Chapter 376: You Don’t Know Anything.

"This is going to sound insane." She was staring at the ceiling, not at me — at the bare bulb, at the stone, at nothing that could answer her. "But I need you to fuck me. Please."

I didn’t move.

There was no version of this where rushing helped either of us. Her legs kept their small constant motion against the foot of the frame — the body still fighting what the mouth had already surrendered.

[ There it is. ]

[ Go. ]

[ Sophia Vale. Source ready for extraction. ]

Quiet.

"Sophia."

"Don’t make me say it twice."

"I’m not going to."

I came around the side of the bed so she could see me without having to turn her head against the rope. The mattress dipped under the shift of my weight near her hip.

"You wanted me dead a minute ago."

"I still do." Flat, and immediate. The fangs were gone but the dark hadn’t fully left her eyes. "That hasn’t changed and it isn’t going to." Her throat worked once. A swallow she didn’t want me to see. "Please. Save me."

I sat down on the edge of the frame. Both of us with nothing on. The corridor outside was quiet.

"Is that all you want from me?"

She breathed in. Held it. Let it out through her mouth, slow.

"I’ve carried this for years," she said. "I can’t do it anymore. That’s the whole of it. I’m not being brave about it and I’m not going to pretend."

I stood up and faced her.

From here the full length of her was laid out under the bulb — wrists bound, ankles bound, breasts rising with each breath, the soft open line between her thighs where the rope had left her no privacy and no defence. The small constant tremor in her legs. The way her stomach hollowed when she braced against another wave of whatever was moving under her skin.

[ What exactly do you think you’re doing? ]

[ That is Sophia Vale, laid out in front of you. ]

[ Don’t waste this. It’s the only route to stopping what you saw. ]

Wait.

We held each other’s eyes. Her legs were still going, small and constant, whatever was underneath her still moving. But her face had settled.

"Are you in here by coincidence?" she asked.

"No."

I didn’t dress it up.

She nodded slowly against the mattress. The rope at her wrists whispered.

"I knew this wasn’t the first time I’d seen you." Her eyes moved over my face the way a person reads a page they’ve read before — not searching, confirming. "I’ve seen a great many faces and I lose most of them. Yours has been getting clearer since you walked in."

I let her do the arithmetic herself.

"You’re the boy from Hogsby. Brown’s office." Something surfaced behind the dark of her eyes. "You came in with a girl who had no underwear on."

"How could you possibly know that?"

"I saw."

That was May.

Her whole ability is stopping people from seeing exactly that, and this woman saw it from across a room and filed it.

"And you were both stinking of sex," Sophia said. "I could smell it from the desk." A pause. The corner of her mouth moved and didn’t quite become a smile. "Were you the reason for Brown’s level ups?"

"Yes."

No point in anything else. We’d arrived at the same page from opposite ends of a year neither of us had chosen.

"Let me guess, then." She let her head settle back and the frame creaked underneath her. "You’re here to extract me."

"Yes."

I sat down on the bed again. Closer. The heat of her thigh almost against my hip.

"You work with Eleanor."

"No." I watched the smile start to go — the small one that had almost formed and then thought better of it. "We’re family."

[ This is going considerably beyond the mission. ]

[ The mission is extraction and marking. ]

Sophia laughed. Small, and real, and her legs kept moving through it like a woman holding something shut with her knees.

"How did I miss it?"

Her fingers moved above her head — a reach toward my face that the rope stopped cold, the bindings biting into the raw marks at her wrists. She held the reach for a second anyway, as if the intention mattered more than the contact, and then her hands opened and closed on nothing.

"You have his eyes."

I didn’t say anything to that.

"So you’re the boy from Riya’s funeral. The one Eddie was so worried about." That got a laugh out of her too, and it died faster — cut off by a wave that pulled her stomach tight and lifted her shoulders against the rope. "Do you have any idea what you’re doing?"

"I’m stopping the awakening."

She laughed again. No humour left in it.

"Do you know the awakening works for both of us? Do you understand that? It isn’t a disaster we’re bringing down on earth. It’s the whole point of everything any of us has ever done." Her head turned on the mattress until she was looking at me properly, dark eyes steady. "What’s your name?"

"Abram."

"Abram." She said it back, testing it — the shape of it, the weight. "So he picked you. He couldn’t finish it himself so he made someone to do it for him." She dragged her knees up as far as the rope allowed. The ankles pulled taut. The soft flesh of her inner thighs tensed and released. "What a coward."

"I’m not doing it for him."

"No?"

"I never met him." I held her eyes. "I’m doing this for myself."

"Yes." Something in her gave way — a small collapse behind the face, not in the body. "I agree with you. You don’t know anything at all."

Her back came off the mattress and settled again. A full-body flinch against the next wave. The headboard knocked the wall once and went still.

"And I’m tired of fighting something I’ve already lost." Her voice dropped to almost nothing. "So please. Take it."

Her legs had stopped fighting and gone open instead.

Knees fallen apart as far as the bindings at her ankles allowed, the full bare line of her offered up under the bulb without defence. She was looking at the ceiling again. Breathing in short controlled pulls that lifted her breasts and didn’t steady.

I looked at her eyes while she breathed.

"I’m going to cut you loose."

"Don’t."

"Sophia—"

"Please don’t."

The word landed differently from the others. Not an order. Not the director. Something closer to the woman who’d been trying to bite her own shoulder in the dark.

I looked down at the rope at her ankles. Thick. Well-tied. She couldn’t move them more than a few inches in either direction. The skin under the bindings was red going purple where the fight had been longest.

"You can loose the legs," she said. "Not the arms. Trust me on that."

"Why not the arms?"

Nothing. Her jaw moved once and stayed shut. A thought rose and she crushed it before it reached me.

"Just do one thing for me."

I turned back to her. Her eyes were on mine. Dark. Steady. The centuries and the fire and the woman who had asked me to save her all present at once.

"Make sure I come."