Chapter 356: Open Heads.

The late sun found the small hole in the ceiling and dropped a single ray down into the corridor, where it landed in the middle of the hard white light that hadn’t gone off since the door sealed.

I walked through it toward the knock.

A knock meant one of two things. Food, or somebody upstairs had something to say to us.

It had been food every time.

The tray was already sitting in the gap at the bottom of the door when I got there.

I crouched and pulled it through, and the moment my hands cleared the gap another one slid in behind it. I pulled that. Another came. I pulled that one too, and the fourth arrived, and then nothing.

Four trays on the floor at my feet.

Not a word through the door. Not a face at the gap. Nobody checking that anybody in here was still alive. The gap was exactly wide enough for the trays and nothing else.

I listened to his boots go back up the corridor. Unhurried. The soft continuous rhythm of someone who had been given the basement run as a duty and had decided the duty was simple enough to perform without curiosity.

A week ago you were probably a clerk in this building.

My room was the one nearest the door. Directly opposite Monica’s.

And I’d taken all of this for myself. Every knock. Every tray. Every trip between the four doors.

Nobody had asked me to.

They let me have it because it’s beneath them.

Sophia hasn’t stood up for anything since we came in here. Monica walked the rooms once and picked one and hasn’t come out. They’re waiting. That’s all this place is to them, a chair to sit in while something passes overhead.

So I carry the food. I answer the door.

Six rooms. Three each side.

Monica had taken one. Sophia the other. And the last room on their side was the toilet.

My room was nearest the door. Melissa’s was beside mine. And the bathroom was on our side.

One toilet, one bathroom, four people, and neither of them on the same side of the corridor.

Which meant they had to walk into my half to wash, and I had to walk into theirs every time I needed the other room.

Nobody had discussed it. Everybody had adjusted inside a day. That was the part that told me the most about how long these two expected to be down here.

I picked up a tray and went to Monica’s door.

Nothing came from behind it. No movement. No surface thought.

Asleep.

That was the strangest thing about this place, and I still hadn’t settled into it. Their heads were open to me from the moment I woke up, all day, whether I wanted them or not. And silence had become the only way I could tell that somebody was unconscious. The absence of thought was louder than the thoughts had been.

I knocked once and pushed the door in.

We’d settled that in the afternoon. There was no privacy left between the four of us and there wasn’t going to be any, and nobody had argued about it, and it worked entirely in my favour. The door swung inward on the white light.

Monica was on the mattress on the floor. The luminous skin. The short white hair flat on one side against the thin fabric.

She’d pulled it off the frame within the first hour, which was the right call. The beds were metal and the mattresses were too narrow for them anyway.

"Hey."

I set the tray down on the empty frame. The plastic settled against the metal with a soft ordinary sound.

Three days ago you were standing in a road watching Bala die and telling Sinn it had been handled correctly.

I went down on one knee beside her and touched her shoulder. The skin under my fingers was warm and wrong in the way it had always been wrong. The contact was light. Enough to cross the threshold between sleep and the return of an open head.

"Hey." Low. "Lady Veyron."

Her eyes opened.

She pushed herself up onto her arms and sat with her legs flat in front of her, arms braced behind, hair flat on one side.

"They’ve brought food."

"Oh. Thank you."

Never in my life did I imagine an egg would be the one bringing me my meals.

The thought arrived clean and unaimed.

She arched her back and put a hand around behind her, pressing at something. The white dress shifted.

God. My back.

If we’d stayed up there he’d have found us. He’d have found us and that would have been the end of it.

And this isn’t so far from the end of it either.

The fear sat under the surface thoughts without requiring a name. The same him Sophia had turned toward in the centre of the floor in the morning. Not Max. Not the boy with the army. Something that made a sealed basement and a few hours in a cell feel like the correct position, and the correct position still felt like the edge of the end.

"Everything all right?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"Do you want a massage?"

How could he possibly know that?

The thought flared and settled. The hand stayed at the base of her spine for another half-second and then returned to the mattress behind her.

"No." She sat up straight and folded one leg under her white dress. The refusal was automatic. "Thank you."

He’s a caring young man. He’s been the only person moving in this place since morning.

How did I end up closing every door in my life to men?

I waited.

"Are you sure?"

The pause went on a couple of seconds. The surface thoughts rearranged themselves.

"Okay," she said. "I think I would, actually."

[ Smooth. ]

Shut up.

*****

A/N: We skipped over the first few hours inside the cell. The pacing has slowed down quite a bit, but that’s intentional. This finale volume is going to pick things back up with more action, more smut scenes, and, finally, answers to all the mysteries we’ve been building toward.

Buckle up. Things are about to get interesting.