Chương 17: Chapter 16 - Terrible Timing

The walk back was slower than the walk in, and it took him most of the first hour to work out why. Going out, he'd had somewhere to be moving away from. Coming back, he had nothing pushing him and nothing pulling him either — just grey ground under grey sky, and the accumulating soreness of a day that had already tried to kill him twice. Mahkir padded alongside him, low to the ground, tail flicking with a rhythm that didn't match Ant's stride at all. You've gone quiet, Mahkir said. It's unsettling.

Say a word so I know your brain hasn't fallen out somewhere back there.

"Just thinking." About the artifact you didn't find.

"About the fact that I don't exist anywhere," Ant said.

"No chip. No clan. No paper in the entire world with my name on it. And now I've got a level and a sword and you, and none of it's written down anywhere either." I'm not paperwork.

"You're the part of this that's going to be hardest to explain, is what you are." Mahkir made a small, dismissive sound in his throat. Explain me however you like. I'll still be right here. Ant almost smiled at that. He let the quiet come back for a stretch of road he didn't bother timing, and his mind went, unhelpfully, to Claire — not warmly, exactly, more the way you'd think about a tool that turned out useful despite not being built for the job. She'd handed him a direction without meaning to.

He pictured showing up wherever she was next, unveiling a Kithren she'd never seen a record of, and watching that composed face try to find a shelf to put it on. Who's Claire, Mahkir said, because apparently he'd been listening to more of that than Ant intended to broadcast.

"Someone from before. Not important." You thought about her for four minutes. That's fairly important.

"Drop it." Dropped, Mahkir said, in a tone that meant it absolutely wasn't, and left it there anyway. The academies came next, the way they always did when Ant ran out of better ideas — structure, instructors, other bonded pairs at every level, the kind of accumulated knowledge he had none of on his own. The problem wasn't the idea. The problem was that he was twenty-two and newly bonded, and every academy in the city was stuffed with seventeen-year-olds who'd had their Kithren for months and moved like it.

He could take the looks. It was the questions that would follow him out the door — how'd you bond this late, where's your chip, who ran your ceremony — and none of them had an answer he could hand to an institution that wrote things down.

"I know a way to get you a chip," he said out loud, mostly to have something to say that wasn't about Claire.

"It's not exactly official." How unofficial.

"Back-alley unofficial. There's a whole network under the city that does it — ceremonies, chips, all of it, off the books, for people the regular clans wouldn't touch. I looked into it once, years ago. Never went through with it." Why not.

"Because it's expensive, and what you get is usually a Kithren nobody else wanted, and I'd rather starve than let my old clan find out I'd gone crawling to a black-market bonder." And now?

"Now I've already got the Kithren nobody else wanted to admit existed," Ant said.

"So maybe just the chip part." Mahkir was quiet for a few paces, which from him counted as genuine consideration. And if the chip finds nothing about me. What then. Ant hadn't wanted to say that part out loud yet, but there it was, sitting in the open now that Mahkir had asked.

"Chips don't generate the system. They read it — pick up whatever the bond already changed in the body and put it on a screen. In theory, slotting one in shouldn't step on anything you and I already have running." In theory.

"In theory. What worries me is you. There's no ceremony behind you, no registration, nothing on file anywhere. If a chip goes looking for that record and comes back with nothing, I don't know what it shows. Maybe a blank field. Maybe it decides the bond never happened at all and reads me as unkithered." He kept his eyes on the path.

"That's the version I can't walk into blind." So don't.

"That's the plan. Find someone who actually knows how the thing works before we let them near either of us." This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Good, Mahkir said. I'd rather not be logged as imaginary.

"You're not imaginary. You're just not anybody's problem yet." I intend to stay that way. Ant let out something close to a laugh — the first one that had made it all the way out since the chamber. He didn't know where he'd start looking for that kind of person. Not in any book, not in any academy hall. But he knew the district with no name well enough, the alleys and half-lit corners and the market that woke at an hour nobody with somewhere better to be bothered attending. He'd spent years there.

People who needed the unclanned path talked, because talking cost nothing and information was the only currency some of them had left. Maybe they'd let him work off the fee instead of paying it outright. It wasn't much of a plan. It was the first thing all day that pointed somewhere specific.

"We'll start there," he said.

"Once we're back." Fine. But I choose the fights this time. Not you.

"You didn't choose the last one either. It chose you." It regretted it, Mahkir said, with the smugness of a creature who'd never once lost an argument with himself. They stopped for a while around what Ant guessed was midmorning, still deep enough in the wasteland that the ground hadn't started changing yet. He sat with his back against a low outcrop of grey rock and ate the last of the hard bread he'd carried out of the district, tearing off a piece and setting it down for Mahkir before he'd even asked.

Mahkir sniffed it once, unimpressed. This is terrible.

"It's what I've got." I could catch something better.

"You're the size of a housecat." Housecats catch things. But he ate it anyway, methodically, the way he did everything, and settled against Ant's leg once it was gone. For a while neither of them said anything, and the quiet sat easier than it had all morning — not the kind that needed filling, just two things resting because resting was, for once, allowed.

"You didn't answer me," Ant said eventually.

"Back in the chamber. What you'll become." I know what I'll become.

"Yeah?" Better than I am now. A pause, tail giving one slow sweep across the dirt. You'll have to manage the same trick. Try to keep up. Ant let out a short laugh and let his head fall back against the stone, eyes closed for a minute against a sun that had finally started to feel like actual warmth instead of a threat. He didn't sleep.

He let himself sit there long enough that his shoulders stopped aching quite so insistently, and when he pushed himself back up, Mahkir was already on his feet, waiting with the patient stillness of an animal that had never once considered leaving without him. They kept walking. The sun kept moving.

Somewhere past midday, Mahkir gave up walking entirely — no announcement, just a determined tug against Ant's ankle that resolved, after a confused second, into Mahkir hauling himself up the inside of his coat by the hem.

"That coat wasn't even mine to start with," Ant said, watching him climb.

"I'm not sure how I feel about it getting claimed out from under me." It's warm. You're slow. The math isn't complicated. He settled somewhere around Ant's ribs and went still, heat spreading through the fabric that was noticeably more than a body should put out on its own. The ground gave the first sign the wasteland was ending — grey soil going from nothing to something, small variations underfoot where there'd been only flat and featureless before.

Color crept in after that, pale brown and distant green bleeding in at the edges of his vision, the kind of thing the wasteland had been filtering out for days without him noticing it was gone. Trees arrived the way things did when your mind had stopped expecting them: he registered he was noticing them a moment after he'd actually started.

A line on the horizon resolved into trunks with real depth and real shadow, and below them a path — not a road, nothing that formal, just ground worn down by enough feet over enough years that the scrubland had given up trying to reclaim it. He stepped onto it without slowing down. The trees closed in gradually, the light going from flat grey-white to something broken and dappled overhead, and the air changed with it — damp earth and green growing things, after days of nothing but mineral dust and his own sweat.

He noticed the smell before he noticed he'd noticed it. The world had edges again. Landmarks. He was still turning the district plan over, working out where he'd actually start asking questions, when the Phantom Bunny stepped out of the scrub.

It came in from the left with the confidence of a creature that had already made up its mind about him — roughly the size of a large cat, pale grey with darker markings that seemed to shift as he watched, not quite transparent so much as unwilling to commit fully to being solid. The ears ran longer than a rabbit's had any business being. The eyes sat too bright in its skull. Its posture carried an aggression that had no business belonging to anything built like a throw pillow.

He ran the appraisal before it could finish whatever it was working itself up to. [Phantom Bunny — Level 2. Common. Low threat.] He looked at it. Looked at the lump in his coat.

"Mahkir. There's something here." The lump gave a small, irritated wriggle, and a red head emerged from his collar with the put-upon dignity of an animal that had been perfectly comfortable and was now being asked to care about that. The amber eyes found the Phantom Bunny, took their time doing it, and came back to Ant already carrying the argument he was about to make out loud. You want, Mahkir said, each word measured out like he was working hard to keep his voice level, me to fight that.

He looked at the bunny again. Back at Ant. No. Then he sank back into the coat with the smooth, deliberate motion of a door being shut quietly by someone who'd considered slamming it and chosen better. The Phantom Bunny had been radiating intent to fight since the moment it appeared. It stopped.

Something had changed in the brief window Mahkir had been visible — some register below anything Ant could pick up on, but apparently more than enough for the Phantom Bunny's own senses to reclassify the whole situation from winnable to a very bad idea. The posture came apart. It was still standing there, technically, working out how to leave without making the reason for leaving too obvious. Four seconds. Then it was gone, back into the scrub faster than a dignified retreat should have looked.

Ant stared at the space where it had been.

"I think you scared it," he said. Obviously, said the coat.

"You didn't even do anything." I don't need to do anything. That's rather the point. He was still chewing on that — a level-two common Kithren registering, in three seconds, enough of Mahkir to override every instinct it had — when a voice reached him from further down the path, behind him, pitched exactly the way he'd learned to dread.

"Oh, look who it is. And this time without his friend to help him out."