Chapter 385: Ethan Is Alive.

I turned back into her room.

"What did you just say?"

She was standing now, hands at her sides, the white dress settled clean over her legs again. She watched me the way you watch something you’ve set down and are waiting to see move — not tense, not careful. Patient.

"I asked you to ask yourself why your father never stopped the awakening himself."

"Not that."

A small laugh came out of her. It didn’t reach her eyes.

"So you genuinely don’t know." She tilted her head. The light caught the edge of her face and left the rest in the room’s thin shadow. "Ethan is alive. These walls don’t hold him and they never did. So ask the question again. Why didn’t he do it himself?"

"You’re lying."

"Am I?"

"You’re lying."

"You know I’m not." No rise in her voice. No need for one. "He was never far from you out there, Abram. Every year of it. Whatever came close to you on that plain didn’t get to finish, and you never once asked yourself why a boy on his own lived that long."

And the libra came straight back at me.

A figure out among the infected — not circling, not fleeing — moving through them as if the swarm were weather. Broad shape. Wrong stillness. And I couldn’t turn my head far enough to look at him properly, the vision locking my eyes forward.

"He didn’t want anything to hurt you." Her voice stayed low. "Not because he loved you. You already know why he kept you breathing."

"That’s a lie."

It came out thinner than I wanted it to. The wood of the doorframe under my hand suddenly had a grain I could feel too clearly.

This is the first time in my life somebody’s had me cornered with words.

Not the infected. Not Vince. Not a net or a roof or a bite at the throat. Words. Arranged carefully. Set down one after another like stones in a wall.

"We both know which of us is the liar here." She took a step. Bare feet on stone. No sound. "That man has lied since the day I met him. He lied to a mortal woman and left her on the plain to die when he had every power he needed to save her. You watched her die. He could have stopped that and he stood somewhere and let it happen."

"No."

Every part of it landed like truth. Every part of it also sounded exactly like what a woman would invent to take the legs out from under a boy who’d come to end the thing she’d built her whole existence around. Both versions sat in me at once and neither would give way.

"He’s a liar, and every lie he ever told was walking toward you." She wasn’t stopping. The centuries were in her posture now — not raised, simply present. "He lied to your mother because he wanted a son out of her. That’s all she ever was in it. And every single one of his lies worked."

"I don’t know the man." I got my voice back under me. Level. As level as I could make it while the libra’s half-seen figure still moved at the edge of my memory. "So say whatever you like, because I’ve got nothing to measure it against. But I’ve met Eleanor. And I don’t believe Eleanor lied to me."

"Really?"

A smile started. She was enjoying this and no longer hiding it — a small precise curve of the mouth, the look of someone whose trap had closed cleanly.

"Why would she?"

"She is your father’s sister." A beat. "Why wouldn’t she?"

She handed the question straight back.

I put my shoulder against the wall and let some of the heat out of my voice. The painted stone was cool through my skin. Down the corridor Melissa still slept. Sophia still slept. The seal at the far end still held.

"Monica. You’ve got your reasons for the awakening. I’ve got mine for stopping it, and mine are people. That’s the whole of it."

"I respect that." The smile faded into something closer to seriousness. "I’m not trying to change what you want. I’m trying to open your eyes so that whatever you choose after this, you choose it knowing."

"Okay."

"He used you." Flat. No ornament. "He didn’t want to sleep with his sister. He didn’t want to sleep with his daughter. Both were required and he wouldn’t pay either price, so he made someone who would."

I didn’t have anything for that.

The words sat in the room between us. The hard light. The metal frame of her bed. The faint remaining smell of what she had done to herself before I reached the door. I looked at her and found no crack to push a denial into.

"Is he alive?"

"Who killed Riya Belmonte?"

And the stairs in Riya’s house came back.

Broad shoulders. A masked man walking out of a bedroom after Becky ran — taking his time on the steps, not hurrying, stopping when a dying woman said my name. Not Mute. Not anybody I could place.

"Ask yourself one thing." She crossed to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. The frame ticked once under her weight. She folded her hands loosely in her lap, as if we were discussing a timetable. "Why does he want the awakening stopped?"

I looked at her.

"Answer that," she said, "and then decide whatever you like. I won’t argue with you again."

I walked out of that room.

The corridor air hit cooler. Stone under my bare feet. Behind me her door stayed open; she didn’t follow. And the system said nothing. Not a notification. Not a correction. Not one word of confirmation or denial about a man in a forest house who had spoken into an empty room as if he already knew I would stand there one day and listen.

I looked up the hallway.

The cell door was opening.