Chapter 287: Hope in the Dust
"Fuck you, Max."
I said it to the wall I was leaning on, because there was nobody else in the building to say it to who deserved it.
That was the thing I couldn’t get past.
I’d had peace. Actual peace. For the first time in twenty years I’d had a bed that was mine and a door that locked and a job with a name attached to it, and people. Sherry on the fourth floor. Mercury swearing at me in a car. Bala trusting me with things he shouldn’t have. My life had spent a month quietly assembling itself into something with a shape, something I could have pointed at and called mine.
And a certain Max Donman decided none of it was allowed to continue.
"Fuck you, Max." It came out cracked the second time and I let it. The words sat in the little stone room and didn’t echo. The cool air didn’t care.
Venna didn’t say anything.
That was the kindest thing she could have done and she seemed to know it. She stayed where she was against the opposite wall with her legs pulled up, arms loose around her knees. When one person in a room comes apart, the other one loses the option, and she’d taken the loss without complaining about it. The quiet she gave me was clean and complete.
The stone lay between us where it had landed, one thin white scratch still visible on the glass above it like a single hair of light.
The fridge stood over both of us holding everything we needed and refusing to discuss it.
At least the room was cool. That was the whole of the good news.
"Are we going to die?" she asked.
I didn’t answer.
Because that question had been put to me once before, on a plain. It got answered then. It wasn’t getting answered that way twice.
And if something did finally close the account, it was going to be teeth or a blade or a woman with her hands turned toward the ground. Not an empty stomach. Not while there was a shop across the road with its doors open.
"We have to do something, Bram."
She’d said the thing I’d been holding for an hour. The words landed soft and absolute.
"Yeah." I got myself off the wall. The movement cost more than it should have. "There’s a supermarket directly opposite this building. Doors are open. I saw them from the window."
"Outside." She got her hands under herself. The effort showed in her shoulders. "Bram, that’s not a good idea."
"We’ve run out of good ideas. And you were right this morning. Whatever we do, we do while we can still stand up."
I crossed the room to her. The stone floor was cool under my feet. The heat from the rest of the building pressed against the open doorway like something waiting.
"What about the glass. One more go."
"That glass will take everything we’ve got left and give us a second scratch." I put my hand down and she took it and I hauled her up. Her palm was damp. "We’re done spending on it."
"So what’s the plan?"
"We watch."
****
The reception took the temperature back up the second we walked into it. The air hit like a held breath finally released—hot, still, thick with the day’s accumulated heat. Sweat started again almost immediately.
I found a chair with tall legs and dragged it to the window and got up on it. The wood was warm under my bare feet. Venna took the short one. The one I’d wrecked my arms on trying to break a fridge with. The legs still carried the splinters from the earlier attempt.
Ten out there now. Maybe fewer.
All of them drifting the same direction, unhurried, the way they always move when nothing has given them a reason. One stopped completely and stood facing a wall for a while, head tilted, as if the brick had spoken, and then carried on as though it had remembered something. Their shadows stretched long and wrong across the road.
Then I caught the woman outside the supermarket. She’d stopped moving. Her palms had turned down toward the ground.
And the ground was opening underneath them. A hole widening in the dirt, soil lifting away in a slow spiral and settling around the rim, and her hands never came within a foot of it. The earth simply obeyed. Dust hung in the air above the growing cavity like a private weather system.
"That thing could go through a wall," I said. "Straight through. The only reason we’re alive right now is that there’s nothing left in them to plan with."
Venna didn’t answer.
Nothing came off her either. Her head had gone quiet again, and I’d started to understand what that meant.
I kept my eyes on the woman.
She was the entire reason I hadn’t already gone out there. Nothing infected that touched me survived the electrical body, and I’d proved that five times last night.
But the street out there wasn’t the plain. The plain never had ability users on it. Those things out there had kept everything they had and lost every scrap of control over it, and not one of them needed to get near me to open me up. A hole in the ground. A wall of fire. A body that could hang against brick and wait.
So we sat at a window and waited for a road to empty.
"Who’s Max?" Venna asked out of nowhere, quietly.
"Some weirdo who’s responsible for all of that." I nodded at the glass. The woman was still working the hole, patient and empty.
"How do you know?"
"A friend told me."
Out on the road the woman straightened up, left her hole unfinished, and started staggering off after the others. The cavity she’d made stayed open behind her, a dark mouth in the dirt that nothing filled.
"Your comms still work?" Venna murmured. "Mine died in the night."
"Mhm."
Which meant Sherry could reach me and Venna’s uncle couldn’t reach her, and I filed that somewhere to feel bad about later. The knowledge sat light and heavy at the same time.
I tracked them as they went. Slow. But going. The clusters thinned. The road began to look almost ordinary again, if you ignored the way the remaining figures moved.
Then something flashed.
Sunlight off metal, down in the yard, not far from the building at all. A brief, hard glint that shouldn’t have been there.
Keys. A whole ring of them, half-buried in the dirt.
"Ven."
Hope arrived before I could talk myself out of it. Clean, sharp, almost painful in its suddenness.
"Venna." I came down off the chair. The landing sent a dull jolt up through my knees. "Come and see this."
"What?" She got up. The short chair scraped softly against the floor.
I brought her to the glass and traced the line of it for her with my finger until her eyes landed on it. The keys sat half-buried in the dust, the metal ring catching the light each time the air moved.
"That’s Abuela’s holder," she said.
And something in my chest let go.
Not the shop. Not across the road, past the woman who opened ground with her hands. The yard. Twenty metres, maybe less, and a street that was emptying by the minute.
Okay. You’ve got this, Abram.