Chương 67: [B2] Chapter 24: Threadbare

Miho woke the way her clan had trained her to wake in unsafe territory: completely, instantly, and without letting a muscle admit it. She was upright, wedged between bodies. Wood beneath her, rough and unsprung, jolting over a road that no sigil had ever maintained.

The air was close with the smell of unwashed wool and too many people, someone's shoulder was pressed into hers on the left, someone smaller was asleep against her arm on the right, and through the slats of the carriage wall, a grey morning moved past at the speed of a tired horse. She catalogued her body the way Zero would have, because it was not hers. It was smaller. No older than sixteen at most. Hands callused in a pattern she didn't recognize, suggesting rope and repetitive gripwork rather than swordplay.

One tail, where there should have been three; fox ears, the left one notched close to the skull by someone else's scissors. And at her throat, a band of cold iron with a smooth ceramic plate set into it, which hummed faintly against her skin with a magic she did not need to use Identify to understand the purpose of. A window resolved in front of her, patient, visible to no one else.

World 3 — Objective Overview Goal 1: Locate all members of your team — Incomplete (0 of 3 located) Goal 2: Complete your host's personal objective — [Undisclosed: will reveal upon discovery] Goal 3: Complete a Gold-rank Adventurer's Guild request as a full team — Incomplete She dismissed the window and listened, because the carriage was full of information wearing the shape of exhausted conversation.

"–Sustrai's again, has to be, this is the mill road–""–was at his dye-yard last season. The mill's worse. The mill has the cutters–""–just don't be slow. That's all. You're new, right? so hear it once: whatever they hand you, carry it, and don't be slow." Piece by piece, the shape of it assembled: The people in this carriage did not belong to the man they were being taken to. They belonged to someone else, who loaned them out by the contract.

With coin changing hands at both ends, and none of it ever touching the hands that would do the real work.

'Rental stock' was the phrase actually used by the driver, through the slats, to a toll-keeper: rental stock, eighteen head, Sustrai's mill. Miho sat with that phrase for a long moment. Her clan had been destroyed by people who believed strength made ownership legitimate. And the system, in its boundless editorial wisdom, had looked across an entire world of possible lives and dressed her in this one. Fine, she thought, in the flat inner voice she reserved for enemies who did not yet know they were enemies.

I will wear this life, I will learn everything it can teach me, and when I am done with this world, it will remember that I passed through. The carriage turned off the road. Ahead, through the slats, a long low building crouched against a canal, its chimneys already smoking before dawn had properly finished.

The mill made cloth the way a threshing floor made grain, which was to say: efficiently, indifferently, and without any regard for what got caught in the machinery. The workfloor was one vast room, thick with fiber dust that turned the lamplight solid. Powered looms ran in ranks down its length, driven by groaning mana-shafts along the ceiling. Between them moved the leased: hauling, feeding, and folding.

All while the cutters at the far end came down on bolt after bolt of finished cloth with a sound like a door slamming underwater. Everything produced here was cheap. She could see it in the weave from across the room, loose, thin, and hurried; cloth made to be sold for mere coppers, under anyone else's price and to survive perhaps a season of wear. Outside, common folk were buying mountains of it and never once wondering how the price was possible. The handlers walked the aisles in pairs.

Each carried a short rod of dark wood capped in brass, and Miho learned what the rods did within the first hour, when an older man two looms down stumbled under a bale and went to one knee. The handler touched the brass cap to his shoulder without breaking stride. There was a crack, a smell of scorched air, and the man convulsed and folded. The handler said "Up," in the tone of a person addressing a stalled cart, and the man got up, and the aisle kept moving, and that was all. There was no anger in it.

That was the detail Miho noted most carefully. The rod was less of a punishment and more of a procedure, administered with the boredom of a long routine. Boredom meant it happened many times a day, every day, and had stopped being an event for anyone except the person convulsing. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Miho's own assignment was hauling.

She moved cloth bales from the loom-ranks to the cutting tables, each one a dense, dead weight very nearly the mass of the body she was wearing. For the person she actually was; level 59, with a foundation built by some of the finest physical traditions of her world, the bales weighed nothing. That was precisely the problem: a malnourished slave girl should not be able to do that. So she performed. She let the girl's thin arms shake at the correct moments.

She staggered on the eighth and eleventh trips, calibrating her weakness against the workers around her the way she had once calibrated sword forms against a master's example. Strength, here, would be noticed. Noticed things were reported, and reported things were sold. And Miho had no intention of discovering what Sustrai's mill did with stock that could carry double. She did not stop noticing the things around her, either. Shaft-couplings that could be jammed with a finger's worth of debris.

Handler rotations: pairs, twenty-minute circuits, a blind lane behind loom-rank six. A floor supervisor who watched the tally board and never the aisles; a wagon gate barred from outside; and a canal door that was not barred at all, because the canal was assumed to do the barring. Miho was not planning anything yet. She was simply incapable of being in a hostile structure and not mapping it. Rezu would have understood.

She noticed the hand before the boy it was attached to. He was working near the cutting table. A catkin, dark-haired, ears flat with exhaustion, perhaps a year younger than the body she wore, and his job was squaring the cloth beneath the cutter between strokes. He had been doing it for six hours, and his timing had gone soft. Miho had watched the rhythm all day from the hauling line: square, clear, slam. Square, clear, slam. The clearance between his fingers and the falling blade had been a handspan this morning.

It was three fingers now, and shrinking with every cycle, and the boy's eyes had the glassy fixity of someone whose body was continuing a task his mind had already left. She set her bale down at the table's end. Square. He didn't clear. His hand stayed flat on the cloth, adjusting a fold that did not matter. Miho moved. Not as fast as she could, but fast enough. Her hand closed around his wrist and snapped it back off the table. Slam. For a moment he just breathed.

"You–" His voice cracked.

"Thank you. Thank you, I–""Pay attention," Miho said, and picked her bale back up, and moved on down the line before any handler's circuit brought eyes to the pause. Behind her, she heard the rhythm resume.

The shift ran fourteen hours by her count, dawn into full dark, and ended with the mana-shafts simply groaning to a halt, as if the building itself had been unhooked from whatever fed it. The leased were counted twice, walked across a yard under lamplight, and put into a long windowless room at the compound's edge; bunks in tiers, a chamber pot, and one door, which was locked from the outside with a sound that everyone in the room had long since stopped reacting to.

Dinner was a half-loaf of grey bread and a ladle of bean water, which Miho refused to call soup. Still, she ate all of it, without expression, and noted that the bread had been cut to a size calculated by someone: enough to work tomorrow, not enough to think past tomorrow. She had chosen a lower bunk against the wall, sightlines to the door, when the catkin boy found her.

"Hey." Miho's eyes met his. He hovered at the edge of her bunk, ears up now, some of the day's grey gone from his face with the machines silenced.

"It's you. From the tables." He pressed on before she could deflect him.

"I–I'm Blake, by the way. I just… I wanted to thank you properly. You saved my hand. Maybe more than my hand. So, um, thanks."

"If your blood had gotten on the cloth," Miho said, "the bolt would have been spoiled, and the handlers would have docked the whole floor's rations for it. All of us. I was protecting my dinner, not you." Blake looked at his half-loaf of grey bread, then at her, and something in his tired face suggested he found the claim to be insulting to both of them, but had also decided not to argue with it.

"Sure," he said, unconvinced.

"Your dinner." He settled onto the bunk's edge, uninvited, in the way of someone who had decided something.

"What's your name?" Miho opened her mouth, and paused. She realized that did not know. Over the course of a fourteen hour shift, not one person in this entire compound had used her name even once. The realization arrived quietly and sat down next to everything else she was carrying, heavier than the bales had pretended to be. She flicked her eyes to the corner of her vision and opened her status.

STATUS MENU: Name: Miho Host: Soria — Leased Labor, Rental Class (Owner: Undisclosed) Race: Nine-Tailed Fox Tribe (Moon Fox Clan) (Glamoured: Foxkin) Class: Moonfox Avenger Level: 59 Glamour Integrity: Stable Soria. Somewhere under this borrowed skin was a girl with a notched ear and rope-callused hands, whose name existed, as far as this world cared, only in a ledger listing what she cost per season. Perhaps not even that.

"Soria," Miho said.

"My name is Soria." Blake nodded, satisfied, as though a transaction had been completed and the world was slightly more in order than it had been a minute ago.

"Get some sleep then, Soria. The second day's always the worst." He climbed to his own bunk. Around them, the room settled into the breathing of eighteen exhausted people, and the lamp outside the door threw its bars of light across the floor, and Miho lay awake in the dark with her back to the wall, holding a stranger's name, and began quietly, and thoroughly, the same way she did everything, to plan.