Chapter 297: Settling Accounts.
It is important that each of you decides for yourself, because no one owns your life.
Sinn’s voice came through the speakers while the two of us stood at the window watching the last of them disappear down the road. The words filled the reception and settled against the stone. Outside, the street lights threw long yellow stripes across empty dirt. The last dark figures moved through the bands of light and were gone.
No man carries a spare life. Going out into those streets will be your own decision. Joining the people out there who have already lost themselves will be your own decision. I will not make it for you.
Venna turned and looked at me with her eyebrows up. The evening light caught the edge of her face and left the rest in soft shadow.
"Are we seriously listening to a cold war right now? Live, over the emergency system?"
"Looks like it." I kept my eyes on the road. The asphalt still held the heat of the day in a low shimmer. "But that’s not politics. That’s a man losing his grip in public."
You cannot honestly tell me, Sinn went on, and I heard him breathe into the microphone, that any of you would take instruction from a drunkard’s lecture.
Venna made a small sound—half laugh, half disbelief.
It is all up to you now. But I will tell you one thing. This government remains in control. Please do not risk your lives on the word of a man who was fired from a school.
Outside, the road had emptied completely.
Every one of them was gone from the yard, from the front of the supermarket, from the length of the street as far as the lights reached. All of it drained toward the far side of the capital, toward CGI, toward whatever was calling them in. The yard sat still and ordinary under the street lights, as if the last forty hours had never happened.
"Should we go now?" Venna asked.
"Not yet." I stayed at the glass. The cool of the evening was finally reaching the room through the open seams around the window. "Let’s give it a little longer. Let the dark come down properly first."
Darkness cost them more than it cost me.
We need everyone to remain calm.
A woman’s voice now. Melissa’s. Controlled. Almost gentle.
The situation is contained. Our teams are in position and the perimeter is holding. A pause, and something in her tone shifted very slightly—enough to notice, not enough to name. We would also ask that anyone in the vicinity of Robert Bagins do what is necessary. He is a danger not only to these walls but to himself.
"Did she just—" Venna started.
"Yeah."
Do the needful. The same phrase Sinn had used in the first broadcast about family members who turned. Melissa had just put a professor in the same category as the infected, and she’d done it in a voice you’d use to read out a weather report. The words hung in the air after she finished, clean and absolute.
Then the city answered.
A noise went up somewhere to the north. Not the roar from before—this was organised. Voices moving together, finding a rhythm, hundreds of them. Then a second group joined from another direction, and a third somewhere behind the buildings opposite. The sound rolled across the capital in overlapping waves, finding its own tempo.
I opened my hearing and pulled it in.
WE ARE NOT PRISONERS. THE WALLS BELONG TO US.
Over and over, in time, from three directions at once. The words arrived clear and hard, carried on thousands of throats.
"What are they saying?" Venna asked.
"They’re about to take the streets."
"Is that good for us?" She was already reading my face. The blue of her eyes caught the yellow of the street lights. "That clears the road, doesn’t it?"
"No." I could feel exactly how this went. The arithmetic was simple and completely one-directional. "That’s what Max wanted. Every one of those people is walking into an open street tonight and by tomorrow morning most of them will be out there staggering with the rest."
They thought it was arithmetic. They thought outnumbering the infected meant something.
It had never once been about numbers. Not out on the plain, not in the Fallen City, not here. It only takes one bite for their side to gain a body and yours to lose one, and every hour their numbers go up and yours go down and the maths runs one direction only.
"Should we go?" Venna asked again.
"Give it a moment."
My comms vibrated against my wrist.
May.
I answered it instantly. The metal was cool against my skin.
"Hey."
"Hey." Her voice was low but steady. Somewhere quiet on her end. "Where are you?"
"In the capital." I stepped back from the window and Venna moved straight into my place, taking over the watch without being asked. Her silhouette filled the frame against the yellow light. "Where are you, May?"
"Somewhere safe. I heard about the infection, the broadcasts reached us out here." A pause. "Is everything okay with you?"
"Yes."
I glanced over at Venna, who was watching the empty road with her arms folded. The street lights laid long stripes across the glass in front of her.
"May. You didn’t call me to say hello."
"No." Something went out of her voice—the careful brightness left it cleanly. "I wanted to know you were alive. And I needed to tell you that Harmione is dead."
"Harmione." It landed sideways. The name didn’t fit the shape of the evening. "Was she in the capital?"
"No. We were at her home. The whole family was there." Her breath caught and steadied. "Mute attacked. He killed all of them, Bram. Every person in that house."
"Wait." I turned away from the room. The corridor behind me was darker than it had been a minute ago. "Who did you say?"
"Mute. He studied with us at Hogsby. Quiet boy, sat at the back. You remember him."
"Bram." Venna, from the window. Her voice was low, questioning.
I put a hand up. One minute.
"Mute," I said into the comms, trying to fit it against everything else. The borrowed body. "Why would he go after the Redheads?"
There was an obvious answer. The primordials wanted the influential families gone, and the Redheads were as influential as they came. Bagins had showed it in Mrs Rivers’ living room. The pieces sat clean and incomplete.
"He didn’t come for the family," May said. "He came for Harmione. The rest of them were in the way. I watched him kneel down in front of her and say something to her face and I couldn’t come out from where I was."
Harmione.
And it all came apart and reassembled itself in about two seconds.
Harmione.
I want everything you took.
Everything you took from me.
I want you to feel what I felt.
Not me. Not only me. He’d been going down a list, and Harmione had been on it. The image of purple hair in a burning street arrived again, unhurried, upright among the bodies.
I’m the last name. He’s saving me for last.
"May." I dropped my voice. "Can you do something for me."
"Always."
"Go to the stray town. Find Sherry. She’s there with Daphne and Becky." I turned back toward the window. Venna’s silhouette hadn’t moved. "Don’t tell her I asked. Just be there."
"Okay."
She hung up. The line went dead with a soft finality.
I crossed the room to Venna. The boards under my feet gave the soft, familiar complaints of a house that had carried too many quiet hours.
"It’s time," I said.
My comms vibrated again.
I looked down at my wrist.
Azure.