By the time they reached the edge of Ryu's territory, nobody was talking anymore.
It wasn't tension. It was habit. Every one of them had learned the same lesson in the first weeks after the system came down, and none of them had ever forgotten it. Out here, in the dark, the loudest person was the first one found.
So they moved the way they'd always moved.
Seul floated a little above the road, her boots a hand's width off the asphalt, so her footsteps made no sound at all. She'd started doing it without thinking months ago, and now it was just how she walked at night. Every so often she reached out with her power and lifted a loose can or a chunk of glass out of someone's path before they could step on it.
