Chương 8: Crawl

Solstice screamed. His leg wouldn't move. The roach's dead weight sat on it like a collapsed wall, fang still buried deep, and every inch he tried to drag himself sent fire tearing up through muscle that didn't want to be there anymore. He could feel his own pulse in the wound, a second heartbeat pounding out of sync with the one in his chest, both of them screaming the same thing. Across the cavern, the world hadn't stopped for him.

Miners swung pickaxes at anything that flew close enough, hammering chunks off the salt vein and shoving them into their mouths raw, desperate for whatever strength the fever might buy them. One man bit down on a shard too hard and spat blood along with it and kept chewing anyway. Lere stood further off, nose streaming blood down his chin, both arms locked rigid, holding a barrier against one shrieking roach while the other three cut through everyone else like they were made of paper. Someone was praying.

Someone else had stopped making any sound a person should make.

'MOVE. GODDAMN IT, MOVE—' Solstice yanked his leg again. The pain that answered nearly whited out his vision. Blood pooled beneath him, warm at first, already cooling at the edges where it met stone.

"Argh—!" He rolled onto his stomach and clawed forward. His leg stayed exactly where it was, pinned under the fang, flesh shredding thread by thread with every pull. He could feel the grind of it against bone. He could hear it, a wet, grating ring that lived somewhere behind his teeth. His eyes were going dim at the edges. Everything blurred soft and gray, his stomach lurching, his whole body shaking now, not from cold.

The light around him, the threads he'd learned to touch, to bend, thinned out too, flickering, fading like a lamp starved of oil. The warmth in his chest was going with it. He flipped onto his back and dug into his coat, fingers closing around the small dagger he'd taken off a dying man. He drove it into the roach's shell. It skidded off without leaving a mark.' Okay. Whatever you did before. Do it now, or you bleed out right here.'

He forced his eyes open through the haze and reached for the colors still clinging faint to the roach's exoskeleton. He grabbed for them the way he had before. Nothing. His fingers passed straight through, like the light wasn't even really there.

'My Saltis… It's freezing again. Not enough warmth in me.' He turned his head, scanning through the blur, and found a vein of Pale Salt studding the wall just out of reach. He twisted toward it. His arms were too short, his body too pinned. He crawled anyway, an inch at a time, his own flesh tearing wetter with every drag, a scream torn out of him on every single one. Spit ran down his chin, mixing with the blood already crusted there. His nails split against the stone. He didn't stop.

Every drag forward cost him something. He could feel it leaving, heat, strength, whatever was left of the fight in him, bleeding out onto the ground behind him in a thin, widening trail. Somewhere in the back of his skull, a voice that sounded almost like his own kept insisting this was fine, this was survivable, people didn't die from a torn leg. He didn't believe it. Plenty of people died from smaller wounds than his, down here, in the cold, with no one willing to carry them out.

He'd made sure of that himself, more than once, on other men's bodies. He crawled faster. Somewhere to his left, a severed arm hit the ground in a spray of red, someone's scream cutting off mid-note. Solstice didn't look. He kept crawling until the dagger's edge finally scraped against salt. He hacked at it, weak and off-angle, whatever strength was left in his arm barely enough to chip a few grains loose. They scattered across the stone in front of his face. He licked the floor. Cold. Bitter.

Metallic, thick with old blood already crusted into the cracks. He didn't care. He dragged his tongue across it again, gathering every speck of dust the blade had managed to knock free, and when that wasn't enough he pressed his split lips flat against the stone and sucked what was left straight out of the grooves, blood and salt and grit all going down together. Some distant part of him understood exactly how disgusting this was. That part didn't get a vote.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Warmth crept back in, slow at first. Fingertips. Chest. Eyes. His breathing steadied. His skin stopped feeling like it belonged to someone else. His trembling hand went still. His eyes went wide. Bzzzzz. The sensation was back, humming under his skin like something waking up. One point of light rose off the ground. Then another.

Then dozens, then more, gathering into a hundred faint pinpricks hovering in the dark around him. He dragged himself another inch toward his own trapped leg and reached out, trying to do whatever it was he'd done to break the last one's wings. Nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing. His fingers slid straight through the colors without moving a single thread, and a second later the lights dimmed and thinned and the sting behind his eyes went with them.

'Come on. Come on, come on, come on—' He grabbed at the light again, harder this time, like force alone might make up for whatever he was missing. It didn't. The threads scattered apart under his fingers like smoke, reformed somewhere just out of reach, and refused to answer him a third time.' Huh.' Then it landed on him, cold and simple as the floor under his cheek. His leg was still bleeding. Every second it kept bleeding, it kept pulling warmth out of him faster than any amount of salt could put back in.

He could eat the whole vein and it wouldn't matter. The wound would win eventually.

"FUCK!" His vision was going dark at the edges again, faster this time. He caught sight of a pickaxe lying a few feet to his left, half-buried under the chaos, too far to reach. An idea came anyway, ugly and immediate. The last resort of someone with nothing clean left to try. Beside him, still twitching faintly, lay the severed arm from before. He grabbed it.

Using the dead fingers like a hook, he flicked at the pickaxe's handle, an inch at a time, dragging it closer with a corpse's hand until his own fingers finally closed around the shaft. He didn't let himself think about what he was holding until after it was done, and even then he only thought about it for as long as it took to throw it aside. He hauled the pickaxe in and jammed the head under the roach's body, wedging it against the fang still buried in his thigh. A lever. The only one he had. He pulled.'

MOVE, DAMN IT—' The roach's upper body lifted, slow and grinding, and the fang tore fresh as it rose. Solstice bit down hard enough to taste blood and kept pulling anyway, weight thrown into every inch. The fang gave. He ripped his leg free in one motion, blood spraying loose across the stone, flesh and cloth trailing with it. He was free. He lay there a moment, staring up at the ice-spiked ceiling, breathing ragged and shallow.' Get up. It's not over.'

Some part of him, small and detached, was already cataloguing what he'd just done, eaten off a blood crusted floor, used a dead man's arm like a tool, bit through his own scream to save a leg that still might not be worth saving. He didn't feel proud of it. He didn't feel ashamed either. It had worked. He forced himself upright, tore a strip of cloak from his own body, and wound it tight around the ruined mess of his thigh, teeth gritted through every pass. Blood soaked through before he'd even finished the knot.

It would have to do. He got his feet under him using the wall as an anchor and looked out at what was left of the cavern. Murren was standing. Barely. Blood still ran from his shoulder, and a sheet of frost had crept up one whole arm like something had bitten straight through the skin and left winter behind instead of a wound. He kept bringing the pickaxe down on a roach that had long since stopped moving, over and over, screaming with every swing at nothing anymore. Nobody moved to stop him.

Nobody was left who could have. Off to the right, Lere stood frail, blood streaming freely from his nose, chest heaving. The roach he'd fought was buried halfway into the cavern wall, wings gone still, one leg twitching in a slow, dying rhythm. Lere didn't look at it. He looked like a man holding himself up through sheer refusal to fall down, and nothing else. The rest of the cavern was corpses.

Human and insect both, scattered across ice gone dark with blood, steam still rising faint off some of the bodies where the cold hadn't finished claiming them yet. Everyone is dead. And only four figures were still on their feet. Murren. Lere. Solstice. And a man in a black mask, middle aged, wrapped in a dark blue cloak gone wet at the chest, short and bleeding and still standing anyway.

The same man who'd vouched for him at the start of all this, back when this had still just been a desperate mining job and not whatever it had turned into. Solstice hadn't even learned his name. Solstice's breathing slowed. A thin cloud of mist fogged out from his mouth, softer with every breath. His legs gave out from under him before he'd even decided to let them. The world tilted sideways and went dark all at once. His body hit the ground.' Fuck my life.' Somewhere far off, a voice cut through the black.

"Hey—Sol! Wake up!"