Chapter 403: Responsibility!?

"Let’s go." Code was standing over me, looking down at the body. Eric’s blood still wet on both blades. Celine’s chest still held the dull set of the web. "Bram."

I could hear it through the walls already. The crowd had changed shape. There was screaming in it now — real screaming, the kind that comes from the middle of a mass of people and spreads outward faster than anybody can run. Throats opening. Bodies hitting asphalt.

And Max had stopped talking.

The front doors burst inward somewhere down the corridor. A hard crack of glass and frame, then bodies coming through them — a lot of them at once, people who had been standing in that square two minutes ago and were now running for anything with a roof. Shoes slipping on polished tile. The sound of the lobby filling from the outside in.

"We don’t have time."

"Okay."

I got up. My legs took the weight in stages. I pulled the front of my shirt across my face and took the worst of the blood off one side of it. The fabric came away dark.

"All I want is the girls out of this building safe."

"I don’t care about your girls." He said it with no weight at all. Both blades still in his hands, points down, dripping onto the tile. "I care about you. The rest of them aren’t my responsibility."

Wait.

I stopped.

Boots were already inside the building, a long way off and getting closer — multiple pairs, no rhythm, the chaotic percussion of people who had stopped choosing direction and were only choosing away. I stood still in the middle of that corridor anyway. Code’s eyes found mine over the bodies on the floor.

"What does that mean?"

"Bram—"

"No. Say it properly." I turned on him. "Am I your responsibility? Is that what you just said?"

"We don’t have time for this."

"Did somebody pay you?" I went after him as he started moving — black shoulders already committed to the far end of the corridor. "Is that what this is? Somebody paid you to keep me breathing?"

"We don’t have much time."

And he was right, which was the only reason I let it go.

Every person in this building was running wherever their feet pointed, and not one of them could tell you which of the bodies beside them had been bitten in the last ninety seconds.

I ran.

And my head went straight back to the naked mansion, to a room full of clones and a man in black coming through them whistling, arriving at the exact moment Bagins had Melissa against a wall and me on the floor underneath a sofa.

He said Sinn sent him.

We hit the end of the corridor. He went right.

I went left, because left was where the girls had gone — the direction Azure and Ingrid and Melissa had taken when the charge put Eric on the wall and Celine’s hands were still over her ears.

Behind me his boots turned and came after mine. No argument. Only the sound of him adjusting.

"AZURE."

Her voice came back from somewhere above us. Thin through the stairwell. Alive.

I took the stairs and went up them two and three at a time without breaking stride. Code’s boots landed behind mine the whole way — the same interval, the same commitment, as if the question of responsibility had already been answered in the direction of his feet.

A man came down past me like something released, arms going, missing me by inches and not slowing for any part of it. His shoulder clipped the rail. He didn’t look back. The smell of him was ordinary sweat and fear.

They’re already up here.

They came up before us. There’s another way to this floor.

I came off the stairs onto the landing and Code came up beside me.

And I felt them through the floor before I saw anything. Both directions. Weight coming down the hallway from the left and from the right at the same time — the specific vibration of many feet, some of them still choosing, some of them past choice.

They came round both corners together.

The two of us stood in the middle of it and I ran the arithmetic and hated all of it. Back down the stairs was the only clean ground, and I had no idea at all what was waiting at the bottom of them now.

"AZURE."

Code turned to face the right-hand side and drew both blades, settling into it with no expression whatsoever — weight forward, edges up, the corridor’s width already measured for the first cut.

He’s not sorting them. He’s going to take everything that comes down that hallway, living or not.

The door beside the stairway opened.

Azure’s face in the gap — pink eyes, pink hair, the set of someone who had been listening to the hallway with her hand on the handle.

I went for it, hard, getting there before the mass on either side arrived, and slipped through as she pulled it wide. Shoulder through the frame.

She shut it behind me and threw her weight on it. The latch caught. Something hit the other side of the wood an instant later — a body, or two, the impact running through the door into her shoulder and into mine where I had turned to help hold it.

Leaving Code out there.

And I didn’t spend one second worrying about him. Whatever was in that hallway, it wasn’t the thing in danger. The sounds on the other side of the door went wet and brief and then became the sounds of the next ones arriving.

"Bram." Azure’s arms came around me. Tight. Her face against my shoulder. "Bram."

I held her. The residual of the corridor still on my shirt.

"We need to work out how we’re getting out of this building," I said, over her shoulder.

An office.

Somebody’s old office with the desk still in it — blotter, a dead terminal, a mug with a crack in the handle. Sophia sitting behind that desk with her hands flat on the wood. Ingrid in one of the chairs across from her. Melissa in the other, black dress, jaw set.

All three of them looking at the door I’d just come through.