Chương 46: The Ones Still Standing

Alex handed Mia the quiver before the sun was properly up.

"Seventeen of them are light," he said.

"Those you can spend like normal arrows, the burst is small, but helpful. Feed them a small amount of mana and loose immediately. The other three are separated out at the bottom, and I want you to look at me while I say this part." Mia looked at him.

"Those three took everything I could push into the engraving. I don't actually know how big they are. I know they're a lot bigger than the small ones, and I know I would not want be close, so if you use one, use it at range and use it when it matters." Mia drew one of the three out, turned it over in the gray light, and studied the little script crawling across the head with an expression Alex could not read at all. Then she put it back and slung the quiver.

"Thank you," she said.

"That's it? No questions?"

"You said don't be near it." She started walking.

"I'm never near anything." They went out five strong as the sky started to gray. Alex in front, Jeremy at his shoulder, Liam and Ace behind, and Mia somewhere off to the right where Mia always was, ranging ahead and drifting back without anyone seeing her decide to. The walk south took nearly four hours, and Alex spent most of it looking at a world he'd barely seen. He'd been in the dungeon, or on the wall, or unconscious.

He had not walked any real distance across this place, and it turned out to be beautiful in a way that felt like an insult. Rolling ground, thick grass, tree lines in the distance with the wrong shade of green, and above it all a sky that stayed one degree off from the sky he'd grown up under. Nothing attacked them. They saw a herd of something four-legged and enormous a mile off that ignored them entirely, and twice Mia stopped the group with a raised hand for things that turned out to be nothing.

By the time the outpost came up over a rise, Alex had a knot in his stomach that had nothing to do with monsters. The place was small. Smaller than theirs, a wall maybe two thirds the height and visibly built by people who had learned masonry from necessity, and a good forty feet of it was patched with something that wasn't the original material. There was scorching along one section. The gate had been replaced with a different gate that didn't quite fit its own frame. And it was quiet.

That was the thing that got him. Their own camp made noise from half a mile out, kids and arguments and somebody hammering something. This place made none.

"I'll go," Alex said.

"Alone, to about thirty feet. The rest of you stay where they can see all of you and nobody has a hand on anything."

"You're the scariest one of us," Jeremy pointed out.

"I know. That's the point. If they shoot somebody it should be the guy it won't work on." He walked out into the open with his glaive strapped across his back and his hands loose, and got to about forty feet before a head came up over the wall. Young. Nineteen, maybe. He had a bow and he had it pointed at Alex, and his arms were not steady.

"That's far enough!" Alex stopped and put his hands out to the sides.

"Morning. My name's Alex. We're from a settlement about four hours north of here. Nobody's hurt anybody yet and I'd like to keep that strea going." The kid stared at him. Alex watched something complicated cross his face, the wariness fighting with something underneath it that looked painfully like relief, the specific look of a person who had not seen a new human being in weeks and had started to wonder if there were any.

"What do you want?"

"To talk. That's the entire agenda. If you tell me to leave I'll leave." The bow wavered.

"Stay there. Do not move. I'm getting somebody."

"I'll be right here." It took a few minutes. Alex stood in the grass with his arms out and did not move, and behind him he could feel his family being extremely still, and eventually the ill-fitting gate scraped open a few feet. A man came out first, fifties, gray coming in at the temples, wearing a jacket that had been expensive about a month ago and hadn't been washed since. Two teenagers flanked him, and Alex clocked them fast because he couldn't help clocking them. Sixteen, seventeen. Both armed.

Both standing like people who had learned in the last two weeks exactly where to stand. Behind the three of them, in the gap of the gate, maybe fifteen more people had gathered to watch, and Alex made himself look at them properly. Bandages. Slings. One woman with her forearm ending in a wrapped stump above where the wrist should have been. Burn scarring on a man's neck and jaw that had healed badly and been left to. Not one of them looked like they'd eaten a full meal recently.

"I'm Ray," the man said.

"You're a very large person."

"I get that a lot."

"You get that a lot from people who aren't holding weapons, I'd imagine." Ray's mouth moved slightly, not quite a smile.

"Say your piece."

"How are you doing? And I mean it as a real question, not a greeting." Alex droped his hands.

"Have you had trouble? Monsters, or people?" Ray's face closed a little at the word people, which told Alex something he filed and didn't like. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

"Monsters," Ray said.

"Two days ago. Not the wave, the wave's its own problem. These came at us in the middle of the day and they were organized. They came over the wall in three places at once, and they were people-shaped, and they were smart. We lost eleven."

"Eleven out of how many?"

"Forty-three. Now thirty-two." Alex heard the numbers and kept his face steady.

"We've seen them," he said.

"Not those specific ones, but the type. Intelligent, organized, they build nests and they raid from them. We cleared one about a week ago, a fortress northeast of here, dog-headed things." That got a reaction from the whole gate. Ray's eyebrows went up.

"You cleared one."

"We did."

"How many did you lose?"

"One," Alex said.

"My grandfather died in the wave before it. Nobody died taking the fortress." He let that sit, because it was the credential that mattered.

"I'll be straight with you about why I'm here. There are four settlements within a day's walk of here that we know about. Three of them are dead. Everyone in them. We scouted it yesterday. You're the only one still standing, and I don't think that's because you did anything wrong, I think you just haven't been hit twice yet." Nobody at that gate said anything.

"We have a wall that's held four waves. We have food that comes in every day, more than we eat. We have healers, plural, one of whom is standing behind me right now." Alex kept his voice level and let the offer be plain.

"You are welcome at our settlement. All thirty-two of you. Today, tomorrow, whenever. You don't have to decide now and you don't owe us anything for it." Ray was quiet for a long moment.

"Why," he said.

"Because my father made the argument three nights ago that if we're doing better than everyone else and we sit behind our wall enjoying it while people two hours away get taken apart, that's a choice we made." Alex shrugged.

"He's usually right. It's annoying."

"You've got people hurt," Alex went on.

"My sister is a doctor, an actual one, from before. She's got maybe two or three good heals in her before she's empty and there are thirty of you, so I'm not going to stand here and pretend we can fix this at your gate. But she can take the worst one or two right now if you'll let her." Ray turned and looked at the woman with the stump. Then at a man near the back who was being held upright by two other people and had not looked up once.

"Him," Ray said.

"And Denise." Ace came forward slowly with both hands visible, and Alex watched the entire tenor of the gate change the second the green light came off her palms. Watched people who had been braced for a trick lean in instead. She worked on the man in the back for a long time and something in his posture came loose, and she closed the worst of the stump wound where it had been weeping and left the woman with a wrist that would never grow back but would stop hurting.

When she stepped back her face was gray and she was breathing like she'd run.

"That's it," she said.

"That's what I've got. I'm sorry."

"Don't." Ray's voice had changed.

"Don't apologize for that." They talked logistics after that, and Alex laid out the rest.

"We're going on from here to hit two nests today. The one that raided you if we can find it, and one more if we're still standing after." He nodded northeast.

"That's the other half of why I came. Every one of these settlements has a nest near it, and the ones that died were the ones that didn't get theirs first. That's the whole pattern. It's not luck and it's not strength, it's whether something got to you before you got to it."

"You're going to hit the one that hit us," Ray said slowly.

"If we can find it. My cousin can track a churned-up trail from a raid that recent." And that was when the taller of the two teenagers stepped forward.

"I'm coming."

"Darius," Ray said.

"No." The kid's jaw was set so hard it had to hurt.

"They killed my dad in his tent. In his tent, Ray, he never even got up." He turned back to Alex, and there was nothing in his face but that.

"I'm level nine. I'm the second strongest person here. I'm coming with you."

"So am I," the other one said. Shorter, quieter, and he'd moved to stand beside his friend without appearing to think about it.

"Whatever he's doing." Alex looked at the two of them, sixteen and seventeen and holding weapons like they meant it, and felt the whole shape of what he had to do next.

"No," he said. Darius's face went through several things at once.

"You said you cleared a whole fortress. You said."

"I did, and I'm going to tell you exactly why the answer's still no, because you deserve the real reason and not a kind one." Alex crouched down slightly so he wasn't looming, and kept his voice even.

"The five of us have fought together for days. I know without looking where Mia's arrow is going to be, so I know where not to swing. Jeremy knows the exact second I'm going to overcommit, because I always do. That's not friendship, that's a machine, and it took us four waves and a fortress to build it. If I put you in it today, you don't make us stronger. You make me spend attention on where you are instead of on where the monster is."

"I can handle myself."

"I believe you. That's not the problem." Alex held his eyes.

"The problem is I can't handle you. Not today, not on a nest raid, not while I'm also holding a line. And if you died out there because I said yes to a kid who wanted this for the right reasons, I'd have to come back here and tell Ray about it. I'm not doing that." Darius stood there with his fists closed and his eyes bright and furious and nowhere to put any of it.

"Get stronger," Alex said. Thats all alex had The kid didn't answer. He turned around and walked back through the gate, and his friend hesitated, and followed him. Ace made a small sound behind Alex. He didn't turn around.

"That was well done," Ray said quietly.

"It didn't feel well done."

"No. It rarely does." Ray watched the two boys go, then turned back.

"That offer. Our whole group coming north. Is it real?"

"It's real."

"Then I want to ask you something and I want you to not be offended by it." Ray's eyes came up, and there was steel in the man that Alex hadn't seen until right now.

"Four days ago we ran into another group. Nine of them, armed, and they made us an offer too. Very warm. Lots of talk about safety. What they wanted was people to carry things and walk in front of them, and when we said no threaten to attack with there group later." His jaw tightened.

"So. Thirty-two people, most of them hurt, walking into a settlement four hours from anywhere with a wall around it. What exactly are we walking into? Are we guests, or are we something else?" Alex took the question seriously, because it was a serious question and because two weeks in, somebody had already tried it.

"You're people who live there," he said.

"Everybody pulls watch, including me, I did a full shift two days ago. Everybody works. Nobody's food is different from anybody else's food. We've absorbed other groups already and one of them was thirty-two people, same as you, and sits at the fire when we make decisions." He paused.

"You'll get asked to fight, because everyone fights. You will not be asked to walk in front of anyone." Ray studied him for a long moment.

"Alright," he said.

"Then we'll come."

"Now?"

"Now. Today. I'm not spending another night here waiting for the second raid." He was already turning toward the gate, already becoming a different kind of man, the kind who moves forty people.

"Give me directions." Alex gave them, twice, and drew the line of it in the dirt with a stick while Ray watched, and Liam added the landmarks Alex forgot. He offered to send someone back with them and Ray waved it off, because the road was four hours of open ground and thirty-two people moving together in daylight could handle four hours, and because he could hear it in Alex's voice that the nest could not wait.

"There'll be a wall and a meal," Alex said.

"Tell them we sent you. Somebody will start yelling about tents inside of ten minutes, that's how you'll know you're in the right place." He walked back to his family, and found that they had heard most of it.

"You handled the kid right," Jeremy said.

"I know."

"You look like you don't."

"I'll get over it." Alex pulled the glaive off his back and looked northeast, where the ground rose and the tree line started, where something had come out two days ago and gone over a wall in three places at once.