Chapter 43: The Boy Who Counted

For a week, somebody followed him.

Aren lost the footprints on the bridges on the tenth day, found a cold fire pit full of fish bones picked clean with great care on the twelfth, and on the fourteenth came back to his rock to find an empty crab shell sitting on top of it. It had not been dropped. It had been placed deliberately, right in the middle of the stone, like a coin left on a table.

’Either that’s a welcome present or a threat. Down here I honestly can’t tell the difference.’

By the fifteenth day he could constantly feel the eyes on his back whenever he climbed into the hanging city. On the sixteenth day, the watcher stopped watching.

Aren was asleep in the upside-down bedroom, his back against the wall of scratched marks and his knife in his lap, when the silence changed. Down here silence had a texture, like the weave of cloth, and he had learned to feel it. Something had quietly pulled a thread.

He opened his eyes slowly.

A blade was resting against his throat.

It was bone, long and curved and carefully polished to an edge, like a tooth pulled from something enormous. The hand holding it was thin and grey with dirt, the nails broken to the quick. And above the hand, crouched over him in the faint blue light from the window, was a face.

It had been a boy’s face once. Aren could see that much. Under the matted hair that hung to its shoulders, under the dirt and the patchy beard and the scars that crossed its cheeks like roads on a map, there was a boy of eighteen or nineteen. But the eyes were not a boy’s eyes. They were wide and bright and they never blinked, and they looked at Aren as you would look at a ghost you had seen too many times to fear anymore.

"You’re not real."

Its voice was cracked and hoarse, as if it had not been used in a long time, or had been used far too much, talking to nobody.

"I’m real." Aren kept his hands exactly where they were.

"That’s what they all say." The bone blade pressed a little harder. Aren’s tempered skin held, but only just. "The woman with the bread. The old man who sings. My mother. They come and sit where you’re sitting and say they’re real, and then I blink and they’re gone." The bright eyes searched his face. "You’re the best one yet. You bleed."

"I do bleed. Quite a lot, lately."

[Unknown individual.][Rank D: Flesh.][Hostility: 61%.]

Rank D, Flesh stage, one stage above him. Whoever this was, he had been down here long enough for the Abyss to forge him.

And Aren knew him.

It took a few seconds, because the face had changed so much. But he had stood in a clearing in the Training Rift a lifetime ago and heard a boy with a cracking voice say it came up under him and pulled him down and he was gone. He had read a list of the dead nailed to the doors of the Great Hall. He had watched Mira carefully avoid saying a name for two whole evenings.

"Roderick," he said softly.

The bone blade stopped moving instantly.

"Team Four." Aren went on slowly. "The Training Rift. The first-year exam. Gravemaw came up out of the moss and pulled you under."

The boy above him actually stopped breathing. Then the bright eyes filled all at once and spilled over, cutting clean lines through the dirt on his cheeks. He didn’t seem to notice he was crying openly. The rest of his face never changed.

"Nobody has said my name," Roderick whispered, "in seven hundred and twelve days."

Aren thought about the marks on the walls of this room, groups of five running all the way around. He had stopped counting at three hundred.

Seven hundred and twelve days. On the surface, the Training Rift had been ten weeks ago.

’Oh no. Oh, that’s really bad!’

"It’s been ten weeks up there. Ten weeks, Roderick."

He watched the words land. He watched Roderick try to hold them, like a coal someone had dropped into his hands, and he watched him fail. The boy’s face folded inward like paper in a fire.

Then the bone blade came down.

It missed his throat easily, because it was never aimed there. Roderick had pulled it back and swung it wild and blind at the wall beside Aren’s head, at the scratched marks, at the seven hundred and twelve days. The blade cut a long white line through them, then another. Roderick was screaming now, a raw broken sound, hacking at the wall and the marks and the three words under the last one, THEY NEVER CAME, as if he could cut them out of the stone.

Aren rolled quickly away and came up on his feet.

Roderick turned on him.

There was nothing left of the boy in his face now, only the Abyss looking out. He came straight across the upside-down room with the bone blade low, moving like the creatures of the hanging city moved, low and sudden, on legs that had climbed walls for two years. He was faster than Aren and stronger than Aren, and his Flesh-tempered body hit like a swinging door.

Aren didn’t even try to match him. He let Street Fighter’s Instinct read him instead, and what it read was a body that had learned to kill monsters and had forgotten how to fight people. Roderick swung at where Aren was instead of where he was going. He never feinted and never thought ahead. Every blow was the whole of him, thrown at once, like a drowning man grabbing at a rope.

Aren made him miss, and miss, and miss again. He moved between the iron chandeliers as he had with the Bell-Eater, making Roderick turn and chase. He left his skill alone and his knife in its sheath. He was not going to feed the cold in his side on this.

When Roderick finally overreached and buried his blade in the plaster of the ceiling-floor, Aren stepped in behind him, hooked a foot around his ankle and put him down on the stone with an arm across his throat.

Roderick bucked once, twice, and then finally gave up.

He lay there under Aren’s arm, breathing hard, staring at the window.

"I waited." His voice had gone flat and empty. "On the shore. Every day. For the first hundred days I went to the place where I fell and waited. I thought, the Academy will come. The instructors. Somebody." He laughed, and it was a terrible sound. "They had a list, didn’t they? Of the dead. And my name was on it."

Aren didn’t answer, because he didn’t have to.

"Ten weeks," Roderick whispered. "They forgot me in ten weeks."

[Roderick. Hostility: 61% → 79%.]

’And I’m the one who told him.’

He let go of Roderick’s throat slowly and sat back warily.

They sat on opposite sides of the upside-down room while the jellies drifted past the window.

Roderick told him things in pieces, like water coming out of a cracked jug. How he had fallen for what felt like a whole day. How he’d woken on the grey shore beside a dead shore crawler that had broken open under him, and eaten from it raw for a week because there was nothing else. How the Abyss had started on him in the second month, his skin first and then his flesh, burning him into something harder without ever asking. How he’d found Varn hanging from the sky and climbed into it, and stayed, because at least the city had walls.

He talked about the voices too. The woman with the bread, the old man who sang, his mother, who came and sat right where Aren was sitting now. He talked about them as people in the lower city talked about the weather.

"Are they real?" Aren asked.

Roderick looked at him with those wide, unblinking eyes.

"Are you?" he asked quietly.

Aren had no answer to that either.

He thought it through properly later, after Roderick had climbed out of the window and up into the hanging streets without a word.

Roderick knew the Abyss, two years of it. He knew which crabs were poison, which shadows moved, and which streets of Varn were safe to sleep in and which belonged to the Bell-Eaters. He had survived where nobody should have survived, and every hour of it was written on his body.

He was also mad. He hated the surface and everyone who came from it, and he had just found out the surface had forgotten him in ten weeks while he counted seven hundred days. He would probably kill Aren the first time a voice told him to.

And he hated him. Seventy-nine percent.

A window opened in front of Aren’s eyes, and he had been waiting for it.

[Hostility threshold met.][Anchor slots: 2/3. One slot available.][Anchor this target?]

He sat with it quietly for some time. A broken boy the whole world had given up on, worth nothing to anyone, unless somebody was willing to hold on.

He thought about the boy screaming at the wall, cutting through his own count.

’Yes.’

[Anchor established: Roderick.][Anchors: 3/3.]

Far above him, somewhere in the upside-down streets, a voice began to sing. It was thin and cracked and old, a song with no words.

He couldn’t tell if it was Roderick, or one of Roderick’s ghosts.

He scratched the entry onto the wall beside the window, under the long white cuts.

DAY 16. SKIN 26%. HIS NAME IS RODERICK. I GAVE HIM TEN WEEKS. HE GAVE ME 712 DAYS.