Major talked without stopping from the moment we entered the building. I fell back slightly, letting him walk ahead with Mercury, whose laugh I could hear from behind him every few seconds.

Whatever he was saying, she was finding it funny, which was either genuine or the specific social intelligence of someone who understood how useful it was to make a person feel interesting.

I walked with Sherry.

"How safe are we?" she asked quietly.

"Safe for now," I said. "Worried that a certain bald member of our team might change the stats."

She grinned. "What do you mean?"

I didn’t answer. We needed somewhere private before I told her what I thought about Owen. Out here in the middle of Major’s people was not that place.

The building opened up around us as we entered. A hotel, pre-catastrophe, the kind that had been built for a different world and had survived into this one by becoming something else.

The reception area was large, ceilings high, and there were children inside, which was the first children I had seen since crossing the life layer. Running between adult legs, existing in the specific way of children who don’t know yet that they’re supposed to be afraid.

"Welcome to my kingdom," Major said, turning and tapping my shoulder. "Abram of Goth."

"Nice place," I said, and meant it more than I expected to.

"Make yourselves at home," he told the rest of the team, then steered me by the shoulder toward two swinging chairs at the end of the reception, a table between them.

His men were already taking the boxes from our team, directing people to rooms, the practiced efficiency of an operation that had been running for a while.

I sat down. The chair moved with me, comfortable in a way I hadn’t felt in days.

"You feel it?" Major asked, settling into his.

"Yeah."

"That’s how the Mayor lives." He gestured broadly at the building. "All of this is mine. I sleep wherever I want." He smiled with the specific satisfaction of a man who has built something from nothing and knows it. Then abruptly: "Jenn."

"Yes, Major." A female voice from a small room that had been a minibar.

"Bring my drink. I have a visitor."

He turned back to me.

"I know you’re from Goth," he said. "But I have something you’ve never seen. Have you tasted coca?"

"No," I said, already regretting my registered status as team leader. "What is coca?"

He smiled. "Wait."

A girl came out. Nineteen, maybe. Beautiful eyes. Braided locks. A dress that had lost its color long enough ago that you couldn’t guess what color it had been. She was carrying two small glasses barely bigger than bottle caps and a large plastic bottle of black liquid, half-full, red sticker on it with all the words worn away.

She set the glasses down and poured. One drop fell on the table.

Major’s face moved. Something crossed it fast, controlled just as fast, the expression of a man deciding not to react to something that he very much wanted to react to.

He picked up the drop with his finger and licked it immediately.

"Jenn," he said, very carefully. "It’s okay. Just a drop."

"I’m so sorry, Major." She apologized with the gravity of someone who understood what the drop meant.

She took the bottle back and retreated. I looked at the two small glasses on the table.

She’s served him this drink since she was ten, he had said. She was nineteen now.

Don’t tell me, I thought. That’s the same bottle.

"This is coca," Major said, lifting his glass with ceremony. "Drink."

I picked mine up and put it to my mouth. Whatever it had been before the catastrophe, it had become something else in the intervening years. I wanted to spit it out immediately. I swallowed instead because I was a guest and I had been raised with more manners than this situation was requiring.

Good that the glass is small.

"Feel the magic?" Major asked, watching me with the attention of someone sharing their most prized possession.

I nodded.

He tasted his first with the tip of his tongue, smiled, and drank it in one swallow. Leaned back. Let the chair swing.

"Wow," he said.

I stood.

"Thought your people were hungry," I said.

"We are," he said, still leaning back. "Also disciplined. That’s why we’ve survived this long."

"I want to check on my team."

"Twenty minutes," he said. "We eat then." He looked toward the minibar. "Jenn. Take him to the executive section."

****

Jenn appeared and led me up the stairs. She moved with the ease of someone who had grown up in this building and knew every step of it.

"He’s actually a good man," she said, as we climbed.

"I can see that," I said. "How long have you been with him?"

"He rescued me when I was eight." She said it simply. No drama around it. "He’s like a father to me."

"The connection makes sense," I said. I thought about asking what happened before eight and decided against it. Outside, before eight usually told itself.

"What’s your dream?" I asked instead.

She looked at me. The specific look of someone who has never been asked that question and is trying to locate the answer.

"Nobody’s asked me that before," she said.

"I know."

She was quiet for a moment, climbing.

"Marrying," she said finally. A small laugh. "And seeing the walls open for everyone one day."

"Good dream," I said.

"Yours?"

"Just got a new one," I said. "I’m going to open the walls."

She laughed. Not mockingly. The laugh of someone who wanted to believe it and found the wanting pleasant even if the believing was difficult.

We reached the executive section. The rest of the team were already there, distributed across the corridor.

"This is you," Jenn said. "I’ll go back down."

"Wait," I said. "Do you need new clothes?"

She looked at her dress. The smile that came was different from the one before. Quieter.

"Yes," she said.

"I’ll sort it," I said. "Meet me downstairs."

She turned and went back down the stairs. I watched her go for a moment and thought about Azure and the purple mark on her thigh and every person outside the walls who was living at the mercy of someone else’s decision.

I’ll open the walls, I had said.

I meant it, I thought.

I pushed the door open.