Chương 3: Chapter 2 — Someone Else's Hands

A dirt path ran past his shoulder, with low brush gone scrubby and half-dead on both sides. The sky was the wrong color, pale gold fading to white at the horizon, with no sun in it that he could find. The light came flat from the east and threw no proper shadow. The air smelled of damp wood and something metallic. Somewhere out of sight a bird made a sound with a trill on the end that belonged to no bird he had ever heard. Ted stayed on the ground and ran the check. Not the panic version.

The ordered one, the sequence he had written into chapter two of his own book, because going down a list was better than screaming on the inside. Lungs first. They ached deep, the way lungs ache after running in cold air. Breathing in was fine. Breathing out burned along the left side. Bruised ribs, then, or a strained muscle between them, and not a puncture, or so he hoped. Novels said a puncture hurt on the inhale.

Novels had never had to keep a body alive, and it was a great deal less funny as a diagnosis than it had been as research. Hands next. They tingled, numb in some internal way, as though the blood were present but moving too slowly. He held them up. They were not his hands. Younger. Narrower. Calluses ridged the fingers, dirt packed under the nails, and the knuckles were scraped raw, one of them weeping a slow dark line toward the wrist. The skin ran a shade lighter than his own.

He turned them over, and the word in his head, my hands, refused to line up with what his eyes were reporting. He studied the scraped knuckles for about three seconds. Then the rest of it arrived. This is real. The panic came on schedule. Chest tight, breath shallow, vision pulling in at the edges.

He named it while it happened, hyperventilation, acute stress, an ordinary response to an impossible morning, because naming a thing was the first move in chapter two and because a man counting his own symptoms was a man not yet screaming. Shut up. Look around. Then take stock of the body you woke up in. He had done the first. He kept at the second. Hunger sat under the ribs like a clenched fist; this body had not eaten in a day, maybe longer.

The limbs were heavy, the joints stiff in a way the fall couldn't explain. And low in the gut, central, there was a faint warmth that wasn't quite heat, more the memory of a cramp already passed. When he reached toward it with his attention the warmth sharpened, and his skull answered with a spike of pressure that made him stop at once. A dantian. Or what was left of one. The handbook was clear on the point. If reaching for it burns, stop reaching. He sat up slowly. The world swam, then settled.

Bruised ribs, empty stomach, weak limbs, and something in the gut that might be a cultivation base or might be an injury. Not good. Not fatal either. He went through the robe before he stood. A crude pocket had been sewn into the lining, and inside it his fingers found a wooden disc the size of a large coin, with two lines of characters carved into one face and a single character cut into the other. He could not read any of it.

But it had the feel of something official, issued rather than owned, and a man did not carry an unreadable credential unless somebody expected him to produce it. Ted put it back where the body had kept it. The body earned a C-minus at best. He gave himself an incomplete and went to find water. * Water was first on the list, so water was what he went looking for.

It took twenty minutes downhill before the path met a wider road and a stream ran along it, knee-deep and slow, a scum of yellow pollen riding the near edge. Ted knelt and drank from cupped hands. The water was cold and faintly mineral, iron somewhere under the taste of earth. His body wanted it badly enough that the math was simple. He drank, waited out a cramp, and drank again. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Then he looked down, and the shallows were still enough to hold a face. It wasn't his. The face was young, late teens, twenty at the very most. It was thin and sharp-jawed, with dark hair past the ears in an unwashed tangle. The cheekbones stood out too far. This was not one skipped meal but weeks of them. A bruise spread along the left temple, green-yellow at the edges, dark in the center, a few days old. Someone had struck this head recently, and not as a warning. Ted raised a hand. The face raised its hand.

He turned his head left, then right, and the bruise ran down toward the ear on one side. A label surfaced as he watched. Not a memory. Something flatter than that, rising with the dull certainty of a fact he had always carried. Two syllables. Lin Shou. The name belonged to the body, he assumed. It was residue, left by whoever had lived here before Ted moved in. And with the name, rising in the same flat certain way, came a station: outer disciple. The wooden disc in the lining had a probable meaning now.

The bruise said someone had beaten him. The starved frame said nobody had cared whether he ate. For a moment Ted just looked at him. There was a person who had owned this face. A young one, hungry and hit and apparently alone, who had gone to sleep in his own skin and not woken up in it. Ted had spent three years turning exactly this scenario into checklists and appendices, and it had been a puzzle the whole time, clean and bloodless on the page. It was not clean now.

It had a bruise along the temple, and it was wearing his attention like a coat that didn't fit. He let himself feel that for as long as it was useful, which was not very long. Then he set it down where he could find it later and went back to work. Stripping the robe, he inspected the rest of the body. The ribs showed. The stomach was hollow. Older bruises yellowed along the left side, days past the one on the head, and someone had kicked this body while it was already down. He counted seven he could see.

None precise, none targeted. This was casual violence, the sort a person collects when someone hits him one week and again the next and no one thinks it worth a second look. Outer disciple. Bottom of the ladder. Sect property. He nearly missed the second thing. The token sat where he had left it, in the crude pocket sewn into the lining. But the lining held stiff on the other side, and when he worked two fingers in he drew out a folded square of paper, soft and grayed from handling. He couldn't read it.

The script was the same set of unfamiliar strokes carved into the token. A document, though, has a shape before it has a meaning, and Ted had spent nine years reading documents whose contents he did not personally care about. He knew this shape. One line set off by itself at the top, the way a name or an account number sits at the top. Beneath it a column of evenly spaced marks, a tally or a schedule.

In the lower corner a single character pressed hard into the fiber, darker than the rest, the ink of a thing stamped rather than written. It was an authority's mark. Beside it sat a figure, and beside the figure a smaller glyph that matched one carved on the back of his token. He did not need the language. He had read about hundreds of these in another life. It had the shape of an obligation: a quantity owed or a duty assigned, set against a name that was now his, under a seal belonging to someone with standing.

It could as easily be a ration account or a work quota. None of the readings were good. The column was the part that dropped his stomach. The marks ran left to right and stopped partway across, and the last one was heavier than the others and ringed with a hard circle. It was a count ticking toward something. A due date, or a deadline already behind him. Ted sat back on his heels with the paper in one hand and the stream water drying on his chin. So Lin Shou had not merely been someone's punching bag.

Lin Shou had owed something, to the sect or to someone inside it, and the beatings and the deadline were not two facts but one fact seen from two sides. Ted was holding the bill. He could not read the number. He could read, without any trouble at all, that it was due. That reordered his problems. He needed three answers before he did anything else.

Where the sect was, because an outer disciple was expected back at it, and a missed duty in a world like this got punished somewhere on a scale that ran from extra labor to a quiet disappearance. Who had done the beating, because that person was waiting on a result, submission or fear, and a Lin Shou who came back behaving wrong would pull down precisely the attention the handbook spent a chapter teaching him to avoid.

And how much time he had, which had stopped being a vague worry the instant he found the circled mark. None of it could be answered from the bank of a stream. He put the robe back on, tied the belt, and tucked the paper in beside the token where his fingers could find both. He stood. His legs held on the first attempt now. The water had helped him that. The cover story wrote itself, because the body had already handed it over. Head injury. Robbed on the road. Memory unclear.

It accounted for the confusion and the gaps and the general wrongness he was going to give off for days, and it asked nothing of him but a flinch and a vague answer. Boring. The best cover stories were the ones no one cared enough to check. Don't sign anything. Don't promise anything. Don't be interesting. He had already broken the first rule, on Earth, with a borrowed pen. He meant to keep the other two for as long as the world would let him.

The road bent south around a low hill, and past the bend there was smoke. Rooftops of dark tile, clustered behind a waist-high wall, a wooden gate standing open. People meant water and rules and, eventually, a name for the thing he owed. People also meant whoever had been collecting it. Ted started toward the gate, faster than his legs wanted to carry him. The circled mark rode in his robe the whole way, and he had no idea how old it was.