Chapter 16: Privacy Was Apparently a Class Requirement
Chapter 16: Privacy Was Apparently a Class Requirement
I’ve had time since to think about whether what I did next was cowardice or cruelty or just survival. I’ve settled on: yes.
I let my hands go slack on his wrist. I let my shoulders drop. I let the fear onto my face—which took no acting at all, since it was extensively available—and I looked up at him and held his eyes, and I let him have the full weight of a hundred points of Charisma at a range of thirty centimetres in bad light.
It isn’t mind control. It doesn’t make anyone do anything.
It only makes what they already want louder.
"Garrick," I said, and I made my voice small and unsteady and slightly broken. "I’m so tired."
Something went through his face.
"I know," he said. His grip loosened—not released, loosened, his fingers relaxing out of the fist into something closer to a hold. "I know you are. Come on now. It’s over."
"I can’t— I can’t keep doing this."
"You don’t have to." He was leaning in. His voice had gone soft and pleased and horribly warm. "You were never supposed to be out here. Look at you. You were never made for—"
I got the tin of chilli powder out of my coat pocket, thumbed the lid off with the movement of standing up straighter, and threw the entire contents into his face.
Garrick’s head snapped back. Both hands went to his eyes—both, which meant neither was on me—and I went sideways off the shelving, hooked the loaded cart I’d left parked in lane four, and drove it into the back of his knee at a dead run.
He went down onto one leg. I didn’t try to hit him; hitting him would have been a fascinating way to break my hand. I put my kitchen knife across the outside of his forearm as I went past—shallow and ugly, the kind of cut that bleeds theatrically and heals in a week—and he roared and grabbed at where I’d been.
Then I was under the security shutter, flat on my back, hauling myself through on my elbows with the corrugated edge scraping my chest.
I got up on the other side.
Garrick was on one knee at the checkout lane, blind and streaming and furious, his own blood running off his elbow, still hunting for me by sound. Behind him, Silas Rook stood at the end of aisle one with his hand nowhere near his weapon.
Silas looked at Garrick. Then he looked at me—a long, level, professional look, the sort that goes into a ledger—and he did not raise the alarm, and he did not move to cut me off, and he did not help me either.
He just watched me go.
❖ ❖ ❖
The building I stopped in was two hundred metres past the loading yard: a squat brick utility block with a fusebox room, a sink, and a door that locked from the inside.
I checked it before I trusted it. One entrance. One high window, painted over, big enough to climb out of and awkward to come in through. No sightline from the yard. Concrete floor, so nothing would creak. I dragged a steel cabinet across the door and pulled a sheet of collapsed ceiling board over the gap, so from outside the room would look already searched and abandoned.
Nothing confirmed any of it. There was no window that said safe. There was just me in the dark, listening to my own pulse and doing arithmetic about lines of sight.
I sat against the cabinet, drank a third of a bottle of water in one go, and made myself stop. I repacked the gash under my ribs and bound both palms. The shutter scrape had already stopped bleeding, which was new.
Then I took the Rift Core out of my pack and held it in both hands and thought about the line I hadn’t had time to think about.
Compatibility detected: Dimensional Summoner.
I opened the class interface. Not a status glance—the whole thing, the panel I’d been too frightened and too busy to sit down with since the day it appeared. I found the section that had been greyed out since the beginning, and I focused on the core, and I asked.
The window that opened was longer than any I had seen.
[Compatible class resource detected.]
[Exclusive Class Foundation Path]
[Dimensional Anchor]
[Available initiation: Mortal Anchor]
Requirements:
—One stable D-grade Rift Core
—Host Level 4 or higher
—No active manifestation
—Stable physical position
—Thirty uninterrupted minutes
[Blind Call natural recovery: Unavailable]
[Unlock condition: Establish Mortal Anchor]
I read it three times.
It did not tell me to begin. It did not tell me the room was secure. It did not offer an estimate of where Garrick was, or how long a man with chilli powder in his eyes takes to start hunting again, or whether Silas Rook was at that moment standing in the loading yard reading the scuff marks I’d left in the dust.
It just listed conditions, the way a lock lists conditions.
So I did the thinking myself, because there was nobody else in the room to do it.
The core would be consumed. One core, one use, and it had cost half a tonne of groceries and a woman’s blood to obtain. I would have to hold still—stable physical position, a phrase doing an enormous amount of quiet work. The interface did not list the consequences of interruption. That left me to choose between wasting the core, damaging whatever foundation the process was meant to build, or discovering an entirely new way to die halfway through it. None of those possibilities improved because I was tired.
And underneath all of it, the line I kept coming back to.
Blind Call natural recovery: Unavailable.
Zero charges. No regeneration. Every hour from now until I did this, I was a Level 4 man with a kitchen knife and no summons and no way to get one—which meant Liora’s Preserved Signature, that fragile slightly-better-than-nothing pull, was worth exactly nothing until I fixed my own body.
There was no version of this where I didn’t do it.
There was only the question of where, and when, and how long I could stay in one place without dying.
[Estimated initiation duration: 30:00]
Thirty uninterrupted minutes.
Garrick was still hunting me.
Apparently, rebuilding my body required the one resource the apocalypse had made extinct.
Privacy.