Chapter 410: No Room.

[ Results complete. ]

“You’re weak.”

He said it like a diagnosis. The conversational register held. Ten metres of asphalt between us and the empty pieces of Max and the quiet infected on both sidewalks.

“That’s all it was. Too weak. You couldn’t finish me. She did it for you.”

He came another step.

“And what finished it, what actually took the last of it away, is that you’ve done every filthy thing you’ve done for a man who left you on a plain as a child.”

[ He kills you in every defensive line. Every single one. ]

[ Returning to offence. ]

“I’ve never done anything for Ethan.”

“Come on.” A small laugh, and his voice dropped the way a man’s does when he’s reaching the end of what he came to say. “We both know what you’ve done. What you’ve put yourself through to stop the awakening. For him. All of it, for him.”

“I’ve done nothing for him.” The performance went out of my voice entirely. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for people I love.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know.” He spat on the road. The dark mark sat on the asphalt between us. “Don’t tell me that. That makes you weaker than I thought you were.”

He started walking at me.

Slow still. The same unhurried close that had crossed the street while he talked about Celestine and paper. The gap shrinking by metres.

“There’d be no awakening if it weren’t for him.” He came another step. “They’re not fighting to bring something back. They’re fighting to stop him. And you’ve been helping him do it since the day you crossed.”

“I’m not helping anybody.”

But it went in and stayed, because it was the first time anybody had put the awakening to me that way round — not a thing to be stopped for the world, but a thing aimed at a father I had watched lift a newborn in a forest twenty years ago and never met properly in this life.

“I don’t think you even know where the infection came from.” He laughed. The sound sat short in the street air. “WEAK.”

[ Results out. ]

[ One line survives. The CGI building is the condition. ]

I barely heard it.

Which of them is lying.

Eleanor. Monica. Him. Three versions and every one of them certain.

“I told you I don’t kill family,” Vince said.

He stopped.

Five metres. Close enough.

“You’re not my family.”

He vanished.

The black smoke took him from the feet up in the same motion I had watched on Max — flesh becoming absence, the smile last — and the street where he had been standing was empty for less than a breath.

And appeared in front of me with his hand already going for my throat.

No gap. No run-up. The smoke delivering him into the space my charge had been aimed at a second too late. Fingers open. The same claim that had closed on Max’s throat before the tear.

I’d watched him take Max apart. I knew exactly what he did with room.

So I didn’t give him any.

I went in under the hand — shoulder dropping, head turning inside the arc of his arm — and got both arms around his waist and locked them.

Chest against chest. My face in his shoulder. The borrowed body solid and cold and wrong against mine. No room between us for a single thing he could do at distance.

He opens men in half across thirty feet of road.

That doesn’t work at two inches.

His mouth came down on my neck and went through the charge like the charge wasn’t there.

Teeth. The wet wrong of it. Pain bright and immediate along the side of my throat. Warmth leaving. The pull of something that wasn’t blood alone.

I got my grip higher — arms locking under his ribs, hands finding the far side of his back — and started running.

His mouth lost the hold. Then his elbows came down on my back, one and then another, fast and precise, a man working at a lock rather than hitting something. Point of the elbow into the muscle beside the spine. Again. Higher. Looking for the place the hold would fail.

What is he doing?

His thoughts came through whole, unguarded, loud as speech.

I held tighter and ran.

Fifty metres to the wall. My boots found pieces of road that weren’t road anymore — asphalt turned up where Max had torn it, a wing mirror still attached to a fragment of door, somebody’s shoe lying on its side in a pool of dark. The lamps overhead going on and off in no order at all, the stutter returned, the city undecided again.

Where do you think you’re taking… me?

The strikes got worse. Something gave along my spine and I heard it before I felt it and I kept moving, because stopping was the one branch the system had never shown me surviving. His weight on me. My weight driving both of us. The CGI building’s face getting larger in the stuttering light.

Thirty metres.

I’ll have to drain him. Now.

How is he holding me like this?

Why can’t I get him off?

And I felt it land in him. Not fear. Something next to it.

He’s never fought anybody up close.

Not once. Not in either life.

His mouth came back down. Found my shoulder, dragged, found my neck again — teeth seeking the hold he had lost, the pull starting and breaking as the run jolted both of us over the broken road. Warmth down my collar. The charge still useless against the bite.

Twenty metres.

He’d taken everything out of Max in under two seconds and there was no reason on earth I’d be different — only the inches between us, only the lock, only the fact that the tear required space he didn’t have while my arms were closed around him.

Ten.

The face of the building came up in front of us, stone and dark glass and the broken doors away to the left where the crowd had forced them inward, and I put my head down and drove the last of it.

Your gift is the motivation for my creation. Give me more motivation!