Chương 39: Insanity

"The tower has them," I said.

"Somewhere above us." Petra stared at me. I had not planned to say it that way. I had not planned to say it at all, not yet, not in the white corridor between floors with the dark knight waiting on the other side of a gate I had not opened yet. But she had been looking at me with the green eyes that the system did not flag as anything unusual and her parents were the reason she was in this tower and the words had come out before the calculation that usually preceded my words had finished running.

"The tower takes everything," I said.

"People, objects, information. All of it gets recorded somewhere in the system. Your parents descended. That means they are in there. In the record." Petra stared at me, I found it... uncomforting.

"How do you know that," she said. I thought about Livia.

"I know someone who told me," I said.

"And I believe her." Petra's jaw tightened.

"Then how do I find them."

"By going up," I said. She looked at me like I had said something obvious and something insane in the same sentence, which I had.

"That is all you have," she said.

"That is all there is," I said. She exhaled through her nose and looked at the gate ahead and I could see her working through it, the same calculation I had watched her run on floor twenty in the runs where we had reached that point together, where she had stood in front of a door she could not get past and decided whether the door was the limit or whether she was. Mimir spoke from the belt.

"She has climbed fourteen floors," he said to her, which was a sentence directed at Petra but shaped for me, in the tone he used when his professional neutrality was less useful than making a point.

"Alone. From floor one. With a bow that is currently in pieces on the floor below us. If there is anyone in this tower capable of finding what you are looking for, you are currently being difficult with him." Petra looked down at the belt. At the golden-haired head with the green eyes and the braided hair and the expression of someone who had catalogued the entire situation and found it moderately exasperating.

"You are a head," she said.

"So? You are just a filthy mortal," Mimir said.

"On his belt."" What load of crap!" Mimir said.

"We have discussed it." Petra looked back at me. The silence between us stretched long enough that it became its own kind of conversation, and what it said was that she was deciding whether to trust something she had no rational basis for trusting, and that the decision was going to cost her either way, and that she had been making decisions like that since she was nine years old and was not going to stop now.

I reached into my pack and found what I had been carrying since floor eight, retrieved from a collapsed building in the Victorian subsection because the material sense passive had flagged it as structurally significant in a way that had not made sense at the time. A small bear, worn at the seams, one button eye replaced with a dark thread knotted into a circle. I held it out. She went completely still. Not the stillness of surprise. Something deeper than that.

The stillness of someone who had not seen a specific thing in a very long time and whose body had recognised it before their mind had caught up. She took it with both hands and held it against her chest and did not say anything for a moment.

"Where did you get this," she said quietly.

"Don't remember..." I said. She looked at me over the bear, and there was something in her face that I had only seen on floor twenty in the runs where she had lived long enough to reach the part of the floor where she died, a specific quality of a person who had been carrying something alone for so long that the weight of it had become invisible to them until someone else acknowledged it existed. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

I hated watching that expression on her face. I had hated it every time across every run it had appeared, and I had never found a way to say that out loud because saying it out loud. I had tried to save her. More times than I had told Mimir, more times than I had told myself, because the record of those attempts lived only in me and in whatever the tower kept in its catalogue.

I had found her on floor fourteen and floor sixteen and once, inexplicably, on floor eleven, and every time I had positioned myself between her and the sword saint and it had not been enough, because the sword saint in the second phase was not something you could absorb for someone else. You could only face it yourself. She had also saved me once. Floor twenty, run four thousand and something, the run where I had almost lost the thread entirely.

She had found the human civilisation ahead of me and mapped the passage and left markers I had followed without understanding who had left them until I reached her on the far side and she had already been past the point where I could stop what was coming for her. I had repeated my name to myself the entire walk to the trading post after that. Just to have something to say that was not about what I had just watched.

"Petra," I said. She looked up.

"Your parents went inside the inverted spire when you were nine. They did not come back down... or up." I forgot. I quickly correcting myself.

"Humans went down, not up. You have been descending down after them since you were twelve, alone, and you have not been able to get past the floor 14 that keeps stopping you. That is the truth of it, and I am not going to make it smaller than it is." She held the bear. She did not look away.

"I am going up... And you are coming with me. Not because I need you to, and not because I think you cannot do it alone..." I struggled to speak, I don't know why.

"Psst, you are not so eloquent when you are talking to someone else," Mimir grumbled.

"What a load of crap. Who are you to tell me that?" I flinched at her sudden backlash... That's right, she is not aware of the fact that I have been doing this for a while, or that we have even crossed paths... That last part came out differently than I had intended it to. Less measured. More direct than the calculation that usually preceded my sentences would have produced if I had let it finish running. Petra looked at me for a long moment.

"You talk like you know. What are you, my teacher?" she said.

"I have," I said. She accepted that without asking what it meant, which was either trust or exhaustion or the specific pragmatism of someone who had been climbing a tower alone since they were twelve and had learned to work with the information available rather than the information they wanted. She tucked the bear inside her jacket against her chest.

"She cannot stay here," Mimir said. But it didn't change the fact that she was coming to floor fifteen with me. Which meant she would be present when I faced the dark knight, which had cost me more runs than any Titan below the thirtieth floor, not because it was the strongest thing I had faced but because of how it moved and what facing it required me to be willing to lose.

And after the dark knight came the sword saint, which was the moment where Petra died, every run, without exception, and something about this run being wrong in all the ways it had been wrong since floor one made me less certain than I had ever been that the pattern would hold. Less certain that it would hold, and less certain that I wanted it to. I walked back to her and looked at her for a moment.

She was on her feet, steadier than the blood loss should have allowed, the bear against her chest and the broken bow gone and her hands empty at her sides.

"Can you fight without the bow," I said.

"I have been fighting without the bow since floor eight," she said.

"I broke the first one on floor eight."

"What have you been using," I said. She reached into her jacket with her free hand and produced a short blade I had not seen her carry before, plain and practical, no system classification I could read from the distance. I looked at it. Then at her.

"That will not be enough for the dark knight," I said.

"Then what do you suggest," she said.

"Stay behind me," I said.

"Do what I tell you when I tell you. When I say down, you go down. When I say run, you run. Those are the only two instructions." She looked at me.

"That is it."

"That is it," I said.

"You are not going to explain what we are walking into."

"No," I said.

"It would take longer than we have and knowing would not help you." She held my gaze for a moment.

"You are strange."

"Yes," I said. A beat. Then, almost despite herself: "Okay." I turned toward the gate. Checked my resources without looking at the screen. Mana at two-forty. Health full. Spellfist at Rank 4. Azure blade at my hip, unregistered, currently the most unpredictable weapon in my inventory. I stopped and pulled the blade out. [Azure Blade: Level 11] I spent four skill points. [Azure Blade: Level 15 confirmed.] [Spellfist: Rank 4 confirmed.] [Arcane Burst: Rank 3 confirmed.] I put the blade back.

Petra had watched all of that without commenting, which I filed as a positive indicator. People who did not ask questions at the gate were people who had understood something important about what gates meant. I looked back at her. She was close enough that I could see the fear in her eyes and the thing underneath the fear, which was not hope exactly but was the shape that hope left behind in someone who had been practicing it for a long time without reliable results. I breathed in. Out.

"If something goes wrong," I said, "run for the gate on the far side of the floor. Do not stop. Do not look back at me."

"What if something goes wrong with you," she said.

"Then I will find you on the next run," I said. She opened her mouth. Closed it. The calculation behind her eyes ran and did not complete itself because there was not enough information to complete it, which was the correct response to what I had just said.

"Move when I move," I said.

"That is all." I touched the gate handle. Cold, smooth, worn by more hands than I could count. I thought about every version of this moment across five thousand runs of this floor, the gruesome arithmetic of what the dark knight had done to me in each of them, the specific way the second phase of the sword saint worked, and what it had cost me the times I had tried to change Petra's outcome and what it had cost me the times I had not. My arm did not shake. I pushed the door open.