Chapter 148: Back to the Walls.
The plain moved past the windows in a slow, familiar blur, ochre sand, flat horizon, the distant promise of the walls somewhere ahead, invisible but pulling at us like a magnet you could feel in your teeth.
The escort truck slowed at the boundary of the Forsaken City, flashed its lights once, then turned back in a wide arc of dust. We continued alone.
Nobody slept. Nobody spoke. Just the low rumble of the engine and the specific heavy quiet of people who had been through something together and were still turning it over in their minds.
"What was that?" Mercury said suddenly from the front.
"What?" Sherry asked, still pressed against my shoulder.
"You don’t hear it?"
I had been hearing it for minutes. Irregular, insistent kicking from the boot. Dull thuds against metal.
"The infected," Harmione said.
Mercury let out a short laugh. "I’d completely forgotten we were carrying it."
The murmuring started then, small observations, people remembering the specimen in the back.
Carrying it, I thought. It.
I see people. Eleanor’s voice arrived uninvited, clear and calm.
"Stop the car," I said.
Mercury braked without question. The vehicle rolled to a halt in a hiss of sand. No one argued. That alone told me how much had shifted since the Fallen City.
I stepped out. The heat hit immediately, sun beating down on my shoulders. I walked to the rear, Sinn already moving around the other side without being asked. He stopped beside me as I opened the boot.
She was kicking harder now, chest heaving, tape across her mouth stretched tight as she fought for air. I peeled it off carefully, the adhesive pulling at her skin. She gasped in deep, ragged breaths, blue eyes wide and blinking against the sudden light.
Sinn and I stood there, watching her breathe.
"What do you see?" I asked him.
He stared for a long moment, jaw tight. "A girl," he said.
She looked almost normal. Except for that stillness underneath the movement. The specific quality of something that had lost access to itself. But the face was a face. The eyes were eyes.
I closed the boot carefully, the latch clicking shut. Sinn said nothing else. We got back in.
Mercury started driving again.
"I was thinking about Hod," Mercury said, finding her rhythm. "Specifically about whether the size of a man corresponds to the size of everything."
Sinn went very still in the front seat, the specific posture of a man deciding to become furniture.
"It has to be proportional," Harmione said, trying to keep up.
"It isn’t," Mercury answered.
"How certain are you?"
"Trust me."
"Mecury and her conversations," Sherry murmured to me quietly, amusement in her voice.
"Mmm," I said.
She shifted closer, her shoulder pressing warmer against mine. "Where were you last night? I came to your tent."
I looked out through the windshield at the plain rolling ahead. The walls were still invisible, but getting closer with every kilometer, carrying everything I was returning to. Azure. Daphne. Sophia Vale. Three primordial women who didn’t know yet that the house of Nadez had found its purpose.
"I had something to take care of," I said.
Sherry studied my face for a beat, the way she looked at answers she had decided to accept for now and return to later. Then she settled back against my shoulder, hair brushing my neck.
The plain moved past us. The walls came closer. I thought about my father choosing a woman in the sand, walking toward the end of himself so that I could be sitting here, heading toward the beginning of everything he had planned.
"You’ve changed," Sherry said after a long stretch of silence. She sat up straighter, no longer leaning, just looking at me properly. Her eyes moved across my face like she was reading a map that had been redrawn overnight.
"Better or worse?" I asked.
"Better." She didn’t even let the question finish. "You’re not the same Abram who traveled with me from CGI to Hogsby."
I didn’t answer. She wasn’t wrong.
"But the weight though," Mercury cut in from the front, refusing to let the moment stay serious. "Forget the size. Just imagine Hod on top of you."
"Me?" Harmione laughed, sharp and bright.
"Yes you. Maybe Guen is always on top. But even then—"
"That’s enough," Sinn growled from the driver’s seat, forced into it at last. The girls burst out laughing anyway, the sound filling the car in bright, jagged bursts.
The vehicle kept rolling forward.
We passed the stretch of plain where Speed had gone down. I recognized it instantly, the slight rise in the land, the way two dried riverbeds cut parallel like old scars. The exact angle of light on the scrub. I looked at it, felt the memory press against my ribs, then looked away.
The girl in the boot had gone quiet since I removed the tape. Calm in a way I hadn’t expected. I had thought about letting her go out there in the white sand, but she was proof. The mission’s success. The ticket back through the gate.
"Have you missed the walls?" Sherry asked, voice softer now.
"A little," I said. "You?"
"Everything I can miss is with me right now," she answered, settling back against my shoulder.
I sat with that. Max Donman waiting somewhere inside. The people she had grown up with in Goth. The life she had known before the plain crossing. And she was saying everything she could miss was right here in this car. I filed it carefully and said nothing.
Night came down hard over the plain. The headlights carved twin tunnels through the dark, familiar territory now, the ground I had spent twenty years learning to read like braille under my boots.
Then Code started whistling. Low. Tuneless. Careless. I looked through the windshield and saw the walls.
Visible on the horizon now, the gate towers glowing with cold white lights that cut through the blackness like beacons. May gave a sharp shout. Mercury joined her. Even Sinn’s face in the rearview mirror held something he wasn’t quite managing to hide.
We hit the Life Layer.
The girl in the boot coughed once, hard and immediate, as the bluish shimmer parted around the car and closed behind us. The walls rose up solid and real in the headlights, massive concrete and steel, the gates already beginning to rumble open.
We were back. The mission was complete.
And mine was just beginning.
