Chapter 282: Dying Naked.
"Do you think there’s water in here?" Venna asked, sitting up on the mattress, still in no hurry to put anything on. The sheet had slipped to her waist.
Morning light from the window laid a pale stripe across her skin, cutting over one bare breast, the soft plane of her stomach, the curve of her hip.
"I should be asking you that." I crossed to the window. "You’ve been coming here your whole life."
It came out sharper than I meant it to.
Something had started building in me since I opened my eyes—a low, patient guilt with nowhere to put itself—and it was coming out sideways at the person who deserved it least. The face of the newborn kept arriving behind my eyes every time I blinked.
"But are we good?" she asked from behind me.
"Yeah."
I reached the window and looked out.
Not many of them. Two that I could see, moving through the yard at the back of the building in slow overlapping circles. The grass was damp with dew. Their feet left dark, irregular tracks.
Which was the wrong thing for them to be doing. The infected don’t circle. They stagger in the direction of the last thing they heard until they hear something else.
They’re patrolling.
Then one of them came off the ground.
Not jumped. Rose. Straight up, feet trailing, drifting a few metres into the air like the ground had simply stopped applying to it. The body hung there, turning slowly, head tilted as if listening to something only it could hear.
An infected with an ability.
Arms came around me from behind.
Venna had crossed the room without me hearing her at all, which said something about how far out of myself I’d gone. She pressed against my back—warm, bare, the soft give of her breasts against my shoulder blades—and looked past my shoulder through the glass.
"What are you watching?"
I shifted to make room for her. The contact was careful on my side, complete on hers.
Her eyes found it. The one hanging in the air over the yard, turning slowly, the other still circling below like a tired dog.
"Do they normally do that?"
"No."
"Then that isn’t the only one." She said it evenly. No panic. Just assessment. "If one of them kept an ability, they all did." A pause. "We might be trapped in here."
"We are trapped."
She turned around inside my arms and kissed me.
I didn’t kiss her back.
The refusal sat in my mouth like something physical. She kissed me again—softer this time, testing—and I still didn’t answer it.
"Ven."
"What?" She pulled back an inch. Her breath was warm against my chin. "Don’t tell me you didn’t like it. The world’s ending out there. We could be enjoying the time we have."
"Not now."
"What does that mean?" She held my eyes, blue and steady and close. The same blue that had looked at me from a newborn’s face a few hours ago. "Did you not want it?"
"It isn’t that."
"Then what?"
Then what is that I watched a baby with your face get lifted into the air by my father last night. And I need to be a long way from you until I know what that means.
"Venna, look." I pulled her in instead of saying it. My arms closed around her back. The contact was easier than the truth. "We’re stuck in a building and we don’t know if there’s food in it. We need to walk the whole place and find out what we have."
"Yeah." She nodded against me. The movement pressed her closer for a second. "You’re right."
"And you need to get dressed."
She stepped back and reached for her underwear. The white fabric looked almost clinical in the morning light. "How does being dressed help me survive?"
"It does. They come through doors. And if they do, you’ll be running for the street exactly as you are." I let a beat land. "Unless you want to share the best thing I’ve ever seen with the entire capital."
"No." She laughed, pulling them on. The sound was real, unguarded. "Do you know what actually scares me most?"
"Tell me."
"Getting bitten while I’m naked." She said it completely straight and it broke both of us. The laugh that left me was short and involuntary and the first clean thing I’d felt since the vision.
"That’s the worst possible version of it," I agreed. "Dying naked."
She got her bra on and spread her arms. The black fabric sat against her skin with the same quiet confidence it had the night before. "Better?"
"Better."
"Okay. Let’s go through the house."
"After you."
"Absolutely not." She stepped behind me. "No chance. What if something grabs my hand?"
I looked at her and had to smile. The expression arrived before I could stop it.
She didn’t talk like the rest of them. Not like Celestine, not like Carrise, not like Eleanor with her centuries stacked behind every sentence. Venna spoke like a person. She was more mortal than May was. The knowledge of that sat differently now that I’d seen the baby.
I went first. She followed.
Something had loosened in her since last night. She’d been careful with me at the burial, careful in the dark room. This morning she was filling the corridor with words—small observations, half-finished thoughts, the ordinary noise of someone who had decided the world ending didn’t mean she had to stop talking.
I opened the first door on the right.
"Bathroom," I said, and closed it. The tiles inside were white and ordinary. A single window let in the same pale light that filled the rest of the house.
"Good. I’m taking a bath."
"A bath is genuinely the last thing on the list."
"I’m taking a bath." She was already moving past me, bare feet soft on the boards. "We’ll search after."
I looked at her.
The blue hair, the easy set of her shoulders, the complete absence of the weight I was carrying.
"Okay."
She opened the door and paused in it.
"You’re welcome to join me."
I didn’t answer.
There were about nine things ahead of bathing on my list. The floating infected. The food. The question of whether Abuela and her grandsons were still somewhere in the building in any form that mattered. The blue eyes that had looked at me from a pair of hands that belonged to my father.
"Girls," I muttered, and kept walking down the corridor.
The boards creaked under my weight. Behind me the bathroom door stayed open, and the sound of water beginning to run reached me a few seconds later, ordinary and completely out of place in a house surrounded by the infected.