Chapter 413: Is Max Alright?

The door opened and Sherry was standing in it.

Her hair had grown out a little, enough that it caught at her cheekbones when the alley air moved.

Four days since I’d watched her get dressed in her own room with the sun coming through the window, and it felt like something that had happened to a different body in a different city.

She didn’t hug me.

She came into me. Forehead against my collarbone, hands finding the back of my shirt, the whole of her weight arriving at once as if the doorframe had been the only thing holding her up and she had decided to stop using it.

I got my arms around her. The smell of her hair reached me before anything else — clean sweat, dust, the faint soap of whatever water they’d found.

"Don’t worry." I said it into the space above her ear. "He’s dead."

She started crying against my chest. Her whole weight came onto me and her shoulders went and she said things into my shirt that I couldn’t make out. Her fingers closed and opened in the back of the shirt and closed again.

"It’s all right," I said. "It’s all right now."

She pulled back far enough to find air, then came straight back into me as if the inch of space had been a mistake.

"I missed you." Her voice broke on the second word and had to rebuild. "Bram, I really missed you."

"I’m here."

"We don’t have all night," Code said behind me.

I held her tighter.

And what came back was the first time I ever saw her. Outside the gates. Max and Becky and Danny and Nesto beside her, all four of them still carrying the life layer on their skin, and me finished and barely upright, the system new in my head and the walls still a rumour I hadn’t tested.

Something had been wrong with her even then. I’d caught it before I knew any of their names — the angle of her shoulders when Max stood next to her, the way her eyes found him and left him and found him again.

"I don’t want to leave you, Bram." Her hands closed in the back of my shirt hard enough that I felt the seams. "I want to be with you. Properly. For the rest of it."

I held her and the one thing that could take that away sat right there in the middle of my chest, under her cheek, under the blood that had dried along my collar.

Twenty-three days.

The system’s count. The awakening’s count.

"I’m not going anywhere," I said. "I’m not leaving you."

She lifted her head and looked at me properly for the first time.

The blood on me. The wound on my neck — still open enough that the air found it, still being closed by whatever the system had left to spend. Her eyes moved across all of it without flinching and then came back to mine.

"Are you okay?"

Her hand was already up there. Fingers hovering short of the torn skin, close enough that I felt the heat of her palm.

"I’m fine."

I put both hands on her face. The cheekbones under my thumbs. The jaw. Warm. Alive. Shaking once and then steadying.

And that was when I saw them.

Dried blood. On her cheek, along the jaw, into the hairline. Not hers. Or not only hers. The square had put its mark on everyone who had run through it.

I moved her hair back off her face with my thumb. The strands stuck and then gave.

"Who’s with you?" she asked.

I shifted so she could see past my shoulder.

Code was sitting on the veranda with his bad arm across his knee, waiting. He didn’t look at us. He looked at the alley mouth and the quiet infected beyond it.

"Where did you get him?"

She said it in a whisper and didn’t wait for an answer. Her eyes had already done the next piece of arithmetic.

"Where’s Max?"

I didn’t say anything.

The pendant was in my pocket. The weight of it against my thigh. Becky on one side, Sherry on the other. The two people he’d cared about.

"Bram." Her voice climbed. The whisper broke. "Where’s Max?"

She’d seen Code. She’d seen the blood.

"Is he dead?"

"Yes."

She came apart against me.

Not the first crying. Something underneath it — a sound that started in her chest and didn’t become a word, her hands losing the shirt and finding it again, her forehead hard against my collarbone as if pressure could change the answer. I held her. The alley held the rest: Code’s silence, the door still open on the dark behind her, the street lamps burning steady over a road full of statues.

"It’s all right, Sherry."

"It’s not—"

"I know."

"Look at the two fucking lovebirds."

May.

I looked up with Sherry still in my arms and she was standing a few feet away with a smile all over her face. Dust on her clothes. A dark smear across one knuckle. Hair air stuck to her temple with sweat that had cooled.

"Come on." She came toward us. Boots on the alley stone. "You’ve had your minute."

She tapped Sherry on the shoulder. Two fingers. Light.

Sherry came out of my arms and started working at her face with the back of her wrist — eyes, cheeks, the blood at the jawline that smeared rather than lifted — and May watched her do it.

"That’s lovely, that is." Another tap. "Genuinely romantic. And now you’ve cried, which means I’m going to have to do something considerably more impressive."

She turned on me.

"Abram fucking Nadez."

She came into me and I held her. Smaller than Sherry. Solid. The smell of the run still on her.

"The odds on you killing that thing were about ten percent." She said it into my shoulder. The words vibrated against the bone. "I ran them twice and I didn’t like either answer."

She pulled back far enough to find my face.

"But the odds on seeing you again were a hundred. So I wasn’t worried."

She stepped away. The smile was still there. Something under it wasn’t.

"Do you want to fuck?"

My eyes had gone past her to the door.

Becky had come out.

She was standing in the frame with one hand still on it — fingers white against the wood, the other hand empty at her side. Her face had the set of someone who had already survived the square and was now surviving the doorway. Eyes straight at me.

"Are you even listening?" May said.

"May." I put a hand on her cheek. "Give me a minute."

She didn’t make it difficult. She moved aside — one step, then another — and the line between me and the threshold cleared.

I walked over to it.

Becky was standing in the frame with one hand still on it.

Her eyes went past me. Code on the veranda. The blood down my front, dried into the shape of a man’s last hour. The street behind all of it, and nobody else on it.

Then they came back to me, and her heart started going, and I could hear it from where I stood.

She swallowed. The motion travelled the length of her throat.

"Is Max alright?"