Chapter 14: Next Time, Be Specific
Chapter 14: Next Time, Be Specific
The room we chose was a manager’s office at the end of the corridor: no windows, one door, a desk, a dead computer, a corkboard with a rota on it from a world that no longer existed. A vent above the desk came out somewhere near the loading ramp, which meant it wasn’t a coffin.
No window told me it was safe. Nothing told me it was safe. We picked it because it had one door instead of three, because I could hear the front of the store if I stopped breathing, and because everything else was worse.
[Manifestation Remaining: 04:22]
"Sit," I said.
"Bossy."
"Sit down, Liora."
She sat on the desk, which was not what I’d meant, and stretched her left leg out along it, and the muscles in her jaw jumped when she moved the hip.
The gash ran from just above her knee up the outside of the thigh, shallow along most of its length and deep only in the middle where something had caught and dragged. I cleaned it with water because I had nothing better, and my hands were shaking again for entirely different reasons.
"You’ve never done this before," she observed.
"Astonishing deduction."
"Your ears go red."
"They’re doing that because I’m holding a stranger’s thigh."
"Mm." Her tail came up off the desk and wrapped around my wrist, black fur, warm, deceptively strong. "Am I a stranger?"
"You’ve barely known me long enough to learn my name."
"I’ve bled for you before learning your middle name. Back home that’s practically a mortgage." She hissed as I drew the gauze tight, and then, immediately, in exactly the same tone: "A little higher and you’d have to marry me."
"You’re not funny."
"I’m hilarious. Your ears agree."
I tied it off. She was warm through the fabric, and I was aware of it in a way I did not have the emotional infrastructure to process, and she watched me be aware of it with an expression of enormous satisfaction.
Then I looked up and caught her ears.
They were down. Not flat-in-terror down. Just... low. Tipped back and slightly outward, the way they’d gone when the Lurker walked in. Her hands were open on the desk on either side of her, pressed flat, fingers spread. Holding still on purpose.
[Manifestation Remaining: 03:05]
"Ask," she said.
"What?"
"You’re building up to a question. You do a thing with your mouth. Ask it before the clock does it for you."
I sat back on my heels.
"Does time pass at home?" I said. "While you’re here. Do you go back to the same second, or do you lose all of it—"
"I don’t know." She said it fast, then slower. "I felt the limit when the doorway opened, like the connection had an ending built into it. It didn’t tell me what that ending costs. If I’ve lost four hours, the quarry will be gone, and my sister still won’t have her medicine." Her mouth tightened. "If I’ve lost four days, I don’t know what I’m going back to."
"I’m sorry."
"Don’t." Her tail tightened on my wrist. "I didn’t choose the crossing, and neither did you. I had a second and a half to look at you before I hit the floor." She shrugged. "Then I saw your face and decided helping you was more interesting than panicking."
"That’s a terrible reason to forgive an interdimensional abduction."
"It’s an honest one. Do you know how rare those are?" She leaned forward, ears still down. "Now the other question. The one you’re actually afraid of."
I looked at the floor.
"Say it, Vale."
"There’ll be others," I said.
"There will."
"The call’s random. Next time it could reach somewhere stronger—a cultivator, a knight, something with a bloodline and a title and an actual grasp of how not to die." The words came out clumsy and too fast, and I hated all of them. "And I don’t want you sitting in your own world thinking I’ll file you away because someone better came up. So I’m saying it now. Badly. Even if I can call you and you’re not the strongest option, I’ll still—"
"Still what."
"Still want you there," I said. "Specifically. You. That’s not a strategy, it’s just true, and I’m aware it’s a stupid thing to promise on barely an hour’s acquaintance, and I’m going to say it anyway because you asked and I’m apparently incapable of lying to a woman who’s bleeding on a desk."
Silence.
Her tail had gone completely still around my wrist.
"Huh," Liora said. Her voice had lost something. "You really don’t know how to do this at all, do you?"
"No."
"Good." She cleared her throat. "That was—fine. That was adequate. Don’t get smug."
"I’m covered in monster, and I can’t feel my left hand. Smugness is out of reach."
[Manifestation Remaining: 01:40]
We both saw me look at it. There was no hiding that; I’d been doing it every thirty seconds for ten minutes.
"How long?" she asked.
"Not long."
She slid off the desk badly, favouring the leg, and I caught her elbow—and then she was simply standing against me, one hand flat on my chest, her forehead resting against mine. She smelled like blood and cold dust and something underneath that was warm and entirely hers. Her breath was unsteady. Without the grin doing its work, she looked twenty-three and frightened and very far from home.
"Last thing," she said quietly. "I want a reward. I’m a mercenary, I’ve bled, I get a reward, those are the rules, and they’re older than either of us."
"What do you want?"
"A kiss."
She didn’t say where. She left it hanging there, deliberately, one eyebrow raised, her fingers curling into the front of my coat, and she didn’t move, and she didn’t lean, and I understood exactly what she was doing. She was giving me the whole distance. Every inch of it. She’d been shameless since she arrived about everything except this.
She’s letting me choose. She’s terrified, she’s about to vanish, and she’s still letting me choose.
I put my hand under her jaw, and turned my head, and kissed her cheek.
I felt her go absolutely rigid. Then she made a small noise, somewhere between outrage and something else, and her ears flushed a startling red at the base, and her tail slapped once against the desk leg.
[Resonance updated.]
Desire: 95 → 97
Trust: 24 → 28
Resonance: 5% → 6%
"You—" she started.
"You left it ambiguous."
"I left it ambiguous because—" She stopped. She was blushing. The shameless one was blushing, and I was going to think about that for a long time. "You are the worst summoner in any world."
"Probably."
Her hand tightened in my coat. The edges of her had started to go strange—not fading exactly, more like the light was arriving from a slightly different direction.
"Next time," Liora said, her voice steady and her eyes anything but, "I’m specifying exactly where."
Then she was gone.
[Manifestation duration complete.]
[Liora Venn returned to origin dimension.]
[Return Point: Exact origin place and instant.]
[Origin-Time Elapsed: 00:00:00.]
[Injuries, healing, poison, exhaustion, spent energy, and technique backlash retained.]
[Preserved Signature retained.]
[Active Summons: 0]
[Blind Call Charges: 0/1]
[Natural charge recovery: Unavailable]
The office was very quiet.
There was a smear of her blood on the desk and a used gauze wrapper on the floor, and my hand was still up near where her face had been. I put it down. Somewhere in the ceiling a pipe ticked as it cooled. I had been alone for two weeks before tonight, and it had not felt like anything at all, and less than an hour of company had somehow made the empty room significantly worse.
Then, from the front of the building, the entrance doors ground open.