Chapter 187: Five Points

(Alash Vortex POV)

The feeling of falling went on.

Moments ago I had bonded one person, plainly, with her consent, knowing exactly what I was choosing. Nobody had chosen this. I had opened a door to let one person through, and whatever was on the other side was coming through it toward all five of us.

Then the platform went away.

I was on my knees on a stone floor, in a hall I had never seen, high and plain, with old beams crossing the ceiling. Both my palms were pressed flat to the cold stone, and they were burning.

Walls were coming up out of the floor around me. They came in layers, folding over one another, with pillars locking into the gaps between them.

I could feel every one of them in my hands. Each wall was a weight I was holding up by the wrists.

The weight grew too much, and I let it go.

The walls stopped. My channels burned from palm to shoulder. Whatever had been holding me up went out of me all at once, and I fell backward, and there was no fear in it at all.

Arms caught me before the floor did.

A face came into view above mine. It was James, younger, his hair in his eyes, and he was saying my name. It was Elizabeth’s name, in Elizabeth’s ears, and it was the safest sound I had ever heard.

Certainty went through me like warmth, the certainty that someone would always be there, as plain and solid as the floor.

Then the hall was gone, and I was on the platform again with Elizabeth’s hand in mine, and her face had gone white.

Across the ruins, James was staring at her.

The gold under our feet was brighter. The creature stood inside Sophie’s ice without moving at all, its long head lifted, turning slowly from one point of light to the next.

Sophie had stopped counting. For the first time since she had started, it wasn’t pushing against her.

I didn’t get time to wonder about it.

The platform went away again.

My palms were raw. The leather on a sword grip was rubbing them, and sweat was running into my eyes, and my legs were heavy in a way I recognised from every training session I had ever been forced to attend.

A blade stopped an inch from my throat.

"Dead," said a man’s voice.

He was tall and grey at the temples, and he looked at me as a craftsman looks at a joint he hasn’t finished. Legs. Shoulders. Grip. Breathing. His eyes went over all of it.

"Again," he said, and we went again, and I lasted longer.

He lowered his sword. He looked at me for a long time.

"Better."

One word, and my whole body lifted with it. Pride came up so fast that it hurt, and right behind it came the effort of keeping it off my face.

That was all. One word, from one man, and the gladness of it was worth every hour that had come before.

The yard was gone. On the platform, James had gone very still, and he wasn’t looking at anyone.

The next one came before I could breathe.

I was standing in a small room with a low ceiling. The walls were plaster, cracked in one corner, and there was a smell of bread and wool. My mother was holding my hand so hard it hurt.

I could hear her breathing. I could hear every shaky breath she took, and I could hear my father trying to keep his own steady beside her, and failing.

A man stood in our doorway in clothes that cost more than our house. He looked at me. He looked at my little brother, half hidden behind my mother’s skirt. He looked at my mother and my father.

Fear came up in me, enormous and cold, the fear of being taken away from them.

"Do you wish to remain together?" he said.

My mother started crying again.

The fear broke.

I felt it drain out of me like water from a basin, all at once and then in a last slow trickle. My mother’s grip on my hand was still hard, but it had changed from holding on to me into simply holding me.

My brother had hold of my sleeve. He didn’t let go, and nobody was going to make him.

What came after the fear was so large that I didn’t have room for it. I wasn’t leaving. None of us were. We were still together, all four of us.

The room went away. Sophie, in the middle of her ice, had tears running down her face and didn’t seem to know it.

The fourth one was quieter.

I was sitting at a scarred wooden table in a long room that smelled of soap and too many children. My hands were in my lap, and I kept them very still.

A man sat down across from me. He wasn’t smiling. The wariness in me, which never went anywhere, shifted a little at that.

"You awakened SSS Potential," he said. "People are going to try to use you."

A small part of me eased, the part that had been braced against every kind face in that room.

"I want to adopt you," he said.

"Why?"

"Because if I don’t, someone worse will."

Liking came, careful and small, with no trust in it yet. I held it as carefully as a bird.

The long room was gone, and Daphne was standing on the platform a pace from me with her hands half raised and her eyes on nothing.

The fifth one was mine.

I knew it before it opened. I tried to close it. I didn’t know how, and it didn’t matter, because it was already open.

The forest was full of noise. Steel rang on steel, men were shouting, and the air smelled of crushed leaves and blood. Moonlight came down through the branches in pieces.

I was twelve and small, and I was standing in the middle of it.

At the edge of it all stood a bear in black armour, bigger than anything I had ever seen, with an axe resting across one shoulder. His soldiers were dying around him, and he hadn’t moved once. He was watching me.

Vessa landed beside us, smiling. There was blood on one side of her face, and none of it looked like hers.

"We’re winning," she said.

"No," said Nyra.

Vessa’s smile faded. Nyra’s eyes were on the bear.

"We’re surviving his soldiers."

The bear moved. The ground cracked under him, and then he was standing in front of us.

Vessa went for his neck from behind, with a small blade coated in something black. His hand shot backward and closed on her throat. He hadn’t even turned his head.

He lifted her off the ground with one arm. She kicked. Then his hand tightened, and there was a sound, and she stopped.

Nyra screamed, with no words in it, and went at him faster than I had ever seen anyone move. Her daggers were glowing. He shattered one of them. The axe went across her.

I caught her before she hit the ground. Her blood ran between my fingers. I pressed both hands to the wound, and green light flooded into her.

"Stay still," I said.

"Al..."

"Don’t talk."

I pushed more mana in. Her hand found my wrist. There was hardly any strength in it.

"Stop."

"No."

She looked up at me. Her golden eyes were tired, and strangely peaceful.

"Run," she said.

Her fingers loosened on my wrist.

I kept healing. Under my palms I could feel the wound closing, the flesh drawing itself back together.

She wasn’t breathing.

I gave her more mana anyway.

Somewhere close, Caelum roared.

His chest was crushed and one arm hung wrong at his side, but he had come back anyway, with half a spear. He struck the bear across the face with the broken shaft.

The bear’s head moved.

Caelum looked at me and smiled. There was blood on his teeth.

"Al..." he said. "Run."

The axe came down.

The grief came all at once, with the guilt underneath it. It went into four other people at the same time it went through me. I felt them take it. I felt them fail to put it down.

Afterward there was only the platform, and the gold, and the five of us in it: Elizabeth against the parapet, and me on my knees beside her with her hand still in mine.

Nobody spoke.

I didn’t know where to put my face.

For nearly four years I had kept that forest somewhere nobody could walk into. I had made jokes in front of it. I had slept in front of it, mostly.

I had given Lyssairia the facts of it on a balcony at night, in order, like a report, and even then I had kept the rest.

Now four people had stood inside it with me and felt exactly what I felt, and there was nothing left to arrange.

Nyra had told me to run, and then Caelum had. I hadn’t. The memory had ended before anyone could see what I did instead, and that part, at least, was still mine.

Daphne was looking at me like someone who had been struck. She had turned her whole body toward me, and one of her hands had come up a little way and stopped, as if it had forgotten what it meant to do.

Sophie was crying without any sound at all. She looked at me, and away, and back again, as though her eyes didn’t know what they were allowed to do.

James lifted his head toward me once and couldn’t hold it there. He went back to a point on the ground just in front of his boots, with his jaw set so hard I could see the muscle in it.

Elizabeth’s grip on my hand had tightened until it hurt. She was looking at James with nothing arranged on her face, and I didn’t think she knew what her hand was doing.

Being understood, it turned out, was worse than being pitied. Pity can be refused. This had already happened.

I knew things about every one of them that they had never chosen to tell me. They knew one thing about me that I had never told anyone on this side of the border.

Then the gold under our feet flared, and my core moved.

I had felt my core advance before, a stage at a time, after months of work. It was always a small thing, like a door you’ve been leaning on finally giving.

This wasn’t small.

It went up one stage, and that part felt familiar. Then it went up another, the long one, the one Selene said took most people years, and it went up it in the time it takes to fall.

It hurt. My channels pulled as if someone were stretching them over a frame that was too wide for them. My body hadn’t moved, and my core was somewhere above it, waiting for the rest of me to catch up.

I didn’t look at my status. I didn’t need a number to know my body was behind.

All five of us felt it. I could see it go through them.

Elizabeth’s free hand clenched on the flagstones. Fire flickered between her fingers, uninvited. She shut her fist on it and killed it, and looked at me, and I knew she was keeping her promise.

Her channels were exactly as raw as they had been. The bond hadn’t touched them yet, and the advancement hadn’t touched them at all. It had only put more weight above them.

Her hand in mine was still cold, and whatever had just happened to her core hadn’t put back a drop of the blood she had lost.

James bent forward with his hand pressed flat to his chest, over the place where Spatial lives. He didn’t take it away this time. Whatever had just poured into him had nowhere to go that could help, and from his face, he knew it.

Sophie staggered. Around the creature, her ice doubled without her asking it to. Every lock thickened at once and ran into the next, until the hundred small rings had become one great shell, and she cried out, because it had come out of her without her permission.

Daphne’s knees bent. Her Gravity caught the creature without her meaning it to, and its weight went far past anything she had intended. The flagstones under it cracked in a ring. She let go instantly, like someone who has touched a stove.

"What was that?" she said.

Nobody answered her. Nobody had an answer.

The gold began to fade.

It went slowly, from the edges in, until it was only five points of light under our feet, and then nothing. The ruins were grey again. Dust was still settling.

I could still feel them.

There were no thoughts in it and no words. I couldn’t have said what any of them felt. But I knew where each of them was without looking, the way you know in the dark where the walls of your own room are.

The pull behind my breastbone had eased, faster than it had any right to. It hadn’t gone. The hour of faster recovery had only started on it, but already Barrier would have come easily, too easily.

That was exactly what the System had warned me about. I left it alone.

The creature moved.

Inside Sophie’s thickened shell, its head turned as far as the ice would let it, round the five of us, and this time it didn’t stop on any of us, not even for a moment.

It went from Elizabeth to me to Daphne to Sophie to James, and on past James to empty air, as if whatever it had been following had grown too bright to see.

It tested the ice. The shell held, thicker than Sophie had ever meant to make it, but it was a shell now, and the hundred locks were gone.

Sophie saw it at the same moment I did. She reached for the joints again, and her hands shook, and nothing came.

Everything around it was stronger than it had been a minute ago.

It folded.

Every joint bent the wrong way at once, and it slid out of the shell as it had slid out of her first one, and come through Elizabeth’s walls before that.

It came toward us.

Daphne stepped in front of Elizabeth and me with her hands empty. She didn’t lift them. Her Gravity had just cracked the flagstones without her asking it to.

I got my free hand up. Barrier rose under my palm before I had properly asked for it, far too easily, and I held it there unbuilt and made myself wait.

The creature’s weight settled back into its hind legs. It reached with its sound forelimb, one wrong bend after another, across the rubble toward the centre of Elizabeth’s chest.

That left the rest of its weight on the other side, on the leg it had been dragging and the shoulder James had burned above it.

Halfway to her, the reach stopped.

The head had moved on without it. It swung from Elizabeth to me, and to Daphne in front of us, and back again, and the limb wavered after it, pointing at one of us and then another, and then at the empty air between.

It held the reach there, unable to choose, with all its weight hanging off its damaged side, until that side gave.

The bad leg folded under it. The shoulder above it buckled where the hide had closed over James’s burn and nothing beneath had mended, and the creature came down hard on that side. I felt it hit through the stone under my knees.

The reaching limb folded back into its body. A sound came out of it, long and low, from somewhere very deep.

It hauled itself up again, slower than before. Its head went round the five of us once more and found nothing it could keep.

Whatever it had been hunting, it no longer knew where to look.

It turned away from us, dragging that leg, and went along the broken parapet, casting from side to side as a hound casts for a scent it has lost, to the place where the parapet had fallen in.

It went over the lip of the ridge.

I heard it on the slope below, stone sliding under it, going down toward the border country. The sound grew fainter, until the ridge was between us and it, and I couldn’t hear it at all.

None of us moved. I don’t think any of us could have.

Sophie’s knees went. She sat down where she stood, in the middle of her melting ice, with her hands open in her lap and the blood drying on her lip. She had counted past a hundred and fifty before the gold came, and gone on holding after she stopped counting, and now she couldn’t hold herself up.

Beside me, Elizabeth let out a breath she seemed to have been holding since the gold first came up. Under my hand, her channels were still raw, but for the first time they felt like something that was trying to mend.

She turned her head and looked at me. I had told her everything I knew, and she had said yes to all of it, and none of it had been this.

She didn’t ask me anything. I couldn’t read what was in her face, and I don’t think she could have told me.

Daphne turned round from where she stood in front of us. Once she was looking at me, she didn’t stop.

The thing was still out there, and I was the only one on that platform who knew what the System had called it.

A breath later, the wind came back.

It came over the ridge from the west and through the ruins, carrying dust and the smell of dry grass, and with it came sound. Voices. Boots. A guard swearing.

At the edge of the platform, Renn had been standing with his palm pressed flat against nothing. Whatever he had been pressing against was gone. His hand went forward into empty air, and he caught himself in one step, and looked up.

He took it in with one look: the walls standing crooked at every angle, the grey heaps, the grooves cut in the stone, the scorched streaks.

He saw the five of us in the middle of it.

James was already moving. He went down on one knee beside Elizabeth and gathered her up, carefully, as though she weighed nothing. She didn’t argue. Her good arm went round his neck.

He carried her across the broken stone toward the steps, toward Renn, without looking back.

Renn watched them come.

Then he looked past them at the rest of us, and I watched him count. Elizabeth, in James’s arms. James. Sophie, with the frost still melting off her sleeves. Daphne. Me.

He got to five.

He closed his eyes, only for a moment, and opened them again.