Chapter 401: Peace.

After restoring peace, the government is making the final step that will see peace inside these walls forever.

The broadcast reached the room with the water still running behind the bathroom door — a thin continuous sound under the polished voice coming through the wall speaker, the kind of official cadence that filled every room in the capital whether you had asked for it or not.

Mercury and Venna sat on the bed. The mattress was narrow. Linn was in there bathing, and had been for a while.

This was the girls' room. King had put it aside for Linn a long time before any of this, and now it had three of them in it and had done for days. Clothes on the chair. The back door locked.

The execution of the traitors is the beginning of this new government. We call on every person inside these walls to come and witness history being made. The ceremony has already begun at the headquarters.

"Something's off about that execution." Venna said it looking at the wall, not at Mercury. She had Linn's high skirt on, and it didn't fit her the way it fit Linn.

"I've felt it since the announcement last night." Mercury pulled her knees up against her chest. The bedframe ticked once. "And something's been telling me Bram is one of the people they're talking about."

"Exactly." Venna turned to her. Blue hair catching the low light from the single bulb. "Two full days. Not one word from him in two days, and now there's an execution."

A knock came on the front door.

"Linn."

Trapper's voice. Flat. The boots already planted for the answer.

"She's in the bath," Mercury called.

"Alright. Tell her King's asking for her."

"I'll tell her."

His boots went off down the corridor. The sound of them faded into the hide's deeper quiet.

Venna's fingers found the loose thread at the skirt's hem and worried it once.

"So what do we do? Do we go?"

"That's what I've been sitting here thinking about." Mercury nodded at the wall, at the speaker still carrying Max's government voice into a room that had nothing to do with governments. "But the back door's locked and King's still down in the hide. We'd have to ask him to open it."

"Then we don't ask him." Venna looked toward the bathroom. "We get Linn to ask him. He's never once said no to Linn."

The bathroom door opened and Linn came out with nothing on, hair wet and the rest of her dry — water still beading at her collarbones, the floor taking a few drops as she crossed.

Her skin was still flushed from the heat of the bath. Nipples drawn tight in the cooler air of the room. A thin shine of water held at the tops of her thighs and at the thatch of hair between them before it cooled and dried. She stopped when she caught them looking.

"Why are you looking at me, zombie?"

"We want to go to the execution," Mercury said.

"We're in lockdown." Linn crossed to the closet. The door stuck once and gave. "King isn't opening anything after what Chris's men pulled yesterday. Not a chance."

"That door." Mercury pointed at the back one — the one the two of them had come through two nights ago. "He's frightened. He won't open it for you two."

"He won't open it for us." Venna said it evenly. "He'll open it for you."

"Please." Mercury put her hands together. Not quite a joke. Not quite not. "Do it for us, zombie."

Linn stood with one hand on the closet frame. A drop ran from her hair down the line of her spine, over the curve of her lower back, and disappeared between her buttocks.

"Okay." She came over and dropped onto the bed between them. The mattress dipped. For a moment the three of them sat in a line, the broadcast still working the wall, the water still draining in the bathroom. "But you're not leaving me behind."

Then she got up and walked out through the front door with nothing on and went down the corridor to find King — bare feet on the boards, unhurried.

Mercury looked at the door she'd left standing open and turned to Venna.

"Let's hope he opens it," she said. "Because I think he's in that square."

"I know."

Neither of them said anything after that. The broadcast filled the quiet. Somewhere below, Linn's voice found King's. Somewhere above the capital, a crowd was already gathering for a ceremony that had already begun.

Linn came back inside a minute with the key in her hand. She went straight to the back door and put it in the lock. The mechanism turned with a sound that was louder than it should have been in a room that had been closed for two days.

"Let's go."

"Put something on, zombie," Mercury said.

"I'm not going out there naked, you zombie." She was already at the closet, pulling fabric off hangers, the key still in the lock behind her as if the argument about clothes were the only thing left between them and the street.

***

The three of them came out of the corridor onto the street.

The same street where every one of Bagins' men had turned — the empty stretch that had held four hundred voices and then held nothing, the asphalt still carrying the memory of trucks and boots and a march that had ended in a different square.

The night was still young. Max's voice carried from the center of the city, spilling between the buildings.

I want to build something where nobody is afraid of an infected. Where all of us live side by side, and nobody has to wonder whether the person next to him is going to open his throat in the night.

Mercury stopped and looked down the road.

People were out. Walking, in groups, heading the same direction — toward the voice, toward the headquarters, toward the ceremony the broadcast had sold as history.

And the infected stood along the sidewalks, one every few metres.

A man went past close enough to brush one's shoulder and didn't look up. His group kept walking. The infected did not turn its head.

A woman passed one and tightened her grip on her son's hand without looking at it.

"I don't trust a zombie," Linn said. The words sat flat in the open air. Her eyes tracked the nearest infected and did not leave it. "I don't care what that man says on a speaker. Nobody's going to convince me otherwise."