Chapter 17: Forming the Anchor
Chapter 17: Forming the Anchor
I walked the room four times before I let myself sit down.
One door, blocked with the steel cabinet and a length of angle iron jammed under the handle. One high window, painted over, the frame soft enough with rust that I could kick it out from the inside if I had to and awkward enough that anyone coming in through it would arrive head first and slow. The fusebox room next door had a floor drain, which meant a void under the concrete, which meant nothing at all unless something in this city had learned to swim up sewers, and I had stopped assuming things hadn’t.
I set the water bottle by my right knee. Kitchen knife by my right hand. Bandages, painkillers, and the last of the tinned food in the open pack against my left thigh, because if I came out of this unable to stand, I wanted the calories to be reachable by crawling.
Then I sat with my back against the cabinet and looked at the stone in my palm.
Thirty uninterrupted minutes, I thought. In a city where I have not had thirty uninterrupted seconds since the Merge.
The window still said what it had said an hour ago.
[Available initiation: Mortal Anchor]
[Initiation is irreversible.]
That last line was doing something ugly to my stomach. Irreversible. Not dangerous, not high risk, just — this door only opens one way. The System had never once told me whether a thing was a good idea. It listed conditions. I supplied the courage, or didn’t.
I thought about Liora’s hand flat on my chest. I thought about the three days I would spend hiding without a single Blind Call charge if I put the core back in the bag and told myself I’d do it somewhere safer, and about the fact that there was no somewhere safer, and there never would be, because the world had stopped producing those.
I closed my hand around the core and initiated.
The stone went hot and then went nowhere. It simply stopped existing between my fingers, and everything it had been went into my wrist.
I want to describe it accurately, because I’ve heard people talk about cultivation like it’s a warm bath.
It was like being colonised.
The energy came up my arm in a slow branching push, and it did not follow blood vessels or nerves or anything my body had a plan for. It made its own channels. It went through the meat of my forearm looking for somewhere to hold, found nothing that satisfied it, and kept going. My heart lost its rhythm somewhere around my elbow — three beats too fast, then a pause long enough that I heard the silence, then a slam that hurt. My teeth locked. Every flaw I’d been carrying since the day I awoke in this body lit up like a diagram: the thin muscle, the shallow lungs, the joints that had never quite agreed with each other, the coordination that arrived a fraction of a second after I asked for it.
It’s trying to hold on to something, I thought, through the noise. It’s trying to find the edges of me.
And it couldn’t.
I lasted maybe four minutes before I understood why, and I only understood it because the pain kept dragging up the wrong memories.
I was twenty, in a dark room, in a character creation screen. Dragging the Charisma slider to maximum and laughing about it. Clicking through the negative traits — Frail Body, Weak Constitution, Mana Deficiency, Poor Coordination — because they gave points back and because the character wasn’t going to do anything anyway, it was going to stand in a beginner city and be beautiful and I was going to make friends with it, and I hadn’t, and I’d logged out, and I’d never gone back.
That thing on the screen had been a joke. A doll. A costume I’d built out of spite for my own life.
And then the world had ended and I had woken up inside it.
Every day since, some part of me had been standing slightly to the side of my own arms. Every time I’d failed to lift something. Every time my hands shook. Every time somebody looked at my face too long. That’s not me. That’s the character. I’m in here somewhere and this is the punishment I’m serving.
The dimensional energy needed a fixed reference. It needed to know where Adrian Vale was, in the stack of everything, the way it had known where Liora was. And I was giving it two answers.
My back arched off the cabinet. I bit down on my own sleeve. Somewhere far away a bottle rolled.
Fine, I thought. Fine. Look at it, then.
So I looked.
This body had been hungry for two weeks and had not died. This body had dragged an Ash Rat down aisle seven. These hands — split, bandaged, shaking — had held a strap while a monster decided which of us to kill, and they had held long enough. This chest had a woman’s forehead pressed against it forty minutes ago, and she had been frightened, and she had chosen to stand here anyway.
The old body was gone. It had been gone since the night of the Merge and it was not coming back, and I had spent every hour since then paying rent on a place I refused to admit I lived in.
This is mine, I thought. Not proudly. Not gratefully. It was closer to signing something. It’s weak and it’s badly made and I made it, and it’s the only thing that has ever actually been on my side. It’s mine and I’m in it.
The contradiction went out of me like a held breath.
The energy stopped searching. It settled — down through my spine, out along the long bones, into the joints, into the walls of my lungs — and where it settled it did not feel like power. It felt like scaffolding going up inside a building that had been leaning for a very long time.
I don’t know how long the rest took. When I opened my eyes the light through the painted window had changed colour and my sleeve was wet and my hands had stopped shaking.
[Early Mortal Anchor established.]
[Status: Anchored Vessel.]
[Blind Call natural recovery: Active.]
[Recovery rate: one charge per 72:00:00.]
[Blind Call Charges: 0/1 — 72:00:00 remaining.]
[Passive registered: Dimensional Energy Perception.]
[Mana Deficiency: Active.]
[Ordinary mana acquisition and use remain restricted.]
[Dimensional Anchor medium: Dimensional energy — unaffected.]
No commentary. No well done. It had watched me have the worst half hour of my life and recorded the result the way a scale records a weight.
Seventy-two hours, I thought. Three days before I can call anyone. Excellent. I’ll simply not be hunted for three days.
Then the second thing arrived, and I stopped being funny.
The world had texture now.
Not sight. Not sound. Something underneath both, like the difference between a room being empty and a room being empty and cold. The concrete under me had a faint sour grain in it, old and settled. Above, out past the roof, the sky had weight — vast slow pressure sliding somewhere north, huge and indifferent. Half a kilometre east something sat like a stain, dense and unmoving.
It didn’t tell me what any of it was. There were no names. It was a language I’d been handed with no dictionary, and for about a minute I lay on the floor with my eyes shut just trying not to be sick from the scale of it.
Then my body reminded me what forming an Anchor costs. My arms were water. Standing was going to be a project.
Which is when I heard, from the loading yard, a voice I recognised.
"Drag marks stop here." Flat. Careful. Silas Rook. "He came out of the shutter bleeding and he had a full pack. Twenty kilos across dust. He didn’t fly."
A pause. Then something heavy stepped up onto the concrete outside.
"Then he’s in one of these."
Garrick.
I could barely lift my own arms, and there was a Level 9 standing eight metres away with a tracker who had never once been wrong.