Chapter 352: The Elevator to Sinn.

Max pressed the device and started back toward us through the crowd. The infected opened and closed around him without interest. The scorched face of the headquarters still held its lights. The yard still burned in patches.

"You’re sure she opens them?" Ingrid asked.

"I’m sure."

Max reached us.

"So what’s the plan?"

"Abram has someone inside," Ingrid said. "The doors are opening."

Max looked at me and a smile came up that had nothing but doubt in it.

"That’s a government building. Nobody in there is opening anything for you." He shifted the radio unit under his arm. "The way in is through the front. We hit it until it gives."

"The doors are opening. Give it a minute." I held his eyes. "But I want one thing from you first."

"Go on."

"Don’t kill the people on your list."

"I’m not killing anybody." He said it like the suggestion offended him. The controlled face tightened. "They go in a cell. That’s the whole point. You can’t make a man beg you for mercy after he’s dead."

"Okay." I let a beat go by. "Then you should know you missed a name. She’s in that building tonight and she’s every bit the threat Monica is."

"Thank you." Max turned back toward the front. The assessment had already filed the information and moved on. "You’ve given me a great deal of useful information tonight. And those doors are still shut."

"She’s on it."

The doors slid open.

Melissa stood in the middle of them in a long black dress with the light of the lobby behind her. The administrative white of the interior laid her in hard relief against the dark of the street. The scorched frame of the entrance framed her. Behind her the lobby held its lights and its polished floor and the first of the faces that had not yet decided whether to run.

Max looked at me. Just once, and I couldn’t read a single thing in it.

Then he started walking.

We went after him, and ten of the infected peeled out of the crowd and came behind us in a loose line. Selected. Exact. The rest held their positions in the street as if the open doors were not an invitation that applied to them.

The fires in the yard threw broken light across the asphalt. The administrative floors above us continued to burn their lights against the dark sky.

"You said no infected moves in this city again once Sinn steps down." I caught him up.

"I’m a man of my word." He didn’t slow. The radio unit stayed under his arm. The polished threshold of the headquarters was ten metres ahead. "That’s the only thing I’ve ever actually had."

We reached the doors.

"Hey." Max put a hand out to Melissa. "Max Donman. I’m hoping you remember me."

"Melissa Veyron."

She took his hand, and her eyes came past his shoulder and found mine and stayed there the whole time. The contact was formal. Brief. The particular performance of a greeting that both parties already understood was not a greeting.

The white light of the lobby held both of them.

Ingrid and I stopped outside with the ten behind us, and I looked past all of them into the lobby.

Faces. Twenty or thirty of them pressed back against the far wall, watching their own director hold the door open for the man who’d been shelling the building. Staff. Agents. People who had spent a day and a half in lockdown being told everything was under control.

The polished floor. The reception desk. The corridor that led deeper into the building where Sinn’s office waited on an upper floor with its own version of the evening.

"May we come in?" Max asked.

Melissa stepped back.

And Max Donman walked into the building.

This is where Bala brought us.

The first day. All six of us straight off the life layer with nothing. Max. Danny. Nesto. Becky. They kept those four here. They sent Sherry and me to Hogsby to level up.

Danny’s gone. Nesto’s dead.

And this one just walked back in through the front door with a thousand bodies behind him.

The lobby accepted him without resistance. The polished floor took his boots. The faces against the far wall did not move. The ten infected crossed the threshold behind Ingrid and me and stopped in a loose formation that occupied the entrance without blocking it.

"Thank you, Melissa," Max said as the rest of us came in. "Where’s Sinn?"

I looked back through the doors.

Every infected in that street stood exactly where it had been left. Not one had moved. Not one had followed. The word he had given in the open air held in the physical fact of a thousand bodies that could have poured through the entrance and had been told, instead, to wait.

"His office," Melissa answered.

"After you, please."

We went down the corridor, Max and Melissa in front, Ingrid and me behind, and ten dead men walking after us on the polished floor.

Staff flattened themselves against the walls as we passed. Faces I half-recognised from days of walking these corridors—agents, administrators, the particular wide-eyed stillness of people who had been told the headquarters was secure and were watching the evidence of that security walk past them in the wrong direction.

The ten infected made no sound beyond the soft continuous impact of feet that no longer cared how they landed.

He’s not going to kill you.

I put the thought out where she’d catch it. The channel opened clean under the sound of the boots and the held silence of the staff against the walls.

And I can hear yours now.

Her step didn’t change at all. The long black dress moved with her. The white hair. The tired eyes fixed on the corridor ahead and on the man walking beside her with the radio unit under his arm.

He might not kill us tonight. He’ll do it soon enough. Her thought came back clean. There is nothing in that man’s head that isn’t rotten, Bram. I’ve been inside it since he took my hand. You and I are both already his prisoners, whatever he’s telling you.

I knew I was. I didn’t know you were.

The exchange sat between us without requiring the open air. Max’s boots continued their rhythm ahead. Ingrid’s silence continued beside me. The ten infected continued their loose formation behind. The corridor turned and the elevator bank came into view—the same polished doors, the same upward indicator lights, the same ordinary machinery that had carried me to the fourth floor every morning for a week and was now about to carry a man with a list and a radio unit toward the office of the Lord of the walls.

We reached the elevator.

Sinn’s office was up there, and the man in it had spent the night telling a city he had everything under control.