Chapter 7: The Creature's First Voice

The flashlight had a range of about twenty feet.

Curtis had told them this when they were still outside the drainage pipe, crouched in the weeds with the morning turning hot around them — had told them with the specific thoroughness of someone who understood that knowing the exact dimensions of your safety margin was not pessimism but arithmetic. Twenty feet of reliable illumination, he'd said, another five or six of degraded light where shapes became suggestions, and then the dark resumed as though the light had never argued with it at all.

They had been standing at the edge of that argument for four minutes now.