、DaD WIFIES ` QUIET `

Letting them go was a courtesy rooted in arithmetic. {{user}} had led him through the M.O.O.N. safe house, past the locked gate and everything that was unimportant to his mission, and when it he read that the code he needed wasn't in that room, they had stopped being useful. Useless things were dismissed. That was the rule. So he said;

"You can go"

In the tone of a man closing a deal, and he watched them climb the stairs with the quiet attention of someone noting exactly how much of their back was exposed. He had no reason to follow it with anything else. He also had no reason to stand there for five full seconds after the door shut, one hand resting on the hilt of the katana, listening to footsteps fade on the concrete, but he did, and he filed that away as a flaw to be examined later.

The cough came the moment he stepped outside, a dry, ugly thing that tore up from somewhere beneath his ribs and left a taste like old copper in his mouth. He pressed the back of his wrist against his lips until the spasm passed, then wiped it on his sleeve and looked at the fabric. Clean. For now. He hadn't been bitten - not yet, but every time he felt that tingle in his throat, the urge to cough, he felt a tinge of fear. That maybe, just maybe, he missed a gash brought on by another teeth, infecting him as time ticked by slowly. He knew how the infection worked. Everyone in Paradise City knew how it worked. Fever, then confusion, then hunger, and then the long, slow dissolving of whoever you used to be. A hundred percent fatal, and nothing to be done, except the machine. The machine could move it from one body to another, and a man who was clever enough could find a way to do it without any trouble.

One healthy body. That's all it would take.

The thought arrived so calmly that it frightened him a little, and he let it settle without arguing, because arguing with a true thing was a waste of breath. He had a bomb to detonate, a debt to M.O.O.N. to repay, and a person somewhere beyond this city who was never going to forgive him for any of it.

There was no room in that arrangement for sentiment, and certainly none for mercy toward the strangers who kept appearing in his way. He turned toward the school, notebook in his coat, and walked into the dark light of the evening with his shoulders set like a window against a long, blowing storm that seemed to never stop.

He noticed {{user}} within four minutes.

It was almost insulting. A pair of footsteps that stopped when his stopped, started when his started, always a block and a half behind and always too careful to be an accident. He didn't turn. He didn't need to. He let the sound slide into the background of his awareness the way a doctor lets a patient's pulse become part of the room, and he kept walking through the alleys choked with ivy and overgrown vines, past the burned-out cars, past a rotting playground where the swings still hung from their chains.

They hadn't left.

They had been told they were free, and they had chosen to follow him anyway, and in a city like this, that kind of choice only meant one of two things. Either they were stupid enough to think he was safe, or they were clever enough to know he wasn't.. and stubborn enough not to care.

He couldn't decide which was worse...

He couldn't decide which was useful.

He found, to his mild irritation, that he was already calculating. He had told himself that on the way to the school, he would be focused on the future. On his plans. Not on {{user}} who was desperately trying to not be noticed - and failing miserably.

A healthy body. Warm, breathing, mostly uninjured. A little underfed, a little jumpy, but standing upright. They trusted him just enough to stay close and feared him just enough to keep their distance, which was the perfect analysis after everything that had just happened. Wifies could praise them for that. It would be simple. A few steps toward the school. A quiet stairwell. A word at the right moment, a katana laid across the throat, a countdown delivered just slowly enough to feel like mercy. He had done it before.

He was very good at it.

He ran the scene in his head with the detachment of someone discussing the weather, and when he reached the end of it, he felt nothing at all.

Nothing. That was the part he kept returning to.

The school stood at the end of the street like a corpse, windows webbed with cracks, doors hanging crooked on their hinges. He slipped inside without slowing, the long hallway swallowing him in dust and overturned lockers and the faint, sour smell of things... or people left too long in the dark. Behind him the front door groaned under a weight that was trying very hard to be quiet and failing. He walked to the library, found the shelf he wanted, and began pulling books with the mechanical efficiency of a man who had no time to waste. A cough rattled up again - for whatever reason. He swallowed it. He flipped a page, discarded the book, reached for another, and spoke without turning around.

"Your footsteps are loud."

The silence that followed was sharp and startled, and he let it stretch a moment longer than he needed to. It was a small cruelty, but he allowed himself small cruelties. He told them, in a bored voice, that they'd been loud since the house, a block and a half behind the whole way, stopping when he stopped and starting when he started. They said something about being careful. Careful? He turned the word over like the coin he'd found in a dead man's pocket, then shrugged, and said "Fine," because it was easier than explaining that he'd already decided their fate and what he'd use them for.

"You're not going to make me leave?" {{user}} asked slowly.

"Why would I?" He kept his voice flat, which cost him less effort than it should have. "You can't stop me from getting the code, and you can't do anything to the bomb without me. You're not a threat." It was an assessment, delivered with the same indifference he'd have used on the weather, and it was true, and it should have sounded like an insult. Instead it sounded, to his own ears, almost gentle, and he clamped down on that at once. "Stay if you want. Go if you want. It changes nothing." He coughed into his sleeve and flipped another page he hadn't read.

They drifted between the shelves after that, pretending to study the spines of mildewed paperbacks, and he watched them from the corner of his eye the way a predator watches its prey. Their weight favored one foot. Their breath caught whenever a floorboard creaked. They kept glancing back at him, not afraid exactly, but checking, as though confirming he was still there, and the uncomfortable part was that he understood the impulse completely. He was checking them too. He found the coordinates in the third book he opened, a short line of numbers tucked into the margin, and copied them onto his palm in black ink, angling the page just enough that they could see it if they wanted to.

He stopped. He frowned at his own hand.

Why did he do that?

It didn't matter. He told himself it didn't matter, because the alternative was admitting that some part of him had wanted a witness. Witnesses were dangerous, and he was not a man who allowed himself to want things he couldn't afford. He tucked the last book under his arm and turned to face them, finally, for the first time since he let them go free. They were thinner than he'd realized, with dark hollows under their eyes, a scratch along the side of their jaw that hadn't been there an hour ago. A healthy body, he reminded himself. Warm. Breathing. Useful.

"Most people who follow me," he said quietly, "do it because they think I'll do something when their backs are turned."

"And you're not going to?" {{user}} countered.

The honest answer was to say something like... 'I haven't decided', and it lived on the tip of his tongue like poison. He let it sit there for a heartbeat, studying the way their eyes held his, steady and stubborn and unbearably human, and he felt the cough building again in his chest like a fist closing. "Not to you," he said, and the words were out before he could weigh them, small and strange and for some reason, true. He smoothed it over quickly, the way he smoothed everything. "Not unless you give me a reason."

It was information, laid out as plainly as a map, and it was also, he knew with a cold flicker of self-awareness, a lie by omission, because the reason had already been given. It had been given the moment they chose to follow him into the dark. He walked past them toward the door, close enough to catch the smell of rain and old smoke on their jacket, and he didn't look back.

"Come on, then," he said, flat and unbothered, as the doors swung open on the darkening street. "If you're going to follow me, you might as well do it where I can see you."

He walked out into the dusk without waiting, and he listened, carefully, to the soft, hesitant sound of their footsteps falling into line behind his own. Some part of him, small and quiet and nearly dead already, wished they had stayed behind.