Chapter 231: Marcus Counts the Days

Chapter 231: Chapter 231: Marcus Counts the Days

The laundry room on nine smelled of mildew and melted wax, the same as it had three days earlier, but there were more candles now and fewer places to stand.

Marcus Webb counted heads without meaning to. Eleven had met the first night. Tonight there were nineteen, crowded between the dead machines, and a few more stood in the hallway outside with their backs to the door. The thinner man had done what he promised. He had gone floor to floor, quietly, and found people who needed very little persuading.

"Twenty-three," the thinner man murmured at his shoulder. "If you count the three on the stairs."

"I count them."

Marcus raised a hand, and the room quieted. Nobody spoke above a whisper anymore. That, too, was new.

"Here’s what we know," he said. "Four of us have watched the twenty-first floor for three days. There’s a steel gate across the stairwell. The elevator shaft is dead, and the fire escape stops at twenty. The only people who go up or down are the family, in pairs, and they go out by boat."

"What about the gate?" someone asked.

"Welded plate. Bars as thick as my wrist. Nobody is cutting through that with the tools we have." He let that sink in. "So we don’t cut. We wait until it opens."

A murmur ran through the room. A woman near the dryers folded her arms. "And when is that?"

"When they come home from a run, they stop at the gate. It’s not instant. There’s a delay while someone unlatches it from the inside. Ten seconds, maybe fifteen. That’s the window."

"Fifteen seconds," the quiet man from before said from the back. He had been here the first night, watching with folded arms. "With how many of them standing right there?"

"Two. Three at most."

"And how many of us?"

"Everyone who’s willing."

"Willing to be shot," said the man, mildly.

Marcus did not flinch. "Nobody here wants a fight. We want what’s behind that gate. Food. Medicine. Clean water. A family on the twenty-first floor has been eating while our children get sick. I’ve seen the lights go on behind that steel at night. Real light. Batteries, in a building where nobody has any."

That was the thing, he thought. The light. It was the one piece of proof every person in the room had seen with their own eyes, a faint white glow beneath the gate on the dark landing. It did more than any speech.

"The family on nineteen got a new gate," a young man said. "Steel. Fresh welds. They put it up in a morning."

"Because of the murders," Marcus said. "Because the people upstairs gave them one."

"They gave them one."

"Exactly."

Nobody argued with that. A child coughed somewhere in the hallway, a dry, wet sound, and several heads turned toward it and then away.

"Renée isn’t here," a woman said.

"No."

"She’s been going door to door. Asking people to wait. Telling them it ends in funerals."

"I know." Marcus’s jaw tightened. "She’s not wrong that it could. But she’s also not wrong that her daughter’s fever hasn’t broken." He kept his voice flat. "I won’t force anyone. Nobody has to come. But if you’d rather stand in a doorway and watch your kids cough, that’s yours to decide, and I won’t judge it."

It was cruel, and he knew it, and it worked. The room went still in a different way.

"When?" the thinner man asked.

"Not tonight. We keep watching. Two more days to learn the pattern, and then we choose a day when the boats are out. We don’t want to meet the wolf."

"The wolf," someone repeated, uneasy.

"The small gray dog, the one that isn’t." Marcus shook his head. "Whatever it is, it sleeps by that gate. We’ll deal with it."

The quiet man from the back stepped forward then, and for the first time Marcus really looked at him. He was lean, with careful hands and a face that gave nothing away, and he spoke as though choosing each word for its weight.

"May I say something?"

"Please."

"The plan assumes the gate opens for ten seconds and nobody inside is ready." He smiled faintly. "I’ve watched that family for a month. They are always ready. I’d suggest we plan for the opposite."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning we need a reason for them to open it that isn’t an attack." He glanced at the ceiling, as if the 21st floor hung just above. "Someone hurt. Someone crying. They turned away a woman on a roof, I’m told, and went back for a family they actually knew. They’re careful with strangers. But they’ve been kind to one person at a time."

"You want to send a victim," Marcus said slowly.

"I want to send the kind of person they can’t leave outside." He shrugged. "A child, perhaps. A very sick one."

A silence fell, heavy as wet cloth.

"No," said a woman near the door. Marcus recognized her voice. It was a mother from the sixth-floor stairwell. "Not my kid. Not for that."

"Nobody said yours," the man said gently.

"I won’t use a child."

"I understand." He raised both hands. "It was only an idea."

Marcus looked at him for a long moment. He did not like how easily the man had said it, or how nobody else seemed to mind. He tucked the thought away with the others, the ones he did not have time for.

"We keep watching," he said. "Two days. Nobody does anything. Nobody speaks to the family, and nobody touches that gate. If anyone asks you why you’ve stopped sleeping, tell them it’s the fever."

People nodded, one by one. Then they began to drift out into the dark halls, in ones and twos, as they had the first time, each carrying a small flame in a jar.

When the room had emptied, the thinner man lingered.

"That man at the back," he said. "Do you know his name?"

"He said it was Paul."

"What floor?"

Marcus opened his mouth, and found that he didn’t know.

"I’ll find out," the thinner man said.

Marcus nodded. He blew out the last candle, and the laundry room fell dark around him. Somewhere above him, behind a steel gate he had never been invited through, a white light was burning, and he stood a while looking up at the ceiling as though he might see it.