Chapter 394: Every Possibility.

I leaned against the wall with Azure beside me and looked down the stairway.

Monica was leading. Not hurrying, not once — every step placed as though the stairs belonged to her and had been built at her request. The long white of her composure held even in the thinner light of the stairwell, the fabric of her dress moving only with the measured rise of each riser.

A long gap behind her and then Sophia, moving at whatever pace her body would still give her, one hand skimming the rail without committing to it, the sun still up somewhere beyond these walls and her strength measured against it with every riser. Melissa behind Sophia, held to that same pace and clearly hating it — the set of her shoulders tight, the way she took each step as if she could have taken three and was being forced to wait.

And the two Donmans walking side by side at the back, heads close together, talking about something that wasn’t us. Blond hair catching the late light from above. Celine’s face half-turned toward the man. Neither of them looked up the stairs.

Ingrid stood out in the hallway with the giant facing her. Facing all of us. Close enough that any real movement would put somebody inside its reach — the bulk of it filling the width of the passage, head still slightly bowed.

Her eyes came up and found mine.

She was signalling something. Small, with her chin — a tilt, a direction — and I didn’t understand it and I didn’t let my face go looking for it either, because Celine was forty feet below us and I had no idea what she could see from there. Azure’s breath stayed even beside me.

I turned on enhanced hearing.

My eyes were already working the hallway. The infected filled one direction — the giant’s mass, the wrong stillness of it, the faint wet sound of air moving through lungs that no longer needed it. The other ran clear for twenty feet and stopped at a closed door, ordinary wood, no light under it.

Beyond the wall, out in the yard, there were people. A lot of them. The noise a crowd makes when it has been standing in one place long enough to get bored and is waiting for something to start — foot-shifts, low talk, the occasional cough, the restless energy of bodies that had answered a call and were now owed a show.

The witnesses.

He called them and they came.

I pushed further and found a voice in the middle of it, muffled through stone, clear enough once the hearing locked on.

Max.

"Today these walls will judge the people who never once treated us fairly."

A shout went up and rolled around the front of the building — hundreds of throats, the sound bouncing off glass and concrete and coming back thickened, a single rising wave that broke against the walls and came back again.

"My great grandfather was one of the men who built this wall with his own hands—"

I moved past him.

Underneath the crowd noise was something else. Groaning, low, spread wide, coming from several directions at once — the wet wrong rhythm of lungs that weren’t quite breathing.

The infected are out there too. In among them. Standing in a crowd of living people while the living people cheer.

I looked down the stairs again.

Monica was near the top now. The rest of them strung out below her at Sophia’s speed — the gap between each of them a map of who could still move and who was being patient about it. The Donmans hadn’t closed up. Still talking. Still not looking at us.

I widened the hearing and gave myself the arithmetic. Two minutes, give or take, before the Donmans came off those stairs into this hallway.

And this was it. This hallway, this gap, this two minutes. Whatever we did had to happen before those front doors, and after the doors there was a crowd and a broadcast and nothing at all — no cover, no second chance, only Max’s stage and the people he had filled it with.

"The families pushed him out."

Max was still going. The words came through the stone with the polished rhythm of a speech that had been practised.

"And they have run these walls ever since. Every one of you has lived under them your whole life. Tonight that ends, and it ends in front of you."

I ran it.

Take the giant and run the open side. Leave Celine untouched, because Ingrid was right, and a thousand of them loose with nobody sane at the head of it was a worse city than the one we were standing in. Azure could shift. Ingrid could shift. Monica would walk out on her own terms whether we asked her to or not. Sophia needed the sun down. Melissa was the problem the picture kept returning to.

I looked down one more time.

The order hadn’t changed. Monica at the front, well ahead of everybody. Sophia behind her. And Melissa at the back, with Celine and the Donman walking directly behind her shoulder — close enough for the telepathy, close enough for whatever else those two could do if the line broke wrong.

That was the problem in one picture.

There was still a version where we dropped the giant and moved. There was. But it left Melissa at the back with the two strongest Donmans alive, and Melissa was the only primordial in this building who could actually be hurt.

[ You have extracted the third primordial. ]

[ You can now see the outcomes of a situation before it resolves. You no longer need to calculate. ]

Say that again.

[ You don’t have to strain. You can look. ]

I didn’t know that.

[ Now you do. ]

Then let’s go.

Every possibility. All of them. Right now.

[ Starting. ]

****

A/N: Thanks for sticking with the book. I’ve been sick lately, and it hit my update schedule hard. I know you’ve noticed the gaps and a few inconsistencies. That’s on me.

But I’m back on my feet now.

Let’s go again.