Chapter 20: One Chance

Chapter 20: Chapter 20: One Chance

He made it half a block toward the hospital before he heard the old woman.

It wasn’t a scream. It was smaller than that, a thin, outraged "No, that’s my—" cut off sharp. Elias stopped on the sidewalk. The crowd flowed around him toward the SUVs and flashing lights at the main entrance, but the sound had come from the other direction, from the alley that ran behind the station to its emergency exit.

He turned around.

The alley was where the walking wounded had ended up. Twenty people, maybe more, had come up the back stairs instead of the front, and now they sat against the brick wall clutching wrists and heads and ankles, waiting for medics who were two hundred meters away at the other entrance. A woman in a green coat sat on an overturned crate. A teenage boy cradled his arm at a bad angle. And against the far wall, Elias saw a man with a bleeding forehead and a ten-year-old boy pressed against his side.

The father from the third car.

Five hunters were working their way down the line as if they were shopping.

They weren’t Association. Elias knew the type at a glance: mismatched armor, guild patches torn off, cheap enchanted gear from the back of shops like Ozzie’s. Break chasers. Scavengers who followed gate alerts across the city to pick through whatever the monsters and the guilds left behind. Usually they stuck to monster parts.

Usually.

One of them was pulling the watch off the father’s wrist while the boy watched. Another had the teenager’s phone. The biggest, a broad man with a shaved scalp and a short sword on his hip, held the old woman’s purse and was picking through it with two fingers.

"Salvage rights," he said pleasantly, to no one in particular. "Gate break zone. All property’s forfeit. Association rules."

There was no such rule, and everyone in the alley knew it. But everyone in the alley was hurt and frightened, the scavengers were awakened, and that was the only rule that mattered.

Elias checked his mana. Two summons had cost sixty. Two recalls had cost ten more. Even with three new levels behind him, he had forty-one left.

Enough for one.

He pulled his scarf higher and walked into the alley.

"Put it back," he said.

The big man looked up.

He took in the scarf, the hood, the bandaged arm, the guild dagger on Elias’s belt. Elias watched him do the math every awakened did: no aura, no rank pressure, no guild colors. Nobody.

"Walk on, kid," the man said. "This doesn’t concern you."

"Put it back. All of it. Then leave."

One of the other scavengers laughed. Another, the one holding the father’s watch, squinted at Elias. "Royce. He came up out of the station. The back stairs."

"So he’s lucky," Royce said. "Lucky gets you through a gate. It doesn’t get you through me."

He set the old woman’s purse down on a crate, carefully, the way you’d set down something you planned to come back for. Then he drew the short sword. It was a better blade than the rest of him deserved, enchanted, its edge shimmering a faint, hungry orange.

"Last time," he said. "Walk on."

Elias didn’t move. He stood in the middle of the alley, between the scavengers and the people on the ground, and made himself speak calmly, the way he imagined Aveline would.

"You get one chance," he said. "Drop the sword, put everything back, and walk away. Nobody gets hurt."

Royce smiled.

"Here’s yours," he said, and lunged.

He was fast, C-rank fast, faster than anything Elias had faced outside a gate. The orange edge came straight for his stomach. But Elias had spent weeks of nights behind a knight’s shoulder learning how fast things came at you, and he’d spent his thirty mana before Royce’s back foot left the ground.

The air folded open between them.

Aveline came out of it already moving. Her shield met the sword mid-thrust with a crack like a church bell. She turned her wrist, hooked the blade with the shield’s rim, and wrenched, and the enchanted sword spun out of Royce’s hand, flew end over end down the alley, and clanged off a dumpster twenty feet away.

Royce stared at his empty hand.

Elias was already behind him. Quick Step, one stride. He caught the outstretched wrist with his good hand, twisted it up and back the way the alley fights on Larch Street had taught him long before any system existed, and drove his shoulder into the elbow.

It broke with a sound like a snapping branch.

Royce screamed and dropped to his knees. Elias let him go.

The other four looked at their leader on the ground. They looked at the knight in full plate who had stepped out of thin air. They looked at Elias.

"The watch," Elias said quietly. "The phone. Everything."

They dropped it all on the asphalt and ran. Royce staggered after them, clutching his arm, and didn’t look back once.

The alley went quiet.

Elias picked up the purse and gave it back to the old woman in the green coat. She took it with both hands and held it against her chest, and she didn’t say anything, but her chin was trembling. He gave the phone back to the teenager. Then he crossed the alley to the father from the third car and held out the watch.

The man didn’t take it right away. He was looking at Elias’s face, or the part of it the scarf didn’t cover.

"You," he said slowly. "You’re the one from the train. You came through the window."

Elias didn’t answer. He just held out the watch until the man took it. It was old and cheap, with a cracked leather strap, the kind of watch someone wears because of who gave it to them.

"It was my dad’s," the man said quietly. "Thank you. For the watch. For—" He looked down at his son. "For all of it."

The boy wasn’t looking at Elias. He was staring at Aveline, who stood in the middle of the alley with her shield on her arm and her sword sheathed, watching the street the scavengers had fled down.

"Is she with you?" the boy whispered.

"Medics are at the front," Elias said. "Get your dad’s head looked at. Tell them about the arm too," he added to the teenager.

He recalled Aveline. She vanished in a fold of white-gold light, and somebody gasped.

Then Elias turned to leave, and stopped.

The enchanted sword was still lying beside the dumpster, its edge glowing faintly orange in the gloom. He knew exactly what it was worth. He’d hauled enough loot through enough gates to price a weapon at a glance. Ozzie would pay a month of Mira’s treatment for it, maybe more, and wouldn’t ask a single question.

He stood over it for a long moment.

Then he left it where it lay. The Association would find it, along with five people’s worth of descriptions and a man with a broken arm. He wasn’t a scavenger. Whatever else he became, he wasn’t going to become that.

He walked out of the alley and turned toward Merridan General, his cracked arm throbbing, his back stinging where the stalker’s claws had raked it, his mana scraped to the bottom.

Halfway there, a thought caught up with him and wouldn’t let go.

Royce had seen Aveline. He’d seen a knight step out of nothing to protect a kid in a scarf. And Royce was walking around Merridan right now with a broken arm and a reason to remember.

Elias kept walking. But he already knew what Marcus was going to say about it.