JESSI.
The pounding hadn't stopped — it had just changed rhythm. Desperate, uneven, pleading. The kind that didn't feel like a threat, but like a warning.
The child outside had their hands pressed to the glass now. Just the fingertips, shaking slightly. They weren't crying. They weren't screaming. Just… waiting.
Jessi's voice cut through the room like a crack in stone.
"We can't just leave them out there."
No one answered.
Josh stared at the monitor, jaw tight. Jules didn't move. Boris stood like stone at the perimeter feed, one hand wrapped around his wrist like he needed to tether himself.
"I get it," Jessi continued. "We can't let everyone in. I understand the risk. But it's a kid. One kid."
"With how many people?" Jules asked, calm and cold. "You don't think the rest follow once they see us open the door for one? We open that lock, and it becomes permission."
"So we do nothing? We watch a child die outside a glass door while we sip tea and monitor rations?"
Josh flinched at that — just slightly.
Jules stood straighter.
"You think I want that?"
"I think you've prepared so hard for what's coming that you forgot what we're fighting to keep."
"We're fighting to stay alive."
"We're fighting to stay human," Jessi snapped.
Silence.
Luna whined softly at Jessi's feet. Even Houdini crept closer, ears low, sensing the fracture forming in the center of the room.
Josh finally spoke.
"If we let one in," he said slowly, "we set a precedent. Everyone out there is watching — whether we know it or not. If they think there's a way in, they'll try harder. Get violent. We can't risk that."
"So what, Josh? We leave a kid to die because we're afraid of a crowd?"
"I'm afraid of what a crowd does when they get hungry. When they see weakness."
Jessi looked at him, eyes wide, heart cracked open.
"That's not weakness. That's compassion."
Jules crossed her arms.
"Compassion doesn't hold the door when they torch the building from the bottom floor."
"Compassion doesn't make me slit the kid's throat after they let their uncle in with a concealed weapon," Boris added, voice low, heavy. "I've seen what panic looks like up close. It starts small."
Jessi looked at all of them, stunned. Betrayed.
"You're all just going to sit here while a child dies?"
Josh didn't answer.
He walked to the console, checked the readout.Four bodies still outside. The fifth — the child — now slumped at the base of the door. Still breathing. Barely.
"No," he said finally. "I'll sit here and watch all of us die if we make the wrong choice."
"Then this place isn't a sanctuary," Jessi whispered. "It's a tomb with electricity."
She turned and walked out, Luna at her heels.
The rest of them stayed behind.
And the fists on the glass kept pounding.
The hallway was too quiet.
Her footsteps echoed against reinforced concrete as she walked faster than she meant to — past the library, past the storage unit-turned-infirmary, past the vault-grade doors that were meant to keep death out.
But right now, they felt like they were holding her in.
Luna trotted behind her, tail down, glancing back every few seconds like she wasn't sure if they were playing or running away.
Jessi turned into one of the side lounges — just a small rec room that no one used, with mismatched chairs and a window that had long since been blacked out.
She sank to the floor, back to the wall, fingers shaking as she wiped at her eyes like it might change something.
Luna curled beside her with a quiet huff.
"They're going to let that kid die," she whispered, barely able to say it aloud. "And I can't stop it."
The silence answered her.
She stared at the wall for a long time.
Then reached up and ripped the blackout cover off the window.
For the first time in days, she could see the city.
Or rather, the absence of it — dark towers silhouetted by flashes of lightning, the broken skeleton of Toronto stretching in every direction. There were no headlights. No neon signs. Just the void. And somewhere in that void, five people stood outside the door she lived behind.
And one of them was a child.
"You were supposed to be the good guy, Josh," she muttered, voice cracking. "You were supposed to save people."
She looked down at Luna.
"They talk about survival like it's a science. Like there's math to it. But no one's calculating what it costs to stay this cold."
Luna whined softly and nudged her hand.
Jessi leaned her head back, eyes burning.
Part of her wanted to march straight to the entrance and open the damn door. Consequences be damned. If they were going to fall apart, she wanted it to be for the right reasons.
But another part — the part that still remembered law school drills and evacuation protocols and trauma lectures from Boris — knew Jules wasn't wrong.
Still.
"One child," she said to the storm. "Just one."