Chapter 415 A Big One.

We moved, Code and me, and neither of us said anything for the first stretch of it.

The road took our boots without comment. Straight through the infected — past the ones standing in the junction with their shadows cut hard under the steady lamps, past the ones wedged between parked cars where the panic had left them.

A woman in a good coat, handbag still hooked on her arm, chin on her chest as if she had paused to remember a name. A boy who couldn’t have been fifteen, mouth open, a dark crust at the corner of his lips that the night air had already dried.

I put my hand flat on a man’s back as I went past him. He not turn. I took my hand back and kept walking.

My heart was at rest for the first time in days. Sherry was behind a door with May and Becky. Most of the others were inside arm’s reach and breathing.

"You know there’s nobody running these walls right now?"

Code said it without looking at me. Eyes on the next stretch of asphalt.

And all of it arrived at once.

Bala, killed by the primordials to put Sinn in his chair.

Sinn, killed by his own appetite for that chair, in a basement I was standing in.

And the whole of Goth finished on this road in under three minutes by a man wearing a dead boy’s body.

"So what happens to the people?"

"I don’t know. We deal with these first."

I stopped at the back of a man who’d turned sometime in the last hour, still in a shirt with a collar. The collar sat neat. The body under it had stopped negotiating with anything.

"They’re what’s left. The rest of it can wait a day."

"Then we start now."

His blade went through the throat of the one beside him before I’d finished turning my head.

A short, practised motion — no wind-up, no announcement. The edge opened the neck and came out dark. The body didn’t move at all. It stood there with its head at the wrong angle, the cut wide and wet, and stayed standing until he put a boot in its hip and it went over.

The handbag of the woman in the good coat swung once when the body brushed it and then hung still.

"That’s not what I meant."

"Then say what you meant." He was already looking at the next one, the blade held low. "Because from here there’s nothing to do but walk the city and go through all of them while they’re like this."

"We can’t kill all of them."

We crossed the road with the CGI building coming up ahead.

"There are thousands. They’re across the entire capital."

"So what’s the plan?"

Another one went down on his left. He hadn’t broken stride once. The body folded at the knees and settled against a kerb with its cheek on the asphalt.

"You remember the infected we brought back from the Fallen City?"

"The girl?"

"Yes. She’s running all of them." We reached the steps. "They sleep when she sleeps. They get up when she gets up."

We started up, onto the platform where Max had stood with a microphone in his hand an hour ago.

"So she dies and it ends."

He’d turned around on the step above me. Looking down. Waiting.

Longest conversation I’d ever had with him.

"Yeah."

"Then let’s go and find her." He wiped the short blade down his thigh. The wet left a dark streak on the cloth and the edge came away cleaner. "Where is she?"

Through the broken doors, a few of them stood in the lobby. Stopped mid-step like everything else — one with a foot still lifted, frozen in the act of entering, the other hand reaching for a door that no longer needed opening.

"Ingrid can find her."

"Who’s Ingrid?"

"The bald one. She was in the corridor with the girls."

"Ohh." He nodded slowly. "Then we find Ingrid."

We came through the reception, past Pauline’s desk with nobody behind it — chair pushed back, a cup still on the blotter, the surface clean the way she had always kept it — and turned into the corridor.

Empty the whole length of it. The polished floor threw our shapes back at us in dark doubles.

"Why do you care about those girls?"

It came out of nothing. No lead-in. No glance to soften it.

"I don’t know."

"Good." He rubbed the blade clean on his jeans, the motion small and habitual. "That’s what I’d say if you asked me why I like killing."

I kept walking and let that sit in me. The corridor stretched. Our boots found the same rhythm for a stretch of metres and then lost it where his damaged side still shaved a fraction off the stride.

"You don’t believe that," I said.

"I don’t have to believe it. I watched you."

"Watched me what?"

He didn’t answer.

We took the next turn and the elevator came into view.

Everything where we’d left it. The doors shut. The panel dark.

He stepped over a Guardian without looking down. The body lay on its side with its arms arranged as if it had tried to break a fall that had already finished.

"Are we going back to the room with the women?" Code asked.

"Yeah."

Eric was on his face by the wall with his arms out.

I went round him. Then I stopped and looked back at him for a second — the long chin against the tile, the web gone from the hands, the blood under the cheek pooled and skinned.

An hour ago that man had put his knee into the side of my head in a car. An hour ago he had walked through his niece’s scream while Code dropped and I dropped and the corridor ceased to be a place bodies could stand in.

And now I was walking past him.

"Then we’ve got a problem," Code said. "A big one."

Oh.

I turned from Eric’s back to Code’s face. He was looking past me.