Chapter 275: Fire in the Streets.
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.
"Fuck." Max cursed from the couch.
The broadcast was loud across the whole capital. Every speaker, every screen, the government’s voice pushed into every corner of a city that had spent a hundred years believing this could not happen here. The words filled the room and kept going, repeating themselves in the walls and the glass and the quiet that followed them.
Ingrid stood at the window with the curtain pushed behind her, watching the street below. The fabric was cool against her bare shoulder. Her reflection sat faint in the glass beside the dark shapes moving underneath.
"That was always coming, Max." She didn’t turn around. "They had to say something. If they’d stayed quiet it would have been worse for them."
"Yeah." He stood and crossed to her. The floor was cold under his feet. "How are the numbers?"
"Small. Still small." Her breath fogged the glass slightly, a soft grey bloom that faded almost as soon as it formed. "The cowards moved fast. Faster than we thought they would."
Max pulled the curtain all the way to the side, and the street opened up beneath them. Night air pressed against the window. The city lights that should have been there were mostly gone—whole blocks dark, only the occasional window still lit like a mistake someone hadn’t corrected yet.
The infected were down there, moving through the roads in loose scattered lines, but the city had already shut itself. Doors closed. Windows dark. A hundred thousand people sitting in their own living rooms listening to the same broadcast and doing exactly what it told them. The silence from the buildings was almost louder than the dragging feet.
Then Max’s eyes caught something.
A woman in the middle of the road with both palms lit. Not holding fire. Leaking it. Every step she took left a burning print on the asphalt—small, bright, briefly perfect before the night took them. The parked car she brushed against went up behind her without her noticing or caring. The flames climbed the metal in a clean, sudden rush and painted the street orange for a few seconds.
And further down, another one launched off the ground and cleared four floors in a single motion, landing flat against the wall of the building opposite and holding there. It hung against the brick, head turning slowly, scanning the windows from the outside. Limbs locked to the surface as if the wall itself had agreed to keep it.
Max watched it find one. Watched it start moving sideways across the face of the building toward a lit room on the fifth floor where somebody had not thought to turn off their light. The figure crawled with unnatural patience, each shift of weight precise, hunting the rectangle of yellow that still spilled into the dark.
Every gift survived the infection. Only the owner hadn’t.
Max smiled.
This was the thing. Not the infection on its own. The infection inside these walls, in a city where everyone was about to be handed an ability by their own government. Goth had spent years building toward exactly this and most of them hadn’t lived to see it. The knowledge of that sat warm behind his ribs.
"They don’t know they have them," Ingrid said quietly.
"No."
"That’s worse." Her breath had fogged the glass in front of her mouth again. "A person with fire thinks about where to point it."
He put his hand on her waist.
She felt it and went still.
It was the same hand. Two nights ago it had been raised in a doorway and she had been off the ground with her fingers at her own throat, looking into his face while it happened. The memory arrived complete and uninvited.
She held the stillness for a second too long.
Then she leaned back into him, because the alternative was to not lean back, and she had already worked out what that would cost. The contact was careful. Measured. Her spine found the line of his chest and stayed there.
"Where’s Becky?" Her bald head settled against his chest. The skin was warm.
"She’s fine." He didn’t look down at her. His eyes stayed on the street, on the figure still moving across the brick. "I sent her out of the capital to handle something. She’s fine."
"Out of the capital."
"She’s fine."
Twice, Ingrid thought. He said it twice.
She let it go and let herself have the moment. For years this had been words. Plans in rooms. Arguments about method. Now they were down there on the street inside the walls, and the walls had stopped being walls. The city was quieter than she had ever heard it.
"They’re too few to do real damage yet," she said. "Do I step in?"
"Not yet." His hand tightened on her waist. The pressure was light and absolute.
He had run every version of this in his head a hundred times. He looked out across the capital, past the immediate streets, out to where the lights of the districts sat undisturbed—distant, ordinary, still believing the broadcast would keep them safe.
Too few. He knew that. It didn’t worry him even slightly.
"We stay calm," he said. "And we let them panic. They will panic."
"They’ll put the army on the streets tomorrow," Ingrid said.
"That’s exactly what I want."
She turned her head to look up at him. The angle of her face caught the thin light from the street below.
"They’ll be infected by dawn," Max said. "Every soldier they send out. And everyone sitting behind a locked door tonight is going to be hungry by tomorrow evening, and hungry people open doors."
He kept his eyes on the street. The figure on the wall had almost reached the lit window. The burning footprints still glowed faintly where the woman with fire had walked.
"We’re in control, Ingrid."
She kept looking up at him. The stillness in her body had changed quality. It was no longer the stillness of memory. It was the stillness of someone deciding how much of the future she was willing to stand inside.
"And then we move," he said.
One girl. That was all they had put out there. One naked girl walking out of a door and into a crowd.
And in under six hours the capital had gone quiet and dark and something was crawling across the outside of a building looking for people through their own windows.
"Max," Ingrid said. "What happens when we can’t stop it?"
He smiled at the street. The smile was small and private and completely without doubt.
"Who said anything about stopping it."