Chương 26: Chapter 25 – Salvage, Not Salvation

Bracken drifted in darkness. He could not feel his body. Could not hear or see. His thoughts churned slowly, swimming through an ocean of noctar, promising warmth and comfort if he only surrendered to oblivion. But he could not. Some urgency, some instinctive drive to resist, still spurred him on. A memory half-forgotten, obligations unfulfilled. He struggled against the weight of that darkness, clawing his way towards the surface. But he was weak, and he was tired, and the black kept dragging him down.

With each passing moment, his weariness grew. He sank a little deeper. The darkness felt a little warmer, and the quiet a little more peaceful. Until, at last, he stopped fighting. He drifted down, thoughts hazy and slow, that urgent need to resist almost entirely forgotten. Inwardly he smiled, feeling a kiss ghost over his lips, half felt and half remembered, a lingering goodnight. And then a hammer fell upon his chest. The darkness surged white. Pain speared through him.

The kiss became firm, desperate and cold, forcing air into lungs already clogged with water. The hammer struck his chest again, each blow dragging him closer to the surface. He was wrenched from the peaceful black and thrust into the night, and into a body wracked with aches. His eyes flew open, painful and unfocused. Ressa sat beside him, white-faced with worry. She quickly turned him on his side. He coughed, spluttered, vomited water across the cobbles.

All warmth was forgotten, his body stiff with bone deep chill. Bracken wheezed as his body remembered to breathe, his heart to beat, and his flesh to shiver.

"Bracken," said Ressa, his name sounding like a curse and a prayer in a single breath.

"Can you hear me?" She clapped him on the back, helping to drive the water from his lungs. Pain bounced through his body and Bracken whimpered, feeling like he'd been ground to paste beneath the heel of a giant.

"Passage?" he mumbled, mind finally settling on a single thought. The only thought. Where the hell was Passage? Bracken tried to push himself off the ground, but his arms slipped out from beneath him, not steady enough yet. Ressa caught him before he could bang his head on the stones. Sable and Torvin were there as well, crouching close beside him. None of them answered, all three looking out at the canal. Bracken followed their gazes, trying again to sit up, this time with more success.

The fire in the canal house had spread. Black smoke belched through holes in the walls and orange flames flickered in the windows. All three of the buildings wobbled, unsteady and threatening to collapse.

"Passage!" Bracken tried to yell but managed only a rasp. Someone splashed in the black, flailing towards the edge of a boat drifting before the houses. Torvin and Sable started jogging towards the bridge, wordlessly moving to aid their friend. They paused halfway there and Bracken strained to see, to understand why. He blinked, eyes still struggling to focus, and realised it was not Passage but Pike clutching at the side of a dinghy.

He had trapped the edge of the boat's side under his armpit, no hands left to hold on with. Pike was oddly silent, perhaps too shocked to yet know whether he meant to cry or scream or plead for help. He never got a chance to work it out. The water swirled around him, sloping downwards as if a plug had been pulled from the bottom of the Stillwake and now the canal was quickly draining. From the depth rose a Hollow, no longer bearing any trace of the boy that it had been.

One long, clawed arm dangled by its side, the other a bloodless wound. Its face was corpse white, eyes enormous black spheres, swollen and protruding from a misshapen, narrow skull. Its mouth hung open, too crowded with needle-thin teeth to properly close. It rose up above the water, a bloated leviathan of stretched white flesh. The Hollow had shed any trace of the boy it had once been. Pike struggled against the current dragging him down.

Tried to haul himself into the boat with arms that ended in cracked and chalky stubs above the elbow. The water held him in the Hollow's grip, tearing him from the boatside. He finally screamed and the water dragged him down. His voice was lost, silenced in a burble and a splash. Water continued to swirl a moment longer, the Hollow turning its pitch-black gaze on the canal side. Bracken froze, as did the other three. None dared to breathe, or run, or make any sound at all.

At last, the creature sank, silent, into the black and was gone.

"Passage!" Bracken coughed, finally getting his knees under him and rising with Ressa's help. One arm over her shoulder, they limped after the others, anxiously crowding the canal's edge closest to the ruined houses. He moved clumsily, limbs halfway numb and lungs afire.

"I can't see him," Torvin muttered, anxiety straining his voice. Bracken shrugged his arm free of Ressa and stumbled towards the edge. Sable and Torvin grabbed hold of him, pulling him back.

"What are you doing?" Sable demanded, gripping him tight.

"He could," Bracken coughed.

"Could still be in there. Have to get him out."

"Bracken!" a voice cried from somewhere out of sight, echoing quietly down the canal.

"Passage?" Bracken called out in response. The others joined, a chorus crying out after that voice.

"Bracken!" Passage shouted back, splashing around the corner of the farthest house. He looked beaten to hell, hair plastered to his face, blood running freely from a cut on his forehead. He lumbered through the shallows, the path before the houses sunken just deep enough that the water rose to Passage's chest once he got the stonework beneath his feet. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Bracken tensed, only kept from jumping into the water by his friends' hands on his shoulders. He looked around, expecting at any moment for the Hollow to rise back from the depths and claim Passage as it had Pike. But it did not. Whether that was because there was still some ounce of Patrick left within the creature, or its appetite was sated by that first kill, it did not reappear. Passage splashed towards the steps and the four of them dragged him quickly onto the path, collapsing in a heap.

Bracken hugged his friend close, wordless and grateful and terrified and sorry. Passage hugged him back, the embrace painful but neither one willing to break from it, too relieved to be alive and not having to mourn a brother lost.

"The knuckles?" Bracken asked as they separated, looking around at the others.

"Broken. The bell too," Passage shook his head, grimacing not with pain, but regret. A hollow feeling opened up in Bracken's belly. Without the knuckles, without something to show for what they'd done, then it had all been for nothing. Worse, with Pike dead, there would be consequences. A stolen Implement would have been dire enough, but at least the blame might have fallen on the fools careless enough to be robbed. One of the window frames broke free, as if to punctuate how far things had escalated out of hand.

It fell from the front of the nearest canal house with a tinkling of broken glass and a splash. Black smoke billowed from the wounded housefront, the fire steadily spreading. Bracken stepped down into the water, shrugging off the hands that tried to stop him.

"Bracken, what the fuck are you doing?" Sable demanded. He hastened a few steps deeper before glancing back over his shoulder.

"This can't have been for nothing," he said. His body ached, but he could still move, still salvage something from this disaster. He half-waded, half-paddled towards the rope ladder and Cinder's balcony while the others shouted in protest. There was the sound of splashing, and he turned to see Torvin chasing after him. Bracken winced and struggled, trying to climb the ladder while his body begged him to stop moving. Rather than stop him, or drag him back, Torvin helped shove him up towards the balcony.

"Hurry up," Torvin ordered, looking distrustfully at the water.

"I'm not looking to get eaten by that fuckin' thing." Torvin followed him up and the two of them paused on the balcony. Smoke filled the room within, the fire spreading faster. It had yet to consume the room completely, but already the heat gusting through the broken doorway was scorching. The flames had begun to lap at the stairs. On the other side of the room, flames had climbed the walls and started spreading across the ceiling.

Bracken hesitated, his last sliver of good sense pleading for him to return to the pier. He looked down the canal. Already shutters were opening, lanterns lighting, bystanders quietly watching and waiting, witnesses to their crime. In the dark, it would be hard to make any of them out. None had dared venture into the street – yet. Though, most would keep their distance. They would watch, some prepared to run if the fire spread, others prepared to loot in case it didn't.

He doubted Cinder and Pike were ever close with their neighbours. A cabinet collapsed in the kitchen, splintering and crackling as it fed itself into the flame, the sound reclaiming Bracken's attention. Torvin was by his side, shifting anxiously and waiting for Bracken to make the call. Onwards, Bracken nodded. This was a disaster of his making and he refused to leave his friends poorer and more embattled than they began.

Torvin followed him wordlessly up the stairs, both of them covering their mouths with damp shirts and coughing through the smoke. It stung at Bracken's eyes and made them water, his already aching lungs protesting further. Fire had spread to the floor above, consuming the bed and the far side of the room. They did not stop, climbing all the way to the top floor where Cinder continued to seize and gasp. Torvin froze on the staircase, eyeing Cinder warily.

Bracken ignored the man, making a beeline for the desk and the precious grimoires stacked there. The only things in the room worth saving. Torvin stepped cautiously into the room, keeping his eyes on Cinder's shuddering form and his back to Bracken, guarding him. Bracken was grateful for the gesture if nothing else. He limped about, stepping over Cinder to steal the Caller's shirt from where it hung against the wall and used it to bundle up the books in a makeshift pack.

"Carry these for me?" Bracken coughed, chest tight with smoke. It was rising up the stairs and filling the room far faster than the flames.

"What do we do about him?" Torvin asked, cautiously nudging Cinder with his foot. He accepted the sack of books, looking conflicted. Cinder rolled over, dragging the graspers a few inches further from his face and lay flat on his back. Purple-black veins had slithered through his skin, stretched across his face and throat. His eyes rolled madly, settling on Bracken. Both he and Torvin froze as the Caller's mouth worked soundlessly, dark foam frothing on his lips.

One hand grasped towards them; fingers curled like claws. Bracken was paralysed, not by fear but indecision. The moment, the choice, yawned before him. One more step, one more sin, he could not undo. Somewhere below, another crunch of wood splintering and breaking, fire popping and crackling. Leaving Cinder there would be tantamount to killing him. Perhaps not with his own hands, but near enough. But saving him would kill them all. He looked the man in the eye and knew there was no choice to be made. Not really.

"Fuck him," Bracken said, voice stronger than he felt.

"He was a monster anyway." Torvin met his eyes and nodded, shouldering his share of the sin. Together they headed for the stairs, ignoring the wheezing corpse on the floor, a body waiting to be fed to the flames. Bracken had little time to countenance his guilt, a more pressing problem at hand. The sound from earlier had been the staircase collapsing between the kitchen and bedroom floors.

"Up for another swim?" Torvin asked, sounding like he would rather have pitched just about any other solution.

"Guess so," Bracken replied, praying to Fisher that Patrick's Hollow had swum to distant waters and wasn't waiting for another snack. The pair rushed towards the front windows and pried them open. Cold air rushed in and the fire below roared higher. Torvin leaned out and tossed the sack of books into the dinghy below. They landed with a thud, thankfully on target.

"You first," Torvin helped Bracken, wincing, onto the windowsill. Bracken paused for just one breath. He looked out at the black water; aching, cold, and afraid that he was leaving something of himself behind to burn. He let himself fall.