Chapter 295: The Same Blood.
I opened my eyes into the dark room.
Our hands were still locked together. The cool air of the room sat against my skin like something that had been waiting. No light. No edges. Only the pressure of her fingers and the sound of both of us breathing.
I’d come back out with a head full of the past and a glimpse of the future, and none of it was the thing sitting on my chest. The thing on my chest was a woman holding my hand who thought I’d known.
"Venna, I didn’t."
It was the first thing out of me, like I’d carried the sentence back from the forest. The words left my mouth and sat in the dark between us.
"Bram." Her fingers moved in mine—small adjustments, the soft slide of skin against skin.
"I had a hint. That’s all. I went into the past this morning while you were asleep on me. I don’t know how I did it, I didn’t choose it, and I didn’t get a clear answer out of it. That’s the only reason I asked how old you were."
Silence in the dark. Complete. The kind that listens harder than speech.
"I know, Bram."
Then she came into me and held on, and I held her back, and neither of us said anything for a while. Her forehead rested against the side of my neck. Her breath moved warm against my collarbone. The dark room held the two of us the way it had always held the people who came here looking for answers they weren’t ready for.
I didn’t know what she’d seen after I left her in that room with her mother. She didn’t know what I’d stood at a window and listened to. We’d gone in together and come back with two different days. The weight of both of them pressed against the same small space between our chests.
"You said you’d help me find my past," she said into my shoulder. The words were quiet, almost careful. "You did it."
"Okay."
"Thank you."
She let go first. The loss of contact left a cool patch across my back and the insides of my arms.
And it was there in the dark between us, unmentioned, taking up the whole room. Everything that had happened on that counter and in that bed while neither of us knew. Nobody’s fault and nobody’s to carry, and both of us carrying it anyway. The knowledge sat heavier than the heat of the afternoon had ever managed.
"My uncle must be losing his mind," she said, and her voice had changed—businesslike, deliberately lighter. "We need to start working out how we get out of here."
I understood exactly what she was doing and I let her do it.
Because she was right anyway. Our arrangement in this building had run its course. Eat, go into the libra, come out, eat. The days had been holding together on something that wasn’t available anymore. The dark room behind us felt finished.
We came out of the dark room and went down the hallway toward the front of the building. The boards under our feet gave the soft, familiar complaints of a house that had carried too many quiet hours. Pale light from the high windows laid long rectangles across the floor. Dust turned slowly inside them.
The government has the situation under control.
Sinn’s voice met us as we walked into the reception—flat, official, the particular tone of a man reading from a script while the world outside the windows continued ignoring it.
I’ve received reports of a neighbourhood of ability users who have gathered and intend to move against the infected. That is a foolish decision. We urge all citizens to remain indoors while we continue to study the infection.
I heard what was underneath it.
Nobody with food in the house goes outside. Which meant the people gathering out there had already run out, and Sinn was standing in a room telling starving people to sit still. The words filled the reception and settled against the stone.
"They locked the capital down because they don’t have an answer," Venna said.
"Yeah."
I crossed to the window. My chair was still where I’d left it, the tall one with the warm wood. Venna went round behind the counter, into the little stone room. The cooler air from the fridge spilled out for a second when she opened the door.
I sat down and looked out.
There were more of them now. Considerably more.
And most of the new ones were in army uniform, staggering down the middle of the road with their rifles still slung across their chests. The fabric was the same dark colour it had always been. The bodies inside it moved with the same broken, empty rhythm as everything else. The afternoon light laid long copper shadows behind them.
"That," I said quietly, "was a stupid idea."
Venna came back with two bottles, handed me one, and leaned into the window beside me. The glass was warm under our shoulders. Condensation from the cold plastic ran down the side of the bottle onto my fingers.
"My God." She took a sip and stopped mid-swallow. Her eyes stayed on the road. "They keep multiplying."
"Yes."
I broke the seal on mine. The plastic gave with a soft, ordinary sound. The water was cold enough to hurt the back of my throat in the best possible way.
"Can’t Max stop it?" she asked. "The one you said started it."
I looked over at her. The blue of her hair caught the angled light. Her profile was calm, almost clinical, the way it had been when she first saw the floating infected.
"That’s a good idea, actually." I drank. The water settled cold in my chest. "He’d need a few solid punches in the face before he agreed to anything."
"So we land them." She said it perfectly evenly. "Rather than sitting in this building for another week waiting for a street to clear."
"You’re suggesting we go out through all of that, find Max Donman, and make him stop what he started."
"Yeah." She turned to face me. The light from the window put half her face in gold and left the rest in soft shadow. "How do you see it?"
I thought about it properly.
The original infection had been made. Four women had sat in a room and built it on purpose, which meant it had a design, which meant it had an off switch somewhere. I didn’t know what Max had actually released or how. But if he’d started this one, it was worth finding out whether he could end it.
And it was in the way. All of it. The whole capital burning down around a countdown that the system swore it couldn’t slow by a single day. The road outside kept filling. The uniforms kept arriving.
"Now I believe we’ve got the same blood," I said, and put a finger on the end of her nose. The contact was light, almost teasing, and completely deliberate.
She smiled. The expression arrived slow and real, the first clean one either of us had managed since the dark room.
I looked back out at the soldiers staggering down the road, and nodded. The copper light kept lengthening. The shadows of the infected stretched longer with every minute. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, a man with purple hair was still walking.