Chapter 53 - 52 — The First Watch IV
He did not stand immediately.
He sat for a moment with his forearms on his knees, and turned his head, and looked at each of us in turn. Clara. Gideon. Me.
I kept my breathing where it was. Long, slow and even.
It cost me something to do it, because my heart had come up into my throat the moment his face turned my way, and a heart that fast has to be kept out of the shoulders.
Then he got up.
He did it well. Weight forward onto the hands first, then the feet under, no push off the ground with a palm, no grunt. A man who has stood up quietly beside sleeping people before.
He walked north.
Toward the side of the ring where Ewan was.
I lay there and gave it every innocent explanation I could reach for. He needs to relieve himself. He heard something. He is a light sleeper and has decided to start his watch early. He wants to ask Ewan a question.
Any of those and he comes back inside four minutes.
I counted.
At two hundred and forty I was still counting, and my hands had closed in the leaves on either side of me without asking permission.
At three hundred I turned my head very slowly and looked at Gideon.
Arm across his eyes. Chest going up and down, slow and deep.
My father put one of the six people he takes into Red Gates into this dungeon specifically so I would not be alone in a situation like this.
That man was two feet away from me, completely and peacefully unconscious, and I could not wake him.
Because what would I say.
*A man got up in the night and walked toward a lookout.*
I got up instead.
---
The cold hit properly once I was off the ground, and the sweat that had been sitting under my armour turned into something unpleasant along my spine.
I went the way Declan had gone.
The dying glow of the camp stayed behind my right shoulder and I kept checking it, because a forest at night takes your direction away in about forty seconds if you let it.
The leaf litter was wet enough to be kind. It compressed under my boots instead of cracking.
I put my weight down through the outside edge of each foot, rolled it in, and moved between the wide trunks rather than the open ground, and every time I lost sight of Declan ahead of me I stopped completely instead of hurrying.
Forty metres. Sixty.
Then I heard voices.
Two of them, low, from beyond a stand of three trunks grown up together.
Declan.
And Ewan.
And that is where my feet stopped without me deciding anything, because Ewan Calder was supposed to be on the *northern* perimeter and Erik Lind was supposed to be with him, and the northern perimeter was thirty metres behind me and to the left.
I got a shoulder against the nearest trunk and moved around it until I had an angle.
---
The first thing I saw was a boot.
Just that. One boot, on its side, lying in a bar of grey light where the canopy had a gap in it.
I moved another half metre.
The leg. Then the rest of him, on his back in the leaves with one arm out from his body and the other underneath it.
Erik Lind’s short axe was lying two and a half metres from his hand.
I moved again, squinting my eyes to get the rest of it.
There was a line across his throat, black in that light, and the leaves under his neck and shoulder had gone dark in a spread the size of a dinner plate and were still getting darker.
My breath hitched somewhere around a third of the way in.
My chest locked around it while my fingers dug into the bark of that trunk until something under the nail of my index finger gave and started to sting.
*He’d bought us dinner.*
That is what arrived. Not horror, not yet. That.
He had unwrapped four kilos of meat forty minutes ago and told us nobody was touching the second packet because it was for tomorrow, and he had been proud of it, and he had been turning it on the coals with his face lit orange.
My throat tightened and I put my teeth into the inside of my cheek to stop it from making a sound.
Then I made myself look away from Erik and at the two men standing beside him.
---
They were talking quietly. Unhurried. Ewan had a cloth in his hand and was doing something to his blade with it.
"—nothing about splitting us."
"He couldn’t have. He didn’t know."
"None of us knew." Ewan’s voice was tight in a way Declan’s was not. "That’s the point I am making. He never gave us a signal for this because nobody has ever come back and said the floor does it."
"Then we work without one."
"We don’t know where he *is*, Declan. He could be four layers of this forest away. He could be sitting in another six with two of ours and neither of them able to move either."
"Which changes nothing about tonight."
There was a pause. Something dripped out of the canopy and hit a leaf.
"I think we wait," Ewan said. "We find him first. We find the others, we get the count back, and then—"
"And then it is twenty people again and we have lost the only advantage this floor has handed us." Declan had not raised his voice once. "Six, Ewan.
There are six of us here and three of them are ours. That will not happen again. Whatever he told us to do, he would tell us to do it now."
Another pause.
"Fine."
"Say it properly."
"Fine. We keep going."
---
I want to describe what happened in my chest, because it was not a thought.
It was a kind of dropping. Everything went down out of my chest into my stomach at once and left a cold space behind my sternum.
My hands had gone numb around the bark without me noticing, and my jaw had locked hard enough that the muscle under my ear was jumping.
*Three of them are ours.*
Cormac killed a man behind a crystal seam and killed me for seeing it.
Ewan has just opened Erik’s throat on a watch he was standing with him.
Declan knew, and Declan is deciding what happens next, and Declan is the one who arranged the rotation.
Three. In one raid. Working to something that was planned before any of us crossed that Gate, and the only reason I know any part of it is that this place killed me once already.
I stopped looking at the two men and looked at Erik again, at the axe lying two and a half metres from his hand.
He never got it up. He was standing on a perimeter with a man he had shared a drink with.
---
I started backing away.
Not to listen more. There was nothing left worth the risk, and I did not want the rest of the plan, I wanted Gideon Rook standing upright with his hands free.
Two witnesses ends this. Whatever they are doing needs the other three of us asleep and ignorant, and it stops existing the moment Clara Vogel opens her eyes and sees Erik’s body.
I got my weight onto my back foot. Moved it. Put it down through the outside edge.
The leaf litter took it silently.
I moved the other one.
And Ewan Calder’s head came round.
Not toward a sound. I know exactly what I did and I made no sound.
His head came round because thirty leaves that had been lying at one angle were now lying at another one, forty metres from a fire, in a forest where nothing had moved all night.
Nine years. That is what nine years buys.
"Declan."
I did not wait to find out how certain he was.
I ran.
---
The camp. That was all of it. There was nothing else in my head and nothing else needed to be.
Wet leaves went out from under my left boot on the fourth stride and I got the hand down and kept going with my palm dragging through cold mulch.
A low branch came across my cheek and opened it and I did not feel it until later, when I found the blood dried along my jaw.
My breath was coming in tearing lumps.
Behind me, Ewan.
He was fast. Not Talaria fast.
Just a very fit man in his forties who knew this ground better than I did because he had been standing on it for three hours, and every time I broke around a trunk his footfalls got a fraction louder.
I could not hear Declan at all.
That was the thing that put ice down my arms. Ewan was crashing through the same undergrowth I was, and Declan O’Rourke had said one word and then stopped existing, and there is only one reason a man goes quiet in a chase.
Then, high and ahead, a branch cracked.
I looked up.
Something crossed a gap in the canopy against the grey.
---
He came down in front of me, hard enough to throw leaves and black soil outward in a fan. Already in the crouch, already turning.
He had gone over the top. Trunk to branch, above me, across forty metres of forest in the time it took me to run twenty through it.
I saw his shoulders coil the moment his boots hit the dirt, seeing the punch before he even fully landed.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
My planted foot went.
There is no describing the middle of it. My body was in the line of that fist and then my body was two metres to the left.
My ankle absorbed every bit of the arresting force, and a white line of pain went up the inside of my leg from the joint to the hip.
The fist missed.
What came behind the fist did not.
It caught me across the shoulder and the top of the chest, not steel, not an Ability I could see, just the pressure a man that size puts in front of a strike, and it threw me sideways off my feet.
I went through ferns, hit a root with my hip, rolled twice and stopped face down in wet leaf.
Everything was cold and black and smelled of soil.
I got a knee under me.
The ankle screamed when I put weight on it, and I understood in that half second exactly what I had bought with Talaria and exactly what it costs, and that I could not do that many more times tonight.
Then, behind me, steel came out of a sheath.
I looked back over my shoulder.
Ewan Calder had caught up. He had his sword out and low, and he was not hurrying any more, and his chest was moving but his face was doing nothing at all.
In front of me, Declan was already walking.
One on either side, camped somewhere behind the black, Clara was asleep. And Gideon Rook lying on his back with his arm over his eyes forty metres away, breathing slow and deep, and exactly where I had left him.
I got my chest full.
I knew the wood would eat the sound before it went three metres. I knew he was forty metres away, asleep, and deaf to the world. But that didn’t matter.
And I put every last bit of it into the only word in that forest worth anything.
"GIDEON!"