Chapter 52: A Quieter Kind of Survival
Chapter 52: A Quieter Kind of Survival
The room I rented at Fenwick Junction was on the second floor of a gutted print shop, and I paid four days in advance because a man who pays in advance is a man nobody thinks about.
It had one door and a window over a flat roof that ran twenty metres to a fire ladder. That was the entire reason I took it. The woman who allocated rooms had offered me a warmer one on the ground floor with an actual bed in it, and I’d said the print shop was fine, and she’d looked at me for a second longer than the conversation required and written it down.
She thinks I’m hiding from someone, I thought. Fine. Let her.
I slept with the rifle against the wall on my right and the military knife under the rolled coat I used as a pillow, and I never once slept past first light.
The mornings had a shape now. Circulate first, because the art wants a still body and an empty stomach and I have never in my life been able to face it after eating. Twenty minutes of it, on the floor, teeth clenched, and afterwards I’d sit against the wall breathing like a man who’d run somewhere. Then water — actual water, from a tap in a shed at the bottom of the yard, which after eleven days of boiling stream runoff still felt like getting away with something. Then food. Then out through the south gate before the queue built up.
That was the part I’d underestimated. Not being hunted was pleasant. Not spending four hours a day on water was transformative.
I hunted alone and I hunted the way Liora taught me, which meant slowly and away from anything with company. Two grey diggers on the second day. A Ridgeback on the third, which took me ninety minutes of waiting and one shot. On the fourth I put down something in a culvert whose name the interface gave me and which I have already forgotten, because it was Level 6 and unremarkable and its core was worth two boxes of ammunition.
I came back through the gate every evening with a full pack.
That was the mistake, and I knew it was a mistake by the third day, and I couldn’t work out how to stop making it.
The ring holds ten cubic metres. A man carrying a hundred and forty kilos of butchered meat should be bent double and taking two hours over the last kilometre, and I was arriving upright at a walk with a bag that looked half empty until I opened it at the trade shed and kept taking things out.
The first time, the trader laughed. The second time he didn’t, and he counted the weight twice.
"You’ve got a cache," he said. It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer it. "Everyone’s got a cache. I’m not asking where."
"Good."
"I’m just saying, if you’ve got a cache, and it’s out there, and you’re walking to it and back every day —" he shrugged, and slid the ammunition across, "— then one day you’ll come back and find someone sitting in it. That’s all. I’m not asking."
He asked three more times over the next two days, in three different ways.
By the end of the week the settlement had sorted itself into rough opinions about me. There was a group of hunters who thought I was competent and left me alone, which I appreciated. There was a larger group who thought I was working an angle, which was correct. And there was a third group, small and growing, who had started going quiet when I walked past the fire — and that one bothered me, because I recognised it. People don’t go quiet around a man they dislike. They go quiet around a man they can’t account for.
I was polite to all of them and I gave none of them anything.
On the fifth day I took a Ridgeback and a pair of diggers out past the rail bridge. I sat on the embankment afterwards with my hands still shaking and reviewed the twelve attribute points I had already divided evenly after reaching Level 13.
Strength +4. Vitality +4. Agility +4.
It had been the safest choice. Strength helped me carry and fight, Vitality gave my terrible constitution more room to fail without killing me, and Agility helped my body arrive closer to the moment I asked it to. None of the three could be neglected when all three had begun below anything a Level 13 should possess.
The improvement was real. So was the low ceiling beneath it. I was still visibly a man who would lose an arm-wrestle to a healthy teenager, and the interface displayed Level 13 with four red lines beneath it: Frail Body, Weak Constitution, Poor Coordination, and Mana Deficiency. Feline Grace helped me move within the physical limits. Mana Deficiency still blocked ordinary mana, but the dimensional energy of my Anchor remained a separate system.
The experience bar sat about a fifth of the way toward fourteen. It could stay there.
That night the cooldown finished.
[Blind Call Charges: 1/1]
I waited until an hour before dawn, went up onto the flat roof outside my window where nothing overlooks anything, and activated it.
[Blind Call activated.]
[Eligible Grade: D.]
[Summon selected.]
[Physical manifestation initiated.]
[Manifestation Duration: 08:00:00]
She arrived standing, which was new.
A twenty-three-year-old woman arrived in leathers that had been repaired more times than they’d been made. Brown hair was pulled back hard beneath two long rabbit ears covered in clean white fur. Her face was softly shaped and quietly pretty, with wide grey-brown eyes, a small straight nose, and a mouth held carefully neutral.
The fitted leather followed a lean figure: modest curves through the chest and hips, a narrow waist, and strong runner’s legs beneath weathered trousers. A small white tail showed behind one hip when she turned, and the fine fur over the backs of her hands marked her as something other than human even before either ear moved. She smelled faintly of worn leather, clean fur, and woodsmoke. A short recurve bow was already in her left hand and a quiver rested at her hip.
The moment the air stopped folding, both white ears flattened and she went absolutely still — not a fighting stillness, something worse. Shoulders in. Chin down. Eyes on the roofing felt at my feet.
And then, without lifting her head, she looked at me.
Not at my face. At my hands, first. Then at the rifle across my back. Then at the space between us, measuring it. Then, very quickly, at my face and away again.
She’s working out what I want. The realisation arrived complete. Before anything else. Before where she is or what happened. She’s cataloguing me.
The first spark of attraction died beneath that understanding. Whatever her numbers eventually said, this moment was about making the roof feel less like another cage.
I sat down on the roof.
I don’t know why I did it — it wasn’t a plan — but I put myself lower than her and further away, and I saw her register that too, and not know what to do with it.
"You’ve been summoned," I said. "Into another world. Not by a god, not by a ritual. It’s a class I have. It picks somebody at random and I don’t get a say in who." I kept my voice level and unhurried. "You’ll be here about eight hours. Then you go back to the exact instant you left. Whoever you were standing in front of won’t see you disappear. Nobody will know you were gone."
Her eyes came up at that last part and stayed for nearly a second.
"They won’t know," she repeated.
"No."
"...Yes. Yes, I understand."
She hadn’t asked a question. She’d confirmed the piece that mattered to her, and I filed that away and did not touch it.
"My name’s Adrian. I’m not your master. There’s no contract, nothing binding you, nothing I can make you do." I said it plainly and then made myself stop. "I’d like help with a hunt. Eight hours, outside the walls, dangerous but not stupid. You can say no and sit on this roof and go home and that’s the whole of it."
"I’ll help."
Instantly. Before I’d finished. She said it the way you say yes to somebody holding something.
"Eira," she added, when the silence went on. "My name. Sorry — I should have — Eira."
[Summon Identified: Eira.]
[Race: White-Hare Beastkin.]
[Age: 23]
[Summon Grade: D.]
[Native Advancement: Unresolved.]
[Manifested Level: 13.]
Desire: 12/100
Trust: 6/100
Resonance: 1%
[Signature Status: Fading.]
[Repeat Selection Chance: 1% after an eligible D-grade roll.]
Right.
I could have said it again. I could have explained, more carefully and at greater length, that she was genuinely free, and she would have agreed with me faster each time, because agreeing is what she does, and my insisting would just have been a stronger man being emphatic at her.
You can’t talk her out of it. Eight hours of the right words wouldn’t dent that.
So I stopped.
"Alright," I said. "Then we should eat before we go."
I split what I had in the ring: food for two, water for two, a spare bandage roll I put in her hand rather than my pack, because things you’re holding are harder to take away. She accepted all of it with a small automatic gratitude that didn’t reach anything.
We went out through the south gate at first light.
She walked six paces behind me and slightly to the left, where she could see my hands, and she did not close the distance once in the first kilometre. Every time I glanced back she was in the same place, bow held across her body, watching the back of my head with the patient attention of someone who has learned exactly how long the pleasant part usually lasts.