Chương 5: The Price of Bread

He reached up and tried to swipe the box away. His hand went through it. He'd known it would. He'd tried the same thing his first hour in this world, in the clearing, and the boxes hadn't cared then either. They showed him what they wanted and they left when they were done. [Anomaly. Source: Architect.] hung in the air over the two dead wolves in his own font, bright and steady, in no hurry at all.

'Make it stop looking at me,' he thought, at nobody.

"You can't," Sable said.

"And standing here arguing with it is the single dumbest thing you could be doing right now. Off the ground. Now. Walk." He stepped off the line, off the tower's owned dirt and back onto the wrong-green grass of the clearing, and the second both feet were on unclaimed ground the box blinked out. No sound. Just gone, the way they all went. It didn't make him feel better. The looking had stopped. The fact that it had looked stayed exactly where it was.

He climbed back up the slope to the road his own code had cut, and he started walking. Away from the tower. Away from the patch of ground the System had its eye on. His arm wouldn't stop bleeding. He worked the torn sleeve the rest of the way loose and wound it around the bite as tight as he could with one hand and his teeth. It soaked through pink anyway, and there was nothing to do about that but keep walking.

"Where am I going," he said. Out loud now, because there was no one on the road to hear a man talk to himself.

"There's a town a few hours up this road," Sable said.

"Ashfen. It's a hole. Failed adventurers, broke farmers, mud to the ankle. Nobody there will look at you twice, which is exactly what you need. Go. Eat something. Sleep somewhere with a wall."

"I don't have any money." A pause.

"No," she said.

"You don't. We'll get to that." The three suns slid down the sky at their own strange pace and the light went thin and orange, and by the time he could smell Ashfen he'd stopped being able to feel his feet. He smelled it before he saw it. Smoke, mud, animals, and somewhere under it something frying that made his empty stomach fold over on itself. Then the road bent and there it was, down in a shallow bog of a valley.

A couple hundred low buildings of grey timber and wet thatch, leaning on each other in the muck, woodsmoke going up flat in the still evening. He walked in past the first houses, and the town looked at him. Not all at once, and not for long. A woman pulling washing off a line glanced at him and her face did a small thing and went back to the washing. Two men outside a low tavern stopped talking while he passed and started again after. A boy carrying water stopped dead and stared until his mother hauled him on.

It wasn't the bloody rag on his arm, though that didn't help. It was everything. His clothes were wrong. The trousers, the shirt, the shoes he'd died in, all of it cut and stitched in ways that didn't exist here, out of stuff nobody in Ashfen had ever worn. He didn't move right. He didn't smell right. He couldn't have told you what he'd gotten wrong, and neither could they, but every single person who looked at him knew in half a second that he wasn't from anywhere near here.

"Stop meeting their eyes," Sable said quietly.

"You look at people like you're about to ask them a question. People here don't do that. Look at the ground and walk like you've somewhere to be." He looked at the ground and walked. The frying smell pulled him through the muck toward the middle of the town, where a handful of stalls stood under sagging awnings. Most were shutting for the night. One still had bread on it. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

The man behind it was broad and grey-stubbled, flour worked permanent into the creases of his hands, a stained apron stretched over a belly that said he'd been heavier in better years. He was stacking the last of the day's loaves into a basket. He looked up when Kaito stopped in front of the stall, and where everyone else in this town had looked at Kaito and looked away, this man looked at him and kept looking. What was on his face wasn't suspicion. It was closer to a question he was actually willing to ask.

"You look half dead, friend," the man said. Plain and even.

"And the other half's hungry. Which one do we fix first?" Kaito's mouth watered so hard it hurt. He made himself answer.

"How much for the bread?"

"Two copper a loaf. Day-old's one." The man tipped his head at the basket.

"After dark I'd sooner sell it cheap than carry it home." Kaito put his hand in his pocket. He knew before his fingers got there that it was empty. He checked the other one anyway. Then the back ones.

He stood in front of a basket of bread that cost one copper coin, starving, with a body that had killed two wolves an hour ago, and he did not have one copper coin, because since he'd opened his eyes in that clearing with dew on his hands, nobody had handed him a single coin, and you cannot eat the fact that you built the place.

'One copper,' he thought.

'I priced this. I sat in a meeting once and set the cost of bread to a number on a spreadsheet, and now there's a number on this man's bread and I can't reach it.'

"I don't have any money," he said. The words came out flat.

"I'm sorry. I don't have anything." The man looked at him a moment longer. Then he reached into the basket, pulled out a day-old loaf, and held it across the stall.

"Take it." Kaito didn't move.

"I told you, I can't pay —""I heard you." The man kept holding it out.

"I've gone hungry. It's a stupid way to feel, and there's enough of it going around this town without you adding to it. Take the bread. Find me when you've got a copper. Pell. Ask anyone, they'll point you at the loud fat one who gives his stock away." He almost smiled.

"Don't tell them that last part." Kaito took the bread. It was real and heavy and still held a little warmth from the day, and his eyes did something stupid and hot that he blinked back hard, because he was not going to stand in a mud street and cry over a loaf of bread in front of a man named Pell.

"Thank you," he said.

"Eat it slow," Pell said, already turning back to his basket.

"You'll bring it straight back up if you don't." He turned away from the stall and tore the heel off the loaf and took a bite, and for about three seconds the bread was the only thing in the world and it was perfect. Then something bumped his hip, light and quick. A small hand went in and out of his empty pocket before he'd finished chewing, and the loaf was gone from his other hand. He moved before he thought. His arm shot out and his fingers closed on a skinny wrist. He looked down. A girl.

Tiny, maybe six, drowning in a man's coat cut down to fit her, hair in a knotted rope down her back, his loaf hugged to her chest. She'd come in under his guard clean and she'd have been gone in another half-second. The only reason he had her at all was that an hour with the wolves had taught his body to grab fast and grab hard. She didn't scream. She didn't beg.

She went still in his grip and looked up at him, steady, far too steady for a kid, like she was working out exactly what he was and how much he might be worth.

"Let go of her," Sable said. Careful.

"Kaito. Let go of the child." He didn't let go yet. With his free hand, slow and easy, he took the loaf back out of her arms. She let him. She didn't fight for it. She just watched him take it, and watched to see what he'd do next. He could have shaken her. Could have shouted for whoever passed for law in a town like this, or cuffed her the way the world had clearly already taught her to expect.

He thought about the number on Pell's basket, and his own empty pockets, and the long hungry road still aching in his legs. He broke the loaf in two and gave her the bigger half. He put it in her free hand and closed her fingers around it, and then he let go of her wrist.

"Go on," he said.

"Before I change my mind." She didn't run. She backed up one step, out of reach, the bread held against her chest, and she looked at him. Not scared. Studying. For just a second something moved behind her eyes that was much too old for a face that small. Then she was gone, sideways between two stalls and into the dark, and the muck barely shifted where she'd stood.

"Huh," Sable said, very quietly, and didn't say what the "huh" was for. He stood in the muddy square and ate his half of the loaf, slower this time, and for a minute the day let go of him a little. He had bread. He had a wall to find. He had a voice in his head that, trap or not, had kept him alive twice now. It wasn't much. It was more than he'd had this morning.

"Don't turn your head," Sable said. The almost-okay went out of him all at once.