Chapter 106: One More Thing That Stays

Chapter 106: One More Thing That Stays

The next morning, the shorter of the moss’s two strands had almost caught up with the first, and a third fleck had appeared on a different mat. Silas touched the mats lightly with the damp cloth and left the rest alone. Then he went to Sorel’s lecture, and to lunch, and came back and sat on the floor.

That became the shape of the days.

***

The first evening, he only tried to follow. He sat still with his eyes closed, kept his thread narrow and level, and let the visitor drift wherever it liked. It went from the shelf to the desk to the windowsill, and he followed it the whole way without losing it once. It was the first time that had happened.

The second day, Elyra knocked in the late afternoon with two sheets of paper. She stayed in her coat.

"I’ve got a seminar in twenty minutes," she said, crossing the threshold. The reading came and went; he dismissed it. "I need your opinion. Which one?"

She held them up side by side. The first was a careful drawing of the puddle spirit, every line clean. The second was messier, drawn halfway through changing, legs dissolving into fins, and somehow it looked as though it might move off the page.

"The second," Silas said.

"The first is more accurate," Elyra said.

"The second looks like it’s about to cheat you again," Silas said.

Elyra looked at the second sheet for a long moment. Then she rolled up the first and tucked it under her arm.

"That’s what I thought," she said, pleased, as if he’d passed a test she hadn’t mentioned. "I just wanted someone else to say it." She was gone again in under five minutes.

***

The third day, he practiced with Alden and Dagna in the post field, carrying the training crate through the posts with hold and through and wall until they could do it without thinking. It went well, and it took more out of him than he expected. That evening, nothing worked.

He found Nim and his own thread. He couldn’t find the visitor at all, though it was sitting in plain view on the bookshelf. When he tried harder, he felt himself start to push, stopped, and grew angrier. By the fourth attempt his head ached and the second layer of the room felt like fog.

"You’re doing the shouting face," Nim said.

Silas opened his eyes. "I’m not shouting."

"You’re shouting inside," Nim said.

He looked at the visitor on the shelf and admitted that Nim was probably right.

His communicator buzzed while he was still sitting there. Mara.

I worked out your Harrowglass dates. You’d leave the morning after I arrived, and I’d spend my visit in a guesthouse wondering if you’d fallen in a drain. I’ve asked Dr Kerr for the third date instead, after you’re back. She’s agreed. Don’t argue. I want you there.

He read it twice and felt something in his chest unknot that he hadn’t known was tied.

I’m not arguing, he wrote. Thank you.

The fourth day, he didn’t practice at all.

He decided, deliberately, that he wouldn’t. He ate a proper dinner, read the field handbook for an hour, and slept ten hours, letting the room’s improved recovery do its work. Nim slept on his chest the whole night, which seemed to be approval.

The fifth day, he tried again, and the fog was gone.

Nim moved around the room while he sat with his eyes closed, and Silas kept him separate from the visitor the whole time, even when Nim deliberately sat right beside it on the desk to see what would happen. Once he lost the visitor behind the desk lamp, and instead of pushing, he narrowed the thread, waited, and found it again.

***

On the sixth evening, he sat down on the floor and decided to try everything at once.

"Move around," he told Nim first. "Anywhere. Don’t tell me where. And don’t sit still too long."

Nim considered this. "Extra?"

"Extra," Silas said.

"Then I’ll be very confusing," Nim said, with satisfaction.

The visitor was on the windowsill when Silas closed his eyes. He let his thread out, thin and level, and set his own weight aside. Nim, quick and bright, already padding along the end of the bed. The visitor: small, cool, faint, on the sill.

Then it moved, drifting toward the bookshelf, and somewhere between the sill and the shelf, it stopped glowing.

When he opened his eyes for a second, there was no speck anywhere in the room. Territorial Awareness reported the desk, the bed, the kettle, Nim landing on the floor with a soft thump. Nothing else.

He closed his eyes again.

The visitor hadn’t left. He was nearly sure of that. It had only stopped letting itself be seen, and he’d have to find it with nothing but the thread.

Nim went past him, a bright spark moving left to right. Silas let him go by. He listened for the other thing.

There. High, he thought, and to the right. The top of the bookshelf.

He held his attention there, and after a moment he realized he was wrong. He couldn’t actually locate a presence there. He had pictured the visitor in its usual place, then mistaken the expectation for something he could feel.

The old reflex rose up immediately: Push. Reach. Find it.

He didn’t.

He let the thread go thinner still, almost nothing, and stopped looking anywhere in particular. Somewhere in the corridor outside, a door slammed, loud and sudden, and his whole body jerked. Nim’s spark jumped too, startled. Silas breathed out, let the noise go past, and kept the thread exactly where it was.

And there it was. Not on the shelf at all. Low down, by the leg of the desk, so faint he could have missed it a hundred times. Small and cool and very still.

He didn’t move toward it. He let his attention rest on it lightly, the way you’d watch a bird on a branch without turning your head.

It moved slowly toward the kitchenette. Silas followed it along the base of the counter, nearly losing it at the corner, then kept contact as it curved back toward the desk. He let his attention follow the movement without forcing the thread after it.

Then something happened that hadn’t happened before.

The small cool presence changed. It wasn’t a word. It wasn’t anything he could have written down. It felt, very briefly, as though it had noticed him noticing it. Like someone glancing up from a book because they’d felt eyes on them, and then, unbothered, glancing back down. The coolness brightened for an instant, turned toward him, and settled again.

He wasn’t sure it meant anything except I know you’re there. But it hadn’t pulled away.

He held that, light and steady, for a long time.

[Spirit Communion — Assimilation: 100%.]

[Spirit Communion acquired permanently. Temporary slot available.]

Silas opened his eyes.

The room looked exactly the same. Nim sat on the end of the bed. By the leg of the desk, a pale speck had reappeared, glowing faintly, as if to show him he’d been right. He could still sense the visitor while looking at Nim. The contact held without the effort that had tightened his shoulders all evening. He read the permanent-acquisition message again to be certain. His sixth permanent Talent. He could finally use it beyond these walls.

"I did it," he said out loud, before he could stop himself. "Nim. I did it."

He heard how absurdly triumphant he sounded and didn’t care at all.

Nim looked at him. "Did what?"

"The thing. The listening." Silas laughed, a little helplessly. "I can do it properly now. It’s mine."

"You found the little one," Nim said. "I saw. It was by the desk."

"It was by the desk," Silas said.

"You were smiling at the floor." Nim seemed to find that explanation enough. "Is it extra night?"

"It’s extra night," Silas said.

***

Later, when Nim had been fed and was asleep, Silas went to the door.

He stood on the threshold for a moment with his hand on the frame, then stepped into the corridor and closed the door.

Beyond the threshold, he felt the familiar reduction in strength. He stood in the ordinary corridor and closed his eyes and let a thread out.

It was much fainter out here, like listening through a wall. But behind him, through the closed door, he could still feel Nim: a small bright spark, asleep.

And farther down the corridor, near the window at the head of the stairs, there was something else. Tiny. Cool. Barely there. He wondered how often he’d walked past something like it without noticing.

Silas stood in the cold corridor and grinned at the dark.

The sense was still there. He could take it with him.