[ DAMIAN ]
The ceiling was unfamiliar.
That was the first thing. Not the hospital ceiling with its crack running from window to door. Not the carpark concrete. A different ceiling entirely, lower, with a water stain in the corner that had been there long enough to turn brown at the edges.
I lay there and let the information assemble itself.
Head. Something had hit my head. The pain was sitting behind my left eye in the specific location that meant impact rather than pressure and my vision had that slightly washed quality of someone whose brain had been briefly interrupted and was still rebooting.
My hands were behind my back. Zip ties. The plastic biting into my wrists at the angle of someone who had been put there by people who knew what they were doing. My ankles were bound too, rope this time, tighter than the wrists, crossed and knotted.
My side.
I made myself not react to my side. The sutures were still in. I could feel that. The wound hadn't reopened from the blow or if it had it wasn't catastrophic. I filed it under manageable and moved on.
I turned my head.
The room was a resident room. Single bed, narrow, the kind of institutional furniture that said this space belongs to someone who didn't choose it. A wardrobe against the far wall, doors open, empty. A small window with its blind pulled down, thin lines of afternoon light coming through the gaps. A mirror on the wall beside the wardrobe, frameless, the kind that gets screwed directly into plaster.
And on the bed across from me, sitting up with his back against the headboard and his wrists tied in front of him and his ankles bound to the bed frame, a person.
Mid-twenties. Black hair with blonde highlights that had been growing out long enough that the blonde was mostly at the ends now, fading. A bruise developing along his left cheekbone, fresh, the kind that comes from a fist rather than a fall. His right eye was slightly swollen. He was wearing a grey t-shirt and cargo pants, both dirty, and he was looking at me with the specific wariness of someone who has been in a bad situation long enough to treat every new development as a potential additional bad situation.
I had concluded it was Reuben Lee before he opened his mouth.
"You're awake," he said. Quiet. Careful.
"Unfortunately," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment. "Who are you."
"Damian. You're Reuben."
Something shifted in his expression. Not relief. More like the moment before relief when the brain is still checking whether the thing that looks like good news actually is. "How do you know my name."
"The man who sent me told me. Said you went for medication. Said you had a walkie talkie. Said you'd be scared but not stupid." I paused. "Said you'd know not to give these people what they want."
Reuben's eyes moved to the door. Then back to me. "He sent you."
"Yes."
"How do I know you're not with them."
Fair question. I thought about what the man on the radio had said that these men wouldn't know. "He told me about the red flare. Said he only fires it when there's a herd and he needs you to stay put. Said he's been watching the nursing home through binoculars from his position." I paused. "Said you walk with a slight lean to the right."
Reuben looked at his own right side. Then back at me.
"Old injury," he said quietly.
"He mentioned."
The wariness in his face didn't disappear entirely but it reorganised itself into something different. Still careful. But pointed in a different direction now.
"They grabbed me on the first floor," he said. "I was getting the medication, same as always, same route I've used for two months. They were just there. Three of them waiting." His jaw tightened. "They've been here a week maybe. I'd seen signs, things moved, a door I'd left closed that was open. I should have been more careful."
"They want the base location."
"Yes." Simple. Flat. "I haven't told them."
"How long have they been working on that."
"Since yesterday morning." He looked at the bruise on his own arm, a different one from the cheekbone, older, yellow at the edges. "They're not subtle."
I looked at the door. Listened. Voices somewhere below us, muffled by the floor and the closed door, too indistinct to make out words but present enough to tell me there were more than four of them.
"How many total," I said.
"Seven that I've seen. Maybe more." He paused. "They're organised. Not military but trained. They move like they've practiced moving together." Another pause. "The ones who jumped you. How many?"
"Two in the corridor. Three in the room."
"Five of the seven then." He processed this. "The other two are probably downstairs or on watch somewhere."
I tested the zip ties behind my back. Good quality, properly applied, the kind that didn't give without a cutting edge or a specific technique. I didn't have a cutting edge. I had the technique but not the leverage from this position.
"Your robot," Reuben said.
I looked at him.
"I heard the fight. I heard you shout at him to meet you at level three." He paused. "Is he still in the building?"
"I don't know."
"He can't hurt anyone."
"No."
Reuben absorbed this. "That's a problem."
"I'm aware."
We sat with that for a moment. From somewhere below us the voices continued their indistinct conversation. A door opening and closing. Footsteps on stairs.
Then the door to our room opened.
[ NARRATOR ]
Four of them.
The two Chinese men came in first, then the Malay man, then last through the door the Indian man, moving with the particular careful gait of someone whose ribs had recently introduced themselves to a glass door frame and were still processing the introduction. He had a bandage on his forearm where the glass had found him. His expression when he looked at Damian carried the specific quality of someone keeping something in check that wanted very much to not be kept in check.
The first Chinese man looked at Damian with the assessing quality of someone who had been running things long enough to make assessments before he made decisions.
"You're mixed," he said. Not hostile. Just observational. "Chinese, yeah? What else."
"Does it matter," Damian said.
"Just making conversation." The man crouched down to eye level. "Why'd you kill our guy."
"I didn't kill anyone who wasn't trying to kill me first."
The Indian man's foot connected with Damian's left side. Exactly where the sutures were. The pain was immediate and total and Damian made a sound he hadn't planned on making and the Indian man leaned down close.
"Shut your mouth. You think we didn't see you? Forty infected near this building. Forty. You brought them here." His voice had the specific fury of someone who had been careful for five months and had watched that careful work get disrupted in an afternoon. "What were you trying to do, wipe out whatever's left?"
Damian breathed through the pain. Let it settle from total to manageable. Then said, "Half of them were gone by this morning. Why would I bring forty infected to a building I was trying to get into. Think about it."
"He's right," the Malay man said from near the door. The other three looked at him. He shrugged. "Well technically he's right. You don't attract a herd to a building you're trying to enter quietly."
"We were being chased," Damian said. He paused. "If I wanted to bring infected here I would have just walked in the front door."
The first Chinese man studied him for a moment. Then he held something up.
The service pistol. The one I had taken from the police officer at Outram Park.
"You know how hard it is to find a working firearm in Singapore right now," he said. "We've been looking for months. Then you walk in with a police service pistol." He turned it over in his hands. "Where are the bullets."
"Not in the gun apparently," Damian said.
"Obviously not in the fucking gun. I'm asking where they are."
"Gone."
"Gone where."
"I used them."
The man looked at him with the expression of someone deciding whether a lie was worth pursuing. "You used a full magazine."
"It was a full day."
The second Chinese man spoke up from the corner where he'd been standing quietly. Older looking than the first, heavier set, the kind of stillness that came from someone who had learned to let other people talk first and see what fell out. "We're short a man because of you. You could replace him. We could use someone who can handle himself."
"Thanks," Damian said. "I'll pass."
"Why."
"Because the combined IQ of this group appears to be roughly equivalent to the infected outside. I maybe desperate for help, but not desperate enough to team up with you retards "
The room went very quiet.
The first Chinese man stood up slowly. The Malay man near the door looked at the ceiling briefly with the expression of someone who had been hoping this wasn't going to go the way it was clearly about to go.
The Chinese man pulled Damian up by the front of his jacket with one hand. The punch he threw was clean and properly weighted, the kind that had practice behind it. Damian's head went sideways and he went with it, not fighting the movement, and the Malay man stepped forward and started working on his ribs and Damian counted the impacts and kept his breathing even and didn't give them anything further.
Reuben spoke from the bed.
"Stop." His voice was quiet but it carried. "Stop it. He's already wounded. You keep going you'll kill him and then you've got nothing." A pause. "You said yourself you need people who can handle themselves. You can't use a dead man."
The Malay man stepped back. The Chinese man released Damian's jacket and Damian went back down to the floor and sat there with his vision slightly grey at the edges and said nothing.
The four of them looked at each other with the silent communication of a group that had been together long enough to have a language for it.
Then they left.
The door closed.
The lock engaged.
[ DAMIAN ]
Reuben's voice came across the room at a volume that was carefully calculated to not reach the door.
"What the hell are you doing."
I rearranged myself against the wall. Found the position that put the least pressure on my side. "Getting a feel for them."
"Getting a feel for them. You're tied up in a nursing home with a head wound and a stab wound and you're getting a feel for them."
"It's been a while since I talked to people. Actual people." I paused. "I wanted to see how they'd react."
Reuben stared at me.
"I just wanted a laugh," I said. "That's all."
He kept staring. Then something in his face gave up trying to process that and moved on. "Are you always like this."
"I genuinely don't know. I have partial amnesia."
A silence. "You're serious."
"Five month coma. Memory issues are apparently standard."
Reuben looked at the ceiling briefly. Then back at me. "Right. Okay." He exhaled. "We need to get out of here."
"Yes."
"Any ideas."
I looked around the room properly for the first time since waking up. The window with its blind down. The door with its engaged lock. The mirror on the wall. The empty wardrobe with its doors hanging open. The bed Reuben was tied to, the frame old institutional steel bolted to the wall but the bolts old too, the wall around them the specific soft plaster of a building that had been here for decades.
"A few," I said.
Then I looked at the mirror.
I don't know why I stopped there. There was nothing remarkable about it, just a standard rectangular mirror screwed into the plaster, the kind that nursing home rooms had as a practical afterthought. But I stopped and I looked at it and what was in it stopped me properly.
A face.
My face. Obviously my face. But for a moment my brain didn't produce that information automatically and I sat with the stranger in the mirror for a second before the recognition came.
Dark hair, longer than I kept it, pushed back from my face and starting to curl slightly at the ends from the humidity. The beard and moustache coming in uneven and darker than the hair. A jaw that was sharper than I expected somehow, though I couldn't have said what I expected. Fair skin but the features underneath it were not fair-skinned features, the brows heavier, the nose carrying something that wasn't European, the overall arrangement of things on my face that said multiple answers to the question of where I was from.
Leaner than I should be. Five months of coma lean, the kind that shows in the face before the body, the slight hollowing under the cheekbones.
And the scars. The one on my neck I could see from this angle. The one on my forearm. The edge of another one visible at my collar. Old ones. All old ones. None of them with attached memories, just the physical record of a life I could feel the shape of but not yet see.
I looked at myself for a long time.
This was what Theo-3 had been keeping alive for five months. This was what the porridge every morning had been for. This face, these hands, this specific collection of old damage and new damage and everything in between.
I wondered what he would say if he saw me right now.
Probably something about my vital signs.
Probably something about the sutures.
I almost smiled.
"Hey," Reuben said quietly.
I looked away from the mirror.
"You okay," he said.
"Yeah," I said. "Just the first time I've really looked."
He seemed to understand that without needing it explained further. He nodded once and didn't push it.
Outside the room the building was doing what buildings in this city did now, its own sounds, settling and shifting, the occasional distant movement of things that had been in it for five months and were not leaving. Below us somewhere the voices of seven people who had survived this long by taking what they needed from whoever had it.
And somewhere in this building or outside it or coming through it, a robot with amber eyes and two frequency devices and a core directive that was currently the only thing standing between those six people and the full force of what Theo-3 was made of.
I hoped they didn't figure that out before I got out of these zip ties.
I started working on my wrists.
End of Chapter 15