Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 46: SIX

Six days.

He woke before the grey with the note still sitting in his vision.

Next isolation exceeds prior mass. Affected function may degrade before it clears.

He had slept with it the way a man slept with a sound in the wall. It had not fired in the night.

He knew that the way he knew the forty-one steps. By his chest, which took the first breath of the day as it had taken it the morning before: clear, early-stopping, his and not yet spent.

Still mine this morning. It hasn’t started on the lung. That’s all the screen’s told me. That’s all I get.

He did the only thing he could.

He took Miasma to the dead lamp on his own corner before the route, the drill ground since the egg, the collar with four soft pits in it.

He did not set the tin. The tin had taught her nothing. He had spent a night learning that.

He stood at the collar and made himself think instead of drill.

Every time she broke the wall, something forced it. The grate. The scavenger that wouldn’t leave. The yard is not going to force her. The yard is a box with a door and a panel at the rail. They will stand there and wait for me to make a beast that ends things before they happen start finishing them, in front of everyone.

He put her down. He did not give her forward. He crouched at her level and put two fingers on her side, the way he had the night he put the edge in his voice.

He held there and did nothing. He let her come off the morning’s working pulse into the quiet one. He read what her body did when there was no wall to be and no line to hold.

She leaned into the two fingers.

There. That’s the only thing thirty-some days built that the yard can’t take. Not a skill. That.

He worked from there. Not the tin. Not the collar. He used himself.

He stepped back one pace and gave her the press for forward. He stood as the thing she came toward instead of the thing she put herself in front of.

The first six tries she got between him and the empty air behind him. Empty air behind him was a line, and a line wanted a body across it.

On the seventh try he moved while he pressed. He sidestepped as she came, so the thing she was coming toward was not where the wall went.

The green came down off her spine and onto the foreleg, the only forward she had. She put it into the air where he had been.

Nothing took it. But the green had gone forward instead of down into the wall. Once. Because the wall had nowhere to be.

He logged the once.

Once was a doorway. It had proved the instinct could bend.

The drills existed to widen doorways and to turn one success into two, then ten.

That’s it. I can’t teach her to attack. I can only take away the wall until attacking is the only thing left for her to do. Six days. That’s the whole method I’ve got.

He did it eleven more times before the route. Four of the eleven the green went forward. Seven of the eleven it went to the wall.

He logged the count in his head the way he logged a lamp.

Four of eleven, the morning of six days.

He would take four of eleven down to the dead lamp every morning he had left and see what the number did, because a number that moved the right way when he worked it was the only thing on the route or off it that had ever done what he told it to.

Nyx watched from the sill the whole time and did not come down.

It had not gone through a wall since the cut in the old stone. He had marked that without meaning to.

Days of waking to find it on the wrong side of glass, and since the dog in the old stone it had stayed where he put it, on the sill, on the board, the pale eyes on him more than on the corners.

It did not look at the dark anymore. It looked at him, drilling with Miasma at the collar. When he picked her up to go it came down off the sill on its own and took the shoulder.

Something changed in the cut. It doesn’t leave anymore. No time to think about why.

He worked the route clean. Every lamp, the second day in a row, the most ordinary day a clerk two streets over had ever read.

The column with the absent line in it still had the blank column beside it. The blank column was the one a supervisor signed. A supervisor had not signed it yet. Every clean day was a day the blank stayed blank.

He heard the two men again at lamp eleven. Not the same two. The cold held their voices down the same way.

"—Vane’s not even the worst of it. You hear what came back off the east territories? Whole forage town, charter pulled, every license inside it void in a morning. Not Vane. Church writ. Inquisitor’s seal on it."

"For what."

"For nothing you’d put on a page. The man they sent doesn’t burn anything. Doesn’t have to. He reads the licenses, decides which ones stand, and no one outranks his decision. Thorough, they said. Not cruel. Thorough. Like that’s the better word."

He was a lamp away with the wire in his hand and his head down in the housing. He did not turn it.

Not my territory. Not my licenses. Not my seal. Not my six days.

He logged eleven. He moved on. It went on the shelf at the back of his head, with the burned forest and the wrong-side-of-glass and the four-of-eleven. The shelf of things he did not reach for.

It cost him nothing, because he did not reach for it.

Twelve took four minutes. Thirteen took six and a new wick. Between them the morning stayed the kind of quiet a man could rent but not own. He worked it like a man who knew the lease.

The system fired at sixteen.

No warning. His hand cold off the housing. His chest still clear. He braced anyway. The screen had told him plainly this was coming. It had not told him when.

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[ DETOXIFICATION — ISOLATION BEGINNING ]

Source: Trait — Toxin Filter (passive, continuous)

Now isolating: lung (primary), accumulated load — heaviest mass on record for this host.

Throughput rerouted. Affected function degrading for duration of purge.

Estimated duration: not fixed. Lifespan returned on completion: pending.

[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 1.3 Years — HELD ]

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He read it once.

Point seven five to one point three. The return on the table before it’s earned. Locked in a box I can’t reach until it lets me.

He did not get to read it a second time. His chest took the next breath and the next breath was not the one it had taken all day.

It went in shallow and stopped early, then it did not finish coming back out.

The familiar blockage at the bottom of the breath changed.

It was deeper. It was wider. It was the lung being opened up to be cleaned, and him standing on Sewer Row at lamp sixteen with the route half done feeling the cleaning start.

Not the morning of the yard. Not in six days. Now. It started now.

He put his hand on the wall.

He had not put his hand on the wall in two days. He put it there now because the alternative was the cobbles.

He stood at lamp sixteen with the housing open and the wire still in it. He pulled a breath that went down into a thing being taken apart.

The lamp in his hand shook, once, the way his hands had shaken in the cut and he had let them. There was no letting this. This wasn’t his hand shaking. It was something deeper. The foundation underneath everything else.

Six days.

The screen sat in his vision.

Estimated duration: not fixed.

The number was not climbing. It said HELD.

Under his hand the wall was the only thing on Sewer Row holding him up.

Somewhere two streets over, a column with his name in it had a blank beside it waiting for a signature.

In six days the yard was going to open and wait for him to walk through it. On a lung that had picked this week to come apart, so it could be worth something later.

Miasma’s weight came forward on his shoulder. The careful rhythm. The one for a danger no wall could stop.

Not now. Not you too. There’s nothing to put a body in front of. It’s inside.

He stood at the wall and made the breath go in as far as it would go and come back as far as it would come.

He did not let the lamp down onto the cobbles. He finished the thought he had been avoiding since the screen the day before. It wasn’t a possibility anymore. It was happening.

It runs on its own clock. I knew that. I just found out its clock and the yard’s clock are the same week, and the system does not get a say, and neither do I.

He picked the wire back out of the housing with the hand that was not on the wall. He had a route to finish.

The route did not move. The route did not care that his lung had picked tonight to become worth six-tenths of a year in some week he might not be standing in to spend it.

He finished lamp sixteen with one hand on the wall and one on the wire, his chest doing the new thing, the deeper wider thing. He did the next lamp the same way. The next. The column beside his name was still blank, and a man who stopped now signed it himself.

He got home in the dark with the route logged clean and the breath worse than it had been at sixteen. Nyx rode the shoulder that Miasma was not on. Both of them carried, neither of them a thing he could set down.

Six days. A lung the system had finally come for. A method that worked four times in eleven. A column waiting for a name. A figure of one point three sitting in a box where he could not reach it.

And it picked now. Of everything it could have picked. It picked the six days I needed it most.