Chapter 525 | Tender [GT BONUS]

Chapter 525: 525 | Tender [GT BONUS]

Silas opened his mouth.

He could see the girl holding the boy. Her blue eyes had left the boy’s chest and found Silas’s face across the distance, and she was not screaming anymore. She was quiet and her jaw was set and her arms were tight around a person she was not going to let go of, and the look on her face was the look of someone who had done the math and found the answer unacceptable and was going to refuse the math rather than accept the answer.

Silas’s mother had looked at him once.

He did not remember the context. Nine years old, the house, before the fire, before the algebra tutor crashed and everything burned and his mother went in after his siblings and did not come back. A morning, maybe. Some unremarkable Tuesday. A hallway in the house that no longer existed. His mother’s hand on the top of his head and her face turned down toward him with an expression that the nine-year-old Silas had not possessed the vocabulary to name and the twenty-two-year-old Silas still did not possess the vocabulary to name, though he had spent nine years with the Architect’s vocabulary and the Architect’s categories and the Architect’s relentless insistence that everything could be classified if you applied the correct framework and gave it the appropriate label and filed it in the appropriate drawer where it would cease to be a problem that required emotional processing.

Some things do not have a framework. Some things refuse the drawer.

The girl’s arms tightened around the boy. The boy moved. One hand came up slowly, shaking through the air between them, and touched the side of her face. The touch was gentle despite the fact that the hand was shaking and the fingers were bloody and the boy should not have been conscious, let alone tender. She closed her eyes. The motion was brief. When she opened them again they were still on Silas and the expression in them had not changed at all.

"Nexo," Silas said.

His voice had come apart at the edges. He could hear it. The specific quality of fraying that Gerard monitored through the tapping and the medication and the careful calibration of Silas’s daily routine, the quality that meant the gauge was redlining and the next thing that happened would be either medication or fire, and there was no medication here. The Architect was not here. The routine was not here. There was just Silas and the girl and the thing he had been told to summon and the choice he had not realized he was going to make until his mouth opened and the words came out wrong.

"Stand down."

The gold light from the mezzanine flickered once. The girl behind the pillar with the rivets shifted her weight but did not fire. The blonde one, the illusion artist, the one who had been reading his face from thirty feet, let out a breath that Silas heard across the broken plaza because the room had gone that quiet.

Nexo’s raised hand lowered.

The creature turned its head toward Silas with the same slow wrongness it applied to everything, the six horns tracing arcs through the emergency light, and something in its posture changed in a way that Silas could not name and did not want to because naming it would require acknowledging that Nexo had been waiting for permission and the permission had arrived and the permission was the wrong one.

The black bands dimmed. The pulsing slowed. The longer arm came up and folded across the creature’s chest, and Nexo stood very still with the patient indifference of a machine that had been powered down but not disassembled.

Three seconds.

Silas stood on the plaza floor with his hands open and the fire present in his palms, black and lightless and hot enough to end everyone on the stairwell in a single sustained arc. The fire was there. The capability was there. The Architect’s nine years of work was there, coiled behind Silas’s sternum in the place where other people kept their hearts.

He did not send it.

He looked at the boy’s hand on the girl’s face. He looked at the girl’s arms holding the boy together. He looked at the five students who had fought him for six minutes and lost every exchange and had not left.

He did not examine this.

He could not examine this here. Not with the countdown running and the Network response closing and Gerard’s warm voice in his ear counting seconds in a rhythm that Silas recognized as a lullaby from before the fire, a thing Gerard sang to himself when the situation was bad enough that singing was the only thing left.

"Extraction," Silas said into the collar. "Now."

The grey static opened behind him. Not the showy tears that had deposited operators across the dome forty-three minutes ago, but a clean vertical slit in reality, colorless and silent and approximately three feet wide, and the air that came through it smelled like the sublevel, like concrete and metal and the leather of the armchair where Silas slept on the nights when the medication was not enough.

He stepped backward without turning around.

The blonde girl watched him go. She had not moved from behind the pillar and she had not spoken and she had not created a single illusion since she killed the last batch, and her blue eyes stayed on his face with the specific intensity of someone who understood that what she was seeing was important and intended to remember every detail of it whether Silas wanted her to or not.

The girl with the rivets lowered her palms.

The boy on the plaza floor turned his amber eyes toward the closing slit, and for one second, less than a second, his gaze met Silas’s through the narrowing gap.

Silas felt his right hand begin to tap against his thigh. The four-beat pattern. The wrong speed. The wrong rhythm.

The grey closed.