Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 48: FOUR

Four days.

He woke on the floor with his back against the bench leg. The lung was worse than when he went down. He knew it before the first breath finished.

It went into the deeper wider place and came back short. The second breath knew the first had not finished. There was no morning in either.

Day three of the purge. The screen had said heaviest on record. Heaviest on record did not care for his schedule.

Four days. Lung’s third day. The math said it doesn’t finish before the yard. It didn’t say I’d be standing.

He got up. The floor asked nothing. Everything past it did.

He went to the dead lamp before the route.

He sat with her first. He crouched at the collar at her level. He put two fingers on her side and held there. She leaned into the fingers. He stayed with his fingers there longer than the morning before.

The holding cost him nothing. The breath ran the account on everything else.

Then the method. Step back. Press. Move on the press so she had nowhere to plant herself.

He could not do it many times. The bending charged the lung. The standing charged it. The lung was not taking credit this week. It only took payment. He did it eight times. Five of eight went forward. He stopped.

Five of eight. Six of twelve yesterday. Better than yesterday. It holds even when I can’t hold it. That’s hers. It was always going to have to be hers.

He picked her up. His chest charged him for it. He took the charge standing.

Nyx did not come down off the sill.

He filed it. For days it had come down on its own and taken the shoulder and watched him breathe. This morning it stayed up.

It was not looking at him. It was looking at Miasma. It held the pale eyes on the beast in his arms while he got her settled. It did not take the shoulder when he stood.

He had no air to spend on it. He put it on the shelf with the rest.

The route was the route. One hand found a wall at every third lamp now. The breath went down into the thing being taken apart and came back short.

He made the page ordinary. The absent mark from the cut still had no supervisor’s signature beside it. Every clean day kept it that way. He was not going to let the lung be the reason it got one.

He did not hear the men at eleven.

The lane had had two men in the cold every day for a week. Today it had no one. An empty lane where there had been voices was a thing a man who read bodies read. He read it.

He had nowhere to put it. He kept walking.

Marsh had told him from a window what it meant when the watchers moved. Aiden had no air to carry it and the route at once.

He got to the dead lamp on his own corner at the end of the route, in the dark. Last. The broken one. His.

He stood at it as he did every night now, hand on the cold housing, not working it.

The requisition for the part had gone in eleven months ago. The part was never coming. He had stopped filing the follow-up in the spring. Stopping had felt like a small surrender then. It felt like bookkeeping now.

The lamp and the lung had the same status this week. Out of his hands, on somebody else’s clock, lit or not lit by processes that did not take his input.

He gave the housing two taps with one knuckle anyway. Not maintenance. Just the visit. A man kept calling on the broken things he was responsible for, or he became the kind of man the city was full of.

Miasma went down off his arm to the cobble on her own.

She did not do that. She rode the shoulder to the room. Thirty-some days, every night, she rode the last stretch. Tonight she went down off his arm at the dead lamp.

She put herself on the stone facing the corner of the lane. She went stone-still. The same stillness she had held over the relic and in the cut.

She did it facing nothing. An empty corner. An empty lane. The dark.

Nothing’s there. She’s not bracing to fight and she’s not reading it as a threat. She’s doing the relic one. At an empty corner.

Nyx came off the sill.

He had felt the weight off his shoulder the whole route back and not marked it. The lung took the marking. It came off the room’s sill now.

It had not gone through the glass in days. It went through now. Out into the dark of the lane.

It did not go to the corner. It did not go to him. It went to her.

It crossed the cobbles without a sound. It stopped a body-length from her, as it had at grate fourteen. Small. Dark in the dark, no lamp lit to fail to land on it.

It faced her.

She came off the empty corner and faced it.

They put their bodies square to each other a body-length apart and held.

He stood at the lamp with the wire still in his hand and did not move. His chest would not let him move fast. Moving was the wrong thing to do at whatever this was.

Miasma did not brace. Her pulse stayed level. It went lower than the cut. Lower than the relic. Lower than he had ever felt it. The green banked all the way down and past down.

She had ridden a shoulder away from it for days. She had held herself slow and careful over its shell. She had let that care go the day it walked the wall. She had gone square to it in the sewer and watched it not give the beat back and turned away with nothing in her body.

Days of getting near a thing and not closing on it.

She closed on it now.

Her body set, calm and final. She had placed what the creature in front of her was.

Going down had not loosened her. It set her harder. She held square to a house-cat-sized dark on the cobbles. She held still. The answer had not made it safe to stop holding.

Nyx did not lower its head to her.

It stood square to her. Small. The pale eyes fixed. Total. Looking through her, not at her.

The thing they were on now was Miasma.

For one beat they were not past her. They were on her. Full.

Then they were past her again. Out. At the empty corner she had faced. At the dark with nothing in it. They held there.

Miasma did not come off the square. She held it. The pup looked at an empty corner of an empty lane. Miasma held her body in the line between the pup and the corner. The way she had held the line at the table leg over the shell.

Over the shell she had guarded a thing too young to hold its own. The pup was not too young. It had taken a scavenger off him in the open. It had walked a breach wall without bracing.

She held the line anyway. For it. At a corner with nothing in it.

She knows what it is. She’s not afraid of it. And she’s standing between it and an empty corner like the corner’s the part that matters. She figured it out tonight. The second she figured it out, she put herself in front of it.

He stood at the dead lamp with the wire still in his hand. He could not have written what he saw on any form. He did not try.

Four years of reading what bodies did and filing it and not reaching for it.

He filed this. He had four days. A lung on a clock that was not his. A method that worked only because the beast carried it. Now the beast that carried it had spent the night placing the other one, and then put herself in front of it.

Miasma came off the square slow. Slower than a kill. Slower than the cut. She came down off it slower than she had ever come down off anything.

She did not go to him. She went to Nyx.

The body-length closed to nothing. She put herself alongside it. Shoulder to the small dark shoulder. Facing the empty corner together. The two of them a line across nothing. She held there with it and did not look back at him.

Nyx let her.

He picked them both up off the cobble when it was done. Full dark. The route logged. Nowhere left to stand.

Miasma took the shoulder. Nyx took the other. It set its head against his neck, a thing it had not done since before the cut. It brought nothing back and left nothing behind. It did not look at the corner again. Neither did she.

Four days.

She knows. She’s known since the cut. Tonight she finished knowing. She didn’t tell me with anything but her body. The one thing it told me was this. The second she knew what it was, she put herself between it and the dark.

He went up the stairs with both of them carried. The lung was worse at the top than the bottom, by far.

The system fired the small one before he lay down.

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[ DETOXIFICATION — SUSTAINED ]

Source: Trait — Toxin Filter (passive, continuous)

Isolating: lung — load reduction 35%

Throughput still rerouted. Function degraded.

Estimated completion: not fixed.

[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 1.3 Years — HELD ]

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Thirty-five. Up four in a day. The rate broke. Sixty-five left at four a day is sixteen, and four a day is the minimum. The lung doesn’t finish before the yard. The figure doesn’t come back to me before the yard. The only question left is whether the lung carries me through it.

He lay down on the floor with his back against the bench leg. He did not put either of them down. He looked at the ceiling in the dark with four days on the other side of it.

The one thing he had that was not a problem sat on his chest. It breathed slow while he fought for each breath. For once, something remained beside him without asking him to solve it before morning came.

The system did not fire. It had nothing to say about any of it. It never had.