Chapter 393: The Last One Up.

The infected was already moving.

Azure looked sideways at me, waiting for any signal at all. I gave her nothing and started walking, and Ingrid caught me up in three strides — feet quiet on the stone, the practical pace of someone who had already decided how much of this climb she was going to waste on hope.

The rest of them fell in behind. Everybody moved except Celine and the man, who stayed where they were and let us pass them. Their eyes tracked us the way handlers track stock.

The corridor air changed as we crossed the threshold out of the cell.

I looked at the patch of stone where the giant had put Sinn down.

Nothing there now. Somebody had cleaned it. A man who called himself Lord of these walls went out of the world on that spot and there wasn’t a mark left to say so — no stain, no scuff, no evidence that bone had given in a wet sound in a stone corridor.

And the thing that had done it was walking ten feet ahead of me under somebody else’s instruction, head still slightly bent as if the ceiling of every floor in this building were an inch too low.

It started up the hallway.

"Can’t you take it back?" I kept my voice under everything else — under the bootfalls, under the soft sound of six people finding the same rhythm. "Any of them?"

"No." Ingrid didn’t turn her head. "Celine has all of it now. Max didn’t decide that this week. He’s been building toward it for a long time and I never saw it coming."

"So we kill her."

"And then what?"

"Then they’re nobody’s."

"That’s exactly what I’m telling you." Her voice dropped further. The giant’s bulk filled the turn ahead of us. "Killing her doesn’t hand them back to me. It leaves a thousand of them in this city with nobody sane pointing them anywhere. I don’t know what they do without a head. Nobody does."

The giant reached the stairs and turned onto the first one. The step took its weight with a sound that ran back down the stairwell to the basement we were leaving.

"Then what do you want?"

"We kill Max." She said it flatly. No ornament. "The Donmans aren’t bad people. I can reach Celine. I can talk her round and she’ll put every one of them down herself." A pause. Her hand found the rail. "But not while he’s alive. Nobody in that family moves while he’s alive."

We turned onto the stairs, the others coming up behind us. Monica’s measured steps. Sophia’s slower ones. The blond Donman and Celine bringing up the rear with the patience of people who already knew the destination.

"We don’t have that kind of time, Ingrid."

"Bram—"

"You don’t have time to talk to her. We’re going out through those doors in about four minutes and we’re coming apart the moment we’re clear of the basement. That’s the plan."

"That’s going to kill people."

"Say it properly."

"The two behind us are the strongest Donmans alive." She glanced back once — a flicker of the eyes, nothing that would read as communication from above — and came forward again. "You run in front of them and most of us don’t make the street."

"Okay."

I let that sit on me for a step and a half. The stairwell light was thinner than the basement’s hard white — late-day spill from somewhere above, gold at the edges where it found the walls.

Then I dropped back and let her go ahead.

Azure came up level with my shoulder, pink hair catching what light there was, and behind her walked three open heads.

I’m not dying with any of these idiots.

Monica, and there was no strain in it at all.

I came into that room on my own terms and I’m walking out of it on mine, at a time I choose.

Let the sun be down.

Sophia’s, and it arrived thin. Nothing behind it.

Please let the sun be down. I can’t do the sun today. Not today.

Nothing useful from either of them.

I reached for Melissa and got nothing at all.

I stopped on the stair.

The whole line stopped behind me, turned, and looked down.

What’s Ethan’s bastard thinking about now.

Monica, uncharitable and unhurried.

He honestly believes he’s walking out of this. I hope he dies out there. I hope he dies and Ethan is left holding nothing.

Melissa was at the very back.

She’d put herself there. Celine and the Donman were walking directly behind her and she’d let them, because her ability works on proximity and the only way to get inside those two was to keep them within arm’s reach for the whole climb. Her face gave nothing.

What are these people planning?

Monica again.

Are they planning something and leaving me out of it?

I started walking.

The line moved.

Have you got anything?

Yes.

Melissa, finally, and it came through clean.

Ingrid was three steps above me. I closed it up.

They’re doing it directly outside the building. Front of the headquarters, in the open. And they’ve been calling people in all afternoon. There’s already a crowd out there.

How many?

He doesn’t have a number in his head. He has a picture.

Alright.

I came up level with Ingrid. The last of the basement air fell away behind us. Ordinary corridor smells arrived — polish, recycled air, the faint human residue of a building that had spent a day and a half in lockdown and still had people in it who were not walking to an execution.

The giant took the last stair, stepped off onto the floor of the hallway, and turned around.

Then it stopped.

Ingrid came off the stairs and I came off behind her, and the thing stood square in the hallway facing us — shoulders filling the width of the passage, head slightly bowed under a ceiling that had been built for ordinary men — and didn’t move.

Waiting.

It wasn’t going anywhere until the last one of us was off those steps.