Chapter 384: Are You Sure He’s Dead?

I turned on my enhanced hearing.

Somebody had been in that room. The list of who it could be was short.

Melissa’s room came back quiet — just breathing, slow and deep, a woman still under from what had happened in the bathroom. No movement. No change in the rhythm.

That left one.

I pushed the hearing out toward Monica’s door and the sound arrived at once. Skin on skin. A wet, deliberate rhythm. Under it the small strained noises of someone keeping quiet on purpose — breath cut short, held, released through the nose, every sound managed so it wouldn’t carry.

[ That’s bad. She saw what happened to Sophia. She’s trying to finish herself. ]

Isn’t that what I want? She comes, the season’s over, she’s spent.

[ No. If she releases by her own hand she stops being a source and she never becomes a mark. ]

[ It transfers. ]

I had the door open before the rest of it landed.

[ Stop her. If it goes across we lose every route to the Veyron girl. ]

I pulled the door shut behind me and ran.

Six strides down that corridor and I did the arithmetic on every one of them.

Ingrid on the other side of the steel with a door in her hand and me telling her no. Sherry somewhere in this city with Vince moving toward her. May and Becky walking in today with no idea what was waiting.

Four strides.

I stayed for this.

I let a woman offer me the way out and I handed it back.

Two.

The sound behind Monica’s door changed — faster, tighter, the edge of something that had already committed.

I hit the door.

It wasn’t locked.

Monica had her dress pulled up around her waist. One foot planted on the edge of the metal frame, the other flat on the stone floor. Head tipped back. Throat exposed. Her hand was between her legs where it needed to be, working with a steady ruthless precision, and the inside of her thigh was already slick down to the knee, shining under the white light.

She heard me come in.

Her eyes came down off the ceiling and found mine.

She held them.

Her hand didn’t stop.

Nothing in her face changed at all — not shame, not hurry, not the smallest flicker of surprise. Only the focus of a woman finishing a job she had timed to the second.

Then she went over.

In front of me. Eyes on my face. Her mouth opened on a silent breath. Her standing leg trembled. The foot on the frame pressed harder into the metal until it ticked against the stone. A low sound finally escaped her as the climax took her — controlled even then, almost private — and her hand kept moving through it until the last of it had been pulled out of her body on purpose.

[ Too late. Source transferred. ]

She hadn’t panicked. She hadn’t hurried. I understood why in the same second the system confirmed it. She had known before I got off my bed that she had enough time. She had left that door unlocked because locking it would have cost her seconds she would rather spend making sure I watched.

You wanted me here for it.

You could have done that any hour of the night and you waited until I was awake enough to run.

I turned to go.

A source into another woman — a name the system had failed to find — somewhere out in a capital that was already coming apart.

Eleanor. Venna. Sophia. And one left, and I didn’t have her name.

"Disappointed?"

I stopped at the door and turned around.

She was smoothing the dress down over her legs, unhurried, the fabric falling back into place as if nothing in the room had happened. Her face was composed. Colour still high at her throat. The slick on her thigh caught the light once before the hem covered it.

"No."

"No?"

"I’ll find the last one. And I’ll extract her before the day."

She put her foot down off the frame. The metal ticked again as her weight left it.

"You’re ambitious. I’ll give you that much." She straightened up. The centuries sat back down in her posture like a coat she had only shrugged for a moment. "So what’s in it for you? All this chasing and screwing around — what do you get to keep when it’s over?"

I put my shoulder against the frame.

"The awakening stops. That’s the whole of it."

She laughed. Not unkindly, which was worse than if she had.

"You don’t know anything, kid."

"I know what it does." I held her eyes. "And I’m not going to stand still while your family empties these walls to get it."

"So that’s your position." Level. Patient. The voice of a woman who had had this conversation with better men than me and watched every one of them fail to finish it. "You’re stopping it so that people don’t die." A pause. "The only way people die is if it doesn’t happen."

"That’s a lie."

"Is it?"

"You want their bodies. You want to put your dead back inside living people and walk them around wearing somebody else’s face."

"That’s right." No hesitation. No dressing. "They’re a small price against the many."

Something came up in me then that hadn’t had anywhere to go since Eleanor first said the word. All those weeks and this was the first time I had stood in a room and argued it out with one of them while the evidence of what they were willing to do was still wet on the floor between us.

"It isn’t happening. I’ll find the girl and I’ll take it out of her."

"Good luck," Monica said.

I opened the door. The corridor air hit my face, cooler, carrying the basement’s mineral chill.

"Wait."

I stopped in the doorway with my back to her.

"Do you know why we chose ability users?"

"I don’t care."

"You should."

"There are people I care about in that number. That’s as much as I need to know."

"And how did that happen?" Her voice had come closer — not loud, just nearer, as if she had taken a step without needing me to turn and confirm it. "How did you come to care about them? Was any of that yours? Or did your father put each one of them in front of you, one after another, until there was nothing left in you to choose with?"

Shut up.

Sherry. May. Mable. Daphne. Azure. Annabelle.

Every one of them somebody the system needed me close to. Every one of them a face I would still cross a city for.

"You don’t know anything, Abram." Quiet now. Almost gentle. "Everything you think you understand, you’ve got half of it."

"I know enough."

I stepped out into the corridor. Stone under my bare feet. The hard white light running the length of the hall past Melissa’s door, past Sophia’s, toward the steel at the far end.

"Why didn’t he do it himself?"

I kept walking.

"Or are you still convinced he’s dead?"

I stopped mid-step.

And in my head, a man in a forest house turned away from a window and said I’ll keep leaving words wherever I can. Look for them.