Chapter 305: Wrong Turn.
"We need to get out of here," Venna said, her hand closing hard in mine. The pressure of her fingers was absolute.
She was right, and she was right faster than I’d expected her to be.
A gunshot at night in a dead city isn’t a sound. It’s an announcement. It travels further than anyone who fires one imagines, and it pulls things toward it that have nothing else in the world to follow. That was the whole reason King had grabbed the bread and gone, and gone quickly, and taken his crew with him. The echo of the shot was still settling between the buildings, thinner now but present, a thread of violence that the dark would follow.
I’d worked out what part of the capital we’d walked into about ten minutes before the net. Shutters on every ground floor window—metal, heavy, some of them already warped from heat or force. Bars welded across the ones that had glass, the welds crude and recent. A district that had been dangerous before any of this started, and now had nothing standing between it and what it had always wanted to be.
We turned into a corridor, a different one from the one King had disappeared down, and this one had no lights in it at all. The blackness was complete. The air smelled of damp stone and old refuse. Our footsteps became the only measure of distance.
We didn’t run.
Running in a place like that is its own announcement. Careful feet and open ears is the only method that has ever worked and it works everywhere, inside walls or outside them, and I’d spent twenty years learning it from people who died proving the alternative. Heel down. Roll forward. Next step.
Voices came down from an upper floor above us. A man and a woman, going at each other over something, the specific rhythm of an argument that has been running for two days in a locked room—rising, falling, never quite resolving. The words themselves were lost to the walls. Only the shape of the fight remained.
"Did those men just rob us?" Venna asked, barely above a breath. The question sat soft and almost disbelieving in the dark.
She’d genuinely never seen it happen. That was the thing that got me. Nobody had ever taken anything off her in the street. The capital had kept its own rules for her until the infection rewrote them in thirty hours.
"Yeah. That’s what this brings." I kept us moving. The corridor walls were close enough that my shoulder brushed stone once. "Two days without food and people start rebuilding themselves into something else. Fittest. Strongest. Whatever word makes it sit easier."
One and half days.
That was the part that wouldn’t leave me alone.
I’d never once seen the beginning of it. Out on the plain I only ever met the finished article. Major with his tolls and his rules. Richard. I’d assumed men like that were born assembled, that some people simply arrived in the world already sharpened.
And now I was watching a whole city do it in front of me, at speed, and it turned out the process took about thirty hours and a locked door. The knowledge sat cold under my ribs.
"Yeah," Venna said. The single word carried the weight of the same arithmetic landing in her for the first time.
We walked.
"Why did you pack ice cubes?"
I’d been carrying that one since the road and it had started to itch. The question left my mouth quieter than the footsteps.
"Because we don’t know where we’re sleeping tomorrow." She said it as though I’d asked why she’d brought her own legs. The logic was clean and absolute in her voice. "I wasn’t doing another day like that building. No water, no cold, that heat coming off the stone. I made a decision about that."
"Fair enough." I let a step pass. The dark ahead of us had begun to thin. "And the makeup kit?"
"That is always the first thing in my bag."
Both of us went, quietly, in the dark, walking. The laugh didn’t last long but it did something for the corridor—loosened the air for a few seconds before the silence took it back.
Light at the far end. Street lights, still working, still fed by a grid that nobody was left to switch off. The yellow reached into the mouth of the corridor in a long, broken rectangle.
We came up to the mouth of it and I put my head out first and looked both ways down the road.
Clear. Empty in both directions as far as the lamps reached. The asphalt held the last of the day’s heat in a low, invisible shimmer. Shopfronts stood dark and shuttered. The street lights burned in isolated pools, each one a small island of yellow in the larger black.
We stepped out.
And it arrived the moment we did. Chanting, from somewhere up the city, hundreds of voices moving together in a rhythm, rolling down between the buildings and reaching us with the words worn off it. The sound was thick, organised, completely unbothered by distance or by what might be listening. It filled the gaps between the street lights and kept coming.
"Which way?" Venna asked. Her hand was still in mine. The blue of her hair caught the nearest light in a soft, unnatural edge.
The sound was coming from higher up—north, toward the centre, toward CGI and whatever Bagins was building out of the panic.
"Down." I turned us. The decision was immediate. "Whatever’s happening up there, I want two districts between it and us."
"Do you know where we are?"
My eyes went across the shopfronts. Signage in a script I didn’t recognise from my side of the capital. Shutters. The shape of the roofs against the bruised night sky. Nothing answered.
"No." Not one part of it. "I’ve never been on this side of the capital."
"Then I think we need—"
She didn’t finish it.
Something came down out of the dark above us and Venna went with it, straight to the ground. The mesh closed over her before I understood what I was looking at—a heavy, weighted net, the edges already pulling tight, the fabric coarse and dark against the yellow of the street light. Her body hit the asphalt with a sound that was mostly air leaving her lungs.
I got half a movement.
The second one took me from the side.
I went down hard on the road with it over me. The impact drove the air out of my chest. The mesh was rough against my face, my arms, the back of my neck. My first instinct was the wrong one, and the net taught me that in under a second.
Every push I made into it took slack out of it somewhere else. My arm came across my chest and stayed there, locked by the tightening weave. My knee locked where it was. The weighted edges bit into the asphalt and held.
Weighted at the edges. Thrown by somebody who had done it a lot. The design was simple and absolute and completely without mercy.
Footsteps. One set, unhurried, coming out of a doorway we’d already walked past, which meant he’d let us go by and dropped it behind us. The patience in the timing was the worst part of it. Soft boots on asphalt. No rush. The particular confidence of a man who already knew the outcome.
Then headlights swept onto the street from the direction we’d been heading and a vehicle came down the road fast. The beams cut hard white across the asphalt, across the nets, across the two of us pinned under them. The engine note was high and close.
"Bram. Bra—"
"Stop moving." I made my voice flat, because panic in a net is what nets are for. The words left my mouth against the mesh. "Ven, listen to me. Stop fighting it. It closes when you fight. Go completely still."
She stopped.
The stillness was immediate and complete. The net settled. The pressure across my chest eased by a fraction that still left me unable to move anything useful.
The man arrived and stood over us.
From flat on my back all I had of him was the underside of a long chin and the shape of his shoulders against the street light behind him. The light threw his shadow long across both nets. He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t there to talk to us. He was waiting. The patience in the posture was the same patience that had let us walk past the doorway.
The car stopped a metre from my head, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off the engine block. The metal ticked. Exhaust drifted across the road in a low grey sheet. The headlights stayed on, turning the mesh above my face into a bright, intersecting grid.
Doors opened on both sides.
And men came out of it.