Chapter 284: The Third Search.
The sun had come up and the stone walls of the building were holding the heat like they’d been built to.
Still morning. Venna and I walked the corridors again. The air sat heavy and still between the walls. Every surface I touched came away warm.
"I’m really hungry," she said.
I turned to her. "Did you say that?"
She gave me a look and a small shake of her head. The blue hair was dry now, pulled loosely back. A thin line of sweat had started at her temple.
"I said I’m hungry."
"Yeah. Heard you."
She glanced sideways at me and faced forward again.
I still couldn’t reliably separate what she said from what she thought. The ability had arrived without instructions and I was learning it live, on a woman who never stopped generating either. The words arrived in my head with the same clarity as speech, only quieter, and without the movement of her mouth to warn me they were coming.
"I wouldn’t be this hungry if you hadn’t fucked the food out of me." I turned to look at her and her mouth was closed. "And now he’s not even caring, when his dick is half responsible. That thing was hitting my stomach for real—"
"Ven." I cut across it. "Let’s check the reception room again."
"There’s nothing in there." She fell into step beside me. The boards creaked under both of us. "We’ve been in there twice."
We’d checked every room in the building. The entire haul was a half-empty bottle of water from one of the private rooms. We’d checked, rechecked, and now we were doing it a third time, door by door, because there was nothing else to do that qualified as effort. The heat made every empty cupboard feel personal.
"Let’s try anyway."
The only cooled room in the building was the dark room, and neither of us wanted to be in there for reasons we hadn’t said out loud. So we walked the corridors in the heat, both of us down to underwear, sweat on both our backs, the fabric already sticking in places.
"This place is an oven," Venna said as we came into the reception. "Imagine the afternoon."
We dropped into the chairs. Both of us sat badly, legs stretched out, no dignity left in either of us. The wood was warm under my thighs. The air in the room barely moved.
"I’ve dreamed about every single thing that has ever happened to me," she said. "Every one. And I never dreamed about this."
I looked at the small window ahead. The light coming through it was hard and white, the kind that belonged to the plain more than the capital.
I used to go a week without food on the plain. Longer, twice. And here I was, one day in, feeling like the floor was coming up to meet me. The walls had made me soft in a month. The knowledge of that sat in my stomach alongside the hunger and made both of them worse.
"Tell me what you’ve dreamed about," I said.
No intention behind it. I just wanted the conversation running. Something to put between me and the quiet.
She took a sip from the bottle. There wasn’t much left and I’d stopped drinking from it. One of us needed strength if something came through a door. The water moved in the plastic with a small, liquid sound.
"Everything." She let her head fall back against the chair. Her eyes closed. "Even last night."
"That’s beautiful," I said. "Can I ask you something personal?"
"Yeah." Lazy. Half asleep. "That works. We should keep talking."
"What would you do if you slept with your brother without knowing he was your brother?"
"Nothing." No hesitation. "Nothing I could do. It’s already done at that point." A pause. The silence that followed was longer than the answer. "Why?"
"Keeping the conversation going."
"Fine." She closed her eyes again. The line of her throat was damp with heat.
"How old are you?"
That was the whole question. Everything else had been the approach. The words left my mouth carefully, as if volume itself might change the answer.
"Twenty," she said, without opening them.
I sat very still.
Twenty.
I’m twenty. And that baby was born before I was, in a house my father ran to after leaving my mother at the safe city.
She’d be twenty-one. Twenty-two.
It isn’t her.
I didn’t let any of it reach my face, because I had no idea how far her ability reached in the other direction. The relief arrived slow and incomplete, like water finding its level after a long drought. It didn’t fix the rest of what I’d seen. It only removed the worst of it.
"We should look outside," I said, standing. The movement made the heat feel thicker for a second. "If we sit here long enough we’ll stop being able to."
"Right." She didn’t move. One arm hung over the side of the chair, fingers lax.
I crossed to the window.
The infected were on the street. Twenty of them, maybe more, spread out along the road in loose clusters. Not many by plain standards. More than enough for two people with no food and a half-bottle of water. Their movements were still wrong—too purposeful in places, too empty in others. One of them stood perfectly still in the middle of the road, head tilted, as if listening to something the rest of us couldn’t hear.
Behind them, across the road, a supermarket stood with its front doors open. The glass was intact. The interior looked dark and untouched. Forty metres of open ground and staggered bodies between us and it.
"Venna."
"What." No movement.
I was already building it in my head, because I was not going to starve in a stone building with a shop forty metres away. The arithmetic was simple and brutal and completely clear.
I turned back toward her.
And my eye caught something.
Behind the counter, set into the stone, was a door. Painted and fitted to match the wall so exactly that I’d walked past it four times. The edges were almost invisible—just a hairline seam where the colour didn’t quite match under the angle of the light.
"Venna."
She opened her eyes.