"Oh, this is nostalgic," says Oreo as we step out into a garbage-sorting area. It's packed with hazardous-waste bins and other detritus—sealed bags of old lab supplies are scattered everywhere. "That way," says Oreo, pointing to another door. There are several leading off from this room, but apparently the doors from waste-disposal bays in scientific buildings look the same everywhere. He's right again, anyway. This one lets us out on the other side of those big glass doors. It's a little eerie to see the Anport van still parked outside with Sleepwalkers shambling past it, like at any moment, one will decide to smash in its windows and contaminate the inside, leaving us stranded. None of that happens, of course. I've just watched too many zombie movies.

The stairs of the building are unlocked. Ember proves she's a beast by beating all of us to the almost-top floor, where Oreo pinpointed the address of the scientific team. I come close to overtaking her when Ditzy gets distracted by a brightly hazard-signed lab on floor seventeen. 

"No," I say.

"It's been seven weeks. Even most viruses die without a host by then."

"I don't care. We are not opening the hermetically sealed biohazard laboratory in the top-tier university science building whose other inhabitants started a Sleeper apocalypse."

"Can I just see if it's unlocked?"

"Why?"

"In case we need somewhere to escape the Redding." She smiles as brightly as the neon-yellow warning signs. I am not convinced. "If air can't get in, water can't, either."

She just wants to see the inside of the forbidden room. I should have seen this coming. Ditzy takes warning signs as a challenge, not a hint.

"My answer is no," I repeat, then stop dead at the faintest ticking sound in the wall beside us. We both fall silent, listening.

"Pipes," says Ditzy.

"Redding activity, or just cooling?"

"Use your Redding-sense."

I keep forgetting I have that. The wall and pipes do give off a signal, but it's faint. The ticking seems to be a standard case of building-cooling at the end of the day—we are on the side that would have faced the sun an hour ago. Now that I'm paying attention, though, I notice something else. There's a thin line of Redding in these pipes, but past it is another, then past that, another. There are pipes running through these walls like spiderweb, and with the door we're standing beside, it suddenly makes sense. Labs need water. Lots of water. If there are high-end labs like this one all over, this building could be a highway for the Redding if it wants to come for us. I brief Ditzy on what I find, then pull her away. This time, she doesn't protest.

We catch up to the others on the twenty-ninth floor, in front of a more office-style lab door. It's locked. Ember kicks it in, making Oreo wince.

"Don't break their experiments," he says.

"I'll break anything I have to to get this thing off my lawn." Ember tracks down a rolling chair and deposits him in it. "Your wheelchair."

He thanks her and scoots off, pushing off the counters to propel himself. "Gather the laptops," he calls back to us as he vanishes down the nearest aisle.

Ember waves to Ditzy, who empties our solar charger and Oreo's onto a counter. We fan out. It's evening now, and the red light that bounces off the next-door apartment block isn't enough to illuminate the lab. We click on flashlights instead. I feel like a burglar. So do the others, apparently: Calico J jumps like a squirrel every time he bumps into something, Patrick touches nothing at all, and Ditzy is obviously enjoying herself.

My first aisle search takes me to the windows. Light outside catches my attention. That next-door apartment block still has electricity, a haunting reminder that for all that's happened since Red Thursday, it's only been seven weeks. The grid here isn't down yet. The building's patchwork of homey yellow windows illuminates a laptop on the counter beside me. I bring it back to the charging station. Patrick and Oreo have already revived a different one. Patrick slips a hand over its USB port. It's so surreptitious, I can't even discern what he's doing before he unplugs something with a near-imperceptible flick. So that's how he gets into devices.

Sure enough, a few more clicks and a burst of typing takes him to the computer's desktop. Oreo leans over his shoulder as they take turns scrolling and clicking through its files. Searching for the photos that the media redacted fifteen years ago. Photos of the thing that set a ticking time bomb for this whole apocalypse. A name on a plinth at the bottom of the world.

Laptops drain our solar chargers much faster than phones do, so we don't have much time on each computer. After a brief conferral, Patrick lifts his head. "Does anyone here have cell service?"

Nobody does. This doesn't stop Patrick, who just shrugs and then goes down some computer rabbit hole with a snippet of code in a black box on the screen instead. Offline storage of the computer's online drives, from what I hear of the conversation.

The first laptop yields nothing. Patrick and Oreo switch to another and repeat the process. Ember kicks boxes out of the way to investigate a printer in one corner of the lab. Calico J finds what we're pretty sure is the last laptop. Five in total. Patrick and Oreo are faster this time, clearing the second laptop and starting on a third. The first solar charger is dangerously low. I check the door and walls for Redding-signals, then the windows on a nervous compulsion. I can't tell if the signals are stronger than before. At least there are no Sleepers here.

A curse from the laptop table: the first solar charger has died. Ditzy joins Ember at the printer. Both whoop as it whirrs to life. "We can print if we need to," calls Ember over her shoulder. "It's Bluetooth-enabled."

"And half-full battery," confirms Ditzy. "It put itself to sleep instead of dying."

I run into Calico J at the lab's far end. He's combing shelves for something that definitely isn't laptops.

"I'm looking for a dictionary," he says when I give him a quizzical look. "If they were doing translation work in here before Red Thursday, they probably have at least one."

I've never been more grateful for my teammates and their respective brains and skills. I add myself to Calico J's search. In a minute, Ember and Ditzy join us. We find a handful of papers with similar symbols to the ones Oreo's been studying, and then Ditzy hits the jackpot: a whole stapled stack with notes for translation. We're on our way back to the charging table when Patrick leaps to his feet, laptop in hand. Oreo scoot-races him to the printer. They found something. And in that moment, a flicker in my peripheral vision draws my eye to the windows.

A light in the building across from us goes out.

It's right at the bottom. Several long seconds later, another follows it, then all three on the same floor.

"Guys?" I say. "It's coming."

The printer whirrs to life. The blackout is speeding up. I tune in to the Redding. It's is on the move both across from and below us. It's in the pipes, pulsing up the tentacles it used to infiltrate this building. I run to another window and realize with a gut-clenching shock that the two buildings are connected. There's a catwalk between them. The moment the Redding reaches this, I feel it slither across towards us, doubling the amount in our walls.

"Got it!" shouts Patrick.

He snatches something from the printer just as Oreo doubles over with a retching sound. He slips off his chair. My body leaps into motion; in seconds, I'm at his side, and Ember is at mine, and I'm close enough to realize that Oreo is choking.

"Ānforlǣt!" shouts Ember, voice going shrill. "You fucker! Let him go!"

Oreo gasps, coughs, and spits up Redding. Ember grabs him. Tendrils of Redding slither back from where he lay a moment before. It got in. It's reached us. Ember drags Oreo out of reach, but the Redding isn't done with him. His face twists in pain as he clings to Ember for dear life, body twitching. He's not protected the same way as the rest of us. If there's still Redding in his body, and if it has any sentient capacity to resist Ember's order to leave, it can still hurt him. It has that capacity. It can resist. And it's making the most of it.

And because Oreo's taking damage, Ember is panicking like any sane person would, and the Redding just tried to kill Oreo by choking him, my friends are scared, too. Calico J's jumped on a chair. Ditzy spins on the spot, eyes wild and flail gripped tight as she looks for something to hit. Patrick clutches the print-out to his chest and backs towards the middle of the room as the Redding rears up through the walls. And because I am the kind of person who takes initiative in situations where everything is falling apart, I crouch on the floor and drum the shortest word that might have an impact.

STOP

The Redding-surge slows dramatically. I feel it straining against the order, compelled to obey but conscious and powerful enough to resist. I jump back as something slaps my palm. Tendrils of Redding retreat from my ankle. I grit my teeth. Right now, we have both everything and nothing to lose.

"Patrick! Ditzy! J!" I shout. "Floor seventeen!"

The Redding is attacking Oreo because we found its name, and he's the easiest to kill. We need to draw it off. I sprint for the door, and my friends obey without question. This might well be the stupidest thing I've ever done, but it might also be the smartest, and right now isn't the time to parse out which. The hermetically sealed biohazard lab on floor seventeen just needs to hold off the Redding long enough for us to decode what's on the paper Patrick is holding using the ones Calico J still has clenched in his hand. If that doesn't stop the Redding, nothing will.

We thunder down the stairs. The whole staircase has filled with a nasty slithering, hissing sound as Redding bursts the pipes and attacks the insides of the walls. A tendril shoots beneath my foot. I grab the railing just in time. At floor twenty, Ditzy takes the next stair-flight in a spectacular leap and vanishes ahead. By the time we skid onto the seventeenth landing, she's got the door open. She shouts us through. I throw my shoulder next to hers as we slam the door behind us. Ditzy figures out the sealing mechanism just as the first tendril of Redding forces itself in through the cracks. The slam of a sealing handle severs it from its source. I stomp on it as it wriggles pathetically on the floor.

"Other side of the room," I pant. "As far as possible. Patrick, you've got the papers?"

He does. In a moment more, we've gathered around the paper that might yet cost Oreo his life—or all of us ours, along with the rest of humanity. Patrick's print-out bears a single picture: a stone plinth, ten feet wide and engraved with Old Kjóll lettering. It's a single word, I think, though it's probably thirty letters long. This is going to take a while.

"It's now or never, guys," I say, as Calico J drops the translation booklet beside the page. "Let's see how this thing likes the sound of its own name."

This book is complete, and we're down to the last four chapters here. Looking for something to jump to when you finish reading? I have another chaotic Sapphic Horror novel that you might like. It's Gothic and Dark Academia, but has very similar energy to Red Rover overall.

Interested? Head over to my profile at SmokeAndOranges and find The Book of Miranda! It's complete and fully edited.