Chapter 312: [You don’t have to be here.]
Mercury took him off his feet and the bazooka went down with him, clattering across the floor between a hundred pairs of legs. The sound of the metal striking concrete was sharp and short and immediately swallowed by the rising roar of the room.
I was already down.
My hand found Venna’s arm and I got her up against me while I watched the two men on the floor in front of the crowd, both of them still clawing at their own throats, both of them running out of whatever they had left. Bagins’ face had gone dark under the mesh. The bearded man’s legs kicked once and then slowed.
The crowd was already closing the distance—faces turning, weapons rising, the particular focused silence of people who had just been given a reason.
The room was closing in on us.
And Trapper had just killed all four of us, because getting out of this building meant crossing the entire factory floor from the front to the very back, through every single one of them. The arithmetic was simple and completely against us.
"Let’s go."
I got Venna up into my arms. Her weight settled against my chest, familiar, absolute.
The tattooed boy was down too, wrapped in mesh, kicking. The ink on his neck stood out dark against the sudden pallor of his skin. Mercury was mid-fight with the bazooka man, the two of them going at each other on the floor with people stepping over them—boots, legs, the continuous shifting of a crowd that had not yet decided which direction the violence was supposed to travel.
I looked at her once.
She can handle herself. She’s been handling herself since before I met her.
And I made the decision and hated it.
Venna first. Mercury would understand it better than anybody alive, and she’d have made the same call, and she’d never once let me forget it. The distance was too far and there were too many bodies between us, and I wasn’t putting charge through forty people to reach her.
Trapper was throwing nets into the crowd on both sides now, dropping them in twos and threes as they came at him, buying seconds he had no plan for. The mesh spun out in dark, weighted arcs. Bodies went down. The hard light caught the edges of the nets and threw thin, intersecting shadows across the concrete as more of them formed.
I got to my feet with Venna against my chest. The weight of her pulled at my shoulders. The crowd was already denser ahead of us—faces, weapons, the particular focused silence of people who had just watched their leaders go down and were deciding what to do about it.
Linn was already at the office doorway, one hand on the frame. Her boots were set. Her body was already half-turned toward the corridor beyond.
Something white slammed into her.
It came out of the crowd fast and flat—a sheet of force, or light, or something that had no name I could use—and took her off her feet entirely. Her body left the ground. The doorway frame flashed past her.
I got half a step before the same thing hit me and Venna together.
The world went white.
That was the last thing I saw.
****
My eyes opened on a ceiling full of cobwebs.
Not the office. A different room, smaller, colder, the air different—damp, carrying the particular stillness of a place that had been empty for a long time before tonight. The cobwebs hung in long, undisturbed sheets from the corners, grey against the low yellow light of a single working bulb. The walls were bare concrete, stained with old water marks that ran down in irregular dark maps.
My hands were tied behind me. The rope was coarser than the first set, the knots tighter. My legs were chained at the ankle to something I couldn’t see—metal, cold, the length of it short enough that my first experimental pull told me everything I needed to know about how far I could move.
I turned my head.
Trapper was in the far corner, still out, his broken face turned toward the wall. Blood had dried dark along the side of his mouth and across the bridge of his nose. His chest rose and fell in short, uneven pulls. The same yellow light laid him in uneven colour and left the rest of the corner in shadow.
[ You don’t have to be here. ]
Now you speak.
[ You should be making for the headquarters. It remains the only route to stopping the awakening. ]
The awakening. I pulled once against the chain to learn its length. The metal answered with a short, hard sound that travelled up through the concrete. I’m chained to a floor in a factory. Let’s handle this first.
[ This is also a distraction. The apocalypse is not your task. ]
It had no idea what it was talking about.
My mind wasn’t on the awakening and it wasn’t on the infection either. It was on the two women who weren’t in this room with me. The absence of them sat heavier than the chain.
"Where the fuck am I?"
Mercury’s voice came through the wall. The sound was clear, close, the particular clarity of thin construction and no insulation. Relief arrived in a single clean wave and settled under my ribs beside the cold of the choice I’d made on the factory floor.
I rolled onto my side and worked my way across the floor on my shoulder and hip until I reached it. The concrete was cold. The walls were thin, thin enough that I’d heard her without asking the system for anything. My bound wrists flexed against the rope and found no give.
"Mercury."
"Bram."
"They’ve got you too?"
"Yes. All thanks to you and your stupid long chinned friend."
That got a laugh out of me I wasn’t expecting. The sound left my mouth rough and short and completely without dignity. It bounced once off the concrete and died.
"Is Venna in there?"
"Who’s Venna?" A pause. The silence on the other side of the wall carried the particular quality of someone looking. "The blue haired girl, or this other one with no underwear on?"
"Blue hair. Is she okay?"
"Still out. But breathing fine."
"Okay." I let my forehead rest against the wall. The contact was the closest thing to rest either of us was going to get. "Thank you, Mercury."
"Fuck you, Bram."
The door of my room opened.
I turned my head.
Bagins stood in it with four of his men behind him. The light from the corridor laid him in hard relief.
The four men behind him carried the particular stillness of people who had already decided how this conversation was going to end if it went wrong.
I had watched that man die twice now. Watched a blade open his throat on a marble floor. Watched a net close on his neck while a room full of people screamed his name.
He walked in and closed the door behind him. The soft click of the latch was the only sound in the room for a second. The four men stayed on the other side of it. The yellow light narrowed to the single bulb above us. Bagins’ shadow stretched long across the concrete between us and stopped at the edge of the chain.