Chapter 354: The Chair.

Sinn’s face said all of it.

The authority was still in how he stood, still in the shoulders, still in the way he’d come around that desk. The title was still in his mouth. The room was still his. But underneath it, something had started running the arithmetic and coming up short.

There was never a version of tonight where he pictured this. Not one. He’s been standing in this office for two days telling a city he had it handled and he believed every word.

And he’s waiting. Look at him. He’s waiting on those two women to stand up and do whatever they promised him in this room.

"What are you offering these walls?" Monica asked.

"Peace." Max didn’t move. "Not one infected causes trouble in this city again."

"That’s bullshit." Sinn’s voice cut across her. The edge in it was absolute. "Did it not occur to you, walking in here, that there was every possibility you’d die in this building tonight?"

"General." Sophia stopped him.

"Lord." He turned on her. The correction left his mouth like a locked door. "Lord of the walls."

He took two steps back to his desk and pulled a drawer open. The sound of it was sharp in the held quiet of the office. Max stood where he was, completely composed. Melissa beside him. Ingrid and me at the back with the four of them spread along the walls.

You’re right. Monica, opening it up to Sophia, neither face moving. He’s unstable. The boy is better.

"What is it you want, son?" Sophia asked.

Behind her, Sinn was muttering into his comms, low and fast. The device against his ear. The cadence of a man activating a protocol he had never expected to need inside his own headquarters.

Code. He’s calling Code.

"My only demand," Max said, "is all of you behind bars."

"Fine," Sophia said.

Sinn stopped with the comms in his hand.

"I surrender." Monica came off the desk and stood, and her white robe dropped down around her.

Both of them.

Under ten seconds. Neither of them looked at the other first.

Nobody folds that fast. Not people like this.

Sinn turned around slowly.

Not toward Max. Toward the two of them. The comms still in his hand. The open drawer behind him. The title still sitting on his shoulders with nowhere left to put its weight.

"Say that again."

Sophia didn’t.

"Look at me." His voice had lost the shape he’d been holding it in. The formal cadence collapsed. "You sat in this office and— Both of you."

Nothing came back from either woman.

Monica was already looking at the door. Sophia met his eyes then, and there was nothing in it at all. Not apology, not triumph, not even discomfort. The look you’d give a chair on your way past it.

And Sinn understood.

I watched the whole thing arrive in his face at once. Every conversation he’d had in this room. Every instruction he’d taken and called a decision. Every broadcast in which he had named himself Lord of the walls. All of it rearranging itself around the single fact that he had never been the instrument—only the chair the instrument had been sitting in.

He started laughing.

He forgot about the man on the other end of the line entirely. He stood in the middle of his own office with the comms hanging in his hand and laughed at the ceiling, the laugh of a man watching his own collapse happen in real time.

He came out from behind the desk. The laugh thinned out and died on the way. The authority in the shoulders had nowhere left to go. What remained was a man in a room that had stopped belonging to him between one sentence and the next.

"Where are you taking us?"

"The basement." Max stepped aside to let him pass. "There’s a room down there I used to think about constantly when I worked in this building. Water. Toilets. It’s better than anything Goth has. That’s where we’re going."

Monica went after him. Then Sophia. Then Melissa. The long black dress moved with her. The white hair. The infected fell in behind them.

He knows the way.

Max turned to me. I was still standing where I’d stopped. The office around us had already begun to feel like a room that had finished its purpose—the open drawer, the empty chairs, the residual sound of Sinn’s laugh still sitting in the air with nowhere to go.

"Thank you for tonight." He put a hand on my shoulder. The contact was firm. Not hostile. "All of it. And I’m sorry you’re still a prisoner."

No, you’re not.

I didn’t argue. I turned and headed out. The corridor accepted us. The polished floor. The administrative lights. The soft continuous sound of the procession already ahead of us on the stairs—Sinn at the front.

***

Ingrid caught me up in the corridor. Max came behind us, unhurried, the radio unit in his hand. The four infected had already gone ahead with the others. The stairwell opened under the lights.

"I’m sorry, Abram," she said.

We took the stairs. Ahead and below, the infected were going round the bend with Sinn at the front of them, leading the way to the room he was going to be locked in.

His voice carried up the stairwell in fragments.

"I think you’ve repaid your debt," I said.

She didn’t answer that. The tattoo on her neck shifted as she took the steps.

"Once your people come through those gates, Goth doesn’t get to ask you for anything else. You’ve given them everything you had."

She looked sideways at me and didn’t have anything ready. The half-second of open assessment—the same quality that had appeared when she asked if the tattoo was beautiful—and then the stairs required her attention again.

"You should try enjoying your life at some point, Ingrid." I kept going down. The concrete steps. The residual heat of the building above us. The continuous soft sound of the procession below. "Have you ever been in love?"

"I don’t know."

"That’s a no."

"Maybe."

"You should." I took the next flight. "Everything in my head was survival, every single day, from waking up to going to sleep. That was the whole of me. Then I met people."

She stopped for half a second and looked back up the stairwell.

Max’s footsteps were coming down, still out of sight around the corner—unhurried.

She started moving again.

"How does it feel?"

"It feels like—" I actually had to think about it. The question sat against the plain, against the walls, against Sherry’s voice in a black alley and Venna’s hand in the dark room and Mercury’s middle finger in a dead car. "I don’t know. It isn’t easy. I’ll tell you what it’s like. I’m walking down a staircase to a cell right now, and what’s in my head is a girl called Sherry."

She went quiet for a few steps.

Then she looked over at me.

"I think you and I have a lot to talk about."

"Well." We came out into the corridor. The basement level. "I’m in your custody now. Reach me whenever you want somebody to talk to."

"Sure," she said.

Ahead of us the others had stopped at a closed door, and it got clearer with every step we took toward it.