Chapter 71: The Diesel Was the Bait

Inside the Survival Space, Ethan watched the alley through the boundary.

The Tiger King was working.

Every roar rolled down the brick and came back smaller. Every swipe sent another body across the pavement, arms loose, guns spinning off into the dark. Ray’s men had found chains somewhere. They got the first set around a foreleg. The beast tore through it like rotten rope. The second lasted longer. A third caught the hind leg, and three men put their weight on it, boots skidding, mouths open.

The Tiger King dragged them. Three meters. Then more. One let go. One didn’t, and paid for it.

Ethan waited. He didn’t rush the door. He watched until the chains, the guns, and the fear were all pointed at the same amber eyes.

Then he stepped out.

His boots hit the alley grit. Teleportation took him before the beast could turn its head. The battlefield folded. Gone.

He came back inside Ray’s building, first floor, lamps still burning, nobody home. The card game was three stories up and currently dying in the street.

"Let’s see what you were selling."

Kitchen. Front room. A closet that smelled of cigarettes and wet wool. Nothing that mattered. Then the kitchen floor: a metal hatch set into the concrete, thick steel lock, the kind of hardware you didn’t waste on leftovers.

He pulled. The lock didn’t care.

"Sasha."

He brought her out. She looked at the hatch, then at him, and rolled her shoulders once. "Back up."

Both hands on the handle. The strength that had lifted a wardrobe settled into her arms. Tendons stood. The lock groaned, stubborn, and for a second Ethan thought the building would give before the steel did.

Crack.

The lock snapped. The hatch jumped. Diesel smell came up out of the dark, thick and sweet.

"I’ll check it."

He was gone before she could argue.

Concrete under his shoes. The smell was stronger down here, almost a taste. He clicked the flashlight on. The beam walked the walls. Metal drums in two rows. Twenty. Ten stenciled DIESEL. Ten stenciled GASOLINE. Beside them, two generators still in their plastic, tags on, never started.

His chest loosened. "Finally."

He put a hand on the nearest drum and stopped.

Too light.

He cracked the cap. The flashlight showed a dark skin of fuel at the bottom and a lot of air. The next was the same. The next. He went down the row until the hope was gone and the cold was back.

"You’ve got to be kidding me."

He kicked one. It rolled, hollow, and rang off the wall.

So that was the business. A little real fuel on the table. A story about a tank. Desperate people walked in for a drink. The drink did the rest. Ray hadn’t built a reserve. He’d built a door with teeth.

"Diesel as bait." Ethan’s voice was flat. "Smart. Not smart enough."

He took the generators anyway. Plastic and all. Then he was upstairs again.

Sasha stood by an open storage room, one hand on the frame. "Found something."

Four bags of rice against the wall. His rice. The same bags he’d traded for two gallons and a lie. Beside them, half a box of cured meat, strings of sausage, beer, a box of the same unlabeled liquor that had tried to kill him. He looked at it and thought of the greens on the table upstairs. Too fresh. Too much. Somebody in this building could grow food, or knew someone who could. The ceiling had more rooms in it. He didn’t have the minutes.

He stored what was worth storing.

Voices in the street. Ray, raw.

"Damn it, that thing is insane! Twenty men, easy. If it hadn’t already been cut up by those bats, we’d still be in the alley!"

Ethan caught Sasha’s wrist. "In."

She vanished into the Space. He put his back to the wall beside the door, hand empty at his hip. The sword was still on Ray. If the old man walked through tired and looking the wrong way, Ethan meant to take it back. A gun, if one was stupid enough to be close.

Footsteps. Several. They came into the building breathing hard, tracking blood and brick dust.

One more step.

"Ray. Wait."

The goatee. He had stopped. His eyes were on the door, narrow, certain. "There’s killing intent behind it."

Ethan’s mouth tightened. Perception. Some thin little ability that could smell a man who wanted to end you. The wall was done.

He kicked the door.

Bang.

It hit the plaster and bounced. Every head turned.

Ethan stepped through. Ray’s eyes went wide. "You—"

Final teleport. The room blurred. He was at Ray’s hip before the word finished, hand on the sword, other hand ripping a submachine gun off the stunned man beside him. Both went into the Space.

Ray spun. "Get him!"

Already late. Ethan’s outline was thinning. Ray lunged and closed his fingers on air.

Then the roar came through the walls.

Every face in the room lost its color. Ethan saw them in the last second he had — fear, panic, the late understanding that the bait had teeth of its own. He almost felt sorry.

Almost.

He was gone.

Cold familiar air. Sasha’s room. He caught the wall with one hand and stayed there, breathing, until the floor agreed to be under him. The lamp was where they’d left it. The window. The quiet.

Sasha appeared at his shoulder. She turned a full circle. "We’re home?"

"Yeah."

She stared at him. "How far can you do that?"

He didn’t answer right away. Before they’d left, he had set a Space Anchor in this room. Insurance. A door in case the other doors were lies. He hadn’t expected to use it before the night was old.

"Far enough," he said.

He still wasn’t smiling.

The Tiger King sat wrong in his head. The timing. The alley. Every time he thought the trail had broken, the amber eyes were on the other side of a wall. He looked at his arms. Dried blood. Alley dust. A smear on the cuff that wasn’t his.

Could it have marked him?

A scent. A cut he couldn’t see. Something biological the system hadn’t bothered to name. Otherwise the beast was guessing, and it did not hunt like a thing that guessed.

Ethan’s eyes narrowed.

If it could track him, then the next problem wasn’t Ray, or Blaze, or the diesel they didn’t have. It was whatever the Tiger King had left on him. Because the next time those slits found the street outside this window, he didn’t know if there would be another room to vanish into.