Chapter 224: Quiet on Thirteen

Chapter 224: Chapter 224: Quiet on Thirteen

The knock came a little after three in the morning, three soft raps and a pause, then one more, so small that Kai almost took it for the building settling.

He had the watch. He sat on an overturned crate inside the stairwell gate on 21, a battery lantern turned to its lowest glow beside him and Hrimnir, in his small gray form, stretched across the floor at his feet. The welded bars and plate closed off the stairs completely, so that nobody could climb past this landing. The wolf’s head came up before the second knock. Kai set down the cold tea he’d been pretending to drink.

"Who’s there?"

"It’s Jason." The voice was thin and breathless. "Please. I need to talk to Erik."

Kai crossed to the bars and looked through the gap in the plate. A small figure stood on the landing below, clutching a candle stub in a jar. His coat was dark with rain. Past him, one flight down, a taller shadow waited against the wall and did not come closer. Ethan, Kai guessed, listening to the dark the way he always did.

"Don’t move," Kai said. "I’ll get him."

"Okay."

"Jason." Kai paused. "Are you hurt?"

"No." A breath. "It’s not me."

Kai went up the stairs two at a time. Penelope had Killian on bed rest inside the space, so the watch fell to the brothers, and Erik was awake before the door of 2401 had finished opening. He was already pulling on a jacket.

"Jason," Kai said. "At the gate. He won’t say what."

Erik didn’t ask anything else.

They stood on either side of the steel, with the lantern between them and the candle guttering in its jar. Up close, Jason looked worse than he had on the dock. The hollow beneath his cheekbones had deepened, and his hands were shaking so hard that the flame shivered.

"I’m sorry for the hour," he said. "I know I’m not supposed to come up here without asking. Ethan’s on the landing below. He wouldn’t let me do the stairs alone."

"Good," Erik said. "Tell us."

Jason swallowed. "There was a family on thirteen. Six floors down from us. Four of them. A mom and a dad, a girl who’s maybe nine, and a little boy." He stopped and started again. "They came up from five when it flooded. They’ve been camping in the hallway for two weeks, because the apartments on that floor are full. I’ve seen them. The kid liked to count the doors."

Erik’s expression didn’t change. Kai felt something cold settle in his stomach.

"They were found an hour ago," Jason said. "Lying in a row, in the hallway. Blankets pulled up to their chins. Somebody tucked them in." His voice cracked on the last word. "Nobody saw anything. There wasn’t any blood that I could see. They looked like they were sleeping, except they weren’t."

Hrimnir had risen onto all four feet. He made no sound, but Kai felt the tension go through the landing like a held wire.

"Who found them?" Erik asked quietly.

"A woman who lives at the other end of the hall. She went to use the stairwell and nearly stepped on the boy’s foot." Jason wiped his nose with the back of his wrist. "People came out. Some of them tried to wake them. Nobody wanted to touch the little ones."

"And you went up to look."

"I didn’t mean to." The boy’s eyes lifted, red-rimmed and very young. "Ethan woke me. He couldn’t sleep. He’s been listening to the stairwells at night, because that’s what he’s good at, and he heard them. The family, I mean. Before." He took a shaky breath. "The mom was humming. The kids were whispering about something. Then somebody came up the stairs, slowly. Nobody said anything. Nobody got scared. The humming just went on for a while. And then it stopped."

Erik went very still. "He didn’t hear a struggle."

"No."

"No voice. No footsteps running."

"He says it’s like they were glad someone was coming." Jason’s face crumpled for a moment, and he forced it flat again. "He’s been sick all night. He thinks he should’ve done something. He didn’t know it was wrong. It sounded kind."

Kai exhaled slowly. It was the same thing Ethan had reported weeks ago, after the first killing. The killer never spoke, and the victims never feared. Hearing it again, with a child’s name attached, made it worse.

"Jason," Erik said. "Look at me."

The boy looked up.

"Ethan did nothing wrong. A man doesn’t hear a murder when it sounds like someone tucking children in. If there was a moment to stop it, none of us could have seen it." Erik’s voice was steady, and Kai knew from the quality of the steadiness what it was costing. "I need you to tell him that. Can you?"

"I’ll try."

"Good. Now. Your dots." Erik hesitated, and Kai knew why. They had agreed on the rule, ask as a favor, don’t make it a condition, and Erik kept to it even now. "I’m not asking you to do anything dangerous. If you want to say no, say no. But did you see anything on your map? Before the family was found?"

Jason was quiet. Then, slowly, he nodded.

"I’ve been keeping it open at night," he said. "Dad doesn’t like it. He says it’ll wear me down. But after the other ones, I couldn’t stop." He rubbed his temple. "The family’s dots were on thirteen all evening. Four of them, close together. They didn’t move after dark. Then at some point a fifth dot came to them. It stayed a while, longer than a stranger would, I think. It sat with them."

Kai’s breath caught.

"Whose dot?"

"I don’t know." Jason’s voice dropped. "I only know where people are. Not who. It was one person, and it was calm. It didn’t hurry. When it left, it went down the stairs, and I lost it somewhere below us. I can’t see far through the walls."

"Down," Erik said.

"Yes."

Hrimnir’s head turned, slowly, toward the dark stairwell below. A low rumble started in his chest, so soft that Kai almost missed it. Erik did not look at the wolf. But Kai saw his hand tighten on the bars.

"Thank you," Erik said. "That helps more than you know."

"Does it?" Jason’s voice was very small. "I don’t understand what’s happening. People are scared. They want to put guards in the hallways, but nobody has anyone to spare. Some are saying they’re going to leave. Dad says we can’t. Where would we go?"

"I don’t know," Erik said honestly.

"Is there anything we can do?"

Kai braced himself. He knew what the boy was really asking, and he knew what the answer had to be. They had drawn that line over too many kitchen tables to cross it now, even for a face like this one.

Erik didn’t make him wait.

"Tell your father to bring everyone together," Erik said. "Your whole group, in the same two apartments on nineteen, and a reinforced gate across the hallway entrance and the stairwell door. Nobody gets in without going through it."

Jason blinked. "A gate? Like yours?"

"Like ours." Erik glanced at Kai.

"We’ve got a spare," Kai said. "Stored away, never used. It’s yours."

"We can’t build something like that. We don’t have the tools."

"You don’t have to," Erik said. "Killian can reinforce it, with Kai and Ben’s help. He’s resting right now, so it’ll be a day or two. Until then, take turns on watch, so somebody is always awake. Ethan hears the stairwell better than any of us. If someone comes up, he’ll know." He paused. "And if somebody sounds kind, and you don’t know them, be more careful, not less."

Jason nodded slowly. "A gate," he said, almost to himself. "Dad would like that."

"Good."

"Come to the dock tomorrow, at dusk," Erik added. "Same terms as before. We’ll have a boat for you."

"Thank you." Jason’s eyes were wet. "I know you don’t have to."

"We owe you one." Erik said it flatly, without ceremony. "You told us tonight. You didn’t have to do that either."

"I just thought..." The boy trailed off. "Someone should know. Someone who might do something."

"We heard you," Kai said, as gently as he could.

Jason lifted the jar with its stub of candle, and for a moment the little flame lit his thin face from below. He looked like a child holding up a lantern in a cave.

"I’ll go back now," he said. "Ethan’s waiting."

"Stay together. Don’t stop on any landing."

"I won’t."

He turned and went down the dark stairs, one slow step at a time, with the light shrinking away behind him. On the landing below, the taller shadow fell in beside him without a word. Kai listened to their footsteps until the stairwell swallowed them.

Neither brother spoke for a while. The lantern buzzed. Hrimnir had settled onto his haunches facing the stairs, as still as a statue.

"Four," Kai said at last. "Two kids."

"Yes."

"They tucked them in. Who does that?"

"Someone who wants it to look gentle." Erik’s voice was very quiet. "Or someone who thinks it is."

Kai turned to look at him. "You know something."

"I know nothing." Erik didn’t look away from the stairs. "I have a sound my wolf makes, and a dot that went downstairs. That isn’t knowing."

"But you think."

"I think that whoever it is walks among those people without being feared." Erik finally turned. His pale eyes were hard and tired. "That isn’t a raider, Kai. It isn’t one of the ones we’ve fought. That’s somebody they open the door to."

Kai let that sit. A sleeping family. A humming mother. A visitor so familiar they hadn’t stirred.

"Do we tell the others?"

"In the morning. Silver should hear it first." Erik rubbed the scar on his forearm, the pale fern from the lightning. "And we tighten the gate rule. Nobody opens it. Not for a crying woman, not for a friend, not for a child who knocks politely at three in the morning."

"Jason knocked politely at three in the morning."

"Yes." Erik’s mouth twisted. "And I let him talk through the bars. That’s all I let him do. If I’m going to be afraid of somebody gentle, then I have to be afraid of everybody, and I don’t know how to live that way."

"Welcome to the apocalypse."

"Thank you."

Kai almost laughed. It died halfway out. He sat back on the crate, and the lantern light made long shadows on the steel.

"I keep thinking about the boy," he said. "The little one. Counting doors."

"So do I."

"We could have brought them up. If we’d known."

"We didn’t know." Erik’s voice did not shake, but it came very close. "And if we’d known, there were four hundred other people in the building we also could have saved. That’s the arithmetic, Kai. It’s a terrible kind of math, and I hate that it’s mine."

Kai said nothing. After a while he reached down and rested a hand on Hrimnir’s head. The wolf leaned into it without taking his eyes off the stairs.

Far below, in the dark, a door closed softly on thirteen, and somebody began to carry out the dead.