kara—slow down—” Lena said, breath sharp, matching Kara stride for uneven stride.

“I’m okay,” Kara rasped.

She wasn’t.

They all knew she wasn’t.

But the north wing door was bowing inward.

Someone on the other side screamed for help.

Kara surged forward.

“KARA—!” Alex grabbed her arm, but Kara twisted free—not gracefully, not fast, but with the ferocity of someone who refused to let another person die, not tonight, not after everything.

She slammed her shoulder—her bad shoulder—into the emergency latch. Pain burst white-hot up her neck; the world tunnelled; Lena swore under her breath as she lunged to steady her.

“Kara, stop—” Lena hissed, fingers curling into Kara’s jacket. “You can’t—”

“I have to.”

Alex muttered something furious in a language she only used during absolute catastrophes, then braced her own weight beside Kara. Together, they forced the secondary lock shut.

The hallway thundered on the other side.

“That door won’t hold.” Alex’s voice was low, tight. “We buy time. That’s it.”

A metal groan vibrated through the corridor like a warning.

Then—

A crash.

A dent blossoming outward in the steel.

Kara staggered back, breath ripping out uneven. The blow had rattled her despite being several feet away.

“Kara—look at me.” Lena cupped one hand around Kara’s jaw, guiding her face toward the light. “Your pupils are blown. You’re concussed—”

Another crash.

The steel bowed inward, shrieking.

There wasn’t time.

Kara pulled free from Lena’s hand—gentle, but determined. “Alex, get the backup barricade.”

Alex sprinted toward the supply alcove.

Kara turned toward Lena—just in time to see her step between Kara and the door.

“No,” Kara said, heart kicking into panic. “Lena, move—”

“Absolutely not,” Lena snapped. “You’re hurt. I am not.”

A third slam rattled dust from the overhead vents.

Kara shook her head—slow, dizzy. “Lena—please—”

Lena didn’t budge.

She planted her feet like she was daring the world to try her.

“Kara Danvers,” she said, low and furious, “you will not put your body between me and that door.”

Kara stared at her—raw, breathless, heart in her throat. “I’m supposed to protect you.”

“You already did,” Lena said. “Twice. And nearly died twice. We are not repeating that.”

The fourth hit split the top hinge.

Kara’s knees buckled—

Lena caught her instantly, an arm around her waist, pulling her tight against her chest.

“Stay with me,” Lena whispered, voice cracking.

Kara’s fingers curled weakly into Lena’s jacket. “I’m here.”

Alex returned just as the hinge gave way, dragging the heavy barricade plate with her, breathing hard.

“Move!” Alex barked.

Lena pulled Kara back—Kara stumbling, trying to help, failing, breath wild against Lena’s collarbone.

Alex slammed the barricade into place.

The door collapsed inward a heartbeat later.

The infected slammed into the metal plate, claws scraping furiously, jaws snapping through the half-gap.

The barricade held—barely.

But the metal screamed.

And Kara felt the vibration through Lena’s hands gripping her arms.

Lena turned Kara fully into her chest, shielding her body with her own as debris rained from the ceiling.

“Kara—I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

Her voice was breaking. Shaking.

She didn’t care.

Kara pressed her forehead into Lena’s shoulder, eyes squeezed shut, breath wavering. “I’m sorry—”

“Stop apologizing,” Lena snapped, her hand sliding up to the back of Kara’s neck. “You’re alive. That’s all I want from you right now.”

Alex rammed a second brace into place, muscles shaking. “They’re gathering!” she shouted. “That’s not random movement—they’re pushing in waves!”

Lena’s grip tightened around Kara, grounding her, anchoring her as the world screamed around them.

Kara forced her eyes open—forced her body upright—leaning heavily on Lena.

“I can help,” she whispered.

“You are helping,” Lena shot back. “By staying conscious.”

The barricade bowed.

“You two,” Alex growled through gritted teeth, “I need you behind me. Now.”

Lena maneuvered Kara backward, not releasing her for a single heartbeat.

Kara looked up at her—exhausted, hurting, utterly sincere.

“I’m still here,” she whispered.

Lena’s lips trembled. “I know,” she whispered back. “I know.”

Another slam.

The barricade groaned.

Alex swore. “They’re going to breach the secondary hall—”

A siren blared overhead.

Red lights strobed.

And from deeper in Halcyon—

shouting.

Running.

Chaos erupting.

“We’re surrounded,” Alex said.

“No,” Kara whispered, breath fanning across Lena’s collarbone. “They’re herding us.”

Lena’s pulse stuttered.

Alex looked at the map. “Kara’s right.”

Another slam—closer, deeper—like something hitting the inner walls.

Lena seized Kara’s hand.

Kara squeezed back, forehead brushing Lena’s cheek as dust rained around them.

And in that moment—between breaths, between impacts, between the shuddering collapse of their temporary sanctuary—

Kara whispered, soft and urgent :

“Lena… don’t let go.”

Lena’s eyes burned.

“I won’t.”

The hall went dark.

The barricade cracked.

The infected screamed.

And Kara—bleeding, concussed, shaking—held onto Lena like she was the last solid thing in a collapsing universe.

Because she was.

---

---

**CHAPTER 8 — Scene 5

“Heat Signatures”**

POV: Brainy → Cat → Alex (brief)

The auxiliary monitoring bay had once been a student engineering lounge.

Now it was a bunker of screens, wires, and adrenaline.

Brainy stood at the center of it, fingers flying over a cracked keyboard he’d rebuilt out of three others. His eyes moved faster than the code—fast enough to make even Winn step back and say, “Okay, Sheldon, breathe.”

But breathing was a luxury.

Because the numbers were wrong.

Very wrong.

Brainy tapped three keys at once, dragging thermal scans across Halcyon’s perimeter. Little dots—white, blue, and faint yellow—blinked into existence. Not unusual.

But then—

The dots began clustering.

Like iron filings pulled toward a magnet.

Like something was calling them.

“We have movement,” Brainy said, trying to keep his voice clinical. It came out thin instead. “Lots of movement. And I don’t mean ‘wandering aimlessly looking for snacks’ movement—I mean coordinated.”

Cat Grant, who had not slept in approximately eleven emotional years, strode into the room like a general entering a war tent.

“Define coordinated,” she snapped.

Brainy pointed at the screen.

Every cluster of infected around Halcyon—every group, every straggler—was shifting.

Slow at first.

Then faster.

Converging.

“Heat signatures,” Brainy said, voice tightening. “They’re following heat signatures.”

Winn blinked. “You mean… like animals?”

Brainy didn’t answer immediately. His brain was running too fast, logic competing with panic.

Finally:

“No. Animals break pattern when the pattern becomes inefficient. This—” He gestured at the map as the clusters curved inward. “This is persistence.”

Cat sucked in a quiet breath.

“Oh, that’s bad,” she said, deadpan in a way that made everyone in the room shiver.

Brainy zoomed in.

The spiral shape from the night before was gone.

Now?

Everything was forming a funnel.

A single, tightening vortex of bodies all pressing toward the lowest structural weak point on the east wall—right where Alex had stationed one of her emergency barricade teams.

Winn stumbled closer. “They’re not targeting food. Or noise. Or random corridors. They’re targeting…”

“Warmth,” Brainy whispered. “Bodies. Human bodies.”

A heavy silence dropped into the room.

Cat broke it first.

“Then call Alexandra Danvers. Right now.”

Brainy was already grabbing the comm. “Alex, do you copy—?”

Static.

Then half a voice.

“—ady— we’re holding— east wall— Kara’s—”

Static swallowed the rest.

Winn’s eyes widened. “Oh no. Oh no, no, no—”

Cat’s voice sliced clean through the rising panic.

“What happened to communications?”

Brainy’s hands flew. “The infected are close enough that their collective bioelectric output is interfering with the old University wiring. We’re losing clear channels.”

Cat’s jaw clenched.

“Try harder.”

Brainy did—hands shaking now despite himself.

Signals bounced. Screens flickered. Heat maps flared brighter as the infected pressed closer to Halcyon.

Winn whispered, “Brainy… the cluster on the south side… is that…”

“It’s Kara,” Brainy said.

Cat froze.

Winn froze.

The room itself seemed to freeze.

Brainy pointed to a flickering cluster of white heat signatures—one dimmer, smaller point huddled near the internal barricade.

“Kara is losing heat,” Brainy said softly. “Fast.”

Cat swore under her breath—sharp, vicious, human.

“What does that mean?”

Winn whispered, “Shock. She’s going into shock.”

Brainy swallowed so hard it hurt. “If she collapses out there…”

The sentence didn’t need an ending.

Cat closed her eyes once—brief, quiet, like a prayer she’d never admit to making.

Then she snapped open her eyes and barked:

“Winn. Brainy. Get me Alex. I don’t care if you have to duct-tape that radio to a satellite dish made out of cafeteria trays. And once you get her—tell her she needs to get her sister out of that hallway BEFORE THEY HIT THE WALL AGAIN.”

The lights flickered overhead.

Once.

Twice.

The floor gave a soft, sickening tremble.

Brainy’s head snapped toward the structural sensor logs. “Impact on the east barricade. Not breach yet—but close.”

Winn typed faster.

Brainy typed even faster.

The infected moved faster still.

Cat pressed a hand to her sternum, staring at the map as if she could physically will Kara to move—

“Come on, Little Danvers,” she whispered. “Don’t you dare fall.”

A voice crackled over the comms.

Broken. Distorted.

“—this is Alex— we’re holding— but if they hit again—”

Brainy grabbed the radio. “Alex! Alex, listen carefully—”

Static screamed.

Then—

“—KARA IS DOWN—!”

The room went dead silent.

Cat’s face drained of color.

Winn stopped breathing.

Brainy’s hands curled around the desk as the map zoomed itself automatically—tracking the largest heat surge yet.

A mass of bodies slamming toward Halcyon in a single, coordinated wave.

“Alex,” Brainy whispered, voice cracking. “Get her out. Get her out NOW—”

But the line cut.

The screens shook.

The sensors spiked red.

And Halcyon shuddered under the force of a second impact that sounded like the end of the world.

---

---

CHAPTER 8 — SCENE 6

“The Line That Doesn’t Break”

POV: Alex → Kara → Lena (split resonance)

The hallway shuddered under another impact — closer this time, sharp enough that dust rained from the ceiling in thin, choking drifts. Alex spun toward the sound, gun raised, breath ragged.

“They’re hitting the inner ring,” she hissed. “We need positions now — J’onn, M’gann, with me! Nia, get those suppressors recalibrated! We’re out of time!”

The infected weren’t wandering anymore.

They weren’t guessing.

They were hunting.

Kara pushed off the wall, trying to stand — and her legs folded almost instantly. She caught herself on her palms, breath trembling.

“Hey—hey—” Alex was at her side immediately, hands hovering. “Don’t move. Don’t even try. You’re concussed and half-bleeding out, Kara, you can’t—”

Kara forced out, “People need—”

“No.” Alex’s voice cracked like a whip. “I need you alive.”

Kara froze — because Alex didn’t say things like that unless she meant them more than air.

Lena dropped to the floor beside them, one hand already on Kara’s cheek, guiding her gently upright. “Kara, look at me. Not the hall. Not the alarms. Me.”

And Kara did.

Because she always did when Lena’s voice turned quiet like that — soft as thread, strong as rope.

Another impact rattled the corridor.

J’onn braced himself against the nearest column. “They’re ramming the reinforced doors. We have minutes — maybe less.”

Kara blinked dazedly, trying to focus on him. Her voice thinned. “J’onn… cover the north side. The volunteers — they need someone solid.”

“I am not leaving you,” he said simply.

“You are,” Kara whispered, “if you want the others to survive.”

Alex’s breath hitched. “Kara, don’t— don’t do the noble speech right now.”

But Kara shook her head, pressing her palm weakly to her sister’s arm. “This isn’t noble. It’s logistics.”

Something broke in Alex’s eyes.

“Kara,” she whispered, “don’t do this to me.”

But the structure of the situation didn’t care about emotion.

The infected were pressing in from multiple ducts, from floor vents, from the breach point that shouldn’t have been big enough for a full swarm — and yet they were squeezing through anyway. Fast. Too fast.

Kara forced herself upright again — wobbling — and Lena held her steady with both hands, one on her spine, one gripping her forearm like she could fuse their bones together by willpower alone.

“You need to fall back,” Kara said quietly.

“No,” Lena said immediately, voice sharp, fierce, trembling. “You’re not dictating that.”

“Kara’s right,” Alex whispered — hatred in her voice, not for Kara, but for the truth.

Lena whipped toward her. “Alex, don’t—”

But another groaning, metallic shriek swallowed the rest of the sentence.

The infected slammed the far door again — this time hard enough to make the hinges bow outward.

Everyone jerked their heads toward the sound.

Brainy’s voice crackled through the nearest radio panel:

“Alex—code red. They’ve bypassed two barricades. They’re pushing toward the medical bay from the eastern sub-duct as well. We cannot reinforce both.”

Alex’s eyes widened. “They’re splitting their offensive.”

Kara whispered, “No… no, they’re funneling us.”

And Lena, still cradling Kara’s side, felt her blood run cold.

Because she could hear it too — the pattern.

The coordinated pressure.

The deliberate misdirection.

These weren’t shambling bodies.

This was strategy.

Alex grabbed her sister’s shoulders. “Kara — stay with Lena. Do not move until I come back. DO YOU HEAR ME?”

Kara opened her mouth to object —

And Lena cut in, voice low but lethal.

“You’re not leaving my side again. Not after the fall. Not after last night. Not ever.”

Kara’s breath stuttered. Something in her collapsed inward — relief and fear tangled together like exposed wire.

Alex exhaled once — long, pained. “Fine. Lena stays. Nia stays. J’onn, with me. We hold the first barricade. We buy them time.”

Nia stepped forward, jaw set tight. “I’m not letting Kara out of my sight.”

Alex brushed her fingers briefly over Nia’s shoulder — gratitude, fear. “Then keep her breathing until I get back.”

The lights flickered overhead — dimming, dying, returning in a weak, sputtering pulse.

The generator was failing.

Alex swore under her breath. “They’re targeting infrastructure.”

Kara shivered. “They’re learning.”

Another impact.

Closer.

Nearer.

Hungrier.

Alex backed toward the corner, gun raised, jaw clenched. “If they break the inner ring—”

“They won’t,” Lena snapped.

Alex gave her a burning look. “I hope you’re right. For her sake.”

Then Alex vanished around the corner with J’onn and two volunteers, the thudding alarm lights casting long, twitching shadows along the walls.

Silence swallowed the space for three seconds.

Four.

Five.

Then Kara sagged sideways.

“Kara!” Lena caught her instantly, pulling her flush against her chest.

Kara groaned, eyes half-shuttering. “Just… dizzy.”

Nia crouched beside them, voice shaking. “Her blood pressure’s dropping. She’s not stable enough to move.”

Lena’s grip tightened. “Then we won’t move.”

A growl echoed from the duct above them — low, guttural, almost… communicative.

Nia’s face drained of color. “They’re in the ceiling.”

Lena pulled Kara even closer, positioning both their bodies under the lowest structural beam — the only place the duct wasn’t directly overhead.

“Kara,” Lena whispered, leaning forehead to forehead, “stay awake.”

Kara blinked sluggishly. “Trying…”

“And stay with me.”

A weak smile ghosted across Kara’s lips. “Always.”

The vent above them buckled.

Metal screamed.

Dust rained.

Nia raised her weapon with shaking hands.

Lena wrapped her arms fully around Kara’s torso —

as the infected began to break through the ceiling.

And the world shook again.

Hard.

Brutal.

Like the building itself was cracking under the weight of the dead.

End Scene 6

---

---

CHAPTER 8 — SCENE 7

“The Line That Can’t Break”

POV: Split — Kara → Lena → Alex → Kara

The lights flickered like a dying pulse.

Kara gripped the railing of the damaged stairwell, breath shaking, vision tunneling in and out as the vibrations beneath her boots deepened into a low, predatory rumble. The infected didn’t pound endlessly like animals — Halcyon had taught her that. They struck in intervals, pulsing with the building’s breath.

This wasn’t chaos.

This was a coordinated push.

Her ribs screamed each time she inhaled. Her shoulder throbbed in a sick, hot rhythm. She pressed one hand to the wall and forced herself upright just as Lena’s hand came out of nowhere—warm, steady, anchoring.

“Kara—slow,” Lena whispered, voice sharp with worry she wasn’t even trying to hide. “You’re bleeding again.”

“I’m not stopping,” Kara whispered. “We don’t have time.”

A metallic shriek split the hallway—long, jagged, grinding.

Something was tearing metal. Not just hitting it. Peeling it back.

Lena’s fingers tightened painfully around Kara’s.

“I know,” she breathed.

Kara blinked, forcing her eyes to stay open. “How many points of breach?”

Lena didn’t answer. Not because she didn’t know — but because the truth was too heavy to speak aloud.

Then Alex’s voice cut through the corridor from the far junction:

“KARA! LENA! MOVE!”

They moved.

Or rather — Kara let herself be dragged, her legs threatening to buckle with every step.

The next impact rocked the entire west wing. Several ceiling tiles fell from overhead and exploded across the floor like brittle hail. The lights stuttered so violently that darkness swallowed them in blinking intervals — glimpses of hallway, darkness, hallway, darkness — like a strobe effect designed by nightmares.

Somewhere deeper inside Halcyon, someone screamed.

Nia’s voice followed, urgent and breathless:

“They’re in the vents again! They’re—Alex, they’re coming from above!”

Lena wheeled around, pulling Kara tight against her side as a thunderous clang hit the ductwork overhead. Dust burst from the ceiling like breath from a lung.

Kara felt the vibration in the floor. She felt the shift in air pressure. And beneath everything — she felt the wrongness.

“They’re… triangulating,” she whispered.

Alex didn’t question that.

She skidded into view with J’onn and two volunteers behind her, all of them battered, sweaty, terrified. Alex grabbed Kara’s uninjured arm, voice dropping to a near-growl.

“You stay between me and Lena. You do not move unless one of us drags you.”

Kara opened her mouth to argue—

—but Lena beat her to it.

“She’s not leaving my sight,” Lena snapped. “So don’t even think about assigning her to a flank.”

Kara blinked. “…Both of you know I can still hear, right?”

“Good,” Alex said. “Then hear this: you nearly died today. You’re not doing that twice.”

Another hit. The hallway lights died completely this time, plunging them into pitch-black.

Someone gasped.

Someone cursed.

Someone else whispered a prayer.

Kara felt Lena’s hand sliding up her arm, finding her shoulder, gripping the back of her jacket. Her breathing was shallow, uneven—fear barely contained.

“Kara… please don’t let go.”

Lena’s voice was almost too soft to hear.

“I won’t,” Kara whispered.

But she felt her knees wobble again.

Alex was instantly in front of her. “Kara. Stay with me. Focus.”

A soft blue glow flickered to life — Nia’s emergency chem-light stick — revealing her pale face, wide eyes, and hands trembling as she cracked more open, bathing the hallway in ghostly light.

“Okay,” Nia breathed, voice shaking but determined. “Okay, I’ve got visibility.”

J’onn raised his makeshift metal shield — not a Martian trick, just scavenged steel and stubbornness. “They are gathering just beyond the next intersection.”

“How many?” Lena whispered.

J’onn exhaled shakily. “More than we have bullets for.”

A silence settled — not empty, but packed with the weight of decisions that could kill them.

Kara felt the dizziness surge again, vision blurring.

Lena’s hand caught her jaw, steadying her head. “Kara—look at me. Stay here. Stay with me.”

Kara nodded, but it was slow, dragging, as if she had to command her body manually.

Alex saw it.

Alex broke.

“Kara,” she whispered, voice cracking raw. “I thought— I thought I was going to lose you today.”

“You didn’t,” Kara murmured. “I’m right here.”

“Not if you pass out in the middle of a breach,” Alex snapped, tears shining in the chem-light’s blue glow.

The next strike hit the north wall — hard enough that the concrete cracked.

Dust rained.

Pipes groaned.

The infected screamed — a sound that rattled the teeth in Kara’s skull.

They were so close now the vibrations felt like a second heartbeat.

Kara swayed again.

Lena caught her around the ribs, pulling her flush against her body as if shielding her with her own frame.

Alex grabbed Kara’s free side, steadying her. “Hey. Hey—eyes open. You promised me a breath, remember?”

Kara forced them open.

Barely.

Nia stepped in front of them all, face pale but fierce. “We’re not leaving her behind. We move together. We fight together.”

Another hit. Stronger.

This time, the door at the far end of the corridor buckled inward.

Lena’s breath hitched.

“Kara,” Lena whispered, forehead pressed to Kara’s cheek for the briefest second, “I can’t— I can’t lose you. Not today.”

Kara swallowed, tasting the metallic tang of fear.

“You won’t,” she whispered back.

But even she wasn’t sure.

Alex raised her weapon, body trembling.

“Positions!” she barked. “We hold this hall! Nia—light left flank! J’onn—shield on the main breach! Lena—keep Kara upright! Kara—just breathe. That’s your job. Just breathe.”

Kara opened her mouth to answer—

The wall shattered.

A horde poured through the breach in a single, horrifying wave.

Kara barely had time to inhale.

Lena screamed her name.

Alex fired.

Nia pulled one of the volunteers behind cover.

J’onn roared commands.

And Kara—

Kara slid.

The world tilted.

Her legs buckled—

She hit the ground—

Lena dropped with her, arms wrapping around her chest, screaming:

“KARA—NO—STAY WITH ME—STAY—”

The infected flooded the corridor.

And everything dissolved into violence and blue light.

---

---

CHAPTER 8 — SCENE 8

“The Line Holds… Until It Doesn’t”

POV: Split (Kara → Lena → Kara)

The second wave hit Halcyon like a body slam from the Earth itself.

Kara felt it first — a vibration that wasn’t entirely external. It thrummed through the floor, through the wall she braced against, through her bones like a warning her body recognized before her mind could shape the thought.

The infected were not just climbing.

They were driving upward.

Alex’s voice echoed from down the hall — sharp, clipped, commander-mode:

“Positions! Don’t break formation!”

The volunteers formed a defensive arc around the med bay entrance. Reinforced shutters trembled. Dust sifted from the ceiling.

Kara forced oxygen into her lungs even though her ribs screamed.

Lena stayed pressed to her left side — not hovering, not overbearing — anchoring. One hand hovered near Kara’s waist, not quite touching, but close enough that the warmth of her body bled into Kara’s skin.

“Stay behind me,” Kara whispered.

Lena’s head snapped toward her. “Absolutely not.”

Before Kara could argue, the right-side hallway light flickered — once, twice — then died.

The hall plunged into a dim red pulse.

Movement scuttled in the dark.

Multiple bodies.

Fast.

“Eyes up!” Alex shouted again. “Left flank—!”

A figure burst through the dark — an infected, limbs jerking in unnatural angles, eyes reflecting the crimson emergency glow. Kara lunged instinctively, but her left leg buckled from the earlier impact.

She would have hit the floor—

Lena caught her elbow in a grip that was all adrenaline and fury.

“Kara—!”

“I’m fine—”

She wasn’t.

Another impact hit the outer wall so hard the plaster cracked.

J’onn and M’gann fired at shadows moving beyond the barricade. Nia was already at Alex’s right, eyes wide with that uncanny knowing of hers.

“There are more coming,” Nia whispered. “It’s not waves. It’s a push.”

Kara felt nausea twist through her stomach.

A push meant coordination.

A push meant something smarter than instinct.

A push meant purpose.

The kind of purpose she had seen once — in the movement maps — and had pretended she hadn’t recognized.

Lena saw the truth hit her.

“Kara.” Lena’s voice dropped to a private, trembling register. “Talk to me.”

But Kara couldn’t.

Another infected slammed the barricade, its shoulder punching a dent into the reinforced metal. J’onn moved forward, bracing it with his full weight.

Alex yelled, “Left corridor, NOW!”

Two volunteers sprinted to reinforce—

Too late.

The infected poured from the side hall like they’d been waiting for that exact fracture in formation. One grabbed the first volunteer by the throat, slamming him into the steel framework.

Kara moved to intercept, adrenaline spiking, but her vision swayed for half a breath—

Lena was already there.

She snatched a dropped crowbar, swung with perfect, brutal aim, and cracked the infected across the temple. It didn’t go down. It reeled.

Lena didn’t hesitate.

She drove the crowbar into its skull with a sound that snapped the air.

Kara’s knees nearly gave out—not from weakness, but from the shock of watching Lena Luthor perform a killshot with surgical efficiency.

The infected collapsed.

Lena turned, panting, eyes wide with fear and wrath.

“Don’t you move without me again.”

Kara swallowed. “Lena—”

But a shriek tore through the hallway — something metal being bent.

Brainy skidded around the corner, breathless. “They found a structural weak point! The south support beam is failing—”

As if responding to his words, the entire far wall groaned.

A crack split along the tiles.

The infected weren’t trying to break in anymore.

They were trying to bring the wall down.

Alex shouted for everyone to fall back.

Nia grabbed a volunteer’s jacket, dragging him away from the collapsing corner.

J’onn shoved an entire rack of supplies against another breach point.

Kara tried to step forward—

Her body folded.

A sharp, blinding pain ripped through her ribs, and she dropped to one knee.

“KARA!”

Lena dropped beside her so fast she nearly slid across the floor. Her hands cupped Kara’s face. “No—no, stay with me—look at me—”

Kara forced her eyes open through the haze.

“I’m okay,” she lied.

Lena’s expression cracked, raw and furious. “You’re not. And if you say that again, I swear to God—”

Behind them, something struck the wall hard enough to spider-web it.

They didn’t have seconds left.

They barely had breaths.

“Kara.” Lena’s forehead pressed to hers. Not romantic—desperate. Terrified. True.

“I need you awake. I need you with me. Please.”

Kara reached up with a shaking hand and gripped Lena’s sleeve.

“I’m here,” she breathed.

A final impact hit.

The entire support beam groaned.

Dust rained from the ceiling.

The wall bowed inward.

Alex screamed:

“BRACE FOR COLLAPSE!”

Kara pulled Lena to her chest with the last burst of strength she had—

And the world dropped into noise and breaking metal.

A deafening crack split Halcyon open.

Dust swallowed the hallway.

Kara heard nothing but her own heartbeat slamming in her ears—

and Lena’s breath against her neck.

Blackout.

---

---

CHAPTER 8 — SCENE 9

“The Line Between Living and Dead”

POV: Intercut — Alex → Kara → Lena → Nia → Group

Tone: claustrophobic escalation → tactical horror → emotional convergence → final cliffhanger

---

ALEX — UPPER LANDING / COMMAND SPINE

The stairwell felt too narrow for oxygen.

Alex moved first, shoulder pressed to the peeling wall, pulse pounding hard enough to bruise bone. The screams downstairs blurred into a wet, layered chorus — too many throats, too many bodies. She could feel them vibrating through the metal railing, through the floor, through her teeth.

“Positions!” she hissed.

J’onn and Kelly took the flank. Maggie swung behind her, checking the second stairwell. Nia had one arm braced under Kara’s ribs; Lena hovered at Kara’s other side like a shadow trying to hold her upright through sheer will.

KARA — MID-LANDING

Kara tried to straighten.

Her body disagreed.

She gripped the rail with trembling fingers, breath thin and ragged, vision flickering at the edges like heat static. Every bruise from the fall screamed. Every bone felt too light. Her shoulder throbbed where she’d slammed into the generator.

But she could still hear the infected below.

Worse — she could hear the ones above.

“They’re circling,” Kara rasped.

Alex turned sharply. “What?”

“Not random. They’re—” She swallowed hard. “They’re pushing us inward.”

The realization spread down the line like electricity.

The infected weren’t just breaching.

They were herding.

LENA — CLOSE, TOO CLOSE

Lena’s hand stayed at Kara’s waist, fingers splayed, knuckles white.

“Kara, look at me,” she whispered.

Kara’s eyes met hers — fever-bright, exhausted, stubbornly alive.

“You fall again,” Lena said, voice shaking despite everything, “and I’m chaining you to a wall.”

Kara almost smiled. Almost.

Then the stairwell lighting flickered — once, twice — before plunging the entire corridor into red emergency wash.

A long, dragging moan rose below.

And above.

And behind the far door.

They were surrounded.

NIA — LOWER STAIRS

Nia felt the pressure change first.

Not in her head — not a dream — just gut instinct, the same instinct that had pulled her across newsrooms and battlefields and, once, through the pandemic’s first hellish hours.

“They’re moving,” she breathed. “All of them.”

Winn’s voice crackled through the handheld radio, panicked:

“—they’re converging on your coordinates, every cluster — Alex, they’re not wandering, they’re marching—”

Marching.

The word punched through all of them at once.

ALEX — TACTICAL SNAP

“Move!” Alex barked. “We hold the corridor. Bottle-neck formation. Maggie—right! J’onn—front! Kelly—rear!”

She turned to Kara.

“You stay between me and Lena.”

Kara opened her mouth to argue.

Lena shut it by grabbing her hand — hard. “Don’t.”

The infected crashed against the lower door — a violent, bone-rattling impact that sent dust raining from the ceiling.

Then another.

Then two at once.

THE INFECTED — EVERYWHERE

They came like tidal pressure — silent first, then snarling, claws and bone scraping metal. The walls shook as if Halcyon itself breathed in fear.

The upper vent bent inward.

A hand — grey, broken, trembling with awful intention — pushed through the slats.

Alex lifted her gun. “Contact! CONTACT UP TOP—”

But she didn’t get to finish.

KARA — COLLAPSE AND SURGE

Kara’s knees dipped.

Lena’s arm shot under her shoulders instantly. “Kara—!”

“I’m okay,” Kara ground out.

She wasn’t.

But she forced her body forward anyway, bracing against the wall as another slam shook the door.

“Alex,” she rasped. “They want the center. They’re pushing us inward for a reason.”

Alex swallowed. “We can’t give them that position.”

Another blow — louder, wetter — cracked the lower hinge.

They were seconds away from a breach.

THE CHOKE POINT — EVERYONE

“Positions NOW!” Alex snapped.

Maggie fired first.

Kelly swung her baton up as an arm shoved through the vent.

J’onn kicked the lower door the moment it split, forcing it back long enough for a barricade to brace.

Nia pulled Kara backward just as a second clawed hand slashed through the railing.

Lena stayed with her — anchored, fierce, terrified.

THE FINAL SOUND BEFORE HELL BREAKS OPEN

A groan rose through the entire tower — the unmistakable twist of metal reaching its limit.

The railing beneath them buckled.

The hinges screamed.

And the infected, dozens of them, slammed into the stairwell doors in a single coordinated wave.

BOOM.

Dust exploded outward.

A crack ripped across the wall.

And Kara felt the whole structure shift under their feet.

Lena wrapped both hands around Kara’s, pulling her into her chest as the stairwell groaned under the assault.

Alex turned her head, eyes wide, breath held.

Nia braced.

J’onn leaned in—

The final hinge snapped.

The final bolt dropped.

And the last thing all of them heard before the door blew inward—

was Kara whispering, rasped and certain:

“They’re coming through.”

---

Chapter Text

---

CHAPTER 9 — SCENE 1

“The Door Gives”

POV: Kara → Lena

The stairwell door bulged inward like a lung trying to inhale.

Kara barely had time to pull in one breath—one thin, burning rasp—before the bottom hinge sheared clean off the frame with a metallic snap loud enough to rattle the rail under her boots.

Dust rained down in a choking cloud.

“Hold the line!” Alex shouted, voice cracking from somewhere behind Kara—but the words barely registered.

Because the infected weren’t pounding randomly anymore.

They were driving into the door.

In unison.

Another impact thundered through the stairwell.

BOOM.

The entire structure lurched sideways, a violent tilt that nearly tore Kara’s grip from Lena’s. Lena caught her mid-stumble, arms locking around her waist, pulling her back against the warm, trembling solidity of her chest.

“Kara—!” Lena’s voice was raw, close, frantic against Kara’s ear. “Stay with me. Stay with me—”

“I’m here,” Kara whispered, even though her knees buckled and the world tilted dangerously.

The middle hinge ripped away with a scream of tortured metal.

A crack split through the wall beside the door, long and jagged like lightning frozen in plaster.

J’onn braced his shoulder against the railing, planting his feet, holding the entire group from toppling down the stairs as the landing pitched again.

Nia grabbed the volunteer closest to her, pulling them away from the buckling edge. Her breath hitched, fear splintering her voice: “They’re pushing in waves. Kara—this is coordinated.”

“I know,” Kara whispered.

Another BOOM.

The final hinge groaned—long, low, ghostlike.

Lena’s fingers dug into Kara’s jacket as if she could anchor her through the next impact. Kara leaned into her, exhausted, shaking, but lifting her chin toward the shuddering metal.

A shadow slid beneath the door—fingers, broken and wrong, curling through the gap like they were testing the air.

Alex swore. “Everyone—brace! NOW!”

The bolt at the top of the frame quivered.

Kara’s vision tunnelled. Every instinct she had—every irrational, inexplicable, sharpened instinct she never understood—flared like lightning behind her eyes.

She tightened her grip on Lena’s hand.

“They’re coming through,” she rasped.

The last bolt snapped.

The stairwell filled with the sound of the dead breaking in.

The door blew inward.

And Halcyon fell into hell.

---

---

CHAPTER 9 — SCENE 2

“The Collapse Begins”

POV: Alex → Kara → Lena (split, seamless)

The stairwell door detonated inward like a bomb.

Metal sheared. Bolts flew.

Something wet and snarling hit the floor hard and skidded toward their boots.

“MOVE!” Alex yelled, shoving Kara behind her as the first infected lunged through the cloud of dust.

The world devolved into noise, shrapnel, and heat.

Bodies slammed the threshold in a rabid, synchronized rhythm — the same unnatural cadence from the sensor readings, now amplified by hunger and momentum. A second door hinge tore free and spun across the landing like a tossed blade.

J’onn launched forward first, swinging a reinforced pipe in a brutal overhead arc that cracked the skull of the closest attacker.

“BACK! HOLD THE LINE!” he barked.

But the line was gone — the doorframe was exploding open in four different directions, the infected pouring in like a single organism splitting itself apart.

Alex grabbed Kara’s jacket and hauled her behind the upper railing.

“KARA, DON’T YOU DARE—”

Too late.

Kara’s instinct took over.

She surged forward — half-limping, half-running — to intercept the infected climbing the stairwell wall like feral spiders. Her ribs screamed. Her shoulder burned. Her vision stuttered. But she didn’t stop.

A creature vaulted the railing, jaws snapping for her throat—

Kara caught its face with both hands, shoved downward, and drove her knee into its jaw with a sickening crack.

It dropped.

But the landing shook again.

Alex rammed her shoulder into Kara’s back, pushing her against the wall. “STOP DOING THAT! STOP—”

Her voice broke. “You’re barely standing—”

Kara forced breath into her lungs. “I’m fine.”

“You’re lying,” Alex hissed. “And I can’t lose you— not here, not tonight—”

Another infected slammed against the wall beside them, fingers clawing for purchase.

Nia appeared out of nowhere, swinging a metal rod like a whip. It caught the infected in the ear, sending it tumbling back down the stairs.

“I dreamed this exact angle!” Nia panted. “I didn’t know it was an angle — but it was an angle!”

“NIA, PLEASE DON’T BRAG ABOUT YOUR HORROR DREAMS,” Alex snapped.

“I’M JUST SAYING I WAS RIGHT!”

The stairwell shook again.

A deep, seismic groan rolled beneath them — the entire tower listing by inches, but enough to make the railing sway.

Dust sifted from the ceiling like falling ash.

J’onn threw an arm out, blocking all three of them.

“We can’t hold this landing. Leave it — NOW!”

“But Kara—” Alex protested.

Kara coughed, dizzy.

“I can still fight.”

“No,” J’onn said — not loud, but final, the tone of a man who had made too many battlefield decisions to entertain heroics.

He turned to Kara.

“You fall, the tower loses you. We cannot lose you.”

Kara opened her mouth—

but another body slammed into the stairwell from below.

The second wave.

Kara’s breath hitched — because this group moved even faster.

They weren’t climbing.

They were bounding upward.

Like they’d mapped the angles.

Like they’d rehearsed it.

Nia stared, horrified. “Oh God. They’re learning stairs.”

Alex swore under her breath. “Kara, Lena needs you upstairs. MOVE.”

Kara staggered backward—

—and Lena appeared at the top landing like she had been carved out of terror and momentum.

“KARA!”

Her voice cracked over the chaos — raw, furious, terrified.

Kara’s knees almost buckled at the sound.

Lena didn’t wait for permission.

She sprinted straight into the fray, eyes locked on Kara and Kara alone.

“DON’T YOU EVER RUN TOWARD A BREACH AGAIN!” she screamed as she reached them — and then grabbed Kara’s arm so hard Kara actually hissed. “Upstairs. NOW.”

Kara started to protest—

Lena’s voice dropped, shaking.

“Please.”

That one word cut through the noise sharper than the infected’s claws.

Kara nodded.

Alex saw the nod, the decision, the shift—and immediately barked, “RETREAT ON ME! UPPER CORRIDOR! FALL BACK!”

J’onn hauled the emergency barricade lever beside the door. The mechanism shrieked as a secondary steel plate began lowering over the stairwell entrance — agonizingly slow, ancient machinery grinding against rust.

“Infected incoming!” Nia cried.

Three of them surged upward.

J’onn smashed one. Alex kicked another in the knee. Nia hit the third with the rod again — this time yelling, “I SAW THIS TOO!”

“You said your dream was symbolic!” Kara wheezed.

“SYMBOLISM CAN HAVE VIOLENCE!”

The infected kept coming.

J’onn held the line.

Alex pushed Nia behind her.

Lena dragged Kara backward, arm tight around her waist as more bodies slammed into the descending steel plate.

The plate screeched—

A hand punched through the gap.

Then another.

Then three more.

Kara shoved Lena behind her instinctively, lifting her forearm to block a clawed hand reaching for her face—

The door closed on the arm with a wet CRUNCH.

The screaming stopped.

The plate locked.

Silence.

But not long.

Behind that door, behind that steel, behind that barrier:

Dozens of fists

pounded

in unison.

Slow.

Rhythmic.

Purposeful.

A signal.

A gathering.

A countdown.

Kara’s legs buckled.

Lena caught her fully and sank with her to the floor, pulling Kara into her lap as Kara’s breath trembled in shallow, uneven bursts.

Alex slid down the adjacent wall, chest heaving, sweat streaking her face.

Nia stared at the door with wide, horrified eyes.

“They weren’t trying to break through,” she whispered.

“They were trying to herd us.”

J’onn didn’t answer.

He couldn’t.

Not when every single one of them heard the same thing—

a shift in the pounding on the other side.

The rhythm changed.

Slower.

Harder.

Unified.

Kara lifted her head, barely conscious, barely strong enough to speak.

“They’re coordinating.”

She swallowed.

“They’re trying to bring the whole tower down.”

Lena tightened her grip on Kara’s shaking body.

And nobody — not Alex, not Nia, not J’onn — dared contradict her.

Because for the first time since the outbreak began:

Kara looked genuinely afraid.

---

---

CHAPTER 9 — SCENE 3

“Cutting the Way Out”

POV: Kara → Alex → Lena

---

KARA — LOWER STAIRWELL COLLAPSE

The stairwell gave way in a single, violent shudder.

Kara felt the metal under their feet bend, the bolts sheared clean out of the wall, the landing tilting just enough for gravity to claw at every inch of her.

“KARA—HOLD THE RAILING!” Alex shouted, voice shredded by panic.

But Kara wasn’t grabbing anything except Lena.

Her body moved before the command finished leaving Alex’s throat—she twisted, braced a boot against the sliding metal stair, and yanked Lena against her chest as the entire landing dropped half a meter and slammed into the wall.

Dust exploded like a bomb.

The infected swarmed through the breach behind them—arms, teeth, broken fingers reaching through the twisted frame.

 Around them, the survivors who had been on the same landing scrambled desperately to latch onto whatever wasn’t moving. J’onn pivoted fast, grabbing two volunteers by their jackets and dragging them back onto stable metal before the collapsing section could take them with it. Above, Nia pulled another injured student up by sheer adrenaline, bracing her back against the wall as the railing below tore free.

Kara planted herself between the horde and Lena, one arm braced against the railing, the other outstretched to keep the infected at bay.

“Kara—MOVE!” Alex yelled from farther up.

“NOT WITHOUT THEM!” Kara shouted back, voice ragged. “Lena, stay behind me—”

“I’m not leaving—” Lena’s protest was cut off by another wall-shuddering BOOM as the stairwell door above them warped inward.

“KARA—INCOMING—RIGHT SIDE!” Nia screamed.

Kara spun, ducked, and shoved Lena flat against the inner wall just as a half-reanimated infected launched from the broken railing above, jaws snapping inches from Lena’s throat.

Kara caught it mid-air by the collarbone and used the momentum to swing it over the edge — hurling it down the open center of the stairwell until it vanished into the darkness below.

Her shoulder screamed. Stars burst behind her eyes.

She forced the pain back down.

Not now. Not ever while Lena was in reach.

Lena’s hand brushed her jaw. “You’re bleeding—”

“I’ll live.”

“Kara—”

“I said I’ll live.”

She didn’t have time to lie more gently.

---

ALEX — MID-STAIR LANDING COMMAND

Alex saw it happening all at once — the structural collapse, Kara’s hitched breathing, the rail giving way, the infected climbing the underside of the stairwell like spiders.

This was about to turn into a death funnel unless she fixed it in seconds.

“J’onn—take the upper flank!” she barked, voice cutting through the roar. “Nia—eyes on the left crawl space! They’re trying to flank down the vent!”

J’onn didn’t hesitate. He grabbed the twisted remnants of the upper railing, swung himself over the gap, and took the higher platform by brute strength and sheer training.

Nia pressed her hands to her temples, forcing her fear down until that intuitive, sixth-sense clarity rose to the surface.

“There!” she shouted. “Behind the rusted pipe!”

Alex spun toward Kara.

“KARA—WE NEED A PATH—LEFT—NOW!”

Kara nodded once, blood running from her temple, and shoved her entire weight against the bent landing panel.

It screeched — metal tearing painfully — but it shifted enough.

“KARA!” Alex yelled again. “I need you to clear the narrow corridor! WE’RE PUSHING THROUGH!”

Kara drove her shoulder into the panel one more time with a half-snarl of pain.

The corridor behind it opened just enough for single-file movement.

“GO!” Kara shouted.

“No,” Alex said fiercely. “YOU go. You get Lena through. Now.”

Kara hesitated for half a heartbeat.

Alex didn’t.

“KARA. MOVE.”

Kara obeyed—

—but only after grabbing Lena’s hand like it was a lifeline.

---

LENA — THE BREAKING POINT

Lena’s brain split into two realities:

One where she was a scientist, thinking tactically, tracking the geometry of the stairwell, the weak points in the metal, the position of every threat.

And the other where she was a woman with her heart in her throat, holding Kara Danvers’ shaking hand as the infected surged below them.

“Kara—your leg,” she whispered. “You’re dragging it.”

“I’m fine—”

“You’re lying—”

“Keep moving.”

“Kara—”

“Lena, PLEASE.”

The plea hit harder than any shout would have.

Lena shut up.

But she didn’t let go.

Ahead, the narrow corridor Alex forced open waited — dark, dusty, just barely passable. Behind them, the infected slammed the stairwell in waves, the sound like bones cracking against steel.

Alex shouted over the chaos:

“MOVE, MOVE, MOVE—J’ONN, COVER US!”

The lights flickered overhead.

The walls shook.

Kara squeezed her hand harder — too hard — and Lena felt the tremor in it.

Fear. Adrenaline. Pain.

All three.

She stepped closer, shoulder against Kara’s arm, refusing to leave space between them.

“We’re not dying here,” Lena whispered, trembling.

Kara almost smiled.

“Not planning on it.”

Another slam. Another crack in the structure. Dust poured like sand around them.

Kara pulled Lena forward through the narrow gap, pivoting her own body so the infected couldn’t reach her back.

Alex shouted from the other side:

“GET THROUGH — THE WHOLE LANDING IS FAILING!”

Kara pushed Lena into the corridor—

—and the entire stairwell behind them dropped a full meter with a deafening groan.

The infected tumbled with it.

Kara didn’t.

Because Lena had grabbed her arm with both hands, anchoring her with a strength that surprised them both.

“KARA—MOVE!” Lena screamed.

Kara lunged through the gap.

Lena slammed her full weight into the panel behind her, sealing the narrow passage—

—and blocking off the infected entirely.

For now.

They stood breathing hard in the darkness, backs against the cold concrete, the corridor shaking with every impact behind it.

Kara reached for Lena’s hand again in the dark.

Lena didn’t hesitate.

She took it.

And this time—

This time Kara’s fingers didn’t tremble.

---

---

CHAPTER 9 — SCENE 4 

“The Crawlspace Gauntlet”

POV: Kara → Lena → Alex (intercut as needed)

Tone: suffocation-level tension, body-to-body survival, hard choices

---

KARA — THE CRAWLSPACE BEND

The narrow corridor funneled them into a crawlspace barely wide enough for two shoulders. Kara braced one forearm along the concrete so Lena could slip past her, guiding her forward while keeping her body angled between Lena and the widening cracks behind them.

Each impact from the stairwell made the air vibrate.

Metal whined.

Concrete dust floated in sharp little halos every time Kara’s breath hitched.

Ahead, the crawlspace dipped—then turned sharply left into a deeper, darker artery of Halcyon’s lower infrastructure.

Behind them, the infected shrieked in frustrated, scraping bursts as they clawed at the sealed panel Lena had slammed shut.

“Go,” Kara whispered, nudging Lena’s back gently. “You first.”

Lena twisted just enough to meet Kara’s eyes.

It wasn’t fear in hers.

It was something much more devastating:

I can’t lose you.

Kara swallowed hard and forced a steadier breath. “Lena… move.”

Lena obeyed—but only after brushing her hand down Kara’s arm in a fleeting, grounding touch.

The moment Lena turned the corner, Kara glanced back—just once.

The panel bulged inward.

Cracked.

Screamed.

“They’re learning how to wedge it,” Kara muttered under her breath, a tremor of disbelief and fury knotting in her stomach. “How the hell are they learning that fast?”

She squeezed herself into the bend—

—just as the panel exploded inward with a roar.

“KARA, NOW!” Alex shouted from ahead.

Kara dropped to one knee and scrambled through the dip, teeth gritted against the pain sparking down her leg.

---

LENA — THE BELLY OF HALCYON

The crawlspace widened just enough for Lena to crouch without scraping her shoulders raw. Pipes lined either side—hissing faintly, radiating faint heat. The emergency strip-light overhead flickered like a dying pulse.

She heard Kara’s breath before she saw her—ragged, uneven, but still moving toward her.

“Kara—here—this way—” Lena reached back blindly, fingers brushing air until—

Kara grabbed her hand.

Not panic-grab.

Not survival-grab.

Something steadier.

Something that said:

I’m still here.

I’m not letting you go.

Lena’s heart slammed once—hard—but she shoved the feeling aside and pulled Kara around the next bend.

A roar bellowed behind them as infected bodies slammed into the crawlspace entrance.

Alex’s voice echoed sharply: “MOVE! Crawlspace junction in ten meters! We can bottleneck them there!”

Lena dragged Kara with her, refusing to acknowledge the wet sound of blood hitting metal from Kara’s leg wound.

“Kara…” Lena whispered, voice splintering, “you’re getting worse.”

“I’ll be fine,” Kara lied—poorly.

Lena’s jaw clenched so hard she tasted copper.

“Stop saying that. Stop saying it like it makes it true.”

Kara didn’t answer.

She didn’t have time to.

The floor vibrated violently—enough to knock Lena’s knees out from under her. She slammed forward against Kara, hands scrambling for purchase.

Kara caught her before she hit the pipe wall, arms wrapping around her waist with instinctive certainty.

“Got you,” Kara whispered into her shoulder.

Lena froze—just for a heartbeat.

Because those two words—

Got you—

hit her harder than any fear could.

But there was no time to feel it.

Not now.

Not here.

Behind them, the first infected dropped into the crawlspace with a wet thud.

“KARA—RUN!” Lena shouted.

Kara didn’t run.

She pivoted.

And shoved Lena forward with a force that felt like a promise.

---

ALEX — THE JUNCTION

The crawlspace opened up into a small cross-junction—just big enough for three people to stand if they pressed themselves flat against opposite walls.

Alex reached it first, skidding on one knee, rifle raised.

“Nia, left! J’onn, right! Clear the flanks!”

Nia didn’t need to be told twice; she slid into position, flashlight beam steady despite the tremor in her free hand.

J’onn took the opposite wall, breathing hard, muscles locked for impact.

Behind them—

Kara and Lena barreled through the final bend.

“Kara, DOWN!” Alex barked.

Kara dropped instantly, pulling Lena with her—

just in time for J’onn to swing a broken pipe in a clean arc, smashing the first infected crawling through the vent opening behind them.

Its skull cracked with a wet crunch.

The body convulsed.

Then went still.

More bodies crawled in after it.

Many more.

Alex’s stomach flipped.

“Kara—Lena—GET BEHIND ME! We need to choke-point them!”

Kara shoved Lena backward first—

Then staggered.

Just slightly.

But enough that Alex saw the truth:

Kara was fading. Fast.

“Kara—your leg—” Alex started.

“Later,” Kara snapped, pushing off the wall. “Just keep them off us—”

The entire crawlspace shook like a lung being crushed.

A massive shadow moved behind the smaller infected.

Something heavier. Something bigger. Something that had learned the crawlspace dimensions—and adapted to it.

Alex’s eyes widened.

“Oh, hell no…”

Lena whispered, “What is that?”

Kara breathed, “New evolution.”

Nia took a step back. “We can’t fight that in here—”

Alex grit her teeth.

“KARA—WE NEED AN ESCAPE ROUTE!”

Kara’s jaw tightened.

Her pulse hammered visibly in her throat.

She whispered one word:

“Working.”

And despite the blood and the tremors and the pain,

Alex believed her.

---

---

CHAPTER 9 — SCENE 5

“Through the Vents”

POV: Kara → Lena → Alex (micro-intercut)

Tone: breath-tight claustrophobia, tactical endurance, escalating dread

---

KARA — THE VENT SHAFT

The vent corridor swallowed them whole.

Kara maneuvered sideways first, one arm braced against the wall, the other still firmly locked with Lena’s hand. The space was barely wider than her shoulders. Every breath scraped the stale air. Every vibration from the collapsing stairwell behind them shivered through the metal like a warning.

Alex’s voice echoed from somewhere behind:

“KEEP MOVING—DON’T STOP—THEY’RE TRYING TO BURROW THROUGH!”

Kara didn’t need the reminder.

The thunder of bodies slamming against steel was getting louder.

Closer.

The vent narrowed again; Kara bent at the waist to force herself through. Pain flared hot along her side. She hid the sound that tried to rip from her throat.

Lena didn’t miss it.

“Your ribs,” she whispered behind her. “You’re bleeding again.”

“Not the priority,” Kara rasped.

“It is to me.”

Kara nearly stopped moving—only for a second—because Lena said it like a fact, like a truth she had no intention of taking back.

But another metallic scream tore through the ductwork. Something slammed the wall hard enough to bow it inward. Kara lunged forward on instinct, dragging Lena with her.

“Kara—slow down—”

“Can’t,” Kara gasped. “They’re coming through.”

The crawlspace dipped sharply. Kara gripped the floor grate with her fingers to keep from sliding down headfirst.

The grate wasn’t cold.

It was warm.

Too warm.

Something was underneath.

Kara froze.

“Lena,” she breathed, “back up. Slowly.”

A low groan vibrated beneath the grate — one long, hungry exhale.

The kind infected made just before they struck.

Kara tightened her grip on Lena’s fingers. “Don’t step on the panel. There’s one below us.”

“How many?” Lena asked, voice barely audible.

“Can’t tell,” Kara whispered. “But it’s moving with purpose.”

The infected below slammed upward.

The grate SEPARATED a full two inches.

Lena sucked in a breath.

Kara reacted first — slamming her forearm down across the panel to hold it in place as something thrashed beneath her. The grate buckled under the force. Teeth snapped through the opening, snapping at air an inch from Kara’s arm.

“Go around,” Kara ordered. “NOW.”

“You’re blocking the only path—”

“Lena, GO!”

Lena paused… too long… long enough to make Kara’s heart fracture in panic—

But then she squeezed Kara’s fingers once — hard — and slid past her, pressing flat against the narrowest section of the duct wall, scraping through with barely an inch to spare.

Kara lifted her arm and threw herself after her.

The infected punched through the grate behind them.

And Kara didn’t look back.

---

LENA — MID-CORRIDOR PINCH POINT

The duct grew so tight Lena had to twist her hips sideways. Metal edges scraped her ribs. Sweat stung her eyes. Her breath came too fast — too shallow — too loud in the absolute silence ahead.

Kara was right behind her.

She could hear it — the labored breathing, the pain Kara was swallowing, the tremble in her movements.

“Kara?” she whispered.

A soft grunt. “Still here.”

Lena swallowed. “When we reach the junction, I want you in front.”

“No.”

“Kara—”

“You’ll have better cover behind me.”

“And you’ll have nothing if something attacks from behind.”

“It won’t.”

“Kara—listen to me—”

But Kara’s hand slid up her back — a gentle pressure between her shoulder blades — reassuring and infuriating at the same time.

“Just keep going,” Kara breathed.

Something cracked open inside Lena — fear, fury, affection — too tangled to separate.

“Kara… you can’t keep doing this. You’re hurt.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I said I’m fi—”

The vent above them boomed like a detonating drum.

Both women flinched.

Dust rained down, coating their hair and faces.

Kara’s voice dropped to a whisper Lena felt more than heard:

“They’re learning the upper ducts.”

Lena’s blood went cold.

“How the hell—?”

“Sound. Heat. Us.”

Lena crawled faster.

Not because she wasn’t terrified—

But because stopping would mean looking at Kara, seeing how pale she was, seeing the blood soaking through her shirt, seeing the exhaustion pulling at her every breath.

And Lena Luthor could face death.

But she couldn’t face that.

Not yet.

---

ALEX — THE FAR END OF THE CORRIDOR

Alex reached the junction first.

Barely.

She skidded into the side-wall alcove, chest heaving, hair damp with sweat. The metal door to the backup maintenance access stood just ahead — rusted, warped, but intact.

Behind her, the sounds were getting worse.

Nia scrambled into view, panting. “They’re in the walls—Alex—they’re not just climbing — they’re tracking.”

Alex grabbed her wrist. “Where are Kara and Lena?”

“Five meters back. Maybe less.”

Nia swallowed. “Alex… Kara’s hurt.”

Alex went cold.

Not freezing.

Not panicking.

Cold like a blade being drawn.

“Get the door open,” Alex ordered.

Nia nodded, already pulling tools from her belt.

Alex dropped to her knees and peered down the corridor—

Shadows.

Metal bending.

A flash of blonde hair.

“KARA! MOVE!” Alex shouted.

“Kara stumbled again — catching herself on an elbow as she dragged herself forward with sheer, furious determination.

Lena was behind her, one arm under Kara’s, guiding her through the narrowing duct, jaw clenched, eyes blazing.

Alex’s chest cracked with relief and terror all at once.

“Hurry—hurry—hurry—!” Nia said behind her. “I can hear them—”

Another BOOM shook the ducts.

Kara cried out — a sharp, bitten-off sound she didn’t have the strength to hide.

Alex’s breath stopped.

“Come on, little sister,” she whispered. “Come on—just one more meter—”

Kara reached the final pinch point. Lena pushed her forward with both hands.

“Kara—go!”

“I’m not—leaving—you—”

“You’re not—now MOVE—!”

Kara clawed her way through the last opening—

Alex grabbed her forearm and hauled her out with a grunt of effort, catching her full weight as Kara collapsed into her.

“Kara—God—hey—hey—stay awake—”

Lena crawled out next, gasping, hair falling from its tie, eyes wild and shining with barely-contained panic.

The duct behind them BOOMED again.

Alex wrapped her arm around Kara’s chest, pulling her upright.

Lena grabbed her other side without a word.

Together, they dragged Kara toward the maintenance door—

As the vent behind them gave its last metallic scream.

And something tore through.

---

---

CHAPTER 9 — SCENE 6

“The Longest Hallway”

POV: Kara → Lena → Group Split POV

Tone: dread-heavy, endurance-based terror, slow-burn intimacy under catastrophic pressure

---

KARA — THE HALL THAT WON’T END

The corridor stretched ahead like the throat of something swallowing them whole.

Kara forced herself forward, one shaking breath at a time, trying to keep her weight even. Trying not to limp. Trying not to let Lena feel how close she was to collapsing again.

Her legs weren’t obeying right.

Her lungs burned like she’d swallowed dust.

Her shoulder throbbed with every heartbeat — too fast, too loud.

But ahead of her, Cat braced one hand on the wall, glaring at the flickering lights like she could intimidate them into working.

“Danvers,” Cat barked without turning, “if you pass out again, I swear to every Pulitzer I’ve ever won, I will drag you by your ridiculous ponytail.”

Kara tried to laugh.

It came out a choke.

Lena was instantly at her side.

“Kara—stop. Stop.” Her hand tightened on Kara’s arm. “Look at me.”

Kara did.

Which was a mistake — because the moment she met Lena’s eyes, something raw and terrified shone back at her. Something Lena had been trying to bury since the stairwell dropped. Something she couldn’t hide anymore.

“You’re fading,” Lena whispered.

Kara shook her head. “I can—”

“You can barely stand.”

Kara wanted to argue. But her vision was starting to pulse at the edges, dark creeping in like a slow curtain.

Behind them, the infected slammed into the sealed corridor panel again.

BOOM.

The wall shook.

Dust rained.

They didn’t have time for this.

“Just—help me keep moving,” Kara said, voice rough. “The evac tunnel’s ahead. We just need to reach it.”

Lena stepped closer, shoulder under Kara’s arm, slipping seamlessly into the space where support became proximity, and proximity became something Lena no longer had the luxury to hide.

“I’ve got you,” Lena murmured. “Lean.”

Kara did.

More than she meant to.

More than she should.

---

LENA — HOLDING SOMEONE WHO WON’T LET THEMSELVES BE HELD

Kara’s weight draped across her like something precious and breaking.

Lena kept her grip firm, fingers curling around Kara’s waist, steadying each trembling step. Kara had never felt this fragile before — not even in the duct collapse, not even when she’d shoved herself between Lena and death like she thought she was invincible.

This was different.

This was Kara cracking.

“Kara…” Lena’s voice broke despite her control. “Tell me if you’re going to fall.”

Kara inhaled sharply, a shaking breath. “I’m… trying not to.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

The honesty hit Lena like a blow.

Ahead, Nia looked back — fear and instinct tangled in her eyes.

“We’re close,” Nia whispered. “I can feel the pressure shift ahead — the tunnel entrance is right around the corner.”

J’onn moved beside her, bracing half the landing debris he’d dragged down the hall, making space for the group to move in formation.

Alex led from the front, voice steady but vibrating at the edges.

“Stay tight. If one of us stops, we all stop.”

Kara stumbled.

Lena caught her before she hit the wall.

“Kara—!”

“I’m okay…” Kara breathed, but her eyes fluttered like they weren’t sure whether they wanted to stay open.

“You are NOT okay,” Lena snapped — too loud, too raw.

Kara looked at her.

A tiny, exhausted smile curved her mouth.

“I’m alive.”

Lena’s throat tightened painfully. “For now.”

---

GROUP POV — THE LAST SPRINT BEFORE THE DROP

The corridor narrowed — walls bending inward, insulation peeling like skin. The air pressure shifted, pulled toward the ventilation duct at the far end where the emergency evac hatch waited behind a rusted metal panel.

Alex raised her hand, signaling quiet.

Everyone stilled.

Even Kara tried to straighten.

Then—

SCRATCH.

SCRATCH-SCRATCH.

From inside the walls.

Right beside them.

Nia’s breath caught. “They’re… they’re moving in the crawl spaces.”

Another violent impact rattled the panel they’d sealed behind them.

The infected had found the secondary route.

Alex’s voice dropped into that dangerous, command-mode calm.

“We are out of time.”

She pointed at J’onn.

“You pry that hatch open.”

Then at Nia.

“You keep Kara upright.”

Then at Lena.

“You stay exactly where you are — she listens to you.”

Lena swallowed. Hard.

Kara closed her eyes for one wavering second.

“Kara,” Alex said — softer now. “Look at me.”

Kara did.

“You’ve done enough. Let us take it from here.”

Kara tried to shake her head.

But Lena’s hand slid into hers.

And Kara stopped fighting.

Stopped pretending.

Stopped pushing.

Just breathed.

Barely.

And Lena held her up through every second of it.

---

---

CHAPTER 9 — SCENE 7

“The Only Way Out Is Through”

POV: Intercut (Kara → Lena → Alex → Nia)

The corridor shook like it was being held in the jaws of something massive.

Kara hit the corner first — half hauling, half dragging herself forward — and nearly slammed straight into Cat Grant, who stood at the evac hatch with a flashlight in one hand and an expression that could peel paint off a jet fuselage.

“FINALLY,” Cat snapped. “The rest of them are inside. Move before the ceiling decides to kill us all for sport.”

Behind her, Kara glimpsed the cluster of survivors packed into the narrow loading bay:

Sam with one arm braced against the trembling wall, eyes wide with fear.

Winn crouched over a crate of wiring, knuckles white.

Brainy rapidly securing the fuel cables to the evacuation rig with his usual cold focus.

Kelly holding pressure on a volunteer’s bandaged leg.

Maggie posted at the interior door with a metal pipe like she dared the dead to try her.

James, camera slung across his back, guarding the youngest survivors.

M’gann, helping people through one by one, calm but strained.

They were here.

Alive.

Waiting.

Kara’s knees almost buckled from relief.

But the stairwell behind them groaned — a grinding, twisting metal howl — and Lena grabbed Kara’s waist hard.

“Kara—MOVE.”

Kara lunged through the hatch just as the floor behind them split with a cannon-crack. Dust exploded out in a choking wave. Nia shoved Alex and J’onn forward, stumbling in behind them as Cat slammed the hatch control.

The door did not close.

It jammed halfway, grinding metal against warped metal.

“Oh, for the love of—” Cat growled. “Someone fix that before it becomes symbolic.”

Brainy sprinted forward, hands flying over the bent hydraulics. “The frame is twisted! I need—tools, any tools—”

Sam shoved her wrench into his hand without a word.

The infected hit the other side of the hatch hard.

The whole wall shook.

A collective breath went through the survivors — fear, recognition, despair.

They were seconds from being overrun.

Alex was the first to snap out of it.

“J’onn — reinforce the left side! Nia — right side, brace it with that crate! Maggie, with me — we’re holding this until Brainy gives the word!”

Everyone moved at once.

Kara tried to stand again — too fast — and the corridor tilted sideways. She staggered into Lena, shivering, vision swimming.

“No,” Lena said — firm, fierce, absolute. “You stay with me.”

Kara’s fingers curled into Lena’s sleeve. “I can fight.”

“You can barely breathe.”

But Kara didn’t stop trying to rise.

The screams and impacts from the other side of the hatch sharpened like knives. Adrenaline surged. Her body wanted to launch itself into the fray.

Lena pressed a palm over Kara’s heart — not hard, but grounding.

“Kara. Look at me.”

Kara met her eyes and the world steadied by a thread.

“You don’t get to die today,” Lena whispered. “Not here. Not like this.”

Kara trembled — and nodded.

Behind them, Cat shouted:

“BRAINY, IF YOU DON’T GET THAT DOOR CLOSED IN FIVE SECONDS, I SWEAR ON EVERY PULITZER I’VE EVER WON—”

“GOT IT!” Brainy barked.

The hydraulics screamed—

The hatch slammed shut.

The infected hit it instantly, metal booming like a war drum.

Everyone froze.

Then the lights flickered.

Then —

Brainy checked the lock twice, shoulders sagging in exhausted triumph.

“It’ll hold,” he said. “For now.”

Alex turned to the room, voice hoarse but steady:

“Everyone — MOVE. We are evacuating Halcyon. This is not optional.”

Sam exhaled shakily.

Winn choked out a laugh that was half-sob.

Maggie muttered, “About damn time.”

And Lena—

Lena looked at Kara, who was still leaning into her, breath unsteady, blood drying at her temple.

“You with me?” Lena asked softly.

Kara nodded — not strong, but determined.

“Always.”

And as the alarms wailed behind them and the dead hammered at the metal door, the survivors of Halcyon moved as one toward the last open path left to them.

Into the unknown.

Into whatever future still existed.

Into Chapter 10.

---

Chapter Text

---

CHAPTER 10 — SCENE 1

“Ashes of Morning”

POV: Kara → Lena → Alex

Tone: shock, pain, frantic recalibration

---

KARA — THE MOMENT AFTER SURVIVAL

The door slammed shut behind them with a metallic howl, sealing the infected on the other side — at least for now.

Kara didn’t realize she was still holding Lena until her own knees buckled.

Not from fear.

Not from blood loss.

From the sudden, terrifying absence of motion — like her body had only been held together by the act of running.

For one heartbeat she felt the ghost of the stairwell still shaking beneath her feet — the crash of metal, the snap of bolts, the moment gravity tried to take her and the others with it. It all lived in her bones like aftershocks.

Lena’s hands were already on her shoulders.

“Kara—hey—stay with me.”

Kara blinked hard, breath dragging against bruised ribs. The whole stairwell still shuddered behind the sealed hatch, distant thuds rattling like aftershocks.

“I’m here,” Kara rasped.

Lena didn’t look convinced. Her fingers slid to Kara’s jaw, grounding her, frantic and soft at the same time.

“You scared me,” Lena whispered, voice not breaking — cracking, like something inside her had been struck too sharply.

Kara managed a weak smile. “Join the club.”

Another boom hit the door, louder this time. Dust sifted from the ceiling in pale threads.

Lena flinched. Not because of the infected — Lena Luthor never flinched from danger.

She flinched because Kara swayed again.

“Kara—sit down—now.”

Kara’s legs finally listened. She sank against the wall, adrenaline evaporating like steam off hot metal.

Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, uneven. It wasn’t fear — she knew fear. This was something else. Something she wasn’t ready to name.

Lena knelt in front of her, hands on either side of Kara’s face.

“I’ve got you,” she murmured. “You hear me?”

Kara nodded, eyelids fluttering. “I… think so.”

---

LENA — THE BREAKING POINT THAT DOESN’T BREAK

She’d thought she’d exhausted every iteration of terror the apocalypse could offer.

She hadn’t.

Not until she’d watched Kara fall in the stairwell collapse.

Not until she’d felt Kara’s grip slip when the landing dropped.

Not until she’d seen the color drain from her face when the dust settled.

Even now Lena could feel the phantom pull of Kara nearly being ripped from her hands — the moment she’d braced her entire body to haul Kara through the narrowing gap before the landing fell away completely.

Lena dragged a thumb along Kara’s cheekbone, brushing away concrete grit.

“You shouldn’t be standing,” Lena said, voice trembling with a fury she couldn’t unpack. “You shouldn’t be talking. You shouldn’t be—”

Kara’s eyes opened just enough to meet hers.

“Alive?” she said quietly. “Because I plan on keeping that trend going.”

The laugh that escaped Lena sounded more like a sob.

“You idiot,” she whispered, forehead touching Kara’s for a single, searing second. “You absolute—beautiful—idiot.”

Another impact slammed into the sealed door behind them.

Alex’s voice snapped through the corridor:

“WE NEED TO MOVE! NOW!”

Lena recoiled only enough to look over her shoulder.

“But she’s not—”

“She has to move,” Alex said, breath sharp, posture coiled like a spring. “If they break that door, we’re boxed in. There’s no second choice.”

Lena turned back to Kara.

“Kara.” Her voice softened. “Can you stand?”

Kara swallowed, jaw tensing. “Yeah.”

Lena didn’t believe her.

But she slid an arm around Kara’s waist anyway, pulling her up, keeping her close, keeping her steady.

Kara whispered, “Don’t let go.”

Lena tightened her grip. “Not possible.”

---

ALEX — THE DECISION SHE HATES EVERY TIME

Alex had seen this look on Kara before — twice.

Once when a brutal university workload pushed Kara to faint in a stairwell during midterms.

Once when Kara took a protest sign to the ribs shielding Alex during a campus demonstration.

Both times, Kara had insisted she was fine.

Both times, she’d lied.

This was the same look — only worse.

Alex angled herself between the shaking door and her sister.

“Kara. Look at me.”

Kara lifted her head, barely.

“You run when I say run,” Alex said. “You stay upright until I tell you to fall. Lena, you keep her centered. Nia—rear sweep. J’onn, on me.”

Lena’s arm tightened protectively around Kara.

Alex didn’t miss it.

She didn’t comment, either.

There would be time for that later.

(Probably. Hopefully.)

Right now—

BANG.

The door caved inward another inch.

Alex hissed between her teeth. “Time’s up. MOVE!”

Kara pushed off the wall, leaning heavily into Lena.

The world reeled, blurred, steadied.

She exhaled through the pain, eyes locked on the dark corridor ahead.

“Okay,” Kara whispered.

“Okay.”

She had Lena on her right.

Alex on her left.

A horde behind them.

Her feet took the first step.

And Kara Danvers — trembling, bleeding, half-conscious — braced herself for the next round of hell.

---

---

**CHAPTER 10 — SCENE 2

“The Map We Didn’t Know We Had”**

POV: Winn → Brainy (with Sam, Cat, Alex entering late)

Tone: urgency, discovery, the first flicker of real hope in days

---

WINN — THE DISCOVERY

Winn had never loved Halcyon’s archive room.

It smelled like a cross between burnt plastic and disappointment, and every piece of tech in it was either half-fried, half-corrupted, or half-crushed by something that had teeth.

But today it felt like the only place left that wasn’t screaming.

The metal door jammed halfway, and Winn had to shove his shoulder into it to get it open. Dust puffed off the top of the server banks in pale gray clouds. His lungs burned with every breath — part smoke inhalation, part adrenaline, part I-should-absolutely-be-lying-down-right-now.

But something was nagging at him.

Something Brainy had said two hours ago, right before the escape hatch slammed:

“The infected aren’t moving randomly anymore. They’re avoiding something.”

Avoiding.

Infected didn’t avoid.

Not unless something scared them more than the living.

Winn dropped to one knee beside a pile of cracked plastic casings and ripped-open wiring. With careful fingers, he started pulling out shattered devices, letting instinct guide his hands.

A warped metal tablet.

A melted handheld sensor.

A Halcyon-branded emergency data slate…

He froze.

A laminated strip stuck to the bottom of the pile — half torn, half burned, but unmistakably labeled:

EVACUATION ROUTE – MODEL C

RESTRICTED ACCESS – ADMINISTRATIVE USE ONLY

Winn’s pulse spiked.

“Oh my god. Oh my god oh my GOD—”

He fumbled with the adhesive, peeling it off the ruin like it was made of gold foil. The map beneath was almost useless — smeared ink, bits missing, parts melted — but the skeleton remained.

Routes.

Tunnels.

Fallback corridors.

A perimeter outline.

And a handwritten annotation in red marker from someone long dead:

“QUARANTINE VALLEY → DO NOT ENTER.”

Winn’s eyes widened.

Not do not enter.

Do not let them enter.

There was a difference.

“BRAAAAINYYYYYY!” Winn yelled, voice cracking into a wheeze. “I NEED YOU—LIKE, NOW—LIKE YESTERDAY—LIKE—OH MY GOD JUST GET IN HERE.”

---

BRAINY — THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH

Brainy arrived like a man reluctant to validate panic.

He ducked under the door frame, tablet in hand, glasses cracked at one corner, hair still coated in debris from the stairwell collapse.

“What level of catastrophic urgency are we assigning to this?” he asked.

Winn shoved the laminated sheet into his hands.

“A ten. A TEN. A ‘this might actually save our asses’ kind of ten.”

Brainy blinked down at the map, eyes tracking corridors like he was scanning a star chart.

“This is the old Halcyon Evacuation Model,” he murmured. “It predates the outbreak by at least seven years.”

“Yeah, keep going,” Winn said, bouncing on his toes.

Brainy flicked open his own tablet, overlaying real-time movement patterns from the infected clusters — the data recorded during the breach, the collapse, the escape, and the past twelve hours of seismic activity.

And then—

The two maps aligned.

Perfectly.

Even in places they shouldn’t have.

Brainy froze.

His throat bobbed.

His voice dropped an octave.

“Oh,” he whispered. “Oh, that’s… that’s very important.”

Winn leaned in. “See the dead zones? Where they avoid?”

Brainy highlighted three regions.

Two small.

One massive.

A basin northeast of campus.

A natural depression with a limited number of entry points.

Something the infected weren’t entering.

Not out of strategy.

Out of instinct.

A chill crept up Brainy’s spine.

“They’re not crossing into the quarantine valley,” he said quietly. “Not even when their pathing should logically push them through.”

“They’re scared of it,” Winn whispered.

Brainy didn’t argue.

He tapped the valley outline, zooming in until it filled the screen:

LOW-ELEVATION BASIN

NORTH RIDGE BARRIER

SINGLE-ACCESS ENTRY

POTENTIAL SHELTER ZONE

Brainy swallowed.

“That valley might be the only place left where the infected refuse to go.”

Winn grinned like he was about to cry. “A safe zone. A REAL safe zone.”

“Possibly,” Brainy corrected. “Emphasis on possibly, potentially, maybe—”

“Brainy. Buddy. Pal. Genius. Stop hedging. We finally caught a damn break.”

---

CAT — THE INTERROGATION

“Why,” Cat Grant announced from the doorway like a deity arriving late to her own sermon, “is no one informing me when life-altering discoveries are being made?”

Winn yelped.

Brainy flinched.