Chapter 353: Already Replaced.

The doors opened on an empty car.

Max gestured Melissa in first.

The rest of us followed. Ingrid, me, four of the infected. The other six stayed in the corridor and nobody told them to.

The polished walls of the elevator held our reflections in warped panels—Max with the radio unit, Melissa in the long black dress, Ingrid’s pale head, my own face, and the empty eyes of the four that had been selected to fit. The tallest of them stood with the crown of his head flat against the roof of the car. The contact didn’t bother him.

The car started up.

Nobody said a word. The soft mechanical hum filled the silence. The indicator light climbed through floors that had spent a day and a half in lockdown and were about to discover what the open doors at ground level meant.

Do you have something with the bald girl?

Melissa’s thought, arriving without her face moving.

No. Why?

Because she’s worried about you. Something in it went momentarily blank, the way a person’s face does when they’re re-reading a line. Genuinely worried. She has been since we walked into the lobby.

Why would she be? I met her tonight. Four hours ago.

I don’t know.

The information sat between us without a shape I could use. Ingrid stood beside me with her eyes on the climbing numbers. The tattoo on her neck was angled away. Whatever Melissa was reading off her was not visible on the surface, and the surface was all I had been given.

The car stopped and the doors opened.

"After you," Max said.

Melissa stepped out and we went after her.

Down the corridor, Sinn’s office door standing open at the far end, light coming out of it across the floor. The administrative quiet of the upper level was denser than the lobby—fewer people, more closed doors.

I walked at the back with Ingrid.

She’s worried about me.

And I did something with that I probably shouldn’t have. I let it settle somewhere and stay. The cart. The tattoo under my fingers. The unguarded question about whether it was beautiful. The half-inch drop in her shoulders when she learned Becky was safe. None of it added up to worry about a prisoner she had met on a roof.

My comms went off in my pocket. I pulled it out as we walked.

May.

We’re leaving the stray town. The odds of something happening to us here are climbing every hour and I don’t like the shape of them. We’ll be in the capital in two days. I won’t be reachable. But I’m a hundred percent certain we get there.

I read it twice.

A hundred percent certain.

That’s not optimism. That’s her ability telling her the number.

And she’s moving Sherry because the numbers in that town went bad. Which means Vince is on his way there, or already there.

This is exactly why I put her next to Sherry.

Two days.

The message sat complete and cold. Celestine was moving toward Vince. May was moving Sherry toward the capital. The probability had shifted enough that a woman who could read the shape of outcomes had decided the stray town was no longer viable. I put the comms back in my pocket.

And I’m not going to be anywhere in two days. I’m a prisoner walking down a corridor pretending he isn’t one.

Melissa reached the office. She knocked once and went in.

Max followed with the four behind him.

Ingrid and I came last.

Monica Veyron was sitting on the edge of Sinn’s desk. Short white hair, skin that caught the light off the ceiling bulb in a way nothing living should. Sinn was in his chair. The title still sat on him like a garment he had decided was permanent. And Sophia Vale sat in the seat I’d used every time I’d been in this room—the same angle, the same view of the desk, the same patient attention she had carried.

Not one of the three of them looked surprised.

"Look who it is." Sinn smiled. "Melissa. And Abram." His eyes came to mine and stopped. The absolute assessment of a man who had named me for nothing on a call and was now watching me walk into his office behind the man he had promised to execute. "The enemy is always from within. Every time."

"I’m not here to fight anyone," Max said. "It’s simple. Surrender or die."

Sinn laughed in his chair.

Not nervously. He laughed like a man watching a child threaten him. The sound filled the office and came back off the walls without finding any purchase on the two women sitting in it.

Monica’s expression did not change. Sophia’s did not change. The four infected stood in a loose line inside the door and stared at nothing.

My eyes went to Sophia.

She was looking at Monica, and neither of them had said anything out loud.

This works for us. Let him arrest us. Sophia’s thought came through clean, like she was speaking at normal volume beside my ear. A few days in a cell. Quiet. No decisions, no meetings, no mortal politics. Tell me honestly you aren’t exhausted by these people.

We gave Sinn our word. Monica’s came back, and neither of their faces moved a fraction. He’s trusting us to clear the infected out of his city. He’s staked everything on it.

The exchange occupied the room without touching the open air. Sinn was still laughing. Max was still standing in the middle of the floor with the radio unit under his arm. Melissa stood between them with the knowledge that she was on the list. Ingrid stood beside me with her eyes on Max.

"I am Lord Sinn." He came up out of the chair. The title left his mouth like a locked door. "Lord of these walls. Do you honestly believe you can walk in here and frighten me with four zombies, a boy, and two girls?"

Max didn’t react at all.

"I ran a mission across the plain. Through them. Thousands of them, out in the open, no walls, no doors." He came around the desk. The controlled face. The particular energy of a man who had stopped needing to raise his voice before he crossed the walls and had not restarted the habit. "And I brought members of my team home alive. Didn’t Abram tell you that part?"

This boy can do what Sinn was going to do for us.

Sophia, to Monica. The channel remained open under Sinn’s voice.

Look at him. He walked a thousand of them through a locked city and put them exactly where he wanted them. Sinn couldn’t clear a street.

And I stood at the back of that room and listened to two of them erase a man from the plan while he was shouting in the middle of it, and he never knew.

"Last chance," Max said, and his voice didn’t rise. "Are you surrendering, or should I look at other options?"