Chapter 411: A Different Nadez.

My hands came free and dropped to my sides as the wall came up on us.

Stone. Dark glass. The last of the run resolving into a surface that would not give. His teeth went deeper — the pull bright and continuous along the side of my throat, warmth leaving in a thin steady run.

Both hands locked on the back of my neck now, and I wasn’t carrying him anymore. He was holding on to me, and his weight grew with every second because mine was going out of me into him.

I drove him into the stone.

Hard. Everything I had left and the last of the run behind it. Shoulder and hip and the locked arms and the full momentum of fifty metres of broken road. His mouth tore off my neck — teeth leaving, the wound opening to the air — and he came down on the ground with his feet still under him and his back arched wrong against the face of the building.

Dust shook out of the joints in the stone. A crack ran sideways from the point of impact and stopped.

A space opened between us.

Two feet. Three. The exact space he needed. The only thing he’d wanted since the road — room to tear, room to smoke, room to put a man in half across a distance.

I filled it with charge, running out of my palm into him while I closed it again — white light finding the centre of his chest, the air tightening, the gap collapsing as my shoulder found his and the lock tried to reset.

He struggled to get his legs straight.

My fist met his face.

[ God Hand punch. ]

[ Force ×4 ]

His head went into the wall behind him and he stayed standing. The sound of it was wet and final. Stone took the back of his skull and gave nothing back.

I hit him again. Heavier than anything I’ve ever thrown. The sound of it was metal into bone and it went up the street.

He stayed standing. Balance going, knees loose, upright only because the wall was behind him.

I went rapid.

[ Force ×8 ]

[ Force ×10 ]

[ ×17 ]

And everything came up out of me at once and went into a face I’d first seen across a corridor at School Central. A boy who came at my wing because I’d slept with Mable.

Everything I had held against Vince came pouring out, and I used each memory to strike at him.

Azure, and the way he’d owned her.

Harmione, who’d been nothing but decent in the short time I knew her.

Celestine. Carrise.

May and Sherry running toward infected because he was behind them — the clear side of the road abandoned, the wrong side chosen.

Sherry, carrying my child.

His face came apart under my hands before his legs did — structure failing, the borrowed features losing the argument with the force, blood across all of it, the purple hair matted and dark — and then his legs went and he hit the ground.

I stood over him.

Teeth gone. Nothing in that face arranged the way a face is arranged. Blood across all of it, his breaths coming wet and short, the chest still rising, the thing inside the vessel still present enough to work the lungs.

He said it was easy last time. He said a woman had to do it for me.

I came down onto one knee.

The asphalt grit under the kneecap. The wound in my neck still open, still warm, the system already starting on it and not finished. My hand was already back — charge gathering in the palm for the last of it, the white light finding the shape of a finishing blow.

I’d seen that face in the libra, standing in a burning street while everyone I knew lay around him. He’d torn Max Donman in half a few minutes back and Becky was going to want answers from me about it for the rest of my life.

Whatever my father warned me about, this one dies.

And if he comes back, he dies again. A thousand times if that’s the arrangement.

My hand moved.

"Wait."

It came out through the wreckage of his mouth. Wet. Shaped with difficulty around the damage.

"Wait."

I stopped.

Because it was the one thing I could give him, and because whatever else he was, the blood was the blood. Ethan’s. Mine. The same name, the same inheritance neither of us had asked for.

"I only ever had two endings." Every word cost him something and he spent them anyway. The chest working hard for the air behind them. "You kill me. Or I become his tool. That’s the whole—."

I let him talk.

The charge held in my palm and did not fall. The infected down the street stood perfectly still. The lamps held their stutter and then steadied, as if the street had decided this part was worth lighting.

"I’m not like you. I never had a choice in any of it. Mine was decided before I opened my eyes the first time."

Say it. Say all of it.

I’m so tired of the awakening. I’m tired of every single one of you explaining it to me.

I don’t care.

"But I want one thing." He coughed and something came up with it — dark, thick, running from the corner of what was left of his mouth into the purple hair. "One thing from you."

I waited.

"Don’t follow anything blind." His eyes found mine and held. "Don’t decide with your feelings. That’s exactly where he’s got you."

He coughed again. The chest hitched and settled.

I lowered my hand. There was nothing left in him that needed it. The charge went out of the palm in a thin residual glow and died against the asphalt.

"You’re a different Nadez," he said.

And then he wasn’t breathing.

The chest stopped. The eyes stayed open and stopped seeing.

Whatever had been inside that body finally went quiet.

I got up off my knee.

All down that street, the infected were standing perfectly still.