Chapter 23: Not Asking Permission
Chapter 23: Not Asking Permission
So I did, fast, in the dark, while the clock in the corner of my eye kept falling.
The intake hall, the blanket, the soup. The tablet at four in the morning and the six hundred and seventy credits. Twenty-two a day earned against six a day charged, hazard work at sixty, the injuries from hazard work billed back to the man who took them. The band on my wrist. Residents with a balance cannot be cleared through the gate, and detention costs nine a day.
Then the rest, assembled in pieces across three days. Armed guards, crewed towers, a roster that changes without announcement. People who go out on a work detail and are simply not on the list next morning. One man will tell you the runaways attacked a guard and were executed at the flood channel; another that they’re in a cell; another that they were shipped to a labour camp two settlements east; another that nobody has ever run at all. The stories can’t all be true, and every one of them is believed, which is the entire point of having four.
"I don’t think they’ll let me go," I said. "Even at zero. I can’t build a version where a man with a band ever walks out with a clean ledger."
"And the call? Tonight."
"Escape. I had one charge and I spent it hoping for someone who could get me over that wall." I shrugged, and it hurt. "Then you came through bleeding and I heard four hundred people behind you, so I didn’t ask."
The room went very quiet.
Aria didn’t raise her voice or move at all, which is how I learned what her anger looks like. Her jaw set. Her hands went still on the sword — not tense, still, until the stillness was the loudest thing in the building. And around the rims of her irises, thin and red and unmistakable, a faint fire gathered and did not quite catch.
"They have made a slave of you," she said, "and written it in a ledger so the men doing it can sleep."
"They’d say they’re feeding nine hundred people."
"I am aware of what they would say. I have met administrators." She breathed out. "How does your call work?"
"One charge every three days. It rolls a grade band at random, then picks a compatible summon inside that band. I don’t choose. I can’t aim it."
"If you call again," Aria said, "can you guarantee that it will reach me?"
I looked at the lie for a second. It was right there and available.
"No," I said. "It might. It probably won’t."
[Relationship parameters updated.]
Trust: 11 → 20
Resonance: 2% → 3%
That decided it. I watched it happen in her face.
"Then the matter is closed. You spent your only Call on me when I may have been moments from death, then spent your own resources on medicine for a stranger and asked nothing." Her chin came up. "I do not carry that debt back across with me. We are leaving Eastbridge tonight."
"That’s insane, you have four hundred people at a—"
She stepped forward and put one finger against my lips.
It stopped me completely. Her hand was warm, there was dried blood around the nail, and she was close enough that I could see the fire actually turning — a thin red ring at the edge of each iris — and my face went hot from the jaw to the ears in a way I could feel and absolutely could not prevent.
"I was not asking permission," Aria said. "We are leaving. You will remain close and follow my orders."
She took her hand back. I made a noise. It wasn’t a word.
"Now. Their soldiers."
"Guesswork, mostly." I dragged a hand down my face. "Ordinary guards look like Level 8. Most of the class badges I’ve seen are D-grade, some C. Whoever’s actually running the place — administrators, whoever’s above them — I’d guess twelve to fifteen. I’ve got no proof of that. I’ve never seen one of them fight."
"Then give me the ground."
I gave her all of it.
The shape of the settlement — containers and poured concrete, four heavy towers. Gate crews changing at six, fourteen, and twenty-two, with the sloppy fourteen-hundred handover when both crews want the mess hall. The paths nobody walks: the eastern salvage side, where patrols thin to almost nothing because everything past it is Red Zone and the city does that guarding for free. The flood-channel post at the far end of it — the most distant post in Eastbridge, the longest run from any reinforcement, normally two guards and not more. The wall there, four metres, sharpened wire coiled along the top on both sides, and the gate in it, steel and physical. And past the gate, the drainage cut running north into the ruins: the fastest way off open ground once you’re through.
Aria listened to every word without interrupting once. When I finished she gave me the patrol timings back, in order, correctly, and then the route.
Then she reached out and patted me on the head.
"Good job."
Twice. Firmly. The way you’d praise a competent squire.
Then she went absolutely rigid, took her hand back, looked at the boiler with tremendous interest, and cleared her throat.
Did the B-grade knight just pat me on the head? Is that a thing that happened?
"We are wasting time," Aria said, in the exact tone of a woman who had never patted anyone in her life. She put her hand on the door. "Follow me. Stay behind my left shoulder and do not speak."
[Manifestation Remaining: 17:02]
We got about forty metres before it fell apart.
She moved like water going downhill, even hurt, even at Level 4—and I could not do it. Three days of brick and copper and a shoulder blade that had reopened twice, on a body with Frail Body and Weak Constitution and Poor Coordination written into its foundation by a twenty-year-old who thought it was funny. Level 4 had made me steadier. It had not made me a person who could run.
I made it to the corner of the water plant and had to stop with a hand flat on the wall, and my lungs were making a sound I didn’t like.
Aria came back for me. She looked at my face for about a second.
Then she crouched, took my wrist, and pulled me onto her back the way you’d pick up a child who had fallen asleep at a table.
"Hold tight. If you fall, today will be the day you die."
She ran.