Chapter 391: An Empty Head.

"You heard all of that," I said, walking in.

"Every word of it." She didn’t move her hands out of her lap. The hard white light from the corridor cut a stripe across the floor and stopped at her bare feet. "And I don’t think I’m bothered."

"Max is planning to kill all of us."

"I told you I heard everything." Her eyes came up. Steady. Unhurried. "I just don’t find it worth my time. I have lived a very long while to be threatened by a child."

"You’re right."

I sat down on the far end of the bed, a good distance from her, and put my elbows on my knees. The frame ticked once under the new weight. Stone under my soles. The room still held the faint residual of what she had done to herself before I reached the door.

"But he has power, and he’s determined, and you’ve been alive long enough to know exactly what people do when they get both at once."

"Yes." She almost smiled at that. A small precise curve that never reached her eyes. "And I have never once seen a mortal put a hand on a primordial and survive doing it. That isn’t going to start today in a basement."

"Eleanor told me there were a lot more of you once."

Something in the room changed temperature.

Not the air. Her. The centuries that had been sitting loose in her posture drew tight. Her hands stayed in her lap but the fingers stopped being still.

"I hope you remember how that number came down."

"Don’t tell me she said humans did it." She turned her head and looked directly at me. Full attention. "Did she? Is that what that woman sat you down and told you?"

I didn’t answer.

Because I didn’t have one, and because everything I’d carried out of that white sand camp had been sitting badly in me since the moment Monica opened her mouth in the morning.

"Don’t tell me you believe everything a person says to you," she said.

"Are you going to help us or not."

I wasn’t walking into that conversation. Not now, not with a clock on us, not while she was this comfortable on the edge of a prison bed with the whole morning still ahead of her and no fear in it.

"It isn’t my fight." She settled back. The mattress sighed. "That boy may well kill all of you. He won’t kill me."

"He can kill Melissa. He can kill Sophia. They’re your people."

"My people don’t stand against the awakening." She said it without any heat at all — the flat delivery of a fact that had outlived governments. "Not as far as I remember, and my memory is considerably longer than yours."

"Okay."

I stood up. The frame ticked again as my weight left it.

"Sophia won’t be any use to you today," she said to my back. "Not while the sun’s up. And I heard you counting on the girl above us." A pause. Fabric shifting as she adjusted. "So sit down and wait for her."

"Alright. Thank you."

I walked out.

The corridor air hit cooler. Melissa and Azure were standing in it waiting for me — Melissa still in the long black dress, arms folded, jaw set from whatever she had already pulled out of my face.

Azure had let Ingrid go. She was back in her own skin: blue and pink-eyed, pink hair down past her shoulders, the familiar shape of her under the hard white light. It was strange how much easier it was to look at her. The borrowed face had carried Max’s shove and the floor and the blood at the mouth; this one was simply Azure, standing in a prison corridor as if she had always belonged in the middle of whatever was about to go wrong.

Sophia was awake behind her door. I could hear her moving from where I stood — the soft complaint of the metal frame, bare feet finding the stone, the careful sounds of a body putting itself back together after a night that had taken it apart.

The whole plan in my head had Monica at the centre of it. All of it ran through a woman who could talk anybody into anything, and she’d just told me she had no intention of talking to anyone.

"What did she say?" Melissa asked.

My face gave her the answer before I opened my mouth.

"Why?"

"She says it isn’t her fight."

"Let me talk to her."

She was already moving, past me, down the corridor with the absolute confidence of a woman who has never once failed to get through to her own sister. The dress moved with her. Her bare feet made almost no sound. Monica’s open doorway took her and the corridor was quieter for it.

"So what’s the plan, Bram?" Azure asked.

"We wait." I put my back against the wall. "Ingrid’s the only thing we’ve got."

She nodded and came and leaned next to me. Shoulder near mine. Not touching. The pink of her hair caught the bar of sunlight from the ceiling hole and held it.

Neither of us said anything after that.

I didn’t turn my hearing on. I let all of it go — the whole building, the thoughts behind the doors, the system that answered sideways when it answered at all — and stood in a corridor with an empty head for the first time since that door closed on me.

No thoughts arriving that weren’t mine. No voice inside my head. Just the bar of sunlight moving a few inches along the floor and a girl breathing beside me, the quiet rise and fall of it, the ordinary fact of two people standing still while a city above them decided what to do with the morning.

It lasted about as long as those things ever last.

Melissa came back out and I had my answer before she’d covered half the distance. The set of her shoulders. The absence of triumph. The way she walked like someone who had put an argument down and found nothing under it.

"We put our faith in the girl outside," she said.

And the door at the end of the corridor opened.

Ingrid came through it hard — shoved from behind, no use of her arms, the same violent economy Max had used the first time. She hit the floor of the cell with a sound that carried the full length of the stone to where we stood. Knees. Shoulder. The side of her face. The door still open behind her for a second longer, enough to show the corridor beyond and the shape of whoever had done the shoving, before it started swinging shut again.

What the fuck.