Chapter 64: Every Step Into My Hell
It was nothing like climbing.
The right leg climbed, and for the left one I had to swing the whole hip forward to throw it onto the step above, wait for it to land, check that it was holding, and start again. My free hand trailed along the wall to catch me every time the foot came down wrong, and it came down wrong often. There were no landings either, not one place to sit down, only steps going up into the dark.
Elsa told me once, in a camp where the braziers were going out, that the System watches. That it doesn’t simply hand out blue windows and levels, that it looks, and that it waits. And that the moment it strikes hardest isn’t when you’re at the top, it’s when you’re broken, on the ground, ready to give anything to stop feeling weak.
She had her one eye planted in mine when she said the rest. That it dresses madness up as a reward, and that she’d seen men far steadier than me lose themselves that way, chasing power until there was nothing left of them.
She’d said all of it without once raising her voice, which was how I’d known she meant it.
She was right, and I know it.
I know exactly what I’m doing, I know which place I’m doing it from, and I know that place is precisely the one she told me to be careful of.
"Go on, then."
My voice went off into the staircase and didn’t come back. It was the first time I’d spoken alone since I’d opened my eyes again, and it did nothing to me either way.
"Dress it up however you like. I’ll take it anyway."
I kept climbing.
The staircase went up into a black the light didn’t reach into, wide enough for an army marching abreast, and there was nothing to look at, which meant there was nothing to stop me thinking. The air turned colder the higher I went, and it carried nothing at all, no dust, no smell of stone, nothing. So I thought, step after step, dragging that leg, with the blood from my nose starting up again at some point and running over my mouth and my chin before dropping onto the stone in front of me.
Why did you never tell me.
Step.
Did you know what was in my head, did you know it wasn’t me talking.
Step.
Did you carry it alone, the whole time, while I sat complaining at a screen about things that didn’t exist.
Step.
Did you watch me cry over Alexia’s body already knowing what I was capable of.
Step.
Is that why you’ve never been afraid of me. Not once. Not in that apartment, not in that castle courtyard, not a few hours ago with both my blades in your stomach.
Step.
Is that what you’ve been doing since the first day? All of it?
And the warmth kept rising.
That was the worst part. I should have been on my knees somewhere in the middle of that staircase, I should have felt my lungs burning and my dead leg giving out for good, I should have had one decent reason to sit down and get my breath back. There wasn’t one. Apotheosis filled back in everything I emptied, silently, without asking my opinion, and the higher I climbed the clearer my head got, the lighter I felt, the more I wanted to keep going.
There it is. That’s exactly what she described to me.
And I don’t care.
I started talking to her. To Alice, out loud, in the dark, addressing the empty steps in front of me.
"You could have told me."
Step.
"One evening. Any of them. You came to my place I don’t know how many times. You cooked in my kitchen. You knew the drawers in it better than I did. You fell asleep on my couch."
Step.
"And not once did you open your mouth."
Step.
"You let me write hero stories for years knowing what I’d done in your living room."
My voice broke in the middle of the sentence and I carried on anyway, and I noticed I was smiling, and I have no idea since when.
Then I stopped climbing.
One step, my hand flat against the wall, my head down, with the blood dropping off my chin onto the stone in front of my feet. Because there was somebody else to talk to, and I’d been thinking about it for a while without daring to say it.
"And you."
Nothing.
"You, the one who spoke in my place. I know you can hear me."
The black above, the black below, my breathing, nothing else.
"You told her not to worry. You told her you’d take care of everything."
Nothing.
"So take care of it now. Come back and explain."
Nothing.
"COME BACK AND EXPLAIN!"
It went off up the staircase, climbed, lost itself, and didn’t even come back distorted. That tower never gave anything back.
I stayed there, my cheek against the cold stone of the wall, waiting for an answer I knew perfectly well wouldn’t come, waiting for it anyway, listening hard toward the inside of my own skull. I waited longer than I’d care to admit.
And I started laughing.
It came out in bursts, between breaths. I’d done this once before, in the white hall, alone among the relics, shouting at a demon king who will never know I existed. I laughed by myself, folded over my dead leg, my mouth full of blood, begging somebody who lives in my head to please say something.
You’re losing it completely, Kuro.
Yes. So what?
The laugh went out on its own, and what was left afterward was very calm.
I started climbing again.
I wasn’t asking questions anymore. Questions are what you do when you still believe somebody is going to answer them nicely, and I’d left that place behind somewhere lower down in the dark. Now I was drawing up a list, in order, and I repeated it at every step to be sure I wouldn’t lose a single item when I saw her.
One. What happened in that apartment, in your own words.
Step.
Two. Who cleaned up afterward, and at what price.
Step.
Three. Who wiped my memory, and if it was you, you tell me to my face.
Step.
Four. Who he was.
Step.
And five, Alice.
Step.
Five, do you love me for what I am, or do you love me for what I did that night.
I don’t know how long it lasted. It didn’t matter anymore, there was no up and no down and no duration in that staircase, only the next step and the list, and behind me a line of blood getting longer from step to step that I never once bothered to look at. My left foot had stopped landing flat a while back and I was throwing it onto each step with the hip alone, and I registered that the way you register the weather.
At some point, I realized I wasn’t furious anymore either.
That was worse. Fury rises and always comes back down in the end. The thing that had replaced it didn’t move at all, didn’t heat, didn’t ask for anything. It was simply there, sitting in the middle of me, and it was walking me up those steps.
The black thinned out.
Light ahead, grey and cold, and the sound of a space opening up.
I came out at the top.
I have no idea what that floor was, I registered a vault, a distance, air that went into my lungs wrong, because I didn’t look at any of it. There were four silhouettes standing near the mouth of the staircase, and they turned as one when I came up out of it.
Gabriel. Leon. Evelyn. Yanshu.
I know what they saw. A man hauling himself onto the last step with a dead leg, his face masked in dried blood, two brown lines under his eyes and fresh red running down his chin, his clothes burned open across the chest.
Leon’s mouth opened. Evelyn took half a step toward me and stopped herself. Yanshu’s hand went to his scabbard and came back off it.
Not one of them said a word, which tells you everything.
And behind them, at the far end, her back to the light, her white hair perfectly in place and that drop of amber turning slowly at her ear —
Alice.
"ALICE!"
My voice tore. I went toward her dragging the leg, and everything came at once and none of it in order, I wanted to ask her, I wanted to shout at her, I wanted her to tell me it was false, I wanted her to tell me it was true, I wanted to know what she’d been carrying and since when, I wanted to know who had been in my mouth that night, I wanted to put my arms around her, I wanted, I wanted, I wanted—
She turned her head as I reached her, close enough to touch, close enough to see that her eyes were dry and steady and that she had been waiting for me right here.
She smiled at me, with that smile she keeps only for me.
"Launch stage two."
Then everything went away at once.
And I was somewhere else.