The professor nodded, then added a “Yes,” when the sergeant did not look his way.
“Sounds like there’s a ‘but…’ attached to that.”
“Reinforcements,” the corporal said. “Eight, that we know of. Down from nearly a dozen.”
The sergeant grunted. “It was awfully quiet work.”
“She was just here!”
“Well, now she isn’t,” the sergeant said, with a glance at the professor. “Fix that, so we can get out of here.”
From the distance, in the darkness, there came a flash of bluish light, and the sound of a man’s voice — and then another’s — crying out.
“What in the hells is—” the corporal began, only to be cut off by the sharp report from a sidearm, the bullet pinging off the immobile ever-stair between the first and second floor.
The professor, too, dropped his pack, and after a glance at the directory map on the wall, started down the tiled path towards Maiden’s Wear. He turned, when the girl didn’t follow, and held out a hand.
“Come along, girl,” he said.
As with the three dresses he’d picked prior, the girl looked the garment up and down, and then returned her stare to someplace that seemed to always be over the shoulder of whomever was speaking to her.
“Yeah, not particularly practical.” The corporal tossed it aside, atop the pile with the others.
“Last chance,” he told her, and waited a beat. Then another. He had just turned on his heel to resume his march when the howls sprang up. Not close, well beyond the borders of the housing bloc’s grove. But not so far away that a loping run wouldn’t see them breaking through the trees in less than a stretch’s turnover.
