Chapter 86: Keep Moving
The first handhold was a root.
Arthur grabbed it and pulled and his shoulder screamed and he pulled anyway. Theodore’s weight was distributed across his back with Roz’s wind taking what it could from below but the wind wasn’t enough and Arthur’s legs were doing something that didn’t feel like legs anymore. More like suggestions. Approximations of legs.
He found the next hold. A jutting rock. Cold enough to burn through his palm.
He pulled.
Theodore would be home right now.
The thought arrived between one handhold and the next, uninvited and precise. Home. Helping his family the way Theodore always talked about helping his family, that easy warmth he carried about them, the way his face changed when he mentioned his mother. He would be there right now if Arthur hadn’t needed someone on the perimeter. If Arthur hadn’t looked at the roster of people he trusted and pointed at the one person who smiled too easily for this kind of work and said yes, him, bring him.
Another hold. His fingers were bleeding where the rock had opened the skin. He didn’t look at them.
Pull.
Theodore’s breathing was shallow against the back of his neck. Still there. Still there. Arthur counted it like currency. Every exhale Theodore produced was something Arthur owed him and couldn’t pay back.
’Left side,’ Vexis said. ’Better grip.’
Arthur moved left and found it and pulled.
His arm shook through the whole motion. He felt the shake travel down through his elbow and wrist and into the fingers that were barely holding and he tightened his grip until the shake stopped and kept going.
He didn’t choose this.
That was the thing. That was the specific thing that sat in Arthur’s chest like swallowed stone and wouldn’t move. Theodore hadn’t chosen any of it. Arthur had. Arthur had walked into a novel he already knew the shape of and started pulling threads and Theodore had been standing nearby when the threads pulled back.
Another hold.
Pull.
If he dies out here.
Arthur didn’t finish it. Not because he couldn’t but because finishing it would cost him something he needed for the climb.
He pulled.
The ravine edge appeared above him. Three meters. Two. The rock face leveled into a lip of frozen ground and dead grass and Arthur got one hand over it and then the other and Roz’s wind surged from below with everything it had and Theodore’s weight shifted upward and Arthur dragged them both over the edge and onto flat ground and lay there for exactly two seconds.
Then he got up.
Walking was a different problem than climbing.
Climbing had been about single movements. One hold. One pull. Discrete and countable. Walking was continuous and his legs had not agreed to continuous. They wobbled under Theodore’s weight on the flat ground in a way they hadn’t wobbled on the rock face and Arthur set his jaw and pushed light Stima into them, the barest shimmer, just enough to keep the joints honest.
His vision moved at the edges. Not blurring exactly. More like the world had developed a slight delay between what happened and what he saw.
He tried to push his network forward.
Nothing.
He felt the attempt go out and dissolve immediately, his aetheric blood so thin it couldn’t hold the shape of the anchor at all. Like trying to pour water from an empty cup. The absence of the network was its own kind of blindness. He’d been running it for so long that losing it felt like losing a sense he’d had his whole life.
He was going in blind.
His own eyes. Vexis’s eyes. That was everything he had.
"Roz." His voice came out rougher than he expected. "I can’t push the network."
"I know." Roz was already moving differently on his shoulder, his head up and scanning, his red eyes cutting through the dark tree line in every direction with the attention of something that had been reading forests for six centuries. "Just breathe. I have it."
"Tell me everything."
"I will." A pause. "Just focus on your breathing, brat. You might pass out any minute."
Arthur bit the inside of his lower lip and kept walking.
The forest was dark and uniform and gave him nothing to navigate by. He picked a direction away from where the fire had been and walked it. Every few minutes Roz murmured something. Clear left. Clear right. Nothing behind. Arthur listened and walked and Theodore breathed against the back of his neck in that shallow too-fast rhythm and Arthur counted it and kept moving.
Keep moving.
Time stopped working correctly somewhere in the first hour. Or what felt like an hour. He had no way to measure it. The cold was consistent and the trees were consistent and the dark was consistent and the only variable was the increasing difficulty of each individual step, his legs communicating their position through a language that had stopped including sensation and moved into something more abstract. Weight. Resistance. The mechanical fact of movement without the feeling of it.
Roz pushed aetheric blood through the contact point at Arthur’s shoulder in slow careful increments. Arthur felt each transfer as a brief warmth that faded before it could become anything useful. Not enough to restore. Just enough to keep him from the floor.
Theodore’s mother thinks her son is having a nice vacation.
The thought arrived and Arthur’s leg wobbled and he caught himself on a tree with his free hand and stood there for a moment with his forehead almost touching the bark and his breath coming out in hard white clouds.
She didn’t know. She was somewhere doing whatever she did in the evenings and she didn’t know her son was unconscious in a forest
Arthur pushed off the tree and kept walking.
’You’re listing right,’ Vexis said.
Arthur corrected left.
’Better.’
The silence between them was different from their usual silence. No commentary. No grinning. Vexis tracked the trees on both sides with eyes that didn’t get tired and said what he saw and nothing else and Arthur was grateful for it in a way he didn’t have the air to articulate.
Then his foot caught the root.
He didn’t feel it coming. No warning from legs that had stopped feeling like his. Just a sudden wrongness in his forward momentum and the ground arriving at his face much faster than ground was supposed to and then impact, full and total, and Theodore’s weight coming down across his back and both of them hitting the frozen forest floor and everything stopping.
Roz hit the ground beside them.
"Brat."
Arthur was still conscious. He was aware of that. Conscious and horizontal and completely unable to determine how to stop being horizontal. His arms were somewhere. He knew they were attached. The signal between wanting to move them and moving them had developed a significant delay.
"Brat. Stand up."
’Arthur.’ Vexis’s voice had dropped every register of casual. Direct and close and more serious than Arthur had ever heard it.
’Get up. Right now. Get up.’
Arthur breathed. Came out ragged.
"GET UP DAMNIT!’
Arthur gritted his teeth and extended his right arm.
It traveled approximately six inches and stopped.
He tried again. Got his palm flat against the frozen ground. Pushed. His elbow bent and then unbent and his shoulder rose and his whole body followed it upward by maybe four inches and then something in the chain of effort gave out completely and he went back down and lay still.
His cheek was against the frozen dirt.
He could feel that much.
Roz said nothing for a moment. Then:
"Brat. Wait for me. Don’t sleep got it?"
Arthur heard him move. Small deliberate steps on the frozen ground. Then the steps changed, faster, then gone, the sound of Roz moving through undergrowth at a pace that had nothing casual in it.
Then silence.
The cold pressed down on everything.
’Still here,’ Vexis said quietly. Not information. Just presence. ’Keep perfusing. Don’t stop the Stima. Even if you can’t feel it. Keep it going.’
Arthur told his body to perfuse.
His body considered the request.
’Don’t close your eyes.’
He hadn’t realized they were closing. He opened them. The frozen ground in front of his face was very detailed up close. Individual crystals of frost. A dead blade of grass. The specific brown of frozen dirt.
Theodore was breathing. He could hear it.
He focused on that.
Time passed in a way he couldn’t measure. The cold was everywhere. The trees above him moved slightly with wind he couldn’t feel from the ground and Vexis kept talking, not words Arthur was fully processing, just the sound of a voice that wasn’t going anywhere, and Arthur stayed awake by the specific stubbornness of someone who had decided Theodore was not going to die in this forest and could not execute that decision unconscious.
Then a shadow appeared.
Not his network. His actual eyes. A shape against the dark, moving toward him through the trees, and Arthur’s hand moved toward his fingertips on instinct, reaching for hellshade that his blood couldn’t produce.
Then a second shape. Smaller. Familiar.
Roz.
And a voice.
"Tch’æ xhrii?"
A woman. The language landed with no reference point, no cognate, nothing in Arthur’s nor Vexis’s memory that gave it shape. The words were soft-edged and the voice behind them was warm in a way that didn’t match the forest or the cold or anything that had happened in the last several hours.
Cautious though.
Asking something. About him, probably. About what she was looking at.
Then hands. Real ones. Gripping his arm and his side and lifting, and Arthur’s body left the frozen ground for the first time in however long it had been on it, and the change in elevation made his vision smear white at the edges.
He turned his head.
One thing. One fragment of the world before the white took everything.
A strand of hair falling forward as she moved. Silky. The color of it wrong for the dark of the forest, bright even in no light, a green so vivid it had no business existing in a place like this.
Emerald.
Then nothing.
Comments