Chapter 396: The Cost of Winning.

Every possible outcome came back wrong.

The one I wanted was all six of us off those stairs with Celine still breathing at the end of it, and that version didn’t exist anywhere in what the system was showing me.

I took the first step and followed the giant.

What’s wrong, Bram?

Melissa, and she wasn’t settled at all.

We’d built the whole thing around that hallway. If the cell didn’t open for us, the hallway was where it happened, and she was watching me walk straight past it.

These people are fighting each other. The girl doesn’t believe in what Max is doing, I’ve been inside her head the whole way up those stairs. Are you honestly letting this go without trying?

I kept walking and they came behind me. Bootfalls. Bare feet. The giant’s heavier rhythm ahead, filling the passage.

They planned all of it. I put it where she’d catch it. I’m still working.

The giant went toward the elevator and I followed it and the women followed me in silence. The call button was already lit. Someone above or below had prepared the car. The doors opened on a steel interior that smelled of recycled air and old metal, and all eight of us packed into it.

The infected came in last and squatted down — knees folding, bulk compressing into the doorway space — and after that there was no space left in there for anybody to change their mind about anything. The light of the corridor cut off as the doors closed.

Monica took the corner and stood in it with her arms folded, entirely uninterested in all of us.

I put my back against the side wall with Melissa beside me, both of us facing Celine and the Donman. Ingrid, Azure and Sophia along the long wall at the back, Sophia’s hand finding the rail inside the car. The giant folded up in the doorway like something that had been packed rather than boarded.

The car started down.

Cable. The low mechanical complaint of a lift that had carried ordinary staff for years and was now carrying an execution party. Ingrid and Azure were passing small looks between them, quick, nothing held long enough to be caught by the two at the front.

He’s afraid, Bram.

Melissa, sharp now.

Both of them are. It’s the elevator. They’ve been fine since the basement and the second these doors shut, both of them changed.

This is where we can take them.

I looked properly.

The giant was folded down in a space that gave it nothing. No room to swing. No room to stand. Its only advantage was reach, and even that was useless with its arms jammed against the floor.

The man’s face had something in it that hadn’t been there in the stairwell — a tightness at the jaw, eyes that kept wanting the corners of the box, the specific discomfort of a body that had walked itself into the wrong geometry.

A man who throws webs needs distance. Every single thing he does needs distance.

My hearing dropped through the floor of the car.

Boots. A lot of them, coming into the building somewhere below us — organised, multiple pairs, the rhythm of people taking positions. And Max still going outside with the crowd answering him in waves, the cheer rising and falling like surf against the front of the headquarters.

Azure nodded at me.

And the man caught it.

"Don’t do anything stupid." He came off the wall. "I can see exactly what all of you are planning."

Sophia started laughing.

He raised his palm toward Melissa and me, but his eyes wouldn’t stay on us. They kept going to the sides, to the back wall, to the women behind him, because he knew precisely how many directions this thing could come from and the box had given every one of them to us.

"Relax." I kept my voice easy. "I know what you can do. You throw webs. That’s the whole of it, isn’t it."

He didn’t answer.

But his heart moved. I heard it climb and settle and climb again — a wet quick rhythm under the mechanical hum of the cable, the sound of a man whose body had arrived at the truth before his mouth would admit it.

There it is.

That’s what Vince feels when he’s got me cornered. That’s exactly what he’s been enjoying.

I took a step toward him.

One step in a car that had almost none left to give. The air between us shortened.

"Stop moving." His hand came up higher. White already gathering at the palm — the first threads of the web choosing their shape. "Don’t take another step."

Celine moved one finger.

The giant started to rise in a space that wouldn’t let it — shoulders jamming the doorway, head scraping the ceiling of the car — and the charge was through it before it got halfway. White light. The smell of ozone in the closed air. The bulk of it seized and dropped, full weight hitting the floor of the car, and the whole box rocked on its cable hard enough that everyone found a wall with a hand or a shoulder.

My eyes caught the threads leaving his palm, going for my head, and I already knew what they felt like without having felt them yet — the iron bite, the set, the way they turned breathing into something you had to fight for.

I moved my head a fraction.

They went into the metal wall beside Melissa in the same second the giant’s full weight finished settling and the car shuddered once more on the line. The threads bit steel and locked, bright against the dull interior, the end of them still connected to his open hand.

He pulled to bring the web back.

And I saw it whole. One discharge, here, now, while his line was still out and his arm committed. He goes down. The six of us ride this car back up with Celine alive and nobody dead in the building.

That was the outcome.

That wasn’t all of the outcome.

Because the charge wouldn’t stop at him. It would find the steel. The floor. The walls. Everyone touching them.

Melissa’s hand on the rail, Azure’s shoulder against the long wall, Sophia’s thin hold on whatever strength the day had left her, Ingrid, Monica, Celine herself. The current finds metal and then it finds skin.

I let him pull his line back.

The threads retracted into his palm. His eyes were moving fast now, hunting all six of us at once, the heart still climbing, the box still humming as the floors counted down.

The car stopped.

The doors opened.