Chương 108: Blood Marsh

The ground turned red on the ninety-sixth day, and Keth understood, standing at the edge of it, why the Index had never bothered pretending the color was anything but exactly what it looked like. Not blood, technically. Iron in the water, in the mud, in the strange red vegetation that grew low and wet along the marsh's edges — that was the fact of it, the thing a scout's report would have written down plain and unadorned.

But knowledge and feeling had stopped agreeing with each other somewhere in the last month, and standing at the edge of a swamp the exact color of a wound, Keth felt his whole body recoil from it the way a body recoils from something it already, on some older level, recognizes. He scratched a mark into the strap of his own pack that morning, since stone and wood had both run scarce here, the leather already crowded with faint lines climbing toward a hundred. Ninety-six.

He was thin now in a way that frightened him when he caught sight of his own reflection in still water — cheekbones sharp beneath skin gone the pale, grayish color of someone who hadn't seen proper sun in weeks, his coat hanging off shoulders that used to fill it. He was also, and this frightened him considerably more, stronger than he had ever once been in his whole life, and the two facts sat inside the same failing body without any apparent intention of reconciling themselves.

The marsh took from him differently than anything before it had.

Where the Ribs had demanded quick, decisive violence, the Blood Marsh demanded patience it had already burned out of him weeks ago — quicksand that gave no warning before it took a leg to the knee, blood-leeches that attached painlessly and fed for hours before a person even noticed the weakness setting in, gas pockets that bloomed sudden and invisible from disturbed mud and left him coughing, dizzy, half-blind for the better part of an afternoon on the hundred-and-second day.

He pulled four leeches off his own calves that same evening, working by feel in the dark because he'd used his last proper light two weeks ago, and found, peeling the last one free, that the wound beneath it had already gone an angry, swollen red that had nothing to do with the marsh's own coloring. He didn't have anything left to treat it with.

He wrapped it in a strip of cloth already stiff with old, dried blood from a dozen other wounds, and told himself, in a voice that sounded less and less like his own each time he used it, that it would be fine. It was not fine. He understood that, somewhere honest and quiet beneath the telling.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. He wept that night, alone, curled against the twisted red roots of something that might once have been a tree, and did not fully understand, crying, whether the grief belonged to the infection climbing slow and hot up his leg, or to Aurelian, or to Elian, or to a version of himself that had once believed being strong enough would be sufficient to keep the people he loved alive. I got stronger.

I kept getting stronger and it didn't save any of them. It's not going to save me either, not really. It's just going to make whatever's left of dying take longer. He didn't know if the thought was true.

He cried like it might be, the sound small and raw and swallowed almost immediately by the marsh's own thick, indifferent silence, and somewhere in the crying he found himself murmuring names into the dark the way a person murmurs a prayer they've stopped fully believing in but can't quite bring themselves to abandon. Aurelian. Talia. Elian. Voss. Lira. Ashcroft. The marsh did not answer him. It never once had reason to.

He forced himself upright the following morning because staying down had stopped, somewhere in the last hundred days, feeling like an option his own body would forgive him for choosing. The fever had settled into him properly by then, a low, constant heat beneath his skin that made the marsh's already-oppressive air feel considerably worse, sweat soaking through a shirt that had nothing left in it to trade for dry cloth.

He walked anyway, slow, deliberate, testing each step for the particular give in the ground that meant quicksand rather than solid earth, and understood, walking, that he was no longer entirely certain how many more days like this one his body actually had left in it. He did not hunt on the hundred-and-fourth day. He simply survived it, one careful, fever-slick step at a time, and scratched no mark that evening at all, too exhausted to properly manage even that small, stubborn ritual.

The thing in the water found him on the hundred-and-sixth day, and Keth understood, the single instant he saw it properly, that whatever else the marsh had thrown at him so far had all, in retrospect, been mercy compared to this.

It surfaced without warning a hundred yards out, vast, dark, scaled in something that drank the gray daylight rather than reflecting it, and the sheer scale of the disturbance it made rising — water displaced in waves that reached him even at this distance, the whole marsh's ambient sound dropping instantly into a silence he recognized, cold and total, from a checkpoint gate a lifetime ago. Cataclysm-Sign. He did not think.

He did not weigh options, or calculate distances, or reach for a courage he no longer had the strength left in his fevered, wasted body to properly summon. He simply turned, and ran, sinking to his ankles with every third stride, his newly-strengthened Inferno-Sign body screaming with an exhaustion that had nothing left in reserve to spend on this and spending it anyway, because the alternative to spending it was simply not surviving the next several minutes at all. The creature did not pursue far.

Perhaps it wasn't hungry. Perhaps something else, further out, held more of its attention than one starving, fevered boy fleeing through mud. Keth didn't stop to consider which. He ran until his legs finally, fully failed him, and collapsed hard into a shallow, relatively dry hollow between two twisted red roots, chest heaving, vision swimming at its edges from fever and terror both.

He lay there a long while afterward, staring up at a sky gone the color of old bruises, and let himself, finally, properly grieve the boy he understood, with total and exhausted clarity, he was never going to get back. That boy had believed, once, that being strong enough meant being able to protect the people he loved.

That boy had thrown himself in front of a deer-thing with a kitchen knife because loving Elian had felt, in that single desperate instant, like the only thing in the entire world worth risking anything for. That boy had cried in Voss's arms in a hospital bed and been told, gently, that carrying grief wasn't a debt he had to pay alone. He was alone now.

Entirely, completely alone, in a marsh that would kill him with patient, total indifference the moment his body finally stopped fighting it, and there was no barrier left in him to protect anyone, no squad left to share the weight, no wall waiting anywhere at the end of this that would open for him again.

"I'm sorry," he said aloud, to nobody, his voice cracking apart on the two small words.

"I'm sorry I couldn't be enough. I'm sorry I got stronger instead of getting you all back." The marsh answered him only with wind moving slow through red, twisted branches, and Keth closed his eyes against a sky that offered nothing back at all, and let the fever, finally, carry him down into something too heavy and too total to properly call sleep. End Of Chapter One Hundred Eight