Page 85 of (Mostly) Human Resources

It was pungent and revolting and undeniable: the smell of rotting meat.

Of dead bodies.

She’d never seen or smelled a dead body before, but there’s something in the human psyche that recognizes death like the chill of the wind carrying a storm. It prickles along the spine and grips the heart, whispering,Flee, run, death is near.

But death had come and gone. It’d already touched every inch of that place and left ash and bone in its wake.

Alexys took a step forward. Nic tried to grab her arm to stop her, but she slipped his grip and took another step. There was a horrible squishing crunch as her foot slipped. She didn’t lose her balance, but her gaze swung up to the beast across the room, her breath frozen in her lungs.

The Hollow Walker paused. The rumbling went quiet, and the hairs on her arms stood on end as its head slowly turned to the side.

They still didn’t know if it could see, but it felt like those eyeless pits were staring right at them. Alexys didn’t move, and beside her, Nic pinched his mouth shut. The creature’s bones clicked and scraped together as it turned. One of its skeletal hands scraped along the wall as if to guide its movements while the other clutched a blood-soaked bundle of fabric to its gaping chest. It paused for another painfully long moment before finally turning to shuffle into one of the other tunnels.

Her breath choked out of her, and Alexys heard Nic curse quietly as he slipped past her and into the room. They could face that beast a thousand times, and she would still quake at the sight of it. Alexys took a moment to steady her pulse before looking down to see what she’d stepped on. She was met with instantaneous regret.

At first, the mottled gray thing on the dirt floor didn’t look like much of anything. Alexys almost leaned forward to get a closer look—until she realized there was a thumb attached to it.

Her hand rushed to her mouth in horror, trapping a scream behind it. Her stomach was contracting as she tried to process the details. The harrowing sound, the relatively fresh blood, the length of the forearm, the missing fingers. It all added up to a gruesome picture she couldn’t seem to pull her eyes from.

“Oh my God,” she cried. Nic appeared in front of her and grabbed her face, cradling her cheeks in his warm hands.

“Look at me,” he whispered. His gray eyes stared into hers, refusing to let her look away. “Focus on me. I need you to look at me and listen.”

“But,” Alexys said, her eyes darting to look past him.

He leaned closer, his face filling her field of vision. His grip on her face was gentle but firm.

“I can’t let you look.” He swallowed. Alexys had never seen him look so serious yet so frightened. “They’re dead. They’realldead, Keane, and I can’t let you see that. I don’t know how long they’ve been here.”

She immediately tried to jerk her head free. “No, are you sure? Did you check? Did you check for Elliot? I need to know if Elliot …” She grabbed his wrists and tried to pull free “Ihaveto see if it’s him. I have to!”

“Quiet,” he shushed her and looked over his shoulder. “You can’t.” He pulled her face back to his, eyes locking on hers. “You can’t. They’re …” He closed his eyes tight, thumbs brushing over her cheeks, and she realized he had already seen things that were so much worse than the severed hand. Things he couldn’t erase. Things he was sparing her from.

Alexys slackened her grip on his wrists and kept her gaze fixed on his face.

“They’re what?” she asked quietly.

“They’re in …pieces.” It was a broken whisper, but the words echoed through her.

She wanted to vomit. She wanted to scream, to hit things, and to run. She wanted to find the monster and kill it with her bare hands, and she wanted to curl up in a ball and pretend none of it had ever happened. She wanted to take everything back, to tell, noorderElliot into a different Quadrant, to force him to pack up his things and run like hell. She wanted to scream, at herself, at Nic, at the monster, at …everything.

None of the emotions took hold long enough for her to act on them. They were rushing below the surface of an icy lake, frozen over with the realization that everything had been for nothing.

Rationalization or denial, it didn’t matter which. Her brain kicked into gear as she stepped away from Nic and turned her back on the cavern, avoiding looking in the direction of the corpses. She dropped her backpack to the ground, feeling too hot and too cold andtoo much.

“Maybe he isn’t here,” she said, mostly to herself. “There’s no telling how old the bodies are. Right? There’s no guarantee Elliot even found the mine.”

Alexys was staring without seeing. Her mind provided images of Elliot sitting in the diner, in Opal’s kitchen, in the hotel, anywhere but in that mine. She was in full denial. “He could have gone home. He didn’t tell me about coming out here, so he could have—”

“Keane.”

She rambled on, pacing a few strides back and forth but diligently keeping her eyes trained on the floor. Away from the bodies. Away from the severed hand. Her words grew more frantic, her pace quicker. She wasn’t even aware of what she was saying anymore.

“Keane.” Nic’s voice pulled her from her thoughts. Her head snapped up.

He was standing beside her holding an Entity-issued backpack.

“No.” Alexys snatched the bag from his hands and saw the patch on the side shaped like the state of California. “No, it can’t …”