Chapter 260: The Massacre.
I slid my right hand under Melissa’s thighs and my left arm behind her back, lifting her carefully off the blood-slick floor. Her body was light, almost weightless, but her head lolled against my shoulder for a second before she forced it upright with a small, sharp inhale.
The room stayed sealed in silence. Somewhere beyond these walls the rally was still happening—or I assumed it was—because none of the noise reached us. That was how the place had been built. Whatever happened inside stayed inside. Whatever happened outside stayed out.
Code was already gone. I wasn’t especially worried about the crowd. If anyone stood in the way, he’d clear it the same way he cleared everything else.
My boot caught a body. I stumbled, weight shifting hard, and corrected instantly, tightening my arms so Melissa wouldn’t feel the jolt. I carried her to the doorway where Bagins had greeted us earlier.
Outside stopped me cold. The entire compound was down.
Hundreds of naked bodies lay scattered across the sand and manicured lawns under the brutal afternoon sun. It hadn’t been quick. I could read the story in every frozen posture. Bodies pointed toward the gate, toward the walls, toward anywhere that wasn’t here—cut down mid-stride, momentum still locked in outstretched arms and open mouths. Some had fallen face-first, fingers clawing at the dirt.
Others were tangled together where they’d tried to make a stand: arms raised, hands open, the postures of people who had turned to fight something and found only a man moving through them faster than they could raise a defense. Blood had already begun to darken and dry in long, irregular trails across the ground.
"What the hell." Melissa shifted in my arms, fingers tightening against my chest as she took it in. Her voice was barely above a whisper. "Holy shit."
Code had walked through all of them to reach us inside. This was the path he’d made. Whatever crowd I’d been bracing to push through no longer existed.
I carried her forward, stepping carefully between the bodies. My eyes moved across the dead, trying to make sense of the scale. There was no order to any of it. Some face-up, eyes open to the sun. Some face-down. Some turned to the side, mouths still open mid-scream. Heads pointed in every direction. The heat was already doing its work—flies had begun to gather.
Most of the faces belonged to strangers. Then I recognized one.
Mr. Kim—the man who’d been shouting from the platform—lay face-up to the sun, eyes still open, mouth frozen mid-word, a clean dark line across his throat.
"What is he?" Melissa asked, her voice low and tight. She watched Code moving ahead of us toward the gate, unhurried, still whistling that same tuneless song, black clothes stark against the sea of bare skin.
I didn’t answer. I still didn’t have one. Sophia had called him a level-four blade manifestor and handed him to Bala like a useful tool. All I knew for certain was that he was dangerous in a way that didn’t fit on any scale—and that I’d just spent the one favor I’d ever get from him.
It only occurred to me now that I’d never asked how Code got into the naked mansion without stripping at the gate like the rest of us.
The answer was spread across the yard in front of me. He hadn’t followed the rule. He’d walked in dressed and killed.
I carried Melissa through the dead. Her eyes stayed locked on Code the entire way, working at him, trying to understand. Mine didn’t. He wasn’t what I was carrying out of this house. What I was carrying was a conversation I meant to have the moment we were back at headquarters.
Mercury sat on a chair in the shade of the gate. She watched Code pass her and walk out through it without a word, then turned her eyes to us. For once the usual sharp amusement in her face had thinned into something closer to unease.
"I’m alright now," Melissa said against my chest. "You can put me down."
"You sure?"
"Yes. My body regenerates." A pause. Her fingers flexed against my arm. "It’s nearly done."
I set her down slowly, keeping a hand at her waist until her legs took the weight. She swayed once, recovered with a sharp intake of breath, and we crossed the last stretch to Mercury. Mercury stood as we reached her, looking as unsettled as I’d ever seen her—which on Mercury still came out looking like a crooked smile that didn’t quite land.
"You seen what your psycho did?" She said it with a laugh that never fully committed, eyes flicking over the bodies behind us.
"We’ll talk about it later." I looked past her toward the gate. "Where is he?"
"Left the same way he came." She looked the two of us over, eyes lingering on the blood still streaking our skin and the bruises already darkening across our chests and faces. "And you both look like absolute shit. Clean up before you get in my car." She pointed at a can of water by the doorway.
We went to it and started working the blood off ourselves in silence. The water ran red over our hands and down our arms. The naked mansion was already filing itself into the list of things I wanted out of my head and knew would stay regardless.
Mercury went to bring the car around while we washed.
It was waiting when we finished. Melissa and I both went for the back seat without discussing it. Mercury pulled us away. In the rearview mirror the compound and its dead shrank behind us as we dressed in silence, the road stretching out ahead.
Melissa’s comms vibrated against her hip as she pulled her shirt on. She answered it without looking, lifting it to her ear.
"I’ve never seen anything like that in my life," Mercury said from the front seat, eyes flicking to us in the rearview mirror. Melissa said nothing beside me, listening intently to whoever was on the line, her face unreadable.
"He came to murder. That’s the whole of it." Mercury kept talking, not caring that her voice was carrying straight into Melissa’s call. "And Code’s insane, but even Code doesn’t do what he just did back there unless—"
She stopped herself mid-sentence. It was the exact thought I’d been circling since we walked out of the compound.
Melissa lowered the comms slowly to her lap. Her fingers tightened around it for a second before she spoke.
"The strays have refused the abilities," she said.