Chapter 374: The Scratched Name.

"Uhhhh."

The sound came out of Sophia’s room as I passed it. Not sleep. Not rest. The same fight I’d heard through a locked door earlier, only thinner now, worn down to something that had stopped pretending it could win.

I pushed my own door open slowly, easing the weight so the hinge wouldn’t carry. The latch clicked once, soft, and the room took me in.

Melissa hadn’t moved much. She’d turned onto her back, legs apart and both arms thrown wide, taking up the whole of a mattress she’d been sharing a few minutes back. Short white hair against the sheet. Breasts rising and falling with slow, even breaths. The soft inner skin of her thighs still faintly marked from earlier, a shadow of pressure that the light didn’t hide. Her face was turned slightly toward the wall.

My comms was on the floor where I’d dropped it. I picked it up and went back out and left the door standing open behind me.

Ingrid was still there. I knew it before I reached the steel, the careful placement of weight and the controlled breathing.

I put the comms flat and pushed it under the door. The gap took it with a soft scrape of plastic on concrete.

It hadn’t turned on once since they put me in here. I’d tried it half the day before I worked out why nobody had bothered to search us on the way in. Whatever this room was built out of, it ate everything.

Her hand came down on the other side and took it. Fingers brushed the edge of the gap for a second — warm, brief — and then the plastic lifted away.

"Does it come on?"

"Yeah." A pause. "It’s on."

"Find Code’s number in there."

"Code."

"He’s going to matter to us tomorrow. If we’re standing against the Lord of the walls I want him on the right side of it."

I heard the soft taps against the plastic. Her breathing had steadied further; the run was still in it, but the edge had gone.

"I’ve got it."

"Call him. I want to talk to him myself."

"It’s not going through." Ingrid’s voice changed. Frustration under the fatigue. "There’s no signal down here at all. I don’t think anything reaches this corridor."

"Right."

I put my palm flat on the steel and thought it out. The cold bit into my skin and stayed there. The stairwell behind her. The floors above. The place where the building stopped being a dead zone and became a city again.

"Then take it with you. Tell him Sinn is dead and Abram needs him at the headquarters tomorrow afternoon."

"And if he asks me why?"

"He won’t."

"But if he does."

"Then tell him everything. All of it. He won’t care about most of it."

"Okay."

"I’ll be waiting for you."

"Okay."

I stayed against the door and listened to her go — the sound of her boots getting further up the corridor, the careful rhythm of someone who had already run too far tonight and was still moving, each step measured, each one carrying my comms toward a floor where a call could leave the building. Then the stairwell took her and the corridor was empty again.

I turned and went back to my room.

Melissa was still under. I sat down on the edge of the mattress with my elbows on my knees and let it arrive. The sheet was still warm where her body had been against mine. The smell of the shower was still on her skin — cheap soap, steam, the faint mineral bite of the tile. Her arm lay open toward the space I’d left. She didn’t stir.

[ This is the right time to move on Sophia. ]

[ She is hoping for a rescue. ]

I didn’t answer it.

And sitting there in the quiet was the first mistake I’d made all night, because the moment I stopped moving, my body put its bill in front of me.

I’d moved from Abuela’s building to a factory to a road to a roof. I’d been thrown, netted, dragged down a staircase on my back and locked in a basement, and somewhere in the middle of all of that a day had ended and another one had started without anybody asking me. I hadn’t slept. And Melissa had taken whatever I’d had left in me and I’d given it to her willingly.

The ache sat deep in the muscle, in the joints, in the places Bagins’ ropes had cut, in the base of my spine where the tile had pressed while I held Melissa down.

Down the corridor Sophia’s sound had changed again. It wasn’t a groan now. It had got closer to crying — thinner, shorter, the edges fraying, the sound of someone who had stopped fighting the thing inside them and started grieving it instead.

I looked up at the corner.

High up, where the wall met the ceiling, above the head of the bed. The scratched words I’d seen and not finished reading.

I stood on the bed frame and then onto the mattress, putting my feet carefully either side of Melissa’s open legs, the thin foam giving under my weight, and leaned in until the scratched words came clear under the bulb.

Whatever needs to be done. Do it fast because you don’t have all the time, A—

The last word was under a layer of dust.

I rubbed it with my thumb. The dust came away in a grey smear against my skin. The groove of the letter sat underneath, dug in with something sharp and thin.

Every line of it was sitting on top of exactly where I was standing. Somebody had been in this room with no time and something that had to be finished. Somebody who had stood on this frame the way I was standing now, with the bulb in their eyes and the vent close enough to smell, and put a name into the plaster.

—bram.

I stood on that mattress with my hand against the wall and read my own name.

That isn’t a coincidence.

Nobody leaves that in a corner and gets the name right by accident.

The letters were old. The dust had been thick. Whoever had written them had done it long before Max walked me down those stairs, long before the seal, long before a boy from the plain crossed the walls with nothing. And they had known the name.

I came down off the bed without waking her. The mattress shifted once under my weight and settled. Melissa’s breathing stayed even. Her thighs were still open. Her hands were still open. The scratched message sat in the corner above her head like a clock somebody else had started.

Then I walked out and pushed the door shut behind me, and went down the corridor toward the one that wasn’t locked.

Sophia’s sound came through the wood clearer with every step. Not a groan. Not a fight. Something rawer — short, broken, the edges wet. The handle was still. No bolt. The same unlocked door I’d been walking past all evening while the system told me the window was open and the night was the only one I was going to get.

I put my hand on it.

[ She is hoping for a rescue. ]

So am I.

I pushed the door open.