Chapter 386: No More Tasks.

I stood in the open space between the six doors with nothing on and looked ahead.

The hard white light ran the length of the corridor without warmth. Painted stone. Sealed entrance at the far end. Six doors, half of them holding people who had already cost me something.

Monica had taken everything I thought I knew and turned it face down, and the part I couldn’t get past was that she was right. Not all the way. But right in the way that sticks — the kind of right that sits under the ribs and doesn’t move when you breathe.

He wanted it stopped. He just didn’t want to be the one who paid for it.

That’s the one kind of man I’ll never respect.

The anger came up slow, from somewhere under my ribs, and it had nothing to do with anything I’d done.

Not Eleanor — my father’s own sister. I didn’t regret one moment of that night and I wasn’t going to start now. Not Venna either, and whatever his system had walked the two of us into blind. The heat of those rooms, the cost of them, still sat in my body alongside the newer damage at my throat and the closed punctures on my back.

It was him. A man who’d looked at the price of stopping the end of the world, decided he wasn’t paying it, and made a son who would.

Is he alive?

I put it to the system flat. I had real questions now.

The libra had left him on the inside of my eyes. My father and my mother in a street with no infected in it, under a sun that didn’t burn — his hands on her face, promising to take her somewhere when the time was right. The ordinary heat of a world that still had weather. Her smile given away free.

And the reality of how I had grown. Days wandering in the plain. Lips split, eyes going, walking the plain with nothing. My mother halfway out of a window, and the infected getting hold of her before she could drop. The sound of it. The distance.

Is my father still alive?

[ Monica’s ability is her words. That’s why she was so certain Sophia would be let out if she spoke to Max. ]

[ A woman like her can make anything sound true. ]

"I asked you a question."

It came out through my teeth, out loud, to an empty corridor. The sound of it hit the painted stone and came back thin.

[ I answered. ]

No. You didn’t.

Did I go too far with him?

Monica’s thought, through her door, unguarded — the same clean arrival as every other mind down here when the hearing was open.

No. That boy needs to see all of it before he decides we’re monsters who just want people dead.

I put my fingers in my ears.

It did nothing. It never does. The thoughts came through bone and blood the same way they came through air. I stood there with my hands up anyway, palms sealing nothing, because I needed my own head for a minute and there was nowhere down here to get it. No locked room that locked them out. No silence that held.

Poor kid.

Still coming. Soft. Almost fond. The worst register she had.

Being run by the man who took his whole childhood from him. Poor kid.

I turned and walked toward the bathroom.

Stone cold under my bare feet. The corridor smelled of mineral chill and, faintly, of last night — blood and sex and the sharp residual of what had hit Sophia’s walls under pressure.

She’d said stopping the awakening kills more people than letting it happen. She’d called the ability users a sacrifice. That was the one part I didn’t believe for a second, however true she made everything around it sound.

Riya hadn’t believed it either.

The silhouette in the lab. The letter she never got to finish. A woman that desperate to put one message in front of a boy she’d never met, because she wanted it stopped as badly as anyone alive. Ink on paper. A hand that had shaken and kept writing anyway.

So who killed Riya Belmonte?

Monica had handed me that question and walked me straight to my father’s name with it — the masked man on the stairs, the pause when a dying woman said Abram, the broad shoulders leaving a bedroom without hurry.

And why would he? She wanted what he wants.

It doesn’t fit. Nothing fits anymore.

I didn’t know who to believe. I didn’t know one person in this city I could trust with anything — not the system that answered sideways, not the woman whose words could make anything sound true, not the father who might be a ghost or a coward or both.

Then I trust myself. From here on, that’s all I’ve got.

I opened the bathroom door.

The air inside was cooler, still carrying the faint mineral smell of wet tile and old soap. Our clothes were still on the rod at the far end where we’d left them to dry — my shirt stiff with the shape of how it had hung, Melissa’s black dress, Sophia’s things still hanging beside them from before any of this started, fabric empty and waiting. Drops had fallen from the hems in the night and left dark coins on the stone beneath.

Why does he want the awakening stopped?

Her question came back and sat down in the middle of everything else I was carrying. And I understood it wasn’t one question. If I could ever get my hands on the answer, it was the answer to most of the others — the plain, the libra, the scratched name in the corner of my room, the son built to pay a price his father would not.

I stood in the bathroom doorway with the corridor at my back and the hanging clothes in front of me, and for a moment I did not move at all.