Chapter 407: You’re a Disgrace.

The ground arrived faster than I’d planned for.

Two floors of dark and the street coming up in a single continuous rush and then all of me found the road at once, hip first, and the sound of it was inside my own skull rather than outside it. Bone. The wet give of something that wasn’t supposed to give. My vision went white at the edges and came back in pieces.

[ Vitality restored. Hip restoring. ]

[ 40%. 50%. 60%. ]

I got a hand under me and pushed.

The leg didn’t answer. I made it take me anyway. I came up on one knee, then both, then the bad leg, and the world tilted once and settled.

The pain went up through the hip into the base of my spine and sat there, and I remembered I hadn’t eaten in a full day, and that the thing in my head was building me back out of a body that had nothing left in it to build from.

[ 00:00:45 ]

[ 00:00:44 ]

The ability counting itself home while I limped.

Sherry looked back a fraction as she ran and didn’t see me. May had her by the wrist and wasn’t letting her turn properly, hauling her forward every time her head started to come round.

Becky hadn’t moved at all. She was standing in the middle of that road watching her brother and Vincent Vale go at each other thirty metres away, and she’d stopped running so completely that it looked like a decision. Sword still in her hand. The half-formed ridge of asphalt she had raised still sitting in front of her boots.

The leg came back one step at a time. I made it carry me and it complained — a bright line of pain from hip to knee with every transfer of weight — and then it got on with it.

I crossed the road through a group of infected.

Six, maybe eight. Standing still with their heads down, arms loose at their sides, close enough that my shoulder went past a woman’s face without her eyes moving.

Nothing. Not a flicker.

There’s a whole city of them standing like this right now.

I reached Becky.

"Bram." She jumped properly — the sword coming up a fraction before she registered the face. "How did you—"

"Go with the girls."

Down the street the two of them had made the end of the building. May’s head was going constantly, checking everything, every doorway and every parked car, and she was more frightened than Sherry was by a long way.

That’s the part that matters.

She doesn’t guess. She’s never had to guess in her life. Whatever number she’s reading off this street right now, it’s low enough to make her afraid.

"I can’t leave him." Becky’s voice came out tight and fast. "We’ve got our differences and I know what he is and he’s still my brother. He came for me, Bram."

"I know."

"You don’t—"

"Becky." I got in front of her eyes.

She stopped. The sword lowered. I watched it go into her. I watched her understand exactly what it meant.

[ Vitality restoration complete. ]

It landed all at once. The leg took my weight properly and the pain went out of it like a light going off — the system finishing its work in a single clean rush, the joint solid, the spine clear, the body suddenly mine again in a street that still smelled of dust.

"Go with them," I said. "We’ll handle this."

She looked at me a second longer than I had to give her.

"Make sure he doesn’t die."

I put a hand on her shoulder.

"I’ll do everything I can."

"Okay."

She went, and she went fast — the sword across her back again, the ridge of asphalt left behind her like a half-finished sentence — and the other two were already out of sight past the corner.

[ Ability reset. ]

[ You can now see all possible outcomes. ]

Okay.

I don’t think I need it for this one.

I tested the leg once more — a full step, then another — and looked at the two of them.

A car came off the kerb near the CGI building.

Lifted by nothing at all, four wheels clear of the road, and then it went.

Not thrown. Fired. It crossed that street faster than anything with a chassis has ever moved, so fast the sound of it arrived behind it, a shape going sideways through the dark with Max’s palm open at the end of its line.

Vince dropped flat on his back.

It passed over him close enough to take the air off the road and went into the wall opposite and folded around it, metal screaming, glass becoming a bright spray, and the whole building took the hit. Dust. A rain of fragments on the asphalt. The car’s shape no longer a car’s shape.

Vince came up like he’d never gone down.

Max’s hand came round and the force left it and I watched Vince go through it. Not out of the way. Through — turning in the air, rolling out of the line of the thing the way polythene goes in a wind, the purple hair whipping, the body finding the gaps in a force that had no gaps until he made them.

I saw every part of it coming up the road behind Max.

Max brought both hands together in a clap.

Something caught Vince mid-flight and folded him in the middle and put him into the road, and he was down for less time than it takes to register that somebody is down.

Then the black smoke took him.

He came apart into it from the feet up, and for about half a second there was a man standing there with no legs below the knee and then there was nothing in that part of the street at all, and the smoke went across the asphalt low and fast.

My father was right.

This is stronger than the thing I fought at the Vale house. It isn’t close.

The smoke came up beside Max, inside his reach and behind his eyeline, and Vince rose out of it with his hand already going — fingers open for a throat.

And I put the charge through him.

I’d been holding it since the car. The whole way across that road, through the leg, through Becky, waiting on exactly that, because a man who travels through smoke has to stop being smoke somewhere — has to become flesh again for the hand to close, for the smile to finish, for the claim to land.

It took him in the forehead and threw him ten metres back down the road.

White light. His body leaving the ground in a clean arc and hitting the asphalt hard enough that the sound of it carried past the infected standing quiet on both sidewalks. He slid. Stopped.

Max’s head turned.

He saw me.

Then he looked forward again and said nothing at all.

I closed the distance and stepped into line beside him, the two of us facing one direction with Vince flat on the asphalt in front of us. The infected around us still hadn’t moved. The lamps held.

He came up off it slowly, and he took his time about it.

One hand. Then the other. His eyes found mine and he smiled.

"So you’ve hired every single person you could find." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at it — blood, dark against the skin. "You’re a disgrace to our family."