Chapter 64: Eight Hours
Chapter 64: Eight Hours
[Direct Summoning: Locked.]
[Standard level-based manifestation duration applies.]
[Natural charge recovery begins after manifestation ends.]
[Resonance Imprint Available.]
[Imprint Source: Liora Venn.]
[Selection Method: Random.]
[Trust: 70 → 95]
[Trust Threshold Reached: 90]
The promise had been the final piece, but the numbers weren’t measuring one sentence. They held the whole eight hours: the hunt, the mistake she’d covered, the fear she’d finally trusted me enough to admit, the truth I’d given her in return, and everything we’d chosen together afterward.
I read the Preserved Signature windows twice.
Blind Call was still Blind Call. It would roll an eligible grade first and only then choose a summon.
But if that first roll came up D, Liora’s stabilized signature now had even odds of being selected in the second step. Any other grade would bypass her entirely. Whichever summon manifested, the charge would be spent, and the same three-day recovery would begin only after she returned.
It wasn’t certainty.
It wasn’t permanent.
It didn’t let me keep her here longer than my level allowed, and it did nothing to solve the problem of two people living in different dimensions.
But it was the first thing my class had ever given me that resembled a fair chance.
Liora lifted her head from my chest. Her eyes moved across the windows I knew she couldn’t see, reading the answer from my face instead.
"What happened?"
"Next time the Call rolls D," I said, and my voice did something embarrassing on the second word, "there’s an even chance it finds you."
She stared at me.
I continued before hope could grow larger than what the class had actually given us.
"I still can’t choose you directly. The grade comes first. But after a D roll, it’s fifty-fifty between your preserved signature and the ordinary selection."
"Half?"
"Half."
Her eyes narrowed as though the probability had personally insulted her.
"But my signature gets half the D rolls."
"Exactly half."
"And when the Call comes back?"
"I’ll make the Call and hope it rolls D."
Her tail struck the mattress once, hard enough to make the frame creak. Then she buried her face against my chest before I could see whatever expression had crossed it.
"Good," she muttered. "It had better work."
"I’ll explain that to the interdimensional lottery."
"Do that."
I put my hand over the imprint window.
Feline Grace had carried the pattern of how her body moved. Whatever the System selected now would be random as well. I had no list of options and no way to guide the choice. Only the final imprint at one hundred percent Resonance would belong to me to choose.
I accepted it.
[Random Imprint Selected.]
[B-Rank Passive Racial Trait Acquired: Feline Senses.]
[Racial Trait Imprint Successful.]
[New Racial Trait Registered.]
B-rank.
The same rank as Feline Grace, but this was deeper and simpler: something her people were born with rather than something Liora had learned. It was not knife work, stealth, or any piece of her class. It was the way her senses received the world.
The registered trait opened beneath the acquisition messages.
[Feline Senses]
[Rank: B]
[Type: Passive Racial Trait]
[Source: Liora Venn]
[Effect: Improves low-light vision, directional hearing, scent discrimination, and close-range environmental awareness.]
[Limitation: Does not grant danger precognition, combat experience, or automatic detection of concealed targets.]
The room gained layers.
I heard someone crossing the floor below us, each footstep separated from the faint scrape of a chair farther down the building. The dying lamp stopped being one wavering orange blur; the folds of the blanket and the curve of Liora’s lowered ears remained clear inside the dimness. Her scent separated from blood, soap, leather, and the old wood of the room without any of them becoming overwhelming.
And, beneath my hand, I heard the soft drag of her tail over the blanket.
"Your tail is moving," I said.
It stopped instantly.
"No, it isn’t."
"I can hear it."
She remained very still for two seconds, then wound it around my leg with immense dignity.
"Then learn to mind your own business."
That was the last time all night I looked at a number.
We stayed awake. That was a decision neither of us announced.
She told me about her world in pieces, and it was better than any of it had been the first time because now she wasn’t performing. Salt flats. A caravan route her family worked. A brother who was apparently insufferable and whom she clearly adored. The training yard she’d been standing in nine days ago and again ninety minutes ago, mid-step, with a healed thigh.
"He asked where I’d been," she said. "Both times. Half a second, and he still asked, because my face does something."
"What did you tell him?"
"That I was thinking." She snorted. "He said I should think less and lunge more."
I told her about Greyhaven, and Halloran’s map, and the archive. She made me describe the route twice and then found two things wrong with it that I hadn’t seen—a river crossing where the map showed a bridge that a hand-drawn note said was gone, and a five-kilometre stretch of open ground with nothing marked on either side of it, which she said meant either nobody had ever walked it or nobody had ever come back from it.
"Go round," she said. "It’ll cost you a day."
"It’ll cost me a day."
"Then it costs you a day, and you arrive." She shifted against my shoulder. "Which is the entire point of you now, so let’s not lose it."
[Manifestation Remaining: 00:47:12]
Around the last half hour, she stopped teasing so much and started giving instructions, which was what her worrying looked like.
Don’t hunt anything above my level without a second plan. Don’t sleep anywhere with one exit. Don’t trust a settlement because it has walls. Eat properly. Circulate every day, even when it was agony—especially when it was agony. Learn what happened when the Veil broke and I wasn’t the one who chose the moment.
"And don’t get comfortable," she said. "You’re doing it here. You’ve got a room with a lamp and people who are frightened of you, and it’s made you slow."
"I nearly died in a hedge this afternoon."
"Yes," Liora said. "That’s my point."
[Manifestation Remaining: 00:04:00]
She turned around in my arms so she was facing me, placed her forehead against mine, and neither of us pretended for the last four minutes.
"Say it again."
"I’ll look for a way. I don’t know if there is one. I’ll look anyway."
"Every settlement. Every archive. Every strange woman with a sword who knows something." Her hand rested flat on my chest. "And if some obliging goddess offers to make you strong in exchange for something stupid, you say no and come find me instead."
"That’s oddly specific."
"You have a type, Adrian, and it is dangerous women who want to keep you. I have thought about it and decided the only acceptable one is me."
I laughed, and she kissed me.
It went on for a while.
When she pulled back, her ears had gone flat and low, and she wasn’t quite steady.
"Don’t replace me," she said. "I’m not joking, and I’ll deny that I said it."
"I won’t."
"Nine days," Liora said. "I did nine days. I can do more. But I need you to be there at the end of it, so survive, you idiot. That’s the only thing I’m actually asking—"
She was still speaking when she went.
I’ve thought about that a great deal since.
Not the disappearance.
The weight.
My arm was around her, and then my arm was around nothing. My hand came down onto the mattress where her back had been, and it was still warm.
That’s the part nobody prepares you for.
The warmth stays.
[Manifestation duration complete.]
[Liora Venn returned to origin dimension.]
[Return Point: Exact origin place and instant.]
[Origin-Time Elapsed: 00:00:00.]
[Injuries, healing, poison, exhaustion, spent energy, and technique backlash retained.]
[Active Summons: 0]
[Blind Call Charges: 0/1]
[Natural charge recovery initiated: 72:00:00.]
I didn’t open anything. I didn’t check a single number.
I lay on a narrow bed in a private room in Fenwick Junction with my arm around a shape that wasn’t there and listened to the settlement sleeping.
The fifty-percent chance remained somewhere at the back of my mind.
It was better than searching through infinity and hoping the Call happened to find her again. It was still nowhere near enough. Three days from now, I could spend the charge, fail to roll D, and never reach her repeat-selection chance at all. Even after a D roll, the second step could select a complete stranger.
Or I could get Liora.
That possibility should have comforted me.
Instead, it made the distance between us feel measurable for the first time.
One chance in two, after the right grade.