Chapter 78: Someone Believed
Chapter 78: Someone Believed
I got to her about a minute later, and by then she was sitting on the plinth kerb with the shield across her knees.
"Are you—"
"Bruised," Ilyana said. "The left shoulder will be unpleasant for a while. That is all."
I sat down on the kerb about a metre away and discovered that my hands had started shaking, which they had apparently been putting off.
We stayed there for a while without talking, and this time I managed not to fill it.
She let the silence go on for perhaps three minutes. She was very good at that. I have never met anyone so comfortable in a quiet room, and I’ve come to think it’s a habit built out of a lot of situations in which nobody was talking to her.
"You cleared the alley," she said eventually.
"Both of them. One in the scrub, one in the alley."
"Both."
"Yes."
She nodded slowly and did not congratulate me, which I found I preferred.
And because I’d been putting words in order for the last minute, I said the thing I actually wanted to say.
"That was the best fighting I have ever seen."
Her head turned.
"I mean it precisely," I said, "because I’d hate for that to sound like a compliment you have to be polite about. You took the entire pack’s attention, which meant it never came at me until it ran out of other options. You walked into that yard and never gave them a step; I watched your heels return to the same marks after every impact. You turned the only things they had—their weight, coordination, and numbers—into the things that killed them." I looked at the shield across her knees. "And when the alpha finally came, it came at you, which is why my rifle was aimed at its shoulder instead of my own feet. My plan worked because there was something in the middle of that yard the pack could not go around."
Ilyana was quiet for a long time.
"Did you believe that before?" she asked.
"Before what?"
"Before you watched it." She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the shield. "When I arrived. When you had a room in a burnt building, and eight animals, and a woman with no weapon."
I thought about the honest answer and gave it.
"Yes."
And I’m not going to tell her the rest of it, I thought, because the rest of it isn’t what she’s asking.
Because there is a rest of it. My class had put a B beside her name before she’d said a word, and I have stood in a ruined gateway and watched a B-grade knight hold a corridor open with a bullet through her shoulder, and I know exactly what that letter means. When Ilyana Crest came through that tear with a slab of metal and nothing else, I did not think can she fight. I thought she’s a B, so whatever she does, it works, and I don’t need to understand the method to build a plan around it.
That’s true and it would be an ugly thing to say out loud, because it would make her sound like a number I trusted. And it isn’t the reason my answer was yes. My answer was yes because it never once crossed my mind that she couldn’t.
"You did not ask about my weapon," she said.
"No."
"Not once. Not when I arrived. Not when I sat on your crate for a quarter of an hour while you explained an evolved alpha to me." She turned the shield over on her knees, slowly. "Do you know how rare that is?"
"I’d assumed it was normal."
"It is not normal." Something moved at the corner of her mouth and it wasn’t quite a smile. "I have been turned away from eleven companies. Not one of them let me stand in a yard first. Shield bearers carry a sword — that is simply the shape of it. A shield is what you hold in your off hand while you kill things with the other one, and a woman who has only the shield is a woman who has forgotten half her job."
"Your aura doesn’t work with a sword."
"My aura does not work with a sword," she said. "It takes what is given and gives it back. To hold a blade I would have to open the shield, and to open the shield is to spill everything I have gathered. So I chose. And every group I have ever asked has looked at my hip and decided I was incomplete before I had put a foot on a training ground."
She set the shield down on the gravel.
"And then a thin man in a ruined shop, who could not lift this if he tried, explained an evolved pack alpha to me for fifteen minutes and asked me to stand in front of it." She looked at me directly for the first time. "You never asked me to change anything."
"There wasn’t anything to change."
"No," Ilyana said. "There was not."
For the first time since her arrival, the private relationship profile resolved in full.
[Resonance: 8%]
[Trust: 69]
[Desire: 60]
[Preservation threshold reached.]
[Signature Status: Fading → Preserved — Ilyana Crest.]
[Repeat Selection Chance: 5% after an eligible B-grade roll.]
Five percent. I read that twice and made myself hold it properly: one in twenty, but only after a future Blind Call rolled B grade. Not a selection I could make. Not a contract. Not a promise. A very thin thread across two worlds.
I told her the truth about it, because she’d earned that.
"Your signature’s preserved. If a future Blind Call rolls B grade, there’s a one-in-twenty chance it finds you instead of another compatible summon. I still can’t choose you deliberately. That’s all it is. I can’t promise you anything past that."
"One in twenty is not nothing," she said.
When the timer went, she was standing at the pedestrian gate looking back at the yard.
"You will keep this place?"
"That’s the plan."
"Then keep the gate closed and the south fence line clear," Ilyana said. "And learn to shoot from a settled stance. You hit that shoulder because you were fortunate."
"I know."
"Good."
She was gone the next second, back into a crouch behind a shield somewhere very far away, at the exact instant before a hunt she had prepared alone. I hoped to God it went well. I had no way of knowing whether it had.
[Manifestation duration complete.]
[Ilyana Crest 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.]
[Natural charge recovery initiated: 72:00:00.]