Chapter 416 A Few More Minutes.

"Are you talking about the stairway?" I asked.

My boot had stopped at the edge of the blood above Eric’s head — a dark map on the tile, already skinned at the edges, the shape of a man who had walked through a scream and then stopped walking.

He nodded. "Packed. Top to bottom. Getting through it costs us time we might not have."

He left the rest sitting there, and I knew exactly which part he hadn’t said.

"And there’s a chance they come up while we’re inside it."

"Always a chance." He turned his hand over. The blade caught the corridor light and gave it back dull. "In a space that tight."

"We can manage the risk."

"We can." He didn’t move. "Two of us in a stairwell with a hundred of them and no room to swing, we’d probably come out the other side."

"But."

"But her coming back down through it wouldn’t go the same way."

Which was exactly what I’d been turning over since the corridor and hadn’t wanted to put in words.

Going up was one problem — time, weight, the coil of chance that a thousand eyelids somewhere in the city might open. Coming down with Ingrid between us was a different one, and it only had one answer: the stairs could not be the exit.

"So what’s the plan?"

He left it with me.

I looked down the hallway.

Celine was lying where she’d dropped. The web was still in her chest — a dull white lattice set across the sternum, the strands gone matte since the life left them — and the line of it ran back across six feet of floor to a dead man’s open palm.

"We take the stairs going up." I crouched beside Eric. The tile cold through my knee. "We don’t take them coming down."

I took hold of the line at his hand and pulled.

It came.

Cold as wire left out all night, and heavier than it had any right to be. The first metre slid free of the palm with a faint resistance, then gave.

Code was moving. He crossed to Celine, put the blade under the strand at her chest and cut it, and the sound was metal parting metal. The cut end fell against her shirt.

Then he came back and stood over me and watched it come.

And it kept coming.

Out of the palm of a dead man. Three metres. Six. Ten, with no end to it anywhere, like I was drawing something out of him that had always been in there instead of blood.

The coil built over my forearm, loop on loop, the weight climbing with every length until the muscle in my shoulder started to register the load.

"How much of that have you got in you," Code said to the body.

I kept pulling. The web whispered against itself as it stacked.

"Stop there." He put a boot on the line. "That’s a floor and a half."

"Make it two."

I pulled another stretch out and he cut it clean. The severed end sprang once against the floor and settled.

I wound the rest round my arm. The last few metres had come through the blood on that floor and were slick with it, which was going to matter to nobody at all.

"How did that come to you so fast?" he asked as we started walking.

"I don’t know."

"I think that’s just how you answer questions."

We came out into the hallway with the stairs.

Packed.

Shoulder to shoulder across the whole width of it, and the stairwell beyond solid from the first step up to wherever the light stopped.

Code went in first and put his shoulder into it.

Most of them were people who’d come to watch the execution.

One man still gripping a bottle by the neck, the glass fogged where his hand had been. A woman with her hand closed around nothing at the height a child’s hand would be.

We went up.

Not walking. Working. Shove a body aside and get a boot onto the next step, get a hip through the gap before the press closed again.

A face came round into mine on the third step and stayed there, inches off — eyes open and pointed at my mouth, pupils fixed on nothing, the lips slightly parted as if on the edge of a word that had been cancelled mid-shape.

I pushed its shoulder and it turned away like a door swinging, the body rotating on the step until the face found the wall and rested there.

The coil caught on everything.

A belt buckle. A coat button. The corner of a step where the web had found a crack in the stone and tried to set. Each time I hauled it free the weight shifted on my arm and the cold bit deeper through the cloth.

And the whole way up I ran the same arithmetic over and over.

No room.

If she wakes while we’re in this, we don’t fight anything. We get taken standing up.

"I used to think girls were your weakness," Code said from somewhere above me. "Out there. On the mission."

He was shifting them by the chest, one after another, no care in it at all.

"And now?"

I came through the gap behind him and the coil snagged on a man’s wristwatch and I hauled it free.

"I was right."

I couldn’t see him anymore. Just bodies and the sound of him working.

"I thought you were insane," I said. "On that mission. I watched you enjoy yourself the day Speed died."

"Speed."

A short laugh came back down through all of it.

"That one was obsessed with girls and insane with it. I wasn’t surprised he went first."

A grunt as something heavy moved. The stairwell shifted its balance by an inch.

Something settled against my back.

I stopped dead with my hand already charged.

Nothing.

Just weight settling where I’d moved somebody.

I shoved the last two apart — a man in a suit whose tie had ridden up over his collar, a woman whose earring had torn free and hung by a thread of gold against her neck — and came out into the upper hallway.

A few of them standing in it, well spread. Room to breathe. Room to see the walls again. The air cooler here.

And a few feet away, the door with Ingrid and Azure and Melissa and Sophia behind it.

A few feet.

All we needed was for a girl somewhere in this city to stay asleep a few minutes longer.