I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 212: north it is.

Though. I climbed up beside her.

The city stretched out below us, smoke threads still rising in the distance, the two moons sitting pale against all that overdone blue. She leaned sideways until her head found my shoulder, and her hand found mine again, fingers curling around it and gripping tight.

I sat there with her weight against me, the wind still moving steady across the rooftop, and let my mind wander somewhere it probably shouldn’t have.

Wait hold on. Looking down at the dark hair resting against my arm. I think I actually figured this out.

The mornings— the confusion, the trembling, the shenanigans, the complete lack of memory about anything that had happened the day before.

And then the switch, sudden and total, somewhere in the evening or whenever the trigger actually was, back to the sharp, calculating, real version of her.

Morning Jisoo doesn’t remember the deaths. Doesn’t remember any of it. But night Jisoo does— because night Jisoo is the real one. The actual one. The one who’s been with me the whole time, kinda obvious but.

I looked down at our hands.

I almost pulled mine back.

Some instinct, some leftover survival reflex from an entire day of nearly dying, told me that holding hands with someone who’d slit her own throat 73 times without flinching was probably not the safest hobby I could pick up.

But I left it where it was.

Yeah, whatever happens I don’t care. Settling back against the barrier, the wind pulling gently at both of us. She could probably kill me without trying very hard.

Worth it, though.

Beside me, Jisoo’s grip loosened just slightly— not letting go, just relaxing, she let out a long, quiet breath against my shoulder, the kind that sounded like something in her had finally stopped bracing for a second.

Neither of us said anything else for a while. The smoke kept rising somewhere far off. The moons kept hanging there, doing nothing, asking nothing. And for just a little while, none of it felt urgent at all.

We sat there for a long while, longer than either of us probably should have given everything still moving around down on the streets, but nobody made the first move to get up.

Hah... of course it’s because they can’t see us.

The wind kept pulling at us in slow waves, and somewhere out past the smoke and the broken bridges, that giraffe thing was probably still out there doing whatever giraffe things did with their day.I didn’t look for it again. I just sat there with Jisoo’s hand in mine and let my shoulder hold whatever weight she wanted to put on it.

"Hey," she said eventually, voice quiet, still leaning into me. "Thanks for not weirding out about the hand thing."

"I’m a little freaked out,"

"You hid it well."

"I’m trying very hard right now."

She laughed at that, soft.I looked down at our hands again and didn’t pull away, mostly because pulling away felt like it would matter more than just leaving things as they were.

She didn’t say anything else for a bit. Just sat there breathing slow, watching the smoke columns bend and drift with the wind, watching the two moons do absolutely nothing useful in the sky.

Eventually I broke it. "We should probably actually plan something. Since, you know. We have an actual lead now."

Jisoo straightened up a little, though she kept her hand where it was. "Right. The wall thing."

"Four walls, one exit, exit somewhere in the middle of whichever wall it’s on." I rubbed the back of my neck with my free hand. "That’s not exactly specific."

"It’s more than we had an hour ago." She tilted her head, thinking, the sharp focus creeping back into her voice even with her head still half resting against me.

"Four directions. We can’t check all of them blind, that’d take forever and we’d be walking through god knows how much of that stuff out there for nothing and... I’m scared you know?"

I nodded.

She nodded toward the city, toward the smoke and the wandering monster shapes. "We need to pick a direction with actual reasoning behind it, not just guessing."

"Or," I said, "we use the binoculars from up here and actually look at all four walls before we do anything."

She blinked, then looked at me like I’d said something obvious that she should’ve thought of first, which, fair, I kind of had. "Okay. Uh... it’s miles away you know? You can’t see it."

"I have my way."

"Kay, kay I trust you (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ."

We got up together, her hand slipping out of mine slowly, neither of us in a rush about it.

I grabbed the binoculars off the ledge where I’d set them down earlier and walked to the edge of the roof, doing a full slow turn this time instead of just glancing in each direction like before.

North first.

The wall sat there pale and distant, a thin grey line cutting straight across the horizon, broken in the middle by something that might have been a gap or might have just been distance messing with my eyes.

I couldn’t tell for sure.

East next.

Same kind of wall, same kind of distance, no obvious break that I could make out.

South, same story. West, same.

"Anything?" Jisoo asked, arms crossed, watching me work through the full circle.

"Maybe north. There’s something in the middle that looks different, but it could just be the haze playing tricks." I lowered the binoculars and rubbed my eyes before trying again, longer this time, holding steady on the northern wall and waiting for the smoke or whatever was distorting the air to settle.

There.

A shape~ square, sitting right in the center of the wall where the system’s hint said the exit should be.

I couldn’t make out details from this far, but it stood out from the flat grey stretch around it... "Yeah. North has something. Structure of some kind, dead center."

"You’re playing with me." She said, "It’s like... thousand of miles away plus there’s ALOT of building no way you’ll see what’s over there."

"You’re tight."

Jisoo held her hand out for the binoculars and I passed them over.

She took a while looking, much longer than I had. "Yep, I don’t see anything with this buildings around," She lowered the binoculars and looked at me. "But it’s the only thing we’ve got, so. (￣ー￣)"

"Well, north it is."