Arkady’s long winded monologue didn’t help us with getting off that floor. There didn’t seem to be an end everywhere. Even with rest breaks, the walking was wearing Sky and Me down.

Adrenaline quickly replaced that exhaustion when Sky froze and said, “We need to get out of here.” She didn’t go into specifics, but it wasn’t hard to infer what she was talking about. It had been dark inside the building ever since the storm clouds came in. But now the shadows were becoming darker, and growing longer. It looked like they were moving, slowly covering the room in a wall of blackness. Arkady grabbed a paperweight from a desk and tossed it into the shadows. I waited for the sound of it hitting the ground, but there was nothing. Like it had just disappeared.

A: “Well, that certainly doesn’t look like a friendly development.”

We ran to the window, where there was more light. The shadows continued spreading toward us, leaving everything in darkness. I tried being rational, telling myself that it was just darkness, that it couldn’t hurt me, but that was a failure at reassurance. Normal darkness does not move on its own. Nor does it swallow up all light around it like a black hole.

Further down, the window was broken by a tree that had grown through it. Arkady ran over to check it out, and said we could climb it to another floor. I was strongly against that idea, because climbing up the side of a skyscraper is a terrible plan. But I didn’t get a chance to argue for long; Sky was so panicked by the darkness that she practically jumped through the window and started climbing up as fast as she could. I had to climb after he, and Arkady quickly followed me.

This was one of those times where I hate being right, because climbing that tree was a horrible idea. The storm was worse than it had looked from the inside. The black rain was coming down so hard it was difficult to breathe without swallowing it, and the wind felt like it was trying to blow me off. At least there was too much fog below us for me to see how high up we were. The tree grew along the side of the building for two floors before a large branch had torn another hole in the windows, which was where I presumed Sky was climbing toward. I’m no climber, but I was too busy being terrified that something would happen to Sky to worry about that.

We had almost reached the broken window when things got worse. The bark on the trees began to shift so it looked like it was covered in faces. The faces opened their mouths, and let out a horrible scream. I froze up with fear, but they must have caused Sky to let go, because I saw her falling past me a moment later. I looked down just as Arkady lunged to catch her. He did manage to grab her hand, but then he fell as well, and they both disappeared into the fog.

It was difficult to see while hanging off the side of the tree, so I climbed the last few feet through the broken window, and started looking for them once I was on solid ground. I don’t know what I was looking for, really. I’d seen them fall, and it was impossible to look through the fog. And I thought, that was it. This is how I lose her. Not taken by the Boss, not killed by Arkady, she just falls to her death. And I couldn’t do anything to stop it.

As I was thinking that, a hand came out of the fog, grabbing onto a branch. Arkady pulled himself out of the fog, with Sky hanging onto his back. He must have caught onto something below the fog, and started climbing back up. With Sky, it was taking him much longer to climb. But he was still doing it, slowly regaining ground.

Once again, things got worse when he neared the top. The faces on the tree stopped screaming, and instead started biting, viciously tearing into Arkady’s hands. For a moment I thought he was going to fall, but he kept coming, even as they drew blood. When he got near the window, I grabbed Sky, and pulled her inside. Arkady started to come in as well, but all the blood on his hands caused his grip to slip, and he started falling.

If I’m going to be honest, I have to say that I was completely willing to let him fall. It would have solved a lot of our problems. (Aw, nice to see you care so much. –Arkady) Sky, however, seems more forgiving than me. As soon as Arkady started to fall, she grabbed his arm. And since Sky is a small, malnourished girl, and Arkady is a huge, muscular guy, there was no way she could pull him up. So long as she kept holding on, she was going to get dragged back down. There was no way I was letting her fall again, so I grabbed Arkady’s other arm, and helped pull him back up. I really hope that bit of mercy doesn’t come back to bite us later.

This floor seems normal. Compared to the last one, that is. It still looks like a hybrid swamp/corporate office, but it’s regular sized, and the shadows aren’t trying to kill us. Now we only have to deal with the fact that most of us feel like we are about to collapse with exhaustion and sleep for a few weeks.

Good night.