Chapter 68: The Preserved Signature Succeeds
Chapter 68: The Preserved Signature Succeeds
The window came up at twenty past four in the afternoon while I was sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, because sitting against a wall was the only position that didn’t argue with my ribs.
[Blind Call Charges: 1/1]
And then, underneath it, the thing I’d been staring at for three days without being able to use.
[Preserved Signature: Liora Venn.]
[Repeat Selection Chance: 50% after an eligible D-grade roll.]
Fifty percent, but only if the grade came up D. A coin I was not allowed to flip until the Call chose the right table.
I sat there with my hands flat on my thighs and did the arithmetic I’d already done about forty times. A non-D roll could bring any eligible summon. A D roll gave me even odds of Liora, and even odds of another summon selected at random.
Make the Call. That is the only part I control.
I should be honest about what those three days had been like, because I’d told myself I was being patient and I wasn’t. I’d counted them. Not in a wistful way. I’d known the hour.
I could barely stand up. Everything below my left knee was strapped, the stitches along my forearm were four days old and pulling, my ribs had gone from broken to cracked somewhere in the last thirty hours, and there was a dressing on the back of my skull I couldn’t see and had to check by touch. I had spent seventy-two hours in a room I’d chosen for its single door, mostly horizontal, mostly thinking about what would have happened if Aria’s manifestation had ended ninety seconds earlier.
Roll the grade.
I activated Blind Call.
[Blind Call activated.]
[Eligible Grade: D.]
[Previously Encountered Preserved Signature Detected: Liora Venn.]
[Repeat Selection Chance: 50% after eligible D-grade roll.]
[Preserved Signature Repeat Roll: Successful — Liora Venn.]
[Summon selected.]
[Physical manifestation initiated.]
[Manifestation Duration: 08:00:00.]
The air opened up in the middle of the room and Liora came out of it at a walk.
Not mid-lunge, not mid-anything. She came through mid-sentence, actually — I caught the tail end of a word in a language I don’t have — and her head was turned back over her shoulder toward something that had stopped existing, and her hands were empty.
Fifteen days had changed small things. Her black hair had been freshly cut close at the nape, her skin held the warmth of afternoon sun, and she wore a clean rust-red wrap beneath dark travelling leathers I had never seen before. The outfit fitted the familiar compact curves of her body more softly than armour did, and her tail had been brushed until the fur lay sleek. She looked rested, alive, and so painfully familiar that my chest tightened before she even faced me.
Then she turned round and saw me on the floor.
She was across the room before I’d got my mouth open. Her arms went round my shoulders and her face went into the side of my neck, and she held on, and she did not say anything at all for a long time.
She didn’t look at me first. That’s the thing I noticed. Every other time she has arrived she has inspected — the room, the exits, my kit, my face, in that order, always. This time she crossed nine metres of floor with her eyes on nothing but me and got her arms round me before she’d checked a single door.
"You’re here," she said, into my collar.
"I’m here."
"You’re here." Her tail had wrapped my forearm above the stitches and I didn’t tell her. "Fifteen days. I have counted fifteen days, Adrian, and I had absolutely no way of knowing whether—"
She stopped.
Then she pulled back about an inch and I watched her decide not to finish that sentence, and put something else in its place.
"I was in the middle of an argument," she said.
"...Alright."
"With Nessa. About the northern route, because she’s decided the caravan should take the ridge line, and it’s four days longer and she knows perfectly well it’s four days longer, and I had just said—" She stopped again, and her ears went sideways in a way I’ve come to understand means I have lost the thread of my own performance. "I don’t remember what I’d just said."
"You’ll find out the instant you go back."
"I’ll find out the instant I go back," Liora repeated, and let out a breath, and something in her shoulders finally came down. "She’ll be so annoyed. My face will have done something and she’ll want to know what."
And then she looked at me properly, and the whole thing collapsed.
I saw it arrive in stages. The strapping on my leg. The dressing on my arm. The way I hadn’t stood up to greet her, which she’d been too busy to notice for about forty seconds and which now became the only fact in the room. Her hand came up and turned my head sideways and found the gauze at the back of my skull.
Her ears went flat.
"Explain."
So I did. All of it, in order, with her sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of me and her tail absolutely motionless the entire time.
I’m not going to set it all down again. I lived it four days ago and I’d rather not do it twice. What matters is what she did with it, which was to take it apart piece by piece, in the flattest voice I have ever heard her use.
"You went in alone."
"Yes."
"Knowing what was in the lower levels."
"Suspecting."
"Suspecting." Her jaw moved. "Go on."
"There wasn’t a decision point where a better man would have done something different. It was already happening by the time I understood what I was in."
"There is always a decision point," Liora said. "There is always the door you walked through, and you walked through it because you’d decided the thing on the other side was worth it, and I would very much like to know what you thought was worth this." She gestured at my leg without looking at it. "Because from here it looks like you nearly bled out in a stairwell for a box of medical supplies."
"It wasn’t for the supplies."
"Then what?"
"It was for not dying of an infection in three weeks."
She didn’t have anything for that immediately, and I let the silence do the work, because it was true and both of us knew what an untreated wound costs in this world.
Then she went at it from the other side.
"You used the call on Aria."
"Yes."
"You had one charge, and you were already hurt, and you used it—"
"To get out. Not to win. There was no version where I won." I shifted, which was a mistake, and stopped shifting. "She got me up two flights and out through the loading door and held the corridor while I did it, and she went home with about a minute and a half left on her, and if she’d arrived ninety seconds later I’d have been on the landing when it came up the stairs."
"Ninety seconds."
"Give or take."
"Ninety seconds, Adrian—"
"Yes."
"And what did she say to you?" Liora’s voice had gone quieter, which is worse. "Because I know exactly what I would have said, standing over you in that corridor."
"She said the same as you. Roughly. Less politely."
Her tail moved once, hard, against the floorboards.
And then she started listing my mistakes, and here is the thing I want on the record: she was right about all of them, and she also stopped three separate times to acknowledge the parts I couldn’t have controlled. She said the stairwell was unforgivable and then said that I hadn’t had a second exit because the building hadn’t been built with one. She said I should never have gone below ground level and then said, grudgingly, that I’d have died of the arm inside a month otherwise. She is the only person I have ever met who can dismantle you and be fair about it at the same time.
"You should have waited," she said finally. "For me. Three days. You could have waited three days and had somebody on the stairs with you."
"I know."
"So why didn’t you?"
And I answered it honestly, because I was tired and my head hurt and I’d stopped being able to construct anything better.
"Because I didn’t think I had three days," I said. "The arm was going the wrong way. I’d been running a temperature for two nights. And I sat in a room doing the arithmetic and it came out as go now or don’t go, and I remember thinking—"
I stopped.
"Thinking what."
Don’t say it.
"Thinking that if it went badly you’d come back one day and there’d be nobody here," I said. "And nobody to tell you. You’d just arrive in an empty room and never find out what happened."
Liora looked at me.
Her mouth opened, and every single thing she had been building for the last twenty minutes went out of her face at once.