CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  -Death Is Not an Option

  Gray sky, the color of old bruises. Black grass, still, each blade too sharp, too straight to be real. No sound but my breath, and even that came muffled, like the place didn’t enjoy listening. Between.

  I stood. I never remembered standing, just as I never remembered how I arrived. One moment there was straw under my back and the itch of lice at my neck. The next there was this. My bare feet didn’t leave prints in the grass. The plain stretched away in every direction, a flat sheet of black and gray with no walls, no river, no fort.

  Even I hadn’t expected to end up here again. He’d only fallen asleep; this should have dropped us into the next morning, not back into this place. The First Passage had already run long. Too long. Something was wrong. It should have ended by now. I needed to understand why.

  Pressure gathered slowly behind my eyes. At first it was a dull throb, like the ache after a beating. Then it sharpened. The black grass blurred at the edges of my vision. My stomach dipped.

  [Memory incoming…]

  [Memory unstable.]

  [Fragmenting.]

  The world slipped sideways.

  This wasn’t my memory. It didn’t feel like a thought I’d chosen. It arrived the way the last one had, like something pushing through a crack. It felt, again, like the someone else was the one remembering and I was only borrowing the shape of that memory for a moment.

  The sky above me was still gray, but not this gray. Too close, pulled low over the world like a lid. The grass beneath it lay flat, crushed a long time ago. No horses moved. No smoke rose. The drums were gone. I wasn’t myself.

  My hand was pressed to a belly that wasn’t mine. The weight of the body felt wrong. Hips narrower, balance resting differently on the feet, breath coming in shorter draws. I knew I was inside someone else and still moved in that body as if it belonged to me, the real owner hovering just behind my thoughts.

  The silence didn’t answer her. Something pressed at the edges of her dream. I felt it like pressure at the back of my own skull, but I couldn’t reach whatever she knew from inside it. It wasn’t a voice and not a shape, just a certainty.

  The line ends here.

  For a heartbeat, another thought slid in on top of that certainty, thin and flat and not my own.

  [Memory Fragment [2/7] acquired.]

  I flinched. I didn’t know what it meant, only that it felt like the same wrong voice that had named another fragment once before. The last time I landed here, I’d seen one of these already, a fragment with a different number stamped onto it. I still don’t know if that me saw the same piece I did, or if the Between is showing us different cuts of the same day just to amuse itself.

  By the time I reached for the words, they were already slipping away. Both sentences, hers and the line that had named them, were still echoing in my head when the world snapped back. I dragged in a breath that scraped my throat.

  Gray came back, the same dead shade as before. Black grass under my feet, each blade sharp, utterly still. The pressure behind my eyes eased, settling into a hollow ache, the sense of whatever the jade remembered pulling back and leaving nothing for me to hold. I wiped at my face with the heel of my hand, though there was nothing there.

  In the distance, the yurt waited. The same low, round shape as before, stitched from a strange hide that was neither leather nor cloth, its surface seeming to shift if I looked too closely.

  The first time I’d come here, another memory that wasn’t mine had forced its way into my head: rough cloth against skin, a curved space breathing softly around me, a hand gripping warm jade that beat like a second heart. I hadn’t known why those pieces clung when others blurred. I still don’t know all of it. I only know they stuck.

  I remembered the warmth of the jade in that other hand. The urgency that wasn’t mine and still felt like it should be. My own fingers twitched in remembered pain. There was no jade in my palm now. Only the small weight of the pendant at my chest and the hollow ache behind my eyes.

  I walked toward the yurt because there was nowhere else to go.

  Aldac? waited where it had before. The figure sat cross-legged on the black plain just in front of the low doorway, hands resting loosely in its lap. Between long fingers, a single pale thread hung from nothing, trembling each time the fingers twitched, just as it had the first time I’d seen it.

  Last time, I had stopped there, outside, under the bruised sky. Now, as I drew closer, the felt flap behind Aldac? stirred and slid aside without touch. Beyond it, the air was warmer, but not in any way I understood. It didn’t brush my skin so much as settle around me, heavy and close.

  For a heartbeat I was sure we were still outside. With one more step, the world tilted, and I was no longer sure whether I stood outside the yurt or within it. The black grass under my feet vanished. The sky became a ceiling. The air thickened.

  The space inside didn’t match the size of the yurt outside. The walls fell away and up into shadows that never quite turned to full dark. Lines of pale cord hung from somewhere above, some cut, some frayed, some disappearing high out of sight.

  Aldac? sat at the heart of it in exactly the same posture, the space around it settling into whatever shape it needed to keep it at the center.

  Between Aldac? and me hung a thread. Last time, I remembered only a single pale line between those long fingers, drawn out of nothing. Now I was sure I’d seen it before and yet it was different. Thicker. Or perhaps it only felt that way. It stretched from somewhere above, through the not-space of the yurt, and down past Aldac?’s hand, heavy with its own unseen weight. Four knots bulged along its length. They were thick places where the thread swelled and twisted, fibers pushing against each other. The last of them, nearest Aldac?’s hand, was the newest. It pulsed faintly, whatever it held not yet settled. I couldn’t say how I knew this, only that I did.

  Watching it now, I keep circling the same word for them: deaths. That me on the First Passage wouldn’t let himself call it anything at all.

  Aldac?’s head tilted a fraction toward the thread. Long fingers lifted and brushed the nearest knot. The sensation of that touch skittered along my skin, though we weren’t touching.

  “The knot did not loosen,” Aldac? said. The voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once, not loud, not quiet, simply there. A sound that might have been laughter followed, neither kind nor cruel, like someone amused by a pattern that refused to change.

  My throat worked. I wanted to ask what the knots were. I wanted to ask if they were deaths, or chances, or something older and stranger that I was too small to name. I didn’t ask. Last time, questions hadn’t helped. Last time, what had mattered was what I did. I lifted my chin, just a little.

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  Aldac? wasn’t looking at me now. I remembered too well how those eyes had pinned me the first time; this wasn’t that. The empty place where a face should have been stayed turned toward the thread, toward the knots that marked something I hadn’t yet learned to read.

  Above us, in the unseen height of the yurt, more threads trembled faintly. Most hung free and smooth, unmarked from end to end, some faintly glowing along their length. My skin crawled. I took a breath to speak.

  The world folded. There was no warning this time, no sense of falling or being pulled. Between was simply gone, taken away in an instant.

  I woke to porridge again.

  For a few heartbeats panic was all I had. My fingers were already at my throat, clutching at the pendant, begging it silently to tell me this wasn’t real, that the fort would be gone if I just blinked hard enough. At first it had felt like it might be a crack in the fort the overseer couldn’t see. If I died enough, maybe I could slip through it. Maybe I’d wake somewhere else. Someone else. That me on the First Passage still wanted that to be true. But I know better.

  Under the panic something colder sat. This wasn’t a blessing. It was a trap, keeping me in the same piece of day over and over until I somehow found the one way to move past it. This hadn’t happened to me before. Why? Was whatever power this is different during that missing passage, or did nothing go wrong enough in the Second Passage for it to wake up?

  Panic won for a while. I forgot my own third rule about watching before I moved, and for a time all I did was run at the walls in different ways and die.

  The bell. The mutter. The cold floor under my feet. The line. Forty-eight in front of me, coughing into his sleeve and sniffling between breaths. I stared at the boy’s narrow back and felt my head throb.

  It wasn’t the third time anymore. Not the second. Not something I could count on one hand. I remembered the wall and the arrow and the ditch. I remembered the day of watching. The stories in the dark. The yurt and the thread and the four ugly knots, Aldac?’s fingers brushing the newest, testing it the way someone might test a bruise. I remembered waking here anyway.

  Maybe it’s the wall, I’d thought once. Maybe if I reach it.

  Maybe it’s the river. Maybe I have to cross.

  Maybe I have to bring someone with me. Maybe that’s the trick.

  Every theory had ended the same way, like another knot pulled tight on the thread.

  I tried running the moment the bell rang, sprinting for the weak point in the animal fence before anyone could react. Flea had been faster. Teeth in my calf, wardens in my back, boots and blows and then nothing at all.

  I tried ducking into the reeking pit of piss and shit and staying there all day, crouched in stink and cold, waiting for night so I could climb again. A warden found me anyway, hauled me out by the hair, and taught me exactly how long a man could be kicked before his body stopped answering.

  I tried starting a fight in the porridge line, shoving the boy behind me harder than I meant to. Wardens dropped on us both. In the confusion I slipped away three strides before a hand caught the back of my collar and dragged me into a different kind of pain. Dogs. Fists. Cold. Hunger.

  Once, I made it as far as the granary roof. The slate was slick with packed snow. I hit it and went down the far side in a blur, fingers catching on the eaves just long enough to snap my wrist before my body whipped free and the fall broke my neck.

  I woke up with both wrists whole and the taste of blood in my mouth. I lost track of how many times I died. Boots on my ribs. Teeth in my throat. Water in my lungs. The fort never ran out of ways to hurt me, even when it wasn’t trying to. It also never ran out of ways to show me where it was weak. At some point I stopped keeping count. I still couldn’t tell you the number. Only that it was too many.

  Sometimes I closed my eyes on the yard or the ditch or the inside of the barracks and opened them again on straw and dark and the ache of a body that hadn’t yet been hurt, breath steaming in the cold of the same morning.

  Sometimes I woke to nothing at all. No voice. No sky. Just my heartbeat hammering in my ears and the creak of the barracks settling around me.

  Other times, in that thin slice of a moment before I was fully awake, I could have sworn I heard it: that dry, clicking almost-laugh I’d first heard in the gray place. Bone on bone. Thread on thread. Something amused sat just behind my ear.

  By the time I pushed myself up on the straw mat and rough boards, the sound was always gone. The ceiling was the same cracked wood. The boys around me breathed the same sour air. If Aldac? had been there, it left no mark I could see.

  The last time I woke, belly empty, breath steaming in the barracks dark, I didn’t get up right away. Bodies shuffled around me, straw and fabric whispering over wood.

  How many times am I going to die? The thought came with the same dull weight as the hunger in my gut. Apparently even this many hadn’t been enough. My hand found the cord at my throat before I noticed it moving, thumb rubbing once over the knot where the pendant rested against my skin. I let it drop. Numbers blurred in their mouths when they talked about each other. There were so many of us that no one bothered with names.

  I rolled onto my back and stared into the nothing of the ceiling. Death by boots. Death by water. Death by teeth. Death by falling. Death by hands.

  I tried to count backward through them and failed. The memories overlapped, edges blurring, pain running into pain. Only the first few stood out sharp. After that, the fort became faces I knew would kill me and paths I knew ended in the same last breath and dark.

  I let the bell ring without moving. The mutter about the overseer being angry washed over me. I lay there and let the line form, bodies shuffling past my mat, until staying where I was drew the wrong kind of attention and a heel dug into my ribs.

  “Up,” someone snapped.

  I sat up.

  Forty-eight watched me from the line. The boy’s eyes were wide, his bowl clutched in both hands like a shield.

  “You look tired,” Forty-eight said quietly when I fell in step behind him.

  “I’m…” I said. “Feels like I go to sleep and wake up in the same day, over and over.”

  Forty-eight tried to smile, failed halfway.

  “That’s what this place feels like,” he said. “Like the day never ends.”

  It does, I thought. It ends a lot. The trouble is that it keeps starting again anyway.

  I took my porridge, ate it without tasting. The yard waited. The wardens waited. The dogs waited. I could run again. I could try a dozen more angles. I could keep throwing myself at the walls and the gates and the river until whatever thread I had left was nothing but knots. But each time I woke, the fort was the same. The only thing that could change was me.

  Panic was useless. So was blind courage. I’d proved that ten times over, and probably more. If dying was the price of learning, I thought, then I’d better start learning something worth the cost.

  I set my empty bowl down with care, a gesture better suited to something delicate than a chipped piece of wood.

  I’d started to notice it in small ways. A blow that should’ve left me gasping on the ground for long minutes now let me stand again after a handful of breaths. The bite of cold that had once chewed straight through me stopped nearer the skin. Somewhere between my first drowning and the last time my ribs cracked, my body had begun to blunt the edges.

  The strange flat thought came back, clear and uninvited.

  [Skill acquired: Novice Dead Calm.]

  [Death is not an option, pain is.]

  I couldn’t have said which death had earned it. They blurred together, a tangle of breaking and burning and sinking. At the time, all I knew was this: the pain still came, but it no longer owned me.

  Not that first death, not any of the deaths after it, had ended the First Passage. None of them had been enough to cut the knot. Was I going to be stuck here, watching, until he finally found a way out of this fort? Until when?

  In the yard, the wardens shouted. The overseer’s voice carried, sharp as the air. I straightened my shoulders. No more wild runs, I told myself. No more throwing myself at whatever looks like a door. Next time I moved, it would be because I was sure there was an answer waiting on the other side.

  I’d learned one thing at least. I didn’t have to die for the day to snap back; as long as the knot held, morning would drag me back no matter how the day ended. I didn’t know yet what that answer was. Wall, ditch, dogs, river. Forty-eight. The fort itself. Any of them might be the key. All of them might. But at least I knew how I’d look for it now.

  Not by hoping. Not by praying to a sky that had done nothing for me. I’d do it by watching, by thinking, by learning this narrow, cruel place until I could walk it without breaking. I had a plan now. Not a good one yet, not complete, but at least it was something that could grow with every failure.

  I started sorting through what I actually knew, not what I wished I’d known. I knew someone had spilled a bucket of offal in the yard, a frozen smear of guts I could use if I ever needed a half-starved dog looking the wrong way. I knew there was a shard of blackened clay jar at the edge of the path, sharp enough to cut skin or rope if I got my hand to it first. I knew the overseer was steppe-born, not Zhanar, half an ear gone, whip hand crooked, eyes sliding past the slaves most days, the same empty glance he gave rats unless he wanted something.

  I knew Rauk, the warden on kitchen duty, liked to sit near the chained dogs with a knife and a block of meat, carving and dropping scraps into a pot. I knew the biggest dog, Flea, had a bent peg and a chain that dragged, and how much pull it would take to tear it free. I knew which wardens cut corners on patrol, whose hands shook when he drew his bow, which one limped three steps between each torch before stopping to rub his knee. I knew that at night, once the door was slammed and barred and only a thin line of light slipped under it, neither the wardens nor the overseer came near the barracks at all.

  None of that was an escape yet. But it was something I could start from. Step by step, death after death, I’d take whatever this place offered me: small details, loose boards, lazy wardens, gaps in chains, stories whispered in the dark. Piece by piece I’d collect them until the day stopped snapping back and finally moved forward.

  I stepped out into the cold.

  The day began again.