Chapter 296: The City Roared.
We sat at the window the rest of the day and watched them.
That was the whole of the schedule now. Eat something. Watch the road. Eat something else. Two people in a stone building with cold air behind a locked door, running out of ways to fill the hours. The light outside moved slowly from hard white to something softer and longer.
"They’re going," Venna said, leaning against the frame. Her shoulder pressed the warm glass. The last of the day’s heat still lived in the stone around the window.
The evening had come in while we weren’t paying attention and the street lights had woken up along the road, throwing long yellow stripes across the dirt. The shadows of the buildings stretched and thinned. The infected moved through the bands of light like dark cuts in the brightness.
She was right.
Every one of them was moving the same direction now, in toward the centre of the capital. And the drifting had stopped. No standing in the road facing a wall. No pausing halfway through a step and forgetting what they’d been doing. Whatever was pulling them had turned urgent, and not one of them was holding back from it. Their gait had changed—faster, more committed, the broken rhythm of the infection carrying a new kind of purpose.
"Yeah. They are."
The room had finally come back down to a temperature a person could sit in. The air moved again, faintly. Sweat had dried on the backs of my arms into a thin, tight film.
Good evening, fellow citizens.
A deep voice through the speakers, and then it cut out mid-sentence.
Not Sinn. I knew Sinn’s voice and it wasn’t his. But something in it was familiar in a way I couldn’t put a hand on yet. The words hung in the reception for a second after the cut, unfinished.
"Do they have any plan at all," Venna said, turning around to face me, "beyond broadcasting things at people?"
"Doesn’t look like it." I came up out of the chair. The wood creaked. "Get dressed. The road’s clearing and it won’t stay clear."
"Yes." She didn’t spend a second on it. The decision was already finished. "Let’s go and meet Max."
Good evening, fellow citizens. The broadcast came back and found itself. My name is Robert Bagins.
I stopped where I stood.
He’s alive.
I had watched Code offer that man a hand. I’d watched him take it, relief coming up across his face, and I’d watched the blade go through his neck before the thank-you was out of his mouth. I’d sat on the floor with him bleeding out an arm’s length from me. The memory arrived complete.
I saw him die. I stood over the body.
I’m here to remind us all why our great grandfathers worked so hard to raise these walls. Some of them died raising them. They did not die because they wanted to die. They died so the rest of us could live without fear. They made themselves a sacrifice so that we would never have to hide again.
We went down the corridor with his voice filling the building, and the early evening light coming grey through every window we passed. The rectangles of light on the floor had softened. Dust turned slowly inside them. Bagins’ words moved ahead of us and behind us at the same time, bouncing off the stone.
"That isn’t the government," Venna said as we turned into the room where we’d slept. The bed was still unmade. Our clothes lay where we’d left them, ordinary and out of place.
"No. That’s the opposition." I found my shirt where it had spent the day on the floor. The fabric was cool and slightly stiff. "And I know him. He taught me at Hogsby a month ago. He was nobody. He was a man trying to take credit for a student’s level jump."
"Then how is he inside the government’s broadcast system?"
"I don’t know." I sat on the edge of the bed and started on my shoes. The laces felt unfamiliar after a day of bare feet. "That’s the part that worries me. I underestimated him and so did everyone else in that school, and now he’s got the only voice reaching this entire city."
"He’s a threat." She stopped halfway into her top and looked back at me. The blue hair fell across one eye. "Listen to what he’s actually telling them, Bram. He’s about to get thousands of people killed."
What have they done for us? Bagins was still going. They have driven us into hiding. They want us behind our own doors, starving, waiting. They built a virus and turned it loose in our streets to keep us afraid of them.
But we must stand as citizens. We must take these streets together and fight for ourselves, because the government will not fight for us. We outnumber them. We have always outnumbered them.
And when we have won, let us carry that same rage to the headqua—
Cut.
And then the roar came.
It went up across the whole capital at once. Not a crowd in a square. Every street, every district, tens of thousands of throats opening at the same moment, the sound rolling in through the walls of the building from every direction until it was in the floor under my feet. The boards vibrated. The glass in the windows trembled. The roar had no centre and no edge—it simply arrived from everywhere and kept arriving.
The city announcing it was still alive and had heard every word.
Venna sat on the bed with one boot on and listened to it. Her face had gone still. The remaining light from the window laid a pale stripe across her cheek.
He has them. He actually has them.
"Yeah," I said. "He has them."
She looked up, confused. The blue of her eyes caught what little light was left.
I didn’t say that out loud. Did I?
"No. You didn’t." I finished my laces and stood. The floor felt solid again under shoes. "I can hear your thoughts."
No, you can’t.
"I can. Since this morning. I thought you should know rather than find out."
"My God." She got up and pulled the second boot on. The movement was sharp, almost automatic. "Is there anything you can’t do?"
"Plenty. I spent an hour failing to open a fridge today."
Good evening.
Sinn this time, cutting in over the speakers as we came back out into the corridor, both of us fully dressed for the first time since the previous night. The fabric of my shirt sat strange against skin that had spent the heat of the day uncovered. His voice was tighter than Bagins’, more controlled, already fighting for the same air.
We didn’t stop to listen.
Somewhere across a city with three fires burning in it, Max Donman was sitting in an apartment.
He had to be.