Chapter 412: Sherry, It’s Me.

The infected held. The whole yard stayed quiet.

I stood beside the body and let my eyes go out across the street.

Hundreds of them. Standing exactly where they’d stopped. Heads down, arms loose, nothing moving anywhere on that road.

My body was finished.

I could feel it underneath everything the system was closing up and it wasn’t the wounds. The wounds were going. This was the other kind. The kind the plain had taught me: the empty tank, the body that had spent its last reserve and was now only standing because standing was the instruction it had left.

The street lamps steadied.

All of them at once, the whole length of the road, and stayed lit. No stutter. No pools of dark.

From the far side of the building, somewhere I couldn’t see, something started moving.

Slow. Dragging. Coming around toward me.

I didn’t move.

I stood where I was with my brother at my feet and let myself look at it properly.

Girls I’d gone to with one thing in my head. Charge. Level up. Improve the odds of still being inside these walls by the end of the week.

That was all it had been at the start. A system in my head and a number that went up.

And tonight I’d run a man into a wall with my arms locked around him and beaten his face off his skull because he’d tried to put his hands on them.

Every one of them is my life now.

All of it. There’s nothing else in it.

The footsteps came closer and I turned.

Code came round the corner.

Limping badly, one shoulder sitting a good two inches lower than the other, his left arm hanging wrong from it — the angle of a joint that had left its socket and stayed out.

Black from the neck down and most of it wet.

Whatever that hallway had cost him, it had cost him.

He came up and stopped a few feet short and looked down at the body without any expression at all. Mute’s empty face. The purple hair. The ruin of the features under the street light. Code’s eyes moved across it once and left it.

Then he put his right hand on his own shoulder and pushed, and something went back into its socket with a sound I felt in my own teeth — a wet precise pop, bone finding bone, the arm dropping into a line that was closer to correct.

He didn’t make a noise about it.

"Yeah." He rolled the arm once, testing. The joint held. "Let’s go. These things wake up when they want to."

I looked at them again.

Every one standing in the exact position it had stopped in. Not drifting. Not swaying. A woman’s head still bowed over an empty hand. A Guardian’s chin on his chest, rifle still slung, the strap dark with something that might have been his or might have been the square’s.

The specimen.

They sleep when she sleeps. They come up when she comes up.

There’s no decision anywhere in it. A girl shuts her eyes somewhere in this city and a thousand people stop existing for a while.

"Wait here," I said. "I’ll be a minute."

I started walking, crossing the road, my eyes on the direction the girls had gone — the clear side, the corner past the end of the building, the route May had pulled Sherry along.

"I’ll come with you."

I didn’t look back. His footsteps came after mine, uneven, the limp putting a pause in every second one.

"Who hired you?"

I asked it without turning around and I knew what was coming before it arrived.

"You know I’m not answering that."

"Yeah."

"Then why ask?"

"Because I want you to be free."

He didn’t say anything to that, and I kept going without breaking stride. The infected on either side of us didn’t turn their heads. The lamps held.

"Were you protecting me at the Fallen City?"

"Yeah."

He drew level, which took him longer than it should have. The limp shortened his stride. The wet black of his clothes caught the street light in patches.

I went back through all of it while we walked. The whole trip. The infected. Sinn. Major. Owen. The sand outside the walls.

He’d been beside me for every step of that mission. Through the building. Through the dead coming in the windows. Through all of it, close enough to touch, and he had never once put a hand out.

Because none of it had ever come close enough to the one thing he was paid for.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"Finding my girls."

"Aren’t they in the building?"

"Different group."

"Another group."

He said it completely flat, and didn’t follow it with anything, and we turned the corner of the building the way they’d gone.

A corridor between two walls. Narrow, dark, the street light reaching only the first few metres before the shadows took the rest.

Dead end at the far side with one door set into it — ordinary wood, no light under it, the kind of door a service entrance wears when nobody is supposed to notice it.

Which made the search a great deal shorter than I’d braced myself for.

They were behind it. I knew before I’d taken three steps — the same certainty the plain had taught me when a building held living breath and the wind carried it.

"I don’t like girls," Code said behind me. "I like getting paid."

I didn’t answer that.

I went down the corridor to the door and knocked.

The sound sat in the narrow space and died. Nothing came back. No footsteps. No voice. Only the quiet of the infected on the street behind us and the limp of Code’s breathing behind my back.

I put my palm flat against it. The wood was cool. Ordinary.

"Sherry." Then louder. "Sherry, it’s me."

The lock moved.

I heard someone on the other side take a breath.

Then the door opened.