The steel was bending.
Silver could feel it through her palms. It was no longer a push and resist, no longer a fight of muscle against muscle. It was the slow, patient, inevitable give of metal, and every heartbeat it gave a little more. The seam between the doors had widened to the width of a finger, then a hand, and through it she could see the courtyard in slivers: pale skin, black rain, the wet flash of teeth.
Something shrieked on the other side. A high, wet, clicking shriek that did not come from a human throat.
"We’re not going to hold this!" John’s voice cracked. He had planted both feet against a bench and was pushing with his back. "Fredrick, tell me you have something!"
"I have a very bad feeling," Fredrick gasped, shoulder jammed into the panel, his black jacket plastered to his ribs. "Does that count?"
"No!"
"Then no. I have nothing."
A fist hammered through the seam and hit Silver in the cheek before Taylor’s femur came down and turned it into pulp. Silver reeled, spitting blood. The hand was replaced at once. And another. And another.
’I can’t do this,’ she thought, and the thought was so calm it frightened her. ’I can’t do this. My arms are going.’
"We let go."
The words came from her left, flat and quiet, almost lost in the noise.
Silver turned her head.
Taylor stood with her whole body braced against the door, ice crawling up her forearms in thick, glittering ridges, her breath fogging white in the lantern light. Her face was the same as always. Empty. Unreadable. But her eyes had gone very bright.
"What?" Fredrick asked.
"We let go," Taylor repeated. "And we fight them."
For a moment nobody said anything at all.
"You’re insane," John said finally.
"Have you seen how many there are?" Fredrick’s voice climbed. "That’s, no. Absolutely not. You’re asking us to walk out of a locked room into a hurricane of teeth!"
"We are already in it."
"We’re holding a door!"
"We’re dying against a door." Taylor’s tone did not change. "We push for another minute, we lose our arms. Two minutes, the frame goes. Then they come in all at once, and we’re too tired to do anything about it."
Silver’s breath caught. "If we let go, they’ll all come in. All of them."
"Yes."
"Everyone in here will die." Her voice rose despite her, shaking. "There are children behind us, Taylor. Sick people. If we..."
"They’ll die anyway."
The words landed like a slap. Silver stared at her, and Taylor stared back, and there was no cruelty in her face, only something bone-tired and clear. As if she had already run this argument in her head a dozen times and lost every one.
"It can work," John said.
Everyone turned.
He was staring at the steel, jaw working, eyes distant. "It can work. Think about it. Right now the whole horde is pushing at once. Hundreds of them crushing themselves against a door-width. That’s why we’re losing. It’s the weight, not the numbers." He swallowed. "But if we let it open, they don’t come in all at once. They come in through the gap, in a stream. A door-width at a time. We hold the choke, cut them down as they enter, thin the front of it. And when it’s thin enough..."
"Taylor freezes the doors," Fredrick breathed. "Seals them shut."
"And we barricade over the ice. For good this time."
The idea hung between them, terrible and clean.
Then the silence came, and it was not the silence of doubt. It was the silence of people who understood exactly what it meant.
If they did this, if they sealed the doors for good, then the two people out in the dark would have nowhere to come back to. Grey and Richard could return with every pill and bandage in the district, dragging their bleeding bodies through the rain, and find a wall of ice and iron waiting for them.
Unless someone broke it open again from the inside.
Silver’s fingers dug into the steel. She thought of a flat voice saying, read it after we leave. She thought of a hand reaching into a pocket, and a small square of folded paper.
"Mrs. Veronica," Fredrick said hoarsely. "It’s your call."
Mrs. Veronica had not moved. Her palms were still pressed against the door, her glasses fogged, her hair plastered to her temples. She looked, for the first time since Silver had known her, like a woman who was tired. She closed her eyes.
"Do it," she said quietly.
"Mrs...." Silver started.
"On three." Taylor’s voice cut across hers. "One."
The door jolted. Somebody’s fingers scraped down the steel.
"Two."
Fredrick swore, softly and continuously. John rolled his shoulders and flexed his hands, and Silver watched something change in his face, a stillness, a sharpening, like a hound catching a scent.
"Three."
They let go.
The doors did not swing. They *burst*. The moment the pressure vanished, the horde’s weight slammed into them, and the great steel panels tore inward on their bent hinges with a scream of metal. Silver threw herself backward, hit the floor, and rolled. She saw a bench fly overhead. She saw the frame buckle. She saw the night pour through the gap, black and wet and roaring...
...and in front of it, a wall of ice.
It rose from the floor in a single jagged sheet, chest-high, spiked with ridges the width of a man’s wrist. Zombies slammed into it and broke like glass. The first wave of them died on the points of Taylor’s ice without ever reaching her, and the rest piled up behind, snarling, clawing over the corpses.
Taylor stood before the wall, feet planted, femur raised like a lance.
"Now," she said.
The wall shattered.
Not from the horde. From her. It exploded outward in a storm of glittering shards, each one a spear, each one guided, and the whole mass of shards tore across the doorway and drove into the skulls of the front line. Thirty, forty zombies dropped in a single breath. A giant, hunched, roach-like thing skidded through the ruin and reached for her, and three spikes punched through its shell and pinned it to the floor.
The horde did not slow.
They poured through the broken doors like water through a burst dam, and John went to meet them.