Chapter four

I sat in the dark with a winning ticket in one hand and a voice in my head, and for a long minute I could not tell which one was more unbelievable.

[Slave Evolution: form a bond with the infected, then develop their abilities. Bond success rate: 5%.]

"Five," I said out loud. "Five percent."

[Success rate rises with Host's body, will, and level.]

"You're talking to yourself," Emrys said from across the room, not looking up from the knife he was sharpening. He said it the way you mention the weather. "You've been staring at the wall for ten minutes."

"The ticket won."

That made him look up.

"A hundred and eighty million," I said. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. "I think I just won it."

He put the knife down. He did not whoop or ask how. He studied my face the way he studied an opponent, and something in his shoulders eased, like a man who had just heard a long-awaited footstep on the stairs.

"Then we have fewer problems," he said, "and more work."

The next morning I cashed it in. A polite clerk shook my hand, a lawyer I paid too much handled the taxes, and by noon my account held a number so large it made my teeth ache. I felt nothing. I walked out into the daylight and stood on the curb with my heart still beating, the numbers swimming, waiting to feel rich.

I felt afraid.

Because money could buy a compound. It couldn't buy me ten extra seconds when the dead were at the gate.

I kept the other secret to myself.

The voice in my head spoke only when something changed. It never gloated and never explained. It was patient the way a locked door is patient. And now that it had a name, I could feel it in my chest, a faint, cold second pulse, waiting for something to answer.

I needed a test.

I found it three days later, on a service road outside the city, at dusk. A fox lay in the gravel shoulder, struck by a car, its fur dull and matted. I knelt beside it with my heart in my throat. The air smelled of wet leaves.

"Okay," I whispered. "Let's see what you can do."

I put my hand on its cold side and pushed, not with my arm, but with something behind my ribs, the way you reach for a word you almost remember.

Nothing.

I pushed harder. A pain flared behind my eyes. A thread of warmth ran out of me, thin and bright, and vanished into the animal like water into sand.

The fox did not move.

[Bond failed. Host stamina depleted.]

Blood ran from my nose onto my lip. The road tilted. I sat down hard in the gravel and laughed, a cracked, helpless sound. Five percent. I knew the number. Knowing it hadn't prepared me for how it felt to lose.

So I tried again.

Again.

Again.

Four times, five. A pain like a hot nail slid into my skull. My vision whitened at the edges. The fox lay perfectly still, a small dead thing in the dirt, and my hands shook so hard I had to sit on them.

"Tamsin."

I flinched.

Emrys stood at the edge of the road, truck idling behind him, headlights washing yellow over the gravel. His expression was unreadable. He was looking at the blood on my face.

"I followed you," he said. "You've been disappearing every evening. I thought you were meeting someone." He crouched slowly, careful, as if I were an animal that might bolt. "Are you hurt?"

"No."

"You're bleeding."

"It's nothing. A nosebleed."

He didn't believe me. I saw him decide not to push. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it over, and then, because I think he could see I was holding myself together by the last thread, he said only, "Whatever it is, it costs you. I can see that. I'm not going to ask what yet."

Yet. He said it softly, a promise, not a threat.

"Thank you," I said, and meant more than the handkerchief.

He helped me up and walked me back to the truck. On the way, I looked over my shoulder at the fox, small and still on the road.

Five percent, I thought. That's not an ability. That's a coin flip.

A coin flip I could not afford to lose.

The system knew. It laid it out for me that night, in the quiet of the farmhouse, in a short, cold row of lines.

[Bond success rate depends on Host's strength. Current: Constitution, weak. Will, moderate. Level, 1.]

[Higher-tier targets require higher Host stats. Failure costs stamina and health.]

I stared at the ceiling, thinking of the plane, the lift, the boot.

If I wanted an army someday, I had to become the kind of person who could command one. Not someone who begged. Not someone who carried other people's weight. Someone who could stand in a doorway with the dead pouring in and not blink.

So I trained.

Before dawn, I ran until my lungs burned. At the gym, Emrys had me hitting the bag until my hands bled through the wraps. At night, I read survival manuals until the words blurred, and I practiced the thing that terrified me, sitting cross-legged on the farmhouse floor with a dead mouse from the barn in front of me, pushing that thin bright thread out of my chest and holding it there.

Longer. Longer. Until my teeth chattered.

On the eighth night, the mouse's whisker twitched.

I sat frozen.

[Resonance detected. Bond progress: 7%.]

Seven. I laughed until I cried. Two percent. It was the smallest victory of my life and the sweetest, because it was mine. Earned, not stolen. Bought with every sunrise run and every split knuckle.

The mouse lay still again. But I felt it, a faint tug in the dark between us, like a hand brushing mine.

Then the system flickered, and something shifted in the voice, a note I hadn't heard before. Not calm. Not patient.

Alert.

[Warning. A second resonance has responded to Host's call.]

[Distance: three kilometers. Direction: north. Source: St. Aldric's Hospital, isolation ward. Status: not yet dead. Already belongs to the dead.]

The thread in my chest pulled taut, and from very far away, through walls and fields and miles of night, something turned its head toward me and began to smile.