Chapter 373: A Deal in the Dark.

An uneven breath came through the steel.

Fast, then held, then let go a beat too long. The rhythm of someone who has run further than their body wanted to and only just stopped moving, lungs still trying to catch up, throat working.

I reached the door. No tray in the gap. Only the cold metal and the sound on the other side.

I didn’t say anything.

Whoever was out there stood close enough that I could hear them swallow — a dry click, then another breath started and failed. Nothing on the other side of that door tonight had any business being friendly.

"Who’s there?"

The breathing stopped.

"Abram."

"Who is this?"

"It’s Ingrid." Air in, set down carefully, spent. "It’s Ingrid."

I put my palm on the steel without thinking. Cold climbed the bones of my hand.

"You came down here yourself. At this hour."

"Yes."

"Alone?"

"Yes. Nobody knows I—" She caught it and started again. "Yes. Alone."

"Why?"

"I need a second." Her breath went ragged and came back. "Just give me a second, I ran the whole—"

"Take it."

I sat down on the floor with my back against the steel. It came cold all the way up my spine, through the bare skin, into the muscle. I stayed there. Naked. Listening.

She breathed. I listened to it come down by degrees — the sharp edges softening, the gaps between inhales lengthening.

"If I opened this door right now." Her voice arrived flat and fast, all at once, like she’d been carrying the sentence down four flights and couldn’t hold it any longer. "Could you kill Max?"

"Say that again."

"Could you kill him."

"Why are you asking me that?"

"Do you want out of that room?" Her voice had come all the way down. Level, and working hard to stay there. "Answer that one first."

"Yes."

"Then I can open it. One condition. He dies."

"Wait." I put my hand flat on the metal again. The cold bit into my palm. "Take me back to the beginning, because I’m a long way behind you."

"On the stairs you told me Goth had no right to ask me for anything else. That I’d already given them everything I had." The breath went in and came back wrong — thin, unsteady. "So I went and gave them the rest of it anyway. And then he broke his word."

"About what?"

"The gates. His people came through and he shut the wall behind them with our trucks still out there."

I saw it without wanting to. Trucks on the wrong side of a closed gate. Faces that had trusted the opening.

"That’s bad."

"It’s worse than bad. He’s going to do things inside these walls, Abram. I’ve had years of standing next to him and I know what’s coming, and I can’t get my hands on it by myself."

"I thought he was nothing without you." I kept it low. "You’re the one who moves them."

"I don’t control them. I told you that already."

"You put one hand in the air and a thousand of them stopped walking."

"I reach the first patient. Her and nobody else. Whatever I give her, she carries to the rest."

The specimen. The girl out of the Fallen City.

"Then they’re yours, not his," I said. "Without you he’s just a man with a radio."

"I’m nothing to him now." Everything went out of her at once — the careful control, the level tone, all of it. "He brought a woman in from Goth tonight and she’s taken the first patient off me."

I sat with that against the cold.

A replacement. Someone who could do what Ingrid did, or close enough that Max no longer needed the woman who had emptied a street with a gesture.

The corridor stayed empty and quiet except for Sophia’s distant, frayed breathing two doors down.

And that’s what brought her to my door.

"What’s he planning?"

"He’s executing the three of you tomorrow evening." She didn’t put anything soft around it. The words landed flat and final. "And I think I come after that."

Executed.

The word sat in the dark and didn’t move. Melissa. Monica. Sophia. Me. A schedule with a time on it and a man who had already broken one promise tonight.

"We have to stop him," Ingrid said. "So. Do I open it?"

And there it was, sitting in the dark on both sides of that door.

One turn of a lock and I’m up those stairs and out of this building. Into a city where Vince is moving on Sherry, where three women arrive tomorrow with no idea what’s waiting, where I stop being something on another man’s schedule.

Out was also away. Away from a corridor with two sources locked in it, one already at the wall and the other still holding, in the only window anybody was ever going to hand me.

Walk out tonight and Sherry lives and the awakening happens anyway.

Stay, and I might have both.

Might.

"Abram."

"Not tonight," I said. "Open it tomorrow afternoon."

"I might not get a clean window tomorrow." The edge arrived fast. "Now is good. Now is as good as this gets. You walk out, we find the first patient, we kill her, and the infection stops. Then we go at him with nothing standing behind him."

"I’m going to work with you, Ingrid. I mean it." I put my palm on the steel again. The cold bit deeper. "Give me tonight and the morning. Then we finish him."

The pause went long enough that I listened for her breathing. It was still there — slower now, but present.

"Okay."

The disappointment was sitting right on top of the word and she didn’t bother taking it off.

I got up. The concrete was cold under my bare feet. My spine left the steel and the air felt colder without it.

"Give me a minute. I’ll come back."

"Okay."

I turned toward my room. Down the corridor, Sophia’s door was still unlocked — the gap under it dark, the quiet behind it heavy with the sound of someone still fighting and still losing.

One night to build something out of all of it.