Chapter 7: Five for Five

Five for Five

The stairwell had one light and it was losing.

Lila Sunderland took the concrete steps two at a time with her hand on the rail, and the rail was wet, and she decided not to look at what it was wet with. Behind her the sound was wrong. Not feet — hands and feet. Grip and release. Whatever was coming up had learned stairs today and was enjoying the trick.

“Options,” she said.

Toby Nash had the wall side and was blowing hard. “Second floor. There’s a whole floor of people up there.”

“There’s a null up there.”

“Same thing.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “The kid from the eye room. He’s got a slip. They all get one — break it and you’re outside the wire.”

Owen came up last with one hand on his glasses, as if the frames were the part of this he could fix. “That’s — Toby. Toby, that’s us bringing them up to a person. There’s a fire door by the freight elevator, we could go down instead of—“

“Down is where they came from.”

“I know. I know, I just mean, if we—“ The claws came up the shaft and Owen stopped meaning anything for a second. Then, smaller, and careful, like the fog could hear him: “He’s got a slip. He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine and we’ll be fine and nobody has to—“

He didn’t finish it. Nobody in that stairwell wanted the end of that sentence said out loud.

Lila’s hip hurt where she’d gone into the corner too fast. Eight minutes, the eye room had cost her. Eight minutes and Toby’s face while she asked a null whether he had anything to contribute. She had told herself it was a resource problem. The eye was gone, or the fog had taken it, or the room had been a bad read. A resource problem.

“It’s a resource problem,” she said.

Nobody argued, which meant they understood it the way she did.

They came out on the second-floor landing.

Milo Grant stood in the middle of the corridor twelve feet away with his hands in his jacket pockets, the way you stand waiting for a bus.

“You’re being chased,” he said.

Toby went past him at a dead run. “Use the slip,” he said, not slowing, not turning his head.

Owen went past with both hands up, as though the corridor were a thing that could be apologized to. “Five of them, that’s five, use the slip, please use the slip—“

Lila went last, on the inside line, and did not look at Milo’s face. That was a decision, and it cost her nothing at the time.

They hit the stairs to the third floor. The door at the top banged. The fire door two flights down banged a second later. Then it was quiet except for the stairwell door behind Milo, which was still swinging.

Then the first ghoul put its knuckles through it.

“Huh,” Milo said.

“Five,” Blood-Eye said. “Grade one. All five out of that stairwell and not one of them pacing itself.”

“Can I outrun them?”

“You can outrun one of them. The other four would watch.”

Milo looked at what he had. Forty feet of waxed floor behind him, two supply carts and a gurney to break it up, and at the end of it the stairs the three of them had just taken — one wide, switchback, three panicking people already on it.

“Stairs are a bad idea,” he said.

“The stairs are a terrible idea.”

“Because I’d be on them with five behind me.”

“Because you’d be on them,” Blood-Eye said, “and the stairs don’t go anywhere but up.”

The lead ghoul came out of the stairwell on its knuckles with its shoulders higher than its head. It had been a person. It had gotten the angles wrong.

Milo rolled his right shoulder once and stepped forward instead of back.

“You’re not running,” Blood-Eye said.

“No.”

“Why.”

“Because I spent two hundred points this morning,” Milo said, “and I’d like to see the change.”

He clapped his hands, once, as hard as he could. The crack of it went down the corridor and came back off the tile. “Hey.” The shapes kept coming. Of course they did. They were hungry, not obedient. So he gave them something better than a sound. “Eyes up.”

The lead one lifted its head.

So did the other four.

BLOOD PIT — LV 1
TARGETS IN LOCK: 5
RESERVE: 50 / 200 GHOST QI
HOLD: 30.0 SEC

The floor split.

Not much — a runnel of linoleum opening and going gray, then red, hairline cracks running out from under the lead ghoul’s claws like something had hit the concrete from underneath. Every light in the corridor went the color of the inside of a mouth. The five stopped where they were. Not slowed. Stopped, with their weight still forward and one of them with its jaw hanging open mid-howl and nothing coming out of it.

“Huh,” Milo said, quieter.

“Thirty seconds,” Blood-Eye said. “Shorter than it sounds.”

“Then stop talking.”

Fifty reserve left, per the panel, which was one more of those and no opinion about what came after.

There was a cart by the pathology doors with a stainless case chained to it by one handle. The chain went through the handle. The latches did not. He popped them. Inside was a gray body, a battery the size of a paperback, and a blade in a sheath like a butter knife that had been somewhere bad. He fitted the blade. He pressed the trigger. The thing screamed in his hand.

“That’s for bone,” Blood-Eye said.

“They’ve got bones.”

“Not for long.”

The closest ghoul was eleven feet away and couldn’t move and had its mouth open. Milo got in behind its shoulder where the arms couldn’t reach him even if they started up again, put the blade where the skull met the neck, and leaned in.

He had never cut anything before. That was the joke of it. The blade went where the saw wanted it to go, not where he wanted it to go, and it was loud, and it was warm, and then the whole thing came apart into dust and grit and something that stuck to the sweat on his forearm. The ash fell straight down and heaped itself into a small gray cone.

“One,” Milo said, because counting was free.

He took the second one from the side. Its eyes moved the whole time. He saw that. He saw them track him and understand, and then the blade went in and it didn’t matter.

BREAK POINTS +40
CURRENT: 58

“Where’s that coming from,” he said.

Up on the third-floor landing, three faces leaned over the rail.

“That’s the eye,” Lila said. Her voice came down the stairwell flat and clear. “That’s the eye from the clinic. He took it.”

Toby’s hands came down on the rail. “What?”

“That thing was a controller. Grade two, and it was the only one we’d seen all day, and we walked out of the room and left him in it.”

“He’s a null.”

“He’s rank one.” She wasn’t talking to Toby. “Last in the building, or he was this morning. Null or not, that’s the eye.”

Toby looked down at the corridor with his mouth open on a sentence he’d brought up here and didn’t get to use. Then he straightened, and hit the rail with the flat of his hand, once, and said something that didn’t carry.

“He’s smiling,” Owen said.

Milo was. He could feel it doing something unpleasant to his face and he didn’t stop it.

“Two,” he said, and got the third.

The blade went through the neck and the body went with it, straight down, and up puffed the ash. The fourth one had worked its arm six inches out of the hold, so Milo stepped around behind it and did that one slower, because his hands had started shaking, and then it didn’t matter either.

“Eleven seconds,” Blood-Eye said.

Milo looked at the last one.

The hold was coming apart. He could see it the way you see a thing about to fall — the whole shape of it deciding to be loose. The ghoul’s eyes came round to him and its jaw closed and something in its throat started working.

“Don’t,” Milo told it, and put the saw in under the ear.

The last of the ash hit the floor and puffed up gray around his shins. He stood in the middle of the corridor breathing through his mouth while the lights went back to their normal bad yellow.

“Five for five,” he said.

“That was mine,” Blood-Eye said. “That was my skill doing the work, while you did the—“

“Cutting.”

“Arts and crafts.”

“Yeah.” Milo wiped the blade on his thigh and thumbed the trigger off. “Thanks for the loan.”

Five small hard things were left in the ash, one per pile, the color of old milk. He picked one out with two fingers. Warm. Peach-pit sized. He shook the ash off it, and then off the other four, and held all five up against the light where the landing could see them.

“Grade one,” he called up. “Look at that color. That’s a good morning’s work.” He put them in his jacket pocket and patted it flat.

Then he lifted his hand near his right eye, not touching it, and left it there a second. The number in the corner of his vision hadn’t moved on its own. It moved when they looked at him. He filed that away with his other unpaid bills.

“First thing,” he said. “Thank you. Five of those walked past every other room on this floor and came looking for me, and that’s a service. I’m paying you in attitude.”

BREAK POINTS +40
CURRENT: 98

He could hear the ash settling.

“Second thing,” he said. “Do that to me again and I’ll do something about it.”

“We didn’t do anything to you,” Toby said.

“Say it louder.”

“We didn’t do anything to you.”

“Sure.” Milo bent, picked a strip of something out of the ash, and dropped it. “You just ran a delivery. I already said thanks.”

Lila Sunderland didn’t say anything. She looked at his eye the way you look at a sum that has come out wrong, and then she turned and went up the stairs, and the two of them went after her.

The corridor smelled like a butcher’s drain. Milo walked it with the saw hanging off his hand, checking doors.

The rooms on the right were an office, a linen closet, and a meeting room full of stacked chairs for a meeting something had canceled. The rooms on the left had the dead in them.

The dead had been picked clean of everything that mattered and left with everything that didn’t, and everything that didn’t was jewelry. A watch on a wrist that was mostly sleeve now. A chain hanging through what was left of a collar. A ring he worked loose with the tip of the blade, and then he looked at the finger, and put the ring back on the floor.

He rinsed the watch and the chain at the utility sink and watched the gray go down the drain. He dried them on his shirt, put them in a biohazard bag he pulled from the wall dispenser, and turned the bag inside out first.

The finance office door had a chipped frame and gave up on the fourth shove. Desk, phone, a chair pushed back and left pushed back. The safe door stood open on an empty shelf. The petty-cash drawer wasn’t locked, and inside it was ninety-six dollars, mostly singles, a coffee can of quarters, and a receipt spike with nothing on it.

“Somebody got the box and didn’t bother with the drawer,” Milo said.

“Who’s somebody?”

“The Bureau. Or somebody with nicer shoes than mine.” He folded the singles into his back pocket. “The drawer wasn’t worth the bend. That’s the insult.”

He came out through the nurses’ station and looked up, and there was a man in the window.

Not in the room. In the window — past the glass, past the parking structure, hanging at second-floor height with fog smoking off him and the lot lights behind. He was made of straw. Burlap where a face went, sleeves of it, and the wind in the courtyard moved him gently.

He had a board in his hands. A flat gray board, the kind a score gets kept on, and a stub of pencil, and while Milo watched, the straw arm came up and made a mark on it.

“Hey,” Milo said.

The straw man finished the mark. Then he tipped sideways and was gone, unhurried, the way a plastic bag goes when the air decides for it.

Milo stood with both hands on the counter. Then he pulled up his point total, which was stupid, and looked at it again, which was stupider, and both times it said the same number.

He went back out into the corridor.

He heard it before he’d turned the corner. Not music, not yet. A draw of air through a reed, slow, and then held. Under it a hum that ran through the pipes and the ceiling and the floor, and his back teeth ached, all of them at once.

The cart’s loose wheel began to chirp.

At the end of the corridor the double doors stood closed with a wired glass window in each leaf, and stenciled above them, cracked and still readable: SURGICAL 3.

He was eight feet from it when the system came up in the corner of his eye.

HIGH-GRADE ENTITY — ONE
SOUND SOURCE: BEYOND DOORS

Milo stopped.

“Eleven feet past the door,” Blood-Eye said. “Four feet left of the seam. She’s sitting down. Small — five-three, maybe five-four if she stood up, and she’s not standing up. She’s on the edge of the table with her feet off the tile and there’s a stool two feet away she isn’t using. Right hand’s on the rail. Moving. Back and forth. She’s looking for something. Or reaching. Feel around long enough and it’s the same thing.”

“Breathing?”

“No in, no out.” A pause. “Left forearm and the right hand are burned. Old. The tight kind. Somebody pulled her out of something on fire and it was a long time ago. The scarring runs up under the gown. If we’re being thorough, I can work out how long she was in it, and what order things cooked in, and how much of her is still—“

“Don’t.”

“—I’m being thorough.”

“Be thorough about the door.”

He put his face near the wired glass.

She sat on an operating table shoved against the far wall and never shoved back. A hospital gown gone gray at the collar, feet hanging, head up. On the floor by her knee was a harmonium folded into its case like a suitcase, the lid open, and stamped inside the lid in paint that had cured brown was a number.

Her hand went along the rail, stopped, went back.

The wall behind her was charred from the floor up. Not evenly. The black climbed highest around the outlet and the doorframe and then feathered out toward the ceiling, the way fire goes when it has to work for it.

“Huh,” Milo said.

“That’s what I said.”

Then the sound came out of the room.

It didn’t come out as music. It came out as pressure. The corridor lights took it up, buzzing, the loose wheel chirping along with it, the metal in his hands singing back at it — and Milo found he’d taken a step backward without deciding to.

“What is that,” he said.

“That’s the part where I tell you two things,” Blood-Eye said. “First: leave it. That’s above your pay and above anything I can do for you in the next sixty seconds.”

“And second?”

“Second, open the door. The stairs at the end of this hall are a dead end if she decides to come out anyway, and I’d rather be in the room with her than out here with her undecided.”

“You’re being very helpful.”

“I’m being thorough.”

Milo put his palm flat on the door and didn’t push.

In the corner of his vision, the prompt stayed right where it was.