Chapter 40: Weight

Chapter 40: Chapter 40: Weight

It was Marcus who pulled the knife out.

He did it fast, without warning, the way medics did on battlefields so the patient didn’t have time to brace. Elias barely felt it. Marcus pressed a wad of cloth torn from Tobin’s apron against the wound and wrapped it tight with a strip of the same apron, and Elias just stood there and let him.

"We have to finish the gate," Marcus said.

Elias looked at him blankly.

"The boss is still alive. If we leave, this place keeps filling up. In a week, it breaks, and the golems walk into the river district." Marcus tied off the bandage. "I’ll call it. You just follow. Can you do that?"

Elias nodded. He wasn’t sure he’d heard all of it.

The rest of the foundry passed like something happening to someone else. He remembered pieces of it later. A long catwalk deeper into the heat. Aveline walking ahead of him, her own back bandaged now, her steps slower but steady. A vast chamber at the heart of the foundry, where a crucible the size of a house hung from chains over a lake of molten iron, and something enormous rose from it, made of slag and fire, with a core like a sun in its chest.

He remembered Marcus’s voice, calm and flat in his ear. Elias, left. Elias, down. Elias, move. And his body moving, because it had learned how, while his mind stayed somewhere back on the bridge above the river.

He remembered Tobin’s last frost-seared cleaver going into the core, and the Foundry Heart cooling from white to orange to black.

[Boss defeated: Foundry Heart.]

[Level up: 13 → 14.]

[Gate collapse in 5:00.]

He read the windows without seeing them.

They walked out into the cold night air of the industrial river with seconds to spare. Behind them, the gate folded shut with a long, sighing breath. At the kiosk, the screen flashed green.

Rusted Foundry — CLEARED: Pierce, E. Bounty: 6,000. Payment processing.

Six thousand from the city. Clean, logged, legal. A month of filtration and change.

Elias looked at it for a long moment. Then he recalled his summons, walked to the bus stop, and sat down on the bench to wait for the night bus, staring at nothing.

The bandage on his arm was soaked through. He didn’t notice.

He went into the Sanctum because he didn’t know where else to go.

He couldn’t go to the hospital. Mira would take one look at his face and know something was wrong, and she’d ask, and for once in his life, he didn’t think he could lie to her. He couldn’t stay in his apartment. It was too quiet, and every time he closed his eyes, he saw a man tipping backward over a rail.

So he channeled for five seconds and stepped onto grey slate, and the warm gold light of the Crooked Kettle spilled out across the courtyard to meet him.

Tobin was waiting in the doorway, wiping his hands on what was left of his apron.

"There you are, lad," he said gently. "Come in. Let me look at that arm. I’ve got broth on, and there’s a bit of bread left from—"

"I don’t want soup."

It came out sharper than Elias meant. Much sharper. Tobin stopped.

"I don’t want soup," Elias said again, and his voice was rising, and he couldn’t stop it. "I don’t want bread. I don’t want anybody to look at my arm. I don’t want—" He stopped. His hands were shaking again. He shoved them into his pockets. "Just leave me alone, Tobin. Please."

Tobin looked at him for a long moment. There was no anger in his face. No hurt. Just a sort of quiet understanding, as if he’d seen this before, in some other doorway, in some other world.

"All right," Tobin said. "I’ll be in the kitchen."

He went back inside and closed the door softly behind him.

Elias walked to the firing range because it was the farthest place from the kitchen’s light. He went all the way down the firing line to the end, where Marcus’s old helmet still sat on the wooden post over Reyes’s carved initials, and sat down in the dirt with his back against the post.

The range was dark. The paper targets hung still at twenty-five, fifty, and a hundred meters. There was no wind, there never was, and no sound at all.

He sat there for a long time.

He’d killed things before. Rats, goblins, stalkers, golems. He’d killed a hydra and a chieftain and the Ossuary King. He’d never thought about any of them twice. They came out of gates and they wanted to hurt people, and when they died, they turned to dust or slag or glitter, and windows told you what you’d earned.

Kessler hadn’t turned to dust. Kessler had been a man with grey hair and patient eyes who’d said interesting, and then Elias had put a knife into him, and he had fallen into a river of fire. And no window had told Elias anything at all.

He looked down at his hands in the dark. His right hand had held the dagger. He could still feel the exact moment it slid under the ribs, the resistance and then the give.

At some point, he heard the kitchen door open and close again. He didn’t look up.

Nobody came after him. Nobody called his name. Through the bond, faint and far away, he could feel them in the Sanctum. Aveline, still and watchful. Tobin, moving around the kitchen. Marcus, somewhere close.

None of them were angry with him. He could feel that too. They were just waiting.

Marcus came after midnight.

He didn’t say anything at first. He just sat down in the dirt beside Elias with his back against the next post over, a first-aid kit in his lap. He took Elias’s left arm without asking, unwound the soaked apron bandage, and started cleaning the knife wound properly with something from a brown bottle that stung like fire.

Elias let him.

"First one I remember," Marcus said eventually, his eyes on the wound, "was a bridge. Second year in. Little stone bridge over a river, nothing special. We were holding the near side." He dabbed at the cut. "Kid came across at dusk with a rifle. Directorate uniform. I called out to him to stop. He didn’t. He raised the rifle. I fired first."

He threaded a curved needle with practiced fingers.

"I don’t remember his face," Marcus said. "I’ve tried. I remember his boots. They were too big for him. Laced all the way up and still too big, like they’d been handed down from someone taller." The needle went in. Elias hissed. "Didn’t sleep for four days after. Snapped at everyone. My sergeant let me. Never said a word. Just made sure I ate."

"Does it get easier?" Elias asked. His voice came out rough.

Marcus pulled the stitch tight and was quiet for a moment.

"It gets quieter," he said. "That’s not the same thing. You’ll carry him. You should. The day it doesn’t weigh anything is the day to worry about yourself." He tied off the stitch and started the next one. "But listen to me, Pierce. You stood on that bridge and gave six people a way out. You meant it, too. I heard you. Three of them took it. That’s three people walking around Merridan tonight because you gave them a chance instead of a knife."

Elias stared at the dark targets down the range.

"And the other three looked at that chance and decided they’d rather kill you," Marcus said. "Kill her." He nodded toward the courtyard. "That’s theirs. Not yours. You don’t get to carry their choice. Just your own."

He tied the last stitch, wrapped the arm in clean white gauze, and patted it once.

Then the kitchen door opened again, and Tobin came out carrying a bowl.

He walked all the way down the dark firing line without a word, set the bowl down in the dirt beside Elias, and laid a spoon across it. Barley and onion and a bit of the good ham. Steam curled up into the still air. Then Tobin turned around and walked back to the kitchen without saying anything at all.

Elias looked at the bowl for a long time.

Then he picked it up and ate every bite.

When he finally looked up, the courtyard archway at the end of the range was no longer empty. Aveline stood there in the gap, shield on her arm and her bandaged back to the range, facing out toward the grey plain. She wasn’t watching him. She was watching everything else. Making sure nothing came near.

She was still standing there, exactly like that, when he fell asleep against the post an hour later.

She was still standing there when he woke up.

"Morning," she said, without turning around.

Elias looked at her, then at the empty bowl beside him, then at the neat white gauze around his arm. He didn’t feel better. Not really. But he didn’t feel alone.

He understood something then. It had been building since the first dinner at Tobin’s table, since the cathedral, maybe since before. It didn’t matter how bad his worst day was. They weren’t going anywhere.

"Morning," he said.