Chapter 397: Blind Again.

The doors opened onto a wall of men.

Eight of them, maybe ten, all in the black shirts. GUARDIANS OF THE WALLS across every chest in hard white letters, standing in a loose arc in front of the car with their hands loose at their sides, waiting on us the way men wait on a delivery.

The lobby light behind them was brighter than the car’s. Ordinary building light. The kind that had watched people clock in and out for years.

The Donman’s heart came back down the moment he saw them. I heard it go — three fast beats and then nothing, the rhythm of a man who has just stopped being outnumbered. The tightness left his jaw. His shoulders settled.

Max’s voice was clear now. The speech rolled in through the open doors, polished and rising, the crowd answering him in waves.

Two corridors between this car and the front doors, and past the front doors, a crowd, and whatever he’d built in the middle of it.

I watched the last of the web draw back into his palm and settle there, and a small smile arrived on his mouth alongside it.

Monica stood in the corner with one ankle crossed over the other. Unmoved.

You see what I told you.

Melissa, and there was nothing patient left in her at all.

That was it. That was the only one we were getting and you walked us straight past it.

I didn’t answer her.

Because I could still run it. Every action, every branch, laid out and spent and pulled back before it cost me anything, even with ten men filling that doorway.

The Donman man came toward me. He stepped over the giant on the floor without looking down at it, and the thing was still on its side working against the current in its own muscles — fingers twitching, one boot scraping weakly at the metal seam, the blank eyes still moving as if the instruction to rise hadn’t fully died.

He came level and put his mouth by my ear.

"If Max hadn’t asked for you, that stunt in this car would have been the last thing you did." Very quietly. Breath warm. The smell of him ordinary and human. "Nobody plays games with Eric Donman."

He stepped back.

And his fist went into my stomach.

There was nothing human in it. It didn’t feel thrown, it felt swung — like something on the end of a chain — and everything in me folded around it at once. The air left in a single forced sound. My vision narrowed to a point and then the point was the floor of the car rising to meet me.

I went down onto my knees with both arms crossed over my middle and my forehead nearly on the floor, and the giant’s face was two feet below mine, eyes still moving.

"Anybody else?" He turned in the small space. The Guardians outside shifted their weight and did not come in. "Anyone else here want a little pain before the real thing?"

Nobody said anything. Azure’s breath held. Ingrid didn’t move. Sophia’s hand found the wall. Melissa’s fury sat in my head without words for a second and then found them and held them back.

His hand came down on the infected’s skull.

It went through. The whole thing came apart under his palm — bone, whatever was left of structure, the wet interior of a head that had stopped belonging to anything that needed one — and the blood went out flat across the floor of that elevator and found the seams in the metal and ran along them in dark branching lines toward the open doors and the boots of the men waiting beyond.

I watched his arm come back up wet to the wrist. Drops fell from his fingers onto the giant’s shoulder and did not matter.

Then his knee met the side of my head.

The floor arrived. My cheek went into it and the blood was warm and thicker than it had any right to be and it was directly under my open eye. The taste of metal. The smell of the car suddenly much closer.

"You wanted to play with me." He was shouting now, and his voice filled that box and came back off every wall of it. "Do you know who I am? Do you have any idea who you’ve been playing with?"

"Eric." Celine tried to bring him down and he was miles past her. Her voice cut and died against the volume of his.

"This whole place has been disrespectful since the day we came through." His boot shifted beside my head, the sole filling the edge of my vision, a black shape against the red of the floor. "Every single one of them. We walked into this capital and they looked at us like we’d crawled in off the plain. Like we were something they’d have to clean up..."

I lost the rest of him.

My hearing had gone out through the open doors and past the men and down two corridors to the front of the building.

The crowd. The layered roar of it, rising and dropping in waves the way a crowd does when somebody good is working it.

And threaded all the way through, underneath, in among the cheering, the groaning of the infected.

Standing in the middle of them. The wet wrong rhythm of lungs that weren’t quite breathing, layered under the living cheer like a second audience that hadn’t been invited to speak and had come anyway.

He’s done it.

He’s put a city and the dead in the same square and got the city to cheer.

And every bit of that belongs to the girl standing above my head.

"Get up." Eric’s voice came back into the room. Closer. Controlled again, or performing control. "All of you. Out. Let’s go and meet your execution."

I put both palms flat on the floor, in it. The blood was tacky under my fingers. Warm still at the centre.

Give me every outcome. Now.

[ Usage limit reached. ]

What?

[ The ability resets in thirty minutes. ]

I stayed down there on my hands for a second longer than I needed to. The Guardians’ boots. The cable still humming faintly above. Max’s voice still working the yard. The six of us in a steel box with a ruined infected and a man whose wrist was still wet.

You didn’t tell me it had a limit.

[ You didn’t ask. ]

You’re kidding me. Right?

Nothing came back.

I got one knee under me. Then the other. Then I stood up, with that thing’s blood down one side of my face and both hands red to the wrist, and I looked at Eric Donman while I did it. Slow enough that he had to watch every part of the rising. Slow enough that the smile tried to come back onto his mouth and didn’t quite finish.

He watched me come up and something in his face didn’t like how long I took about it.

"Out," he said.

I started walking.

And my head went back to the old way of doing it. Counting men, counting doors, counting the distance from here to the front and what stood in each part of it. No branches to spend, no consequences laid out ahead of time. Just arithmetic and instinct, the way it was on the plain for twenty years.

Every move from here was going to be made blind.

And any one of them could be the one that finished all six of us.