Chapter 272: The Sacred Place Falls.
[Abram. Open your eyes.]
The words appeared across my sight in whatever place we were standing in, white and absolute, and I opened my eyes into darkness.
Everything about the room was wrong. Not the darkness itself—that was how the room had always been. It was what moved inside it. The drag of feet across old boards. The particular wet rhythm of breathing that isn’t quite breathing. Something roaming between the chairs, close enough that the air shifted with each pass.
Venna’s hands were still in mine. Locked tight.
I never once thought I might be dreaming. Twenty years on the plain had built that out of me. You don’t gamble on the infected being a dream, not even when you’re asleep. Not even when the last thing you saw was a woman turning toward a door twenty years and a whole world away.
I dropped my head on instinct and something swung through the air where it had been. Close enough that I felt the pull of it in my hair—the faint displacement, the near-miss of whatever had tried for my throat.
"Venna." I kept my voice low. Barely more than breath.
They couldn’t see either. That was the only advantage in the room. They were tracking heartbeats and breath and the sound of shoes on wood, and so was I, and the difference between us was that I knew it.
I got her onto my shoulder without deciding to—head and arms hanging down my back, my hands under her thighs, her weight settling against me in one clean motion—and started moving backward. One careful step. Then another. The boards under my boots gave the smallest complaint.
The room heard me.
Every one of them turned toward the sound of my feet and came, faster than the staggering suggested, pushing through chairs, knocking them aside with wet, heavy impacts, converging on the noise I couldn’t stop making. The air thickened with the sound of them.
My back hit the wall.
[Night mode active.]
The room bloomed green.
And I could see all of it, sharp and clean—the same way I’d seen the night I fought Vince Vale in the Vale 2 grounds with blood in my mouth. Every outline cut from the dark. Every edge precise.
My instincts hadn’t lied. Two of them. One upright and coming fast, jaw loose, eyes empty and fixed on the heat of us. One crawling low across the floor with its head raised toward the smell, fingers scraping the boards, the wet sound of its breathing louder now that I could see the source.
How. We are inside the walls. We are inside the walls.
I released charge.
The room lit white for half a second—the shape of every chair and beam printed against the walls in pure, hard light—and both of them went down burning. The smell of it rose immediately, sharp and chemical and wrong. The green night vision held long enough for me to watch the flames take them, then the system released and the dark returned, thicker for the loss of the green.
"Abram." Venna’s eyes opened against my back. Her voice was small, confused. "Where am I?" Her legs moved, searching for a floor that wasn’t there, feet kicking once against empty air.
I set her down. Careful. Steadying her until her weight found the boards.
"You’re with me. Relax."
"What’s happening?" She was staring at the two shapes still burning down on the boards, the light from the fire throwing broken orange across her face and then dying as the fuel gave out.
"The infected came in while we were under."
"What?" Her breathing went short and fast, and the room dropped back into full blackness as night mode released completely. The dark felt heavier now that we’d seen what lived in it. "Abram, did we do something wrong? Did we bring something back with us out of the libra?"
The exact question I’d been holding. It sat between us like a third body.
"I don’t know."
Then I caught something. Faint, a long way off, coming through the walls of the building—thin, mechanical, repeating.
"Do you hear that?"
"Yes." Venna went still. Her hand found my wrist. "Not clearly. It sounds like a warning."
I opened my hearing all the way up.
And the outside arrived in my head at once. The dragging. Dozens of them, maybe more, spread across the ground beyond these walls—feet that didn’t land clean, the wet continuous sound of lungs that had forgotten how to be lungs. Sounds that had no business existing inside the capital. The scale of it pressed against the inside of my skull.
I pushed past it, reaching for the broadcast, and found Sinn’s voice—flat, official, the particular tone of a man reading from a script while the world burned behind him.
We are experiencing an outbreak of the infection inside the capital. All bridges to the outer cities have been closed to prevent the spread. Do not panic. We are handling it. For the moment, if you are safe, remain where you are. Lock your doors. Do not open for anyone. And if you notice any change in the people you are with, do not hesitate. Do what needs to be done.
"Government broadcast," Venna said, catching the shape of it even without the full range I had.
"Yes." I let the hearing drop back. The sudden quiet inside my head felt almost like silence. "The infection is across the whole capital."
"Did we cause this?" The worry in her voice had teeth in it now—sharp, personal, the kind that already assumed guilt.
"I don’t know. But we need to move." I turned toward where the door should be, mapping it from memory in the dark. "The doors are open. I’d bet on it."
"What if they’re already inside the house?"
Her hand found mine and held it. Hard. The bones of her fingers pressed against mine.
"Then we still lock the doors first," I said. "We deal with what’s already in here after. What we don’t do is fight in a building that keeps letting more of them in behind us."
She didn’t argue. That was one of the first things the plain teaches you, and she took it from me without needing the reasoning. The agreement was quiet and complete.
We started out of the dark room, slow, every step placed. Venna moved behind me with her hand in mine and I kept my hearing wide open, listening for anything that shifted—the scrape of a shoe, the wet catch of breath, the soft give of a floorboard under weight that wasn’t ours.
We came out into the corridor.
Clear both ways. The air here was cooler, less thick with the smell of the burned ones. Light from somewhere farther down the building reached us as a thin grey wash, enough to give the walls edges again.
I let my ears run the length of it, first left, then right, reaching for the small sounds—the ones that hide under ordinary silence.
Nothing.
We started toward the other rooms.