Chapter 50 - 49 — The First Watch I
**POV: Jace**
My hand went to my ribs.
There was no hand, and there were no ribs. I was somewhere with no light in it and no edges to it.
And my arm still tried to fold in against my left side, the way it had been trying to for the last four seconds of my life, and the muscle memory kept firing into nothing.
The blade was still in me. That is what my body insisted on. Cold, thin, sitting between two bones, and every time I reached for it my fingers closed on dark.
Three things kept arriving.
Cormac’s face, from below, close enough that I could see he was not angry. He had been *concentrating*. The way you concentrate on a difficult knot.
The Meridian swordsman behind the crystal with his hand still resting where the wound was, arranged like a man who had lain down.
And the noise. Renard shouting about tunnel mouths, a hound screaming somewhere, blue light going across the roof of that chamber, nineteen people fighting forty metres away with their backs to a rock they never thought to look behind.
Nobody knew.
That is the part my jaw kept trying to close on, and I had no jaw either.
> **[Mimesis activated.]**
>
> **[Killer identified: Cormac Keane.]**
>
> **[Three concealed Ability Cards generated.]**
>
> **[Choose one.]**
Three cards, faces away.
Brown. Violet. Red.
I did not even feel the moment of choosing.
My attention went to the red one because red is A and A is the highest thing on that table, and that is the entire reasoning I had, and it is the same reasoning I have had every time.
> **[Selection confirmed.]**
>
> **[Ability copied.]**
>
> **[Talaria — A acquired.]**
> **[Talaria — A]**
>
> **[Type: Active Movement Ability.]**
>
> **[From a planted foot, the user converts a single step into explosive linear acceleration.]**
>
> **[Talaria does not translocate the user. The distance is physically crossed.]**
>
> **[Talaria does not increase reaction speed, perception or durability.]**
>
> **[Deceleration is not assisted. All arresting force is borne by the user’s body.]**
> **[Ability source recorded: Cormac Keane.]**
>
> **[Ability source exhausted.]**
>
> **[Further deaths caused by Cormac Keane will not generate Ability Cards.]**
One. That is all I get from him, ever.
> **[Ouroboros activated.]**
>
> **[Regression point established: Twelve hours before death.]**
>
> **[Now regressing.]**
---
I came awake with my palm already flat against my left side.
Not near it. On it, pressing, three fingers hunting along the space between the ribs where the steel had gone through, and finding skin.
I pressed again.
Skin.
Again, harder, until it hurt in the ordinary way that pressing hurts, and my breath came in and went all the way down without catching, and that was the thing that finally landed.
It went all the way down. I had spent the last minute of that raid failing to fill my lungs past a third.
I sat up in a bed in my own house.
My shoulders had come up around my ears at some point and would not go back down. I put both hands flat on my knees and made myself breathe out slowly, and the out-breath shook on the way through, and I let it.
Behind my eyes it kept running.
Cormac’s hand inside the dead man’s belt rig, closing on something. The narrow puncture under the arm where nothing bites.
*Bled out. Faster than I thought. I had my hands on it.* Said in a completely reasonable voice while he measured how much of it I had seen.
My teeth were together hard enough that the hinge of my jaw ached.
I opened it deliberately and worked it side to side until the ache dulled.
Then I looked down and my hands had closed into fists on my knees without any input from me at all, and the knuckles had gone white.
I sat there for a while looking at them like they belonged to somebody in the next bed.
He killed a man who was still breathing.
Then he took something off the body.
Then he killed me for standing there, and he was efficient about it, and at no point in any of it did his face do anything.
---
There is a thing I did not conclude, and I want that on the record, because I nearly did.
Cormac Keane is not the answer to Eastwick.
He was not on the first attempt. He was not on the second.
The teams that went in before this month walked in whole and never walked out, and the only reason anybody knows they died is that the Bureau’s monitoring watched the life-signatures go out one at a time until the count reached zero.
Nobody came back to explain it. So the file says monsters, or the boss, or the environment, and the file says that because there is nothing else it could possibly say.
Cormac belongs to *this* raid.
Which means what I actually know is that Eastwick kills people, and that there is also a man inside it this week who kills people, and I have no evidence at all that those two facts are related.
That is a worse situation than a conspiracy. A conspiracy has edges.
---
I tested Talaria once, in the courtyard, before the car came.
I put my left foot down, felt the plate under the ball of it, and let the Ability take the step.
The wall arrived.
That is the honest description. I did not experience travelling.
I planted a foot nine metres from the wall and then the wall was against my forearms and I had no memory of the middle, and the whole of my weight went into stopping through my leading ankle.
It held. Barely.
I stood there breathing through my nose with my ankle throbbing in a way that promised to be worse tomorrow, and I understood the shape of it immediately.
This is not speed. This is being fired.
Nothing about it makes me faster at *seeing* things. Nothing about it slows me down at the far end. If I put a foot down wrong, the Ability will happily deliver me into a tree at whatever velocity I asked for.
Cormac used it twice on me and changed his angle in the last third of the second one. That is not the Ability. That is fifteen years of using it.
I did not train it further. I had a car to catch.
---
The second run through the first layer took four hours and it cost us almost nothing, and every minute of it was worse than the first.
Because Cormac was *pleasant*.
He introduced himself to me in the freight yard again, the same handshake, the same slightly repaired gear, the same easy line about the filters being the worst part of any wet Gate.
He called two people by name that he had only met that morning. He asked the Meridian healer whether her shoulder had settled after whatever she had done to it last week.
The first time he spoke to me I had to put my back teeth together to keep my face where it was.
In my memory, he murdered me just hours ago. He knelt on my spine and held my cheek against a wet stone so hard, I could not make enough noise.
And now he stood in the morning light asking whether I had ever worked in poison environment, his head tipped slightly and waiting for the answer.
There was no timeline in which he did that. He did not know. There was nothing behind his eyes to find.
I said no, I had not, and he told me to keep the filter seal wet with my own breath rather than letting it dry out, because a dry seal cracks.
It was good advice.
I used it all day.
---
I did not tell anybody anything they could not have believed.
When the shallows moved, I was already turned toward the water, and being turned is not knowledge.
When the two wall-crawlers went over the front line toward the healers, I called it half a second before the ranged team did, and half a second is the sort of thing a person can simply be.
The Amphisbaena was the hard one.
I could not say *there is a second head and it is behind us*, because there is no version of me that knows that.
So I opened Androphagos as the front head came out of the pool, and I stood there with the whole rear of the formation inside six metres of me, and I waited.
Nineteen seconds. That is how long the second head took to come around under the stone shelf.
I felt it enter the field. Something enormous and alive, sliding through water below and behind us, coming up.
"BEHIND. REAR, IT’S BEHIND US, IT IS THE SAME ANIMAL."
Renard did not question it. He turned half the formation on my word alone, and I have thought about that since, because that is what a captain does with information he cannot verify in a fight.
The rear head came up into a shield wall instead of into a healer’s back.
We still needed everyone. It still took eleven minutes and it still knocked me across wet stone hard enough to make my shoulder sing.
But nobody went into the water this time.
Nobody had ribs broken, or venom in an open wound.
---
The mana crystal chamber was easier still, because I knew which fissures they came out of, and I put myself between the widest one and the extraction crew before anything moved.
The perimeter closed before the rush arrived rather than during it.
The Meridian swordsman with the grey at his temples killed two hounds and took nothing worse than a scrape across the vambrace.
He was alive. He was standing over there wiping his blade on a rag with somebody’s elbow in his side, laughing at something.
Cormac fought forty metres from him the entire time and never got within reach.
I watched him for the whole of it.
He did nothing. He killed three hounds, he shoulder-checked a Meridian ranged fighter out of the path of a fourth, and when it was over he went along the line asking people if they were hurt.
Nothing.
And that was when the cold thing settled properly into my stomach, because I had gone into that chamber half-expecting to *catch* him at something, and instead I had simply removed the wounded man he needed.
I had not exposed Cormac Keane. I had not proved anything. And I had not made a single person in this raid look at him twice.
All I did was take away the opportunity. And a man who murdered when the opportunity arrived was not a man who stopped being a murderer when it does not.
He was waiting.
---
The chamber past the crystals was round.
Smooth walls, which is wrong for a cave. Sixty metres across, empty, no monsters, no bones, no water, no anything.
The floor was divided by faint lines, and I took them for cracks until the first one lit.
> **[First Layer cleared.]**
"Close up." Renard’s voice went hard. "Everyone in, now, on me, tight—"
> **[Second Layer transition beginning.]**
The lines went from faint to burning in about a second and a half.
And they did not light all at once. That is what put the wrongness into it.
Separate sections came up under separate people, one plate here and one eleven metres away.
Renard looked down at his own boots, then at the four metres of dark floor between him and the man beside him, and his face did something I had not seen on it all day.
He did not know either.
Nobody in that chamber knew.
Twenty faces went to the floor at the same time, Meridian and outsiders together, and every single one of them registered the same thing, which is that this was not in the briefing because it has never been in anybody’s briefing.
I looked for Cormac out of pure reflex.
He was staring at the floor with his mouth slightly open.
Then the stone went out from under me.