Chapter 39: Butterfingers

The sand moved under his feet like a living thing.

Aren hit it running, and it was already tilting, the whole oval floor of the arena sliding slowly toward the long black seam in the middle like water toward a drain. Every step sank to the ankle and slid back half as far as it went forward. Behind him people were screaming, and ahead of him the cold was pouring up out of the seam so hard that it burned his face.

Vivienne was sliding faster than he was running.

She had dropped to one knee and driven her sword into the sand to hold herself, and the sand simply flowed lazily around the blade, carrying her and the sword together toward the edge. The silver light around her was flickering out. She was looking down into the black with her jaw set and her hands white on the hilt, and she wasn’t calling for help.

’Naturally. She’d rather fall into the Abyss than ask.’

He was not going to reach her in time. He knew it instantly, the same way he had always known numbers: twenty paces of sliding sand, and she would be over the edge before he was halfway there.

So he stopped thinking like a Servant.

The Moonlit Step came to him without his asking. He shifted his weight back, breathed out, and moved half a step farther than his body could, then half a step farther again, and again, his feet barely touching the sand, skimming across the top of it like a stone skipping across a pond. Someone in the stands might see it, Aldous Penrose or the commander of the Royal Knights running down the steps. He didn’t care. For the first time in either of his lives, he didn’t count the cost first.

He reached her just as the sand gave way under her knees.

She went over the edge, and he threw himself flat on the tilting sand and caught her wrist with both hands.

Her weight nearly pulled him straight in after her.

He was lying on his stomach at the lip of the seam with his arms stretched down into the black, and she was hanging below him with her sword gone, her free hand clawing at the edge and her face turned up toward him. The cold coming up from the dark was so strong that his fingers were already going numb around her wrist. Below her there was no bottom, only black and the low, broken note of the song, rising out of it like breath from a throat.

His hands were around her bare wrist, skin on skin.

It did not matter anymore. There was no cloth over his face and no False Face to break. He was only himself, and she was looking straight at him, and for the first time she actually saw him.

Her grey eyes went wide.

"You," she said.

He didn’t have the breath to answer, so he set his knees in the sliding sand and pulled.

It wasn’t enough. He was Rank E, Level 7, she was wearing silver armor, and the sand under him was moving. He felt himself slide forward an inch, then two, toward the edge, and she felt it too. He saw her understand it, and he saw what she decided, because it was exactly what he would have decided in her place.

Her fingers started to open.

"No! Don’t you dare."

He looked down past her into the black, at the seam itself, at the edge of the sand where it fell away into nothing and pulled him in with it. He thought one word.

’Zero.’

For one second, the pull of the seam went to nothing.

The sand stopped sliding and the cold stopped pouring. The black mouth under them simply let go, just as Aldous Penrose’s hands had let go of his sword in the white circle, and in that one quiet second Aren rolled onto his back, pulled with everything in his body, and threw her.

She came up out of the seam like a stone from a sling. She flew clean over his head and landed hard in the sand three paces away on the solid side, rolled, and came to a stop on her hands and knees, alive.

In the same second, whatever Aren had zeroed in the seam was zeroed in him too: the part of him that held on, his weight, whatever it was that kept a body on the ground. He went light as a feather and lay there helplessly on the very lip of the black, weightless and unable to move.

Then the second ended.

The seam pulled again, harder than before, almost angry, and he slid. His heels went over the edge, then his knees. He dug his fingers into the sand and it ran through them like water, until his hand caught the edge of a broken flagstone buried under it, part of the old floor of the arena, and held on.

He was hanging by his fingers with the black below him and the moon above him.

’Fine. Fine. I can work with this. Probably.’

Someone was standing over him.

He looked up. Vivienne was still struggling on her hands and knees three paces away, trying to stand, and the commander of the Royal Knights was still on the steps.

It was Aldous Penrose.

Aldous had come down over the rail, and Aren had no idea why. To run, maybe, as Darius had run in the Training Rift, crossing the sand to get away from the screaming crowd. Or maybe he had seen the Servant throw himself onto the sand and followed without thinking, like people follow a fire. It didn’t matter. He was here now, standing at the edge of the seam with his weak chin and his clean hands, looking down at Aren hanging by his fingers over the dark.

At first Aldous only stared at him.

Aren saw all of it happen in his face. The fear came first, then the surprise, and then Aldous remembered the white circle. The empty hands over his head, the whole yard laughing, Butterfingers, Penrose.

"Aldous. Give me your hand."

"You’re cursed," Aldous whispered. "Celia said so."

He put his boot on Aren’s fingers.

He didn’t stamp or kick. He just pressed, slowly, as you press on something you want to be sure is dead, and he leaned his weight into it and watched Aren’s face the whole time.

Aren’s fingers slipped off the stone.

The last thing he saw from the surface was Aldous Penrose’s face, pale and frightened and satisfied, getting smaller. And behind him, rising to her feet in the silver light, Vivienne, with her mouth open, screaming something.

It was his name, and she had never said it before.

"Aren!"

Then the black closed over him.

He fell for a very long time.

It was cold and silent and utterly dark in a way nothing on the surface had ever been dark. There was no wind, though he was falling, and no up or down. There was only the low, broken note of the song, far away and fading.

Then there was light, small and blue and calm, opening in the dark in front of his eyes, as patient as it had always been.

[Primary Anchor has completed her Trial.][Vivienne Ashgrave: Rank E → Rank D.][Source: Investment recorded. Hidden aid. Trial protected.][Mirror Return triggered.]

A small wheel spun in the dark. He watched it dreamily, the way you watch something in a dream, until it slowed and stopped.

[Result: x100.][Return: Breakthrough energy x100.][Rank E: Level 7 → Level 8 → Level 9 → Level 10.][Host’s Class Trial: An Anchor must break through before the Host.][Trial completed.]

The heat came all at once, less like a wave than like the sun. It filled him from the inside and burned through every vein and bone and inch of skin, until he wasn’t falling through the dark anymore but burning in it, a small bright coal dropping into the Abyss.

[Host: Rank E → Rank D.]

’Rank D. In the middle of falling to my death. Excellent timing, as always.’

He was still burning when a second window opened beneath the first.

[Host has sacrificed himself for the Primary Anchor.][Investment recorded: Life.][This is the greatest investment the Host can make.][The Anchor survived her breakthrough. She has awakened her second class skill: Moonlit Familiar (Grade B).][Mirror Return triggered.]

The second wheel was huge.

It was golden and it filled the whole dark around him, just as the Genesis Wheel had filled the Great Hall. Its segments glowed: x10, x100, x1,000. And one, very thin and deep red, at the edge.

It spun, and he fell, and it spun with him, and the pointer slowed, and crawled, and crossed into the red.

[Result: x10,000.][Return: Moonlit Familiar. Grade B +4.][Warning: The returned skill is being rewritten by the Host’s class.][Zero does not accept the moon.][Skill acquired: Familiar of Nothing (Grade SSS).][Familiar of Nothing has bonded to the Host.][Resting form: The Scar.][It is hungry.]

Something cold settled into his left side, along the long scar from his ribs to his hip. It was deep and quiet, like snow falling into an empty room.

He never felt himself hit the bottom.