Chapter 355: By Dawn.

We reached the door and stopped.

The three women ahead of us. Sinn beside them, still cursing under his breath in a low unbroken stream, the way a man does when he’s stopped talking to anyone but himself.

The corridor held the four of them and the four infected.

Max’s footsteps were the last sound in that corridor.

He came around the corner unhurried with his palm already out toward the door, and the whole thing slid open before he’d finished walking.

No key. No visible mechanism. The reinforced surface simply accepted the gesture and began to move.

The gap widened onto black.

Nothing in there. No shapes, no depth, no far wall. Just an absence with cold air coming out of it.

"That’s your temporary home," Max said.

"Find somewhere else." Sinn didn’t move an inch. "There is no version of tonight where I sleep in that."

"I’ve got you, bruh."

Max put a hand on his shoulder as he went past him into the dark, easy about it, almost warm. The contact was brief and familiar.

Bruh.

He called him bruh. He called me that once, in a corridor in this building, when he asked me to look after Sherry.

And the tall one hit him.

Backhanded, without turning its head, the way you’d swat something off a table. The empty face didn’t adjust. The body didn’t wind up. The blow simply arrived—absolute, precise, the efficiency of an infected that had been given a single instruction and had carried it out without requiring the instruction to be repeated.

I heard it before I understood it. Bone giving somewhere it isn’t built to give, one clean wet sound in a stone corridor.

Sinn stopped being a person somewhere between the blow and the floor.

He went down with his comms still in his hand.

"You told me you weren’t going to kill anyone."

My voice came up out of me before I’d decided to use it. The corridor held the sound. Max was already inside the dark and the dark had not yet answered.

"You said it to my face. Twenty minutes ago."

"Did I?"

Max’s voice came out of the dark.

Then the lights came on. White, total, filling the whole room at once, and the darkness had never been there at all. The absence resolved into stone, painted walls, a floor that held the cold and gave nothing back. Max was standing in the middle of it looking back at us.

I looked down at the floor.

Two days ago I stood in his office and told him he’d changed and walked out on him.

He was a bad man by the end.

He wasn’t a bad man in the Fallen City.

The body on the corridor floor did not move. The comms in the open hand did not move. The four infected stood in their loose formation and stared at nothing. Nobody else in that corridor looked at the body.

Not Monica. Not Sophia. Melissa glanced once and moved her eyes away, and the three of them walked into the white room past him.

I went in after them.

"There are toilets. Washrooms. Beds through the back there." Max was already stepping out over the threshold. "Ingrid handles your welfare from here."

He crossed the line and turned around.

I turned with him.

Max. Ingrid. Four dead men in a corridor with a fifth on the floor between them.

And an open doorway.

That’s it. That’s the whole line. Four feet of empty air and a door frame.

Two hours ago I was on a road with a cart and no rope on my hands and I could have run at any moment.

I walked in here on my own legs. Nobody carried me. Nobody pushed me through.

It began to close on its own.

Ingrid’s eyes came up and found mine.

She didn’t say anything and neither did I, and the gap narrowed and took Max out of it first, then the infected, then the corridor, and the last thing in it was her face. Then the seal met the frame and the sound of it came back off every wall in the room.

And the four of us were alone in white light.

Nobody moved.

We all read the room instead, the way people do when they’ve stopped being able to do anything else. A big open space. Six doors, three on each side. Stone, painted, cold underfoot.

I looked up.

One opening in the whole place. Small, high, set into the ceiling.

And through it, thin and grey, the beginning of light.

Dawn.

He told them by dawn the walls would have a new government.

He was on time. He was actually on time.

The grey was only the first edge of it—the particular thin colour of a sky that had not yet committed to morning, filtering down through whatever shaft or grille connected this room to the air above the capital.

I don’t think he can reach us down here. Sophia’s thought arrived open and unaimed, not sent to anybody.

She was standing in the middle of the floor turning slowly, taking in the walls, thinking to herself in a room she believed was private.

We stay down here. We wait for the day. It’s the only way any of us survives him.

I kept my face where it was.

Him.

She’s afraid of something and it isn’t the boy with the army.

She surrendered. She stood in that office and offered herself to a cell and there was relief in it. I heard the relief.

Monica had started on the doors, opening each one and looking inside without hurrying, unbothered, the way you’d walk through a house you were considering. The luminous skin. The short white hair. The white robe moving with her as she catalogued the rooms. Sophia continued her slow turn in the centre of the floor. Melissa came toward me.

[ This is where you meet your purpose. ]

[ Alayne Vale has died. One mark eliminated. ]

I stopped breathing for a second.

Alayne Vale.

I have never heard that name. Not from Eleanor, not from Riya’s memories, not once in this entire month.

One of the two I hadn’t met. One of the nine. She existed somewhere in this city or outside it, carrying whatever the rest of them carry, and I found out she was alive and dead in the same sentence.

And something killed her tonight.

Is something hunting them?

Nothing came back.

[ You have one advantage in this room. You can hear every thought in it. Your work will be considerably easier. ]

[ A barrier is now on your own. Melissa cannot read anything you do not offer her. ]

Melissa’s fingers came into mine.

I looked down at them. The contact was warm. I closed my fingers around hers and looked at the six doors and the small grey opening in the ceiling and understood that something had walked me into this room step by step all night, and I still couldn’t see the hand that did it.

[ Current proximity: 3 of 4 remaining targets are in this room. ]

[ 2 are sources. 2 are marks. ]

Okay.

The grey light through the ceiling opening thickened by a degree. Dawn continuing. The walls above us continuing. The work beginning.

****

A/N: And this brings us to the end of this volume.

Thank you for making it this far with Bram and the rest of the cast. This has been a long journey.

Thank you.