Chapter 44: Grey

On the eighteenth day, Roderick left a fish on Aren’s rock, and when Aren said thank you, Roderick threw a stone at his head.

On the twenty-first, he showed Aren which streets the Bell-Eaters slept in. He never said a word, only pointed silently and then went away.

By the twenty-fifth he had started calling Aren "the ghost", which was at least an improvement on "not real".

And somewhere in those days, Aren saw that Roderick was stuck, before Roderick saw it himself.

It showed in small things. He ate crouched over his food like an animal guarding a kill, tearing at raw crab with his teeth, because he had stopped bothering with fire a year ago. He never slept, not properly. He dozed sitting up against a wall with the bone blade across his knees, and every few minutes his eyes snapped suddenly open, bright and empty, checking the room for ghosts.

And it showed in his body. Aren had watched him climb the hanging streets for two weeks now, and watched him kill three grey eels at the edge of the black sea, fast and brutal. Roderick was undeniably strong. The Abyss had burned him all the way to the Flesh stage in one long hard year. But for a whole year after that, nothing had changed, and the System showed it plainly every time Aren looked.

[Roderick. Rank D: Flesh.][Tempering progress: 94%.]

Ninety-four percent, and it had been ninety-four percent for a long, long time.

"How long have you been at that number?" Aren asked him on the twenty-sixth day.

They were sitting on the underside of a bridge high in the hanging city, eating eel. Aren had cooked his over a little fire of dried jelly bells, which burned with a pale blue flame and smelled like the sea. Roderick had refused the fire and was eating his raw.

"What number?" Roderick asked, his mouth full.

"Your tempering. You can feel it, can’t you? How close you are."

Roderick stopped chewing and looked at him with those wide, unblinking eyes.

"Since day four hundred and something. Maybe three hundred. The numbers go soft after a while." He shrugged. "It’s close. I can feel it. Like a sneeze that won’t come." He tore off another strip of eel. "Doesn’t matter."

"It matters."

"Why?"

’Because you’re the only investment I’ve got left in the whole of the dark. Because every inch you grow, I grow a hundred.’

"Because Bone stage is harder to kill," Aren answered instead.

Roderick stared at him blankly, then went back to eating.

[Roderick. Hostility: 79% → 81%.]

’Apparently caring about his survival is an insult down here.’

Aren went at it the same way he had always gone at work: he watched, he made lists, and he made a plan.

The tempering was not stuck because Roderick was weak. It was stuck because the Abyss had forged him in a hurry, like a blacksmith in wartime forging swords too hot and too fast and leaving flaws in the steel. His body had the strength for Bone, but it was missing everything else. It was a year of sleeping sitting up, a year of raw food, a year without ever once being still.

So Aren started fixing what the Abyss had skipped.

He cooked first. Every meal, on the pale blue fire, he patiently cooked twice as much as he needed and left half on a flat stone beside Roderick. Roderick ignored it for three days. On the fourth, Aren came back from the black sea to find the stone empty and Roderick pretending to be asleep.

He found them a room, too. It wasn’t the bedroom with the seven hundred marks on its walls but a small high storeroom at the top of a hanging tower, with one window, one door, and walls too thick for anything to climb through. He blocked the window with a broken table and showed Roderick that the door could be barred from inside.

"I don’t need walls," Roderick said.

"No. But your body does."

On the twenty-eighth night, for the first time in more than a year, Roderick lay down flat on the stone floor and really, deeply slept. Aren sat by the barred door with his knife across his knees and listened to him breathe, slow and even, like someone who had forgotten what safe felt like and had just remembered.

He never used his skill in all that time, because he hunted nothing hard enough to need it. He was saving his strength, he told himself, and letting Roderick make the kills so the growth would be Roderick’s.

The cold in his left side shifted every night, restless.

He told himself it could wait.

On the thirtieth day, it finally happened.

They had gone down to the shore to hunt together, as they did most mornings now. Roderick was ahead, crouched at the edge of the black water with his bone blade ready, watching for the ripple that meant eels. Aren was behind him with his knife, watching the cliffs.

The eel came up out of the water silently. It wasn’t the small grey kind they usually ate. This one was long and thick and black, as long as three men, with a mouth that opened sideways.

[Abyss Eel. Rank D: Bone.]

Roderick never waited for anything, and he didn’t wait now. He went at it with the blade, the eel twisted and struck, and they were fighting at the very edge of the still black sea, fast and silent in the grey sand.

Aren forced himself to stand where he was. ’His kill. His growth. Don’t you dare help!’

He watched Roderick take a hit across the shoulder that would have broken a weaker body, then another. And at the last moment, when the eel opened its sideways mouth to swallow him whole, Roderick drove the bone blade up into its throat with both hands and held it there while the eel thrashed and screamed and finally lay limp.

Roderick knelt in the sand beside it, breathing hard. He cut deep into its body and pulled out the core. It was huge, the size of his fist, glowing a dark, cold blue. He held it for a second, then pressed it hard against his chest.

Aren saw it sink straight in.

Roderick stiffened, arched, and folded forward onto his hands with a sound that was half scream and half laugh. The skin over his arms rippled as if something were sliding into place underneath it. Deep in his body, Aren heard a dull, heavy click, like a stone dropping into a well.

Roderick lifted his head. His bright, mad eyes were huge.

"I felt it," he whispered. "In my bones. I felt it."

[Anchor progressed.][Roderick. Rank D: Flesh → Bone.][Source: Investment recorded.][Mirror Return triggered.]

The small wheel appeared in front of Aren’s eyes, the first since the fall. He hadn’t realized how badly he had missed it until he saw it spin.

It went past x10, crawled across the wide band of x100, and stopped.

[Result: x100.][Return: Tempering progress x100.][Rank D: Skin Tempering complete.][Rank D: Flesh Tempering begins.]

It started in his skin and went inward. The burning he had lived with for thirty days finished all at once, like a fever breaking, and then a new heat began, deeper, in the muscles of his arms and legs and back, slow and heavy and grinding. He staggered and caught himself on a rock.

When he could breathe again he straightened up and looked at Roderick, still kneeling beside the eel, laughing quietly with his face in his hands.

Then he looked down.

There was blood on the sand, Roderick’s blood, from the wound on his shoulder, running down his arm and dripping onto the grey grains in a slow, steady line.

It was grey.

It was not dark, or black in the poor light. It was grey like ash, like the sand itself, like rain on a window. Aren stared at it, then at the dead eel, and its blood was grey too. He looked at his own hands, at the cut on his knuckle from that morning and the thin line welling up in it.

Grey.

Slowly, he looked up at the drifting jellies overhead. Some were blue and some were green. He searched the dark for the faint pinkish ones he had seen on the first day, the ones he had thought looked like the inside of a seashell.

He couldn’t find them, though they were up there, he knew they were. He just couldn’t see what made them different anymore.

[Familiar of Nothing: starving.][It has eaten: the color red.]

He sat down on the sand very slowly, as if his legs had forgotten how.

Thirty days, and he had fed it once, on the ninth day, a little hardness from a Bell-Eater’s plate. Then he had been patient and let Roderick make the kills and told himself it could wait.

It hadn’t waited. It had simply reached for the closest thing it could find, like a starving man eating whatever’s in front of him, and the closest thing had been him.

"Ghost?"

Roderick was watching him, and for once those bright eyes were steady.

"Something’s wrong with your side." Roderick spoke quietly. "It’s been wrong since you came. I see it when you sleep. Something curled up in there, white. It moves." He tilted his head. "It’s awake now. It’s looking at me."

Aren pressed his hand against his left side. The cold was there along the scar, and it wasn’t sleeping. It was watching.

He didn’t sleep that night. He sat at his rock by the shore and scratched the new entry into the stone, slowly, letter by letter.

DAY 30. SKIN DONE. FLESH BEGUN. RODERICK: BONE. FEED IT EVERY DAY. NO MORE RED.

He looked at the last line until he finally understood that he would never see it again. Not the word, not the color of the thing it named. Not blood or fire, or the pink of the sky over the river at sunset on the night he’d sat on the quay with Mira, eating fried fish.

He tried hard to remember what that sky had looked like, and he remembered that it was beautiful.

He couldn’t remember why.