Chapter 406: Fight Hard.

One day I’m not going to be here. That’s why I keep telling you to fight hard, Abram.

My mother’s voice, arriving from nowhere, while I watched Max Donman walk up that street.

And when somebody else is fighting for you, don’t you dare relax. You double it.

The words sat in the office air as if the plain had opened a door into it. Dust. The dead terminal. The iron lattice under my palms still holding the cold of the glass.

Vince came up off the asphalt.

He didn’t scramble. He rose — one hand, then both feet, the motion of a body that had decided the road was finished with him — and set his feet, and a small smile arrived on his face like a man who’d finally found something worth staying for. The empty patience gone; something hungrier in its place.

Max reached Sherry and May.

He went straight past them. Didn’t look at either of them, didn’t slow, didn’t say one word. His shoulder passed within inches of May’s and she flinched and held Sherry’s arm harder. He kept walking toward his sister.

"Bram." Azure’s voice behind me. Closer than before. "You didn’t answer me. Is everything okay?"

I turned my head a fraction. The office. Her pink eyes. The four women still in their chairs, the door still locked against a hallway full of whatever Code hadn’t finished.

"Yes."

And I looked back in time to see Max put one arm around Becky and hold her for a second.

Not long. Long enough that her sword-arm dropped. Long enough that her forehead found his shoulder. Then the arm came off her and he stepped past, putting his body between her and the sixty feet of asphalt where Vince was waiting with that smile still on his mouth.

He came for her.

Sherry stood there in the middle of that road and he went past her. That’s not him choosing Becky over her.

That’s him deciding Sherry belongs to me now.

Which means Sherry and May are nobody’s.

They’re mine. They have always been mine, and I am standing at a window watching.

I looked at the bars.

Iron, crossed, set into stone. I didn’t have a chance of taking them out and even if I did it would cost me minutes I didn’t have a single one of. The lattice had already told me what it was in the vision. It was not going to become a door because I needed one.

Down on the road the infected had multiplied. They were everywhere now — drifting between the parked cars, staggering through the pools of dark where the lamps had failed, standing in the renewed light where Max’s passage had steadied the street. And not one of them was going at anybody.

Calm. All of them. Heads loose. Arms hanging. The wrong patience of bodies that had lost the instruction and not yet found the hunger.

Something else is holding the leash now.

The first patient.

And whatever is left inside her isn’t sane.

It doesn’t know what to do with them yet.

But it will.

I turned from the window and went for the door.

"Do you need help?" Sophia asked, without opening her eyes, already knowing. Her hands were still flat on the blotter. The bare throat still tipped back against the chair.

"No. Thank you."

"Are you going out there?" Azure was up. The chair scraped. She didn’t wait for the answer because I was already at the handle. "Bram, that’s stupid. That’s genuinely stupid."

"They’re calm. I’ll be back."

"You can’t trust that." Ingrid came off her chair. "They move on her orders and she doesn’t know she’s giving them."

"I know." I had the door open. The hallway air came in. "Somebody lock this behind me."

I went out without taking Azure’s hand, because there wasn’t time to explain any of it and because if I’d touched her I might have stayed.

The door pulled shut behind me. The latch found its seat. A second later the lock turned — Azure’s hand or Ingrid’s, it didn’t matter — and the wood became a wall again.

The corridor was full.

Packed with them, shoulder to shoulder the whole length of it, and every one standing still. Heads down. Arms loose. Like something had told them all to sleep where they stood. Staff badges. Black shirts. Ordinary clothes from the square.

The stairway was the same, top to bottom — a column of bodies on every step, filling the risers, blocking the rail, the whole vertical shaft of the building occupied by the quiet that had replaced Celine’s scream.

The whole building. It’s taken the whole building in under ten minutes.

This city has two days. Maybe less.

I started pushing through them.

Not toward the stairs. Right, toward the balcony, because the stairs were solid with them and I didn’t have the time the stairs would cost. My shoulder found a chest that gave without resistance. My hands found another arm and shifted it out of my path; the body swayed, settled, never lifted its head. Fabric. Cold skin. The absence of ordinary human heat.

The countdown kept running behind my eyes. Two minutes. Less now. The ability was coming back, and I might need it before I hit the ground.

I came through the last row of them and hit the balcony rail.

Night air. The street two floors below. Max and Vince had started — a dark shape and a blond one closing the sixty feet between them, the lamps holding steady in a run of yellow along the asphalt where Sherry and May were still moving, Becky still standing with the half-formed ridge of road at her feet.

I put both hands on the rail and went over it.

The system would do whatever the system does about a broken arm or a shattered ankle. That was its problem.

Because if neither of those two stopped Vince, Sherry and May didn’t stand a chance.