Chapter FourRook

They came in through the wall.

Not the door. The wall. One second I was sitting on the floor of Ward 2 with Sam asleep against my shoulder and the sky clock outside reading 70:12, and the next the plasterboard by the fire exit bulged, split, and burst inward in a cloud of white dust. A man stepped through it with a sledgehammer in one hand and a glowing riot shield in the other, and said, "Clear."

He wasn't talking to us.

More came through behind him, shapes in the dust with weapons and numbers floating over their heads. I counted five and stopped, because all the numbers were bigger than mine and that was all I needed to know for now.

The man with the sledgehammer was the biggest. Inspector Rook Adair, Enforcer, Level 10.

"Civilians," said a woman in a builder's hi-vis, with a nail gun that was dripping blue light. "Seven, eight, nine. Two kids."

"I can count, Tash." Rook swept the room with his eyes, like a man pricing furniture. He was in his forties, grey at the temples, with an inspector's pips on the shoulder of what was left of his jacket and a long, fresh cut down one cheek that he didn't seem to have noticed. His gaze stopped on Priya, who had sparks dancing along her fingers, and stayed there. "That one's a caster."

"That one has a name," Priya said.

"Good. You can tell me it on the way out." Then he looked at me. At the paramedic's uniform, the hair tie, the trauma shears on my belt. I saw him read the name badge on my chest and the number over my head, and I saw him decide neither mattered. "Who's in charge here?"

Everyone looked at me. I wished, very much, that they hadn't.

"Me," I said. "I suppose. Mo. Hi. Sorry about your wall. I mean, sorry about our wall. That you broke."

He didn't smile. "Rook. We've cleared the north stairwell and the car park. There's a safe zone at the police station on Gale Street, forty people and counting. We're taking anyone who can fight."

"And everyone else?"

The pause was only a second long. It was long enough.

"Everyone else," Rook said, "can follow if they keep up."

---

"The System rewards kills," Rook said. We were standing by the nurses' station, him and me and Dez and Jonah, while his people kept watch at the hole in the wall. Sam was awake now, sitting on Mrs Adeyemi's bed with his knees pulled up, listening to everything. "That's the whole game. You kill things, you get strong. You get strong, you kill bigger things. In seventy hours the next Tier hits, and everything out there gets worse. If we're not strong enough by then, we're dead. All of us."

He said it the way you'd read out a bus timetable. He wasn't trying to scare anyone. He just didn't seem to think he could be wrong.

"I don't get much from kills," I said.

"I noticed." His eyes went to the number over my head again. "Support class?"

"Triage Warden."

"Never heard of it."

"Neither had I, until about four hours ago."

He nodded slowly. "Look. I'm not saying you're useless. A healer's worth having. But a healer at level five isn't going to stop the Iron Tier, and neither are a guard with a bad leg and a bunch of patients who can't walk. The caster can. She's got the damage." He tilted his head at Priya. "We take her, we take you if you'll come, and we head for Gale Street. Anyone who can't walk stays here, barricaded. We send people back for them when it's safer."

"When will it be safer?"

"I don't know."

"Then you're leaving them."

"I'm choosing," he said, and for the first time his voice got sharp. "I've been choosing all night, Okafor." He'd read it off my name badge; I saw his eyes flick to it. "I've left people behind on three streets. I've watched them die because I couldn't carry them and fight at the same time. I don't like it. I do it anyway, because the alternative is everyone dies together. That's not a rescue. That's a funeral with extra steps."

Dez shifted his weight. He'd been quiet so far. "There are sixteen kids in the Children's Wing," he said. "Still alive. The boss has got them."

Rook's jaw tightened. "Then the boss is our problem too. It's a floor boss. You kill it, the floor clears. That's what's blocking the north stairs from the inside. We can't even get out properly until it's dead."

"You can't kill it," Priya said. "I tried. It caught my fireball like a tennis ball."

"You tried with three people."

"We tried with me. I'm the damage."

"You're one level three caster who's never been in a fight before tonight." He wasn't unkind about it. That made it worse. "There are six of us. We go in together, we can do it."

I thought about the Matron catching the fireball. I thought about her picking Dez up with one hand.

"You'll lose people," I said.

"Probably."

"And when you do, who's going to keep them alive?"

He didn't answer that. Instead he turned his head and said, "Kieran. Arm."

The lanky lad with the knives came over from the hole in the wall. He was maybe twenty, all elbows, with a Harbour Hawks scarf knotted round his neck like it was match day. He pushed up his sleeve without being asked twice. There was a bite on his forearm, from something in the car park, and it had gone bad fast: black at the edges, hot to look at, with red lines climbing towards his elbow.

"Two hours," Rook said. "It was a scratch two hours ago."

I didn't need telling what that was. I put my hands round Kieran's arm and held it, and felt the heat of the infection under the skin, and held it some more. Nobody spoke. It took longer than a bleed. When I let go, the black was gone and the red lines were fading, and a small +20 came off my hands and faded too.

Kieran flexed his fingers and stared at me. "That's mad," he said. "You know that's mad, right?"

"I'm told."

Rook was watching my face, not the arm. "How long can you keep that up?"

"I don't know yet."

"What happens if three of mine go down at once?"

"Then I do three."

"And if you can't?"

"Then you'll know before anyone dies," I said, "because I'll be the one shouting."

He looked at me for a while, the way he'd looked at the room when he came in, like he was measuring it for a barricade.

"That," he said, "is the first useful thing you've said."

---

It wasn't friendship. I want to be clear about that. It was a deal, made at a nurses' station at seven in the morning by two people who didn't trust each other.

His people would do the fighting. My people would do the saving. Nobody would be left behind on this floor, not the patients in Ward 2 and not the sixteen kids in the Children's Wing. When the Matron was dead and the floor was clear, we'd all go to Gale Street together, slowly, at the speed of whoever was slowest.

In exchange, Priya would fight in his line.

"Only if she wants to," I said.

"I want to," Priya said, before Rook could answer. Her eyes were very bright. "Obviously I want to. It's a raid. I've been training for this my whole life."

"You've been playing games your whole life," Dez said.

"Same thing."

It wasn't. We all knew it wasn't. Nobody said so.

Later, while Rook was briefing his people, I pulled Priya aside behind the linen cupboard.

"You don't have to do this," I said.

"I know."

"I mean it. You can stay here with Jonah and Mrs Adeyemi. Nobody would think less of you."

"I would." She was picking at the edge of her wrist cast. "Mo, I've spent my whole life being told I'm too much. Too loud, too fast, too reckless. Falling off walls. And then the world ended, and it turns out too much is exactly what you need." She looked up at me. "Let me be useful. Please."

I knew that feeling. I'd been feeling it since 3:12.

"Okay," I said. "But you stay where I can reach you."

"Deal."

So we had a plan, and the plan was a fight, and I hated it. Rook's people sharpened things and checked things. Tash, the woman in the hi-vis, reloaded her nail gun from a box of nails that glowed blue when they touched it, and told me without looking up that she'd killed a Level 8 on the multistorey with it and would I like to see the photos. I said maybe later.

I went round all of them anyway, one at a time. Most of what I found was bruises and scrapes, and when I put my hands on those, nothing happened at all. No warmth, no numbers. The System didn't care about bruises. It only paid out when something would actually have killed you, or come close.

The big one in the motorbike helmet was called Marcus. He didn't talk. Kieran told me he'd been a delivery rider and had been on the bike when the countdown hit zero, and that his mate had been on the bike behind, and that was all Kieran knew and all anyone was going to know. Marcus held out his left hand to me without a word. Under the glove there was a gash across the palm so deep I could see the tendons, wrapped in a strip of T-shirt that was black with blood.

"How have you been holding a shield with this?" I said.

He shrugged.

I fixed it. +20. When I was done, he flexed the hand, looked at it, and then reached out and gently tapped me twice on the top of the head with one gloved finger, like a man testing a melon. I decided to take it as thanks.

Rook was last. He was standing by the hole in the wall, watching the corridor, and he didn't turn round when I came up.

"I'm fine," he said.

"You've got a cut on your face that goes down to the bone."

"It's stopped bleeding."

"It hasn't. It's still bleeding under the dust from our wall, all down inside your collar. Hold still."

He held still. I don't think he was used to being told to. I put two fingers either side of the cut, and the edges drew together into a clean pink line. He didn't flinch. When I took my hand away, he touched his cheek and looked at his fingertips like he expected blood.

"Huh," he said.

"You're welcome."

"I didn't say thank you."

"I know. I'm saying it for you. It saves time."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It wasn't a smile, but it was a cousin of one. He looked back down the corridor.

"I've got a daughter," he said, out of nowhere. "Fourteen. She's at her mum's, in Westfield. Other side of the river." He didn't look at me. "I haven't been able to get across. The bridges are full of things. I tell myself the people at Gale Street are why I'm still on this side. Some of the time I believe it."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said the only true thing I had. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be useful." He hefted the sledgehammer. "Go and get your people ready, Medic."

So I went. Halfway across the ward, the System decided I'd done enough to deserve an update.

+60 XP: 3 lives stabilised (Serious)
[Triage Warden · Lv 6 · Ember Tier]

Six. Rook was ten, the Ember cap, and he'd got there by killing things all night. Three people with real wounds had got me one level. It was something.

Jonah caught my elbow by the nurses' station.

"You all right?" he said.

"No."

"Good. You'd be mad if you were." He glanced at Rook's back. "He's not a bad man, that one. He's a frightened one with a hammer. I've picked up a hundred of him off the floor on a Saturday night."

"He wants to leave the patients."

"He wants to save the most people he can. So do you. You just count differently." He squeezed my elbow and let go. "Make him count your way, Mo. You're better at it than he is."

I went back to Sam.

He was still sitting on Mrs Adeyemi's bed, still listening. He'd been quiet the whole time. When I sat down next to him he said, without looking at me, "You're going to fight her."

"Rook's people are. I'm going to stand at the back and make sure nobody gets hurt."

"Everyone will get hurt."

"Then I'll be very busy." I nudged him. "What's on your mind?"

He was quiet for a while. Then: "I was in here last year. In the Children's Wing. With my asthma."

I hadn't known that. "Oh, Sam. I'm sorry."

"It was okay. The nurses were nice. There was a night nurse who sang that song. The one the Matron sings." He picked at the blanket. "She sang it every night. And I asked her once if I could go home in the middle of the night, because I missed my mum. And she said no."

"That must have been hard."

"She said nobody leaves a ward without a discharge letter. Not ever. Not even if you cry. Not even if your mum comes. Two people have to sign the paper. The doctor, or whoever's treating you, and the nurse in charge. Then you're allowed to go." He looked up at me. "And the Matron keeps saying hospital things. Visiting hours. No running on the ward. Priya told me what happened, three times. The Matron told her off for running."

I stared at him.

"She follows the rules," Sam said. "Doesn't she? The hospital ones. Like she has to."

The back of my neck prickled.

No running on the ward. She'd said it before she moved. Come back at visiting hours. She hadn't followed us out. She hadn't followed us, and I'd thought it was because she didn't need to, but maybe she couldn't. Patients don't chase visitors down corridors. Nurses don't leave their ward.

"Sam," I said slowly, "you are a genius."

"I know."

"Jonah!" I stood up so fast the bed creaked. "Jonah, Rook, I need to talk to you. All of you."

They turned. Rook raised an eyebrow. Dez was already coming over.

"She's not just a monster," I said. "She's a nurse. The System made her out of this place, out of all the rules this place has. And if she's made of the rules, she has to follow them. We don't need to kill her. We need to..."

I didn't get to finish.

The lights went out.

All of them, every one on the ward, all at once, with a soft click like a switch. In the dark, someone shouted. Tash swore. Kieran's knives flared faintly, a cold blue glow that lit nothing.

The PA crackled, and the soft, kind voice filled the room.

"Patient Samuel Teague," it said. "Admitted three twenty-two a.m. You're out of your bed, dear. Please return to the ward."

"No," I said.

I lunged for the bed and grabbed the blanket, then a small arm, thin and warm, and I grabbed it and held on. Sam's fingers closed round my wrist. He was shaking.

"Mo..."

"I've got you. I've got you, I'm right here."

Above us, the ceiling tile over Mrs Adeyemi's bed slid quietly aside.

Something came down through the gap. In Kieran's faint blue light I saw it for half a second: an arm, white-sleeved and impossibly long, unfolding from the dark like a measuring tape. A gentle hand at the end of it.

It closed around Sam's waist.

I held on. I held on with both hands, with everything I had, and I felt the warmth flare in my palms and do absolutely nothing, because he wasn't hurt, there was nothing to stabilise, and the arm pulled.

It pulled like a winch.

Sam's fingers slipped down my wrist, to my hand, to my fingertips.

"Mo!"

Then he was gone, up through the ceiling, into the dark. The tile slid back into place with a soft click.

The lights came back on.

In the silence, very faintly, from somewhere far down the corridor past the grey balloons, a lullaby began.