Novels by Sophia Amara

"Mine was forty-three," Gideon said again, softly, and took his hand off my shoulder.The tea burned my fingers through the paper cup, but I could not make myself put it down. All around us the survivors murmured and shifted under the awning, and the sirens kept rising and breaking in the dark, and none of it reached me. I could only hear my own pulse."I do not know what you mean," I said."Of course you do." His eyes crinkled, gentle and sad. "Walk with me, Leo. You will want to be somewhere without an audience."Nora was already striding toward the hospital doors with two of his volunteers, calling out orders in the voice of a woman who would hold back the sea if someone asked her to. She did not look back. I should have followed her. Instead I let Gideon lead me around the side of the nearest van, into a pocket of shadow between its open hatch and the wall, where a single flickering bulb buzzed over a stack of water crates.He set his thermos down on the bumper. Then he held out h

"Do not leave us," Vanessa begged.She clung to my sleeve in the hallway with both hands, her face wet and swollen, and behind her Brandon lay motionless on the bed with a towel knotted around his arm. For six years that grip had meant something to me. Now it only felt like a rope that had been cut a long time ago and had not yet realized it was loose."Lock the bedroom door," I said. "Push the dresser against it. Do not open it for anyone, not for me, not for a neighbor, not for a voice you recognize.""Leo, please. Someone has to stay with us.""Yes." I gently unpeeled her fingers one at a time. "Someone does."She understood. I watched it reach her eyes, the memory she could not possibly have, the echo of a sentence she had never said in this life, and she let go of me as though I had burned her.Nora was already halfway down the stairwell. I followed.The city I had walked through that morning had vanished.It was not dark, exactly. Streetlights still burned along the avenue, and

Brandon was still breathing, and somehow that was the worst part.He lay across the foot of our bed with his teeth chattering and his face slick with sweat, and the black lines under his skin crept up his forearm one slow, terrible inch at a time. Vanessa knelt beside him and held his good hand against her cheek, sobbing his name, while Nora moved around them both with the flat, fast calm of someone who had done this a thousand times before."Towel," she said. "Clean. Now."I pulled one from the bathroom and threw it to her. She wrapped it around Brandon's bicep, twisted it with a pen from her pocket, and drew it tight above the elbow until he screamed through his teeth."Hold him down.""I am not touching him," Vanessa whispered."Then get out of the way."I took Brandon's shoulders. His skin burned through his shirt, hot and dry, and his eyes rolled toward me with a bright, desperate, animal confusion I had never seen on that smug face before. For one second, only one, something in

The countdown hit zero, and the dead man stopped talking.For one heartbeat nothing happened. The red panel flickered, spat out a line of broken text, and snapped shut.Intrusion failed. Link severed.Then a sound came through the door that was not a voice at all. It started low in a ruined throat, a wet, hungry groan that climbed into a rasping shriek, and something heavy slammed into the wood so hard that the whole frame shook."Oh God," Brandon said.The second blow cracked the top hinge. The third made the deadbolt jump in its housing. Whatever had been wearing that courier's face a moment ago was gone, like a hand pulled out of a glove, and what remained did not speak or smile or count. It only hit the door, and hit it, and hit it, driven by one simple, endless need.I knew that sound. I had heard it for four months in my old life, through walls and gates and barricades, and I had never once mistaken it for anything but what it was."It lost the signal," I whispered, mostly to my

Vanessa's fingers were already on the deadbolt when I caught her wrist.I held it the way she had held mine that afternoon, hard enough to leave a mark, and for once I did not care how it looked. She stared at my hand, then at my face, and I watched the sleepy confusion drain out of her expression and something sharper take its place."Let go," she whispered. "Leo, what is wrong with you?""Do not open it.""It is probably the neighbor. Or a delivery." She tried to pull free. "Nobody knocks like that unless they need something.""That is exactly why."The phone was still pressed against my ear, and Nora's voice came through it, low and fast and perfectly steady. "Leo. Talk to me. What is happening?""Someone is at the door," I breathed, as quietly as I could. "It is him. The patient.""Do not open it. Is there another way out of your apartment?""The fire escape, off the bedroom.""Good. Stay away from the door and stay on the line with me. I am in my car. I am ten minutes away." A pa

"Where is the ninety thousand dollars, Leo?"Vanessa stood in the middle of our living room with her phone in her fist and the evening news muttering behind her. She had not turned on a lamp. The last of the sunlight fell across her face and showed me something I had never seen in my previous life, because in that life I had never once made her afraid.I set my keys in the dish by the door, slowly, and let my eyes go wide."What ninety thousand?""The transfer." She took a step closer. "The bank says the joint account has been restricted. It says the restriction was requested from your device this afternoon.""I did not request anything." I wrapped my arms around my middle and let my voice wobble. "I was at the pharmacy all day. I thought the bank had sent me an alert and I tapped the wrong button. Vanessa, I am so sorry. I am hopeless with these apps."It was a lie, of course. I had frozen the account from the parking lot an hour earlier, with the help of a banker who still owed my l