Chapter 298: The Visitor.
The cloud sitting over the central city was red and black.
The weather had been behaving wrongly all day. Not storm wrong. Something else. Light coming down the colour of old bruises, and the air holding still in a way that made the whole sky look like it was waiting. The dormitory windows threw the strange light across the floor in long, discoloured rectangles.
School Central had been shut for a week now, but the dormitories still had students in them. Nowhere else to send them, and no roads worth sending them down. The corridors outside were quiet in the particular way of a place that had stopped expecting ordinary days.
Azure sat on her bed folding clothes. The fabric was soft under her hands, ordinary, the kind of task that filled the hours when there was nothing else left to do. Vapour sat opposite her on a small plastic chair he’d dragged in weeks ago and never taken back. The chair creaked whenever he shifted.
It had started with Abram. He’d introduced the two of them, and after he left, Vapour had simply kept coming, every evening, for a conversation before he went back to his wing. The visits had become part of the room’s furniture.
"Do you actually believe the capital’s infested?" He pushed a hand back through his messy ginger hair. The light from the window turned the strands an uneven copper.
"Yeah." Azure kept folding. The motion was steady, automatic.
Her pink hair had grown out. It reached the upper part of her back now, catching the bruised light in soft, unnatural highlights whenever she moved.
She had never especially enjoyed Vapour’s company. He was simply always there, and after a while that had become its own kind of company—the kind that filled silence without asking for anything in return.
"I’ve always wanted to put my finger in an infected’s mouth," he said, and didn’t wait to see how that landed. "I’d be fast about it, obviously. In and out before the teeth closed."
"That is not a good idea."
"Isn’t it? It’s every person’s dream, that. Everyone’s thought about it." He shrugged. The plastic chair complained under the movement. "Anyway. I don’t really believe in zombies."
"Mm."
"Other thing I’d do, given the opportunity, is sleep with one." He said it exactly the way he said everything else. "I’ve been with every type of girl there is. A zombie would round out the collection nicely."
"I have never once seen you speak to another girl." Azure carried the pile to her closet. The floorboards were cool under her bare feet. "Not one. In all this time."
"You don’t know the first thing about me, Zir." He watched her cross the room. His eyes followed the pink of her hair. "But I think you’re a beautiful girl. Regardless of the colour of your skin."
He jumped subjects the way he always did, leaving each one wherever it fell. She’d stopped following him a long time ago. He came, he talked, he left. The pattern had become almost comfortable.
"Are you worried about Bram?"
"A little." She came back to the bed. The mattress dipped under her weight.
"A little?" He sat forward. The chair legs scraped softly. "I’m worried about him constantly. All the time. That’s my baseline."
A knock came on the door.
Once. Just once. Soft. Almost polite.
Azure didn’t hear it. She was back on the bed with the last of the folding, the fabric moving under her fingers in small, precise folds.
Vapour was up and across the room before the sound had finished, pulling it open. The door swung inward on quiet hinges.
Mute stood in the doorway.
The bruised light from the corridor laid him in uneven colour—tall, still, the borrowed body held with a patience that didn’t belong to it. His shadow stretched long across the threshold.
"How can I help you?" Vapour said. The words were ordinary. The posture was open, hand already half-rising in greeting.
Azure lifted her eyes.
And her heart went straight into her throat, ahead of her thoughts, ahead of any part of her that could have explained why. The beat of it was sudden and absolute, a hard, single impact against the inside of her ribs. The air in the room changed temperature.
Mute didn’t say anything. He walked in, and Vapour stepped aside to let him. The movement was almost courteous.
"Okay," Vapour said, and shut the door. The soft click of the latch was the last ordinary sound the room would make.
Mute stopped in the middle of the room and looked at the girl on the bed. The distance between them was only a few steps. The strange light from the window caught the edge of his face and left the rest in soft shadow.
"Hey."
Azure didn’t answer.
She moved her eyes toward the door and back, toward the door and back. Go. Get out. Please. The signal was pure and silent and completely wasted. Her hands had stopped moving on the fabric. The last folded shirt sat unfinished in her lap.
Vapour walked straight past the signal and back into the middle of the room, hand already out, the same easy openness he brought to every conversation.
"Hey," he said, offering it to the tall visitor. The gesture was complete—fingers open, palm up, the kind of greeting that expected nothing worse than a handshake.
Mute moved his hand.
And Vapour’s head came off his shoulders.
The motion was clean. Almost economical. One moment the ginger hair and the open expression, the next a bright, sudden arc of red and the body remaining upright for a fraction of a second longer than it should have—arm still extended, fingers still shaped for the greeting it would never complete.
Then the body understood. It folded. The room turned red across the floor, across the wall, across the small plastic chair he’d been sitting in for months. The sound that accompanied it was wet and final and very short.
Azure made one small movement on the bed. A single shift of weight. Nothing else. Her pink eyes stayed on Mute, tracking him, as he crossed the room toward her without hurrying. The blood had reached the edge of the mattress. The strange light from the window turned the spreading colour almost black at the edges.
"Hey," he said again. "I only came to visit."
She could smell him.
The scent was wrong in a way that had nothing to do with the blood. It was the same wrongness she had known before—old, patient, completely without the ordinary warmth of a living body.
She knew that wrongness.
She had known it before.
The stillness was the same. Even wearing another man’s face, whatever was standing in front of her had brought the same emptiness with it.
She just hadn’t expected him to be alive.
Not in any form. Not in any body. Not ever again.
"Did you miss me?"