Chapter 404: The Wrong Side of the Glass.

"What happened to her?" Ingrid asked.

"Eric killed her." I came out of Azure's arms. The residual of her grip stayed on my shoulders for a second. "Not on purpose. He was already going down and his hand came round loose and the web was still live."

Nobody said anything.

Outside the wood, the hallway kept producing sounds.

I crossed the room with Azure's hand in mine.

Sophia was behind the desk with her head tipped back against the top of the chair, throat bare, eyes shut. Not asleep. Her hands lay flat on the blotter, fingers spread, as if the wood were the only solid thing left in the building.

"We kill the first patient." Ingrid was on her feet before I reached her. The chair scraped. "That's it. That's the whole of it. Nothing out there stops until she does."

"How do we find her?"

"I know exactly where she is."

"Good—"

"But the infected are protecting her themselves," Ingrid said. "So it won't be easy."

"No. It won't."

I went to the window.

Melissa and Sophia were giving me nothing. Two open heads in one small room, and not one usable thought out of either of them — only surface weather, the static of exhaustion, the deliberate blank of women who had decided the next hour was not theirs to solve out loud.

Azure sat down with the others. Sophia stayed behind that desk with her hands flat on it, like the office belonged to her and we were all waiting on an appointment.

I reached the glass.

We were on the side of the building. Down there people were running — small dark figures breaking across the asphalt, some of them falling, some of them not getting up — and the infected were going after them with the unhurried certainty of bodies that no longer needed an instruction.

The dark was coming in fast now because the street lamps were going out one at a time down the length of the road, and each one took a piece of the city with it. A pool of light collapsing. Then the next. Then the next.

I looked out along it.

And something turned over in me.

I've stood here.

I looked at the bars across the window.

Iron. Set in a lattice, crossing over each other, spreading out from the centre of the frame in a pattern that went to all four corners.

I put my hand on them.

Why does this feel familiar?

I looked back into the room. Four women sitting in chairs in an old office, none of them moving, none of them willing to go back out into any more of tonight.

I turned to the glass again and tapped my fingers against the iron. Thin bars. Harder than they looked.

And me behind them.

I pushed against them with both palms, properly, the way you push something you intend to move.

The lattice did not give. The cold bit into the heels of my hands. Outside, another lamp went dark.

And all of it arrived at once.

The street out there was the street.

Not similar to it. The same road, the same lamps, the same angle looking down at it, and I had seen every part of it from inside something I couldn't get out of.

Caught in it. Arms caught, face caught, every strand holding and taking up the slack each time I pulled, while I shouted at people who couldn't hear me — three figures on the asphalt below, running, looking back, not looking up at the window where the shouting was coming from.

A web.

I looked down at my own hands on the bars. Knuckles white. The iron lattice printing its pattern into the skin of my palms.

It was never a web.

It was this window. It was this window and I was standing right here.

My eyes went right.

The lamps on that side steadied and held — a run of yellow still burning toward the junction, the road beneath them empty of infected because every one on that street had gone left after the mass, drawn by the noise and the living and the open front of the building.

A girl came sprinting out of the right-hand side.

The same side. The exact side.

Dark clothes. Fast. She crossed the road underneath the building — a brief shape in the surviving light — and went out of my sightline under the angle of the sill, and I never saw her face.

Then I saw them.

Three of them, running the way they'd run in it. Nothing behind them. Nothing chasing. And all three looking back over their shoulders anyway, at an empty street, afraid of something that wasn't there.

Sherry's hair. Becky's set shoulders. May a half-step ahead, her hand already finding Sherry's.

Running off the clear side of the road and toward the side with the infected on it — toward the dark pools where the lamps had died, toward the bodies that were still feeding and the ones that had finished and were looking for the next.

And the distance between the glass and the three of them was exactly the distance it had been.

Not close. Not similar.

Exact.

Everything in my chest stopped.

It's happening now. Not later. Not in a week.

I'm in the middle of it. On the wrong side of the glass.

That was the part I never understood.

Down on the road the lamps began going out and coming back along the whole length of the street, one after another, out of rhythm with each other — a stutter of light and dark, as if the city itself could not decide whether to hold the scene or erase it.

Becky stopped running.

She planted both feet on the asphalt and turned around to face the empty road behind them. Chin up. Hands open. The exact posture of someone who had decided that whatever wasn't there was still worth facing.

The other two went on, and May had Sherry's hand and was pulling her forward and not letting her slow for any part of it — the grip visible even from this height.

She's doing exactly what I asked her to do.

Stay with Sherry. Whatever happens, stay with Sherry.

And she's going to keep doing it right up until the moment it kills all three of them.

[ Your ability to foresee possible outcomes is resetting in two minutes. ]