Chương 9: Water

Solstice's eyes opened slow, cold soaking through every part of him at once. Disoriented, he tried to push himself up, and a hand caught his shoulder. He flinched hard, shoving away on instinct before the face registered, breath already ragged in his chest. Messy brown hair. Brown eyes. Dried blood crusted above his lip, skin gone pale like he'd bled out half of himself too.

"You okay? Don't worry, we're safe." A beat.

"For now." Lere. Solstice checked himself over. His leg had gone deathly pale, the bleeding mostly stopped, wrapped tight under a bandage someone had actually bothered to tie properly. Someone who'd used more care on him than he'd have used on himself. Ahead, Murren knelt over a roach carcass, single-mindedly working the blade of a broken pickaxe into its shell. His other arm was gone below the shoulder, the stump cauterized black and shining, like something had taken a torch to it and not stopped soon enough.

"Cut it off himself, after the fighting stopped," Lere said, glancing over.

"Burned it shut right after." Solstice said nothing. He watched Murren hack a strip of meat from the roach and eat it raw, chewing like it was the most natural thing in the world, blood from the carcass running down over the burned stump of his arm without him seeming to notice at all. His own stomach twisted. Hungry. Thirsty. Both past the point of ignoring. Off to the side, the masked man sat with his gaze fixed on Murren and nowhere else, unmoving.

"Is everyone else dead?" Solstice asked.

"All of them." Bodies littered the cavern, some crushed flat, others torn apart badly enough that nothing about them said who they used to be. A boot here. A hand there, still curled around nothing. Solstice made himself look at all of it once, and only once. He felt nothing looking at it. Not guilt. Not grief. Just numbers, cold and automatic. Ten went in. Four came out. His eyes moved from Murren to Lere to the masked man. Three who could still fight. He looked down at his ruined leg. Two, maybe.

'I've seen worse than this.' He lowered his eyes.

'I survived. That's enough.' A cough tore out of him, violent, flecking blood across his knuckles. Pain lanced through his back with it.

'Ribs. Broken, probably. From the wall.' Breathing took real effort now. He looked around for a waterskin and found nothing, too weak to stand, too dry-mouthed to think straight. Lere held one out to him.

"Here." Solstice eyed it.

"What's the payment?"

"Watch my back. Survive this." He took it and drank — barely anything left inside, but enough to quiet the worst of it. Solstice made himself stop before the urge to drain the whole thing won out.

"Where'd you get this?"

"Looted the dead," Lere said, sitting with his own skin, drinking from it like the answer wasn't worth flinching over. Solstice wiped his mouth. His thirst had gone quiet. His head hadn't. He counted lamps. Three lit, one cracked. Waterskins. Five. Pale Salt. Not enough. Nowhere close to enough, not for four people walking into whatever came next. His eyes moved across the bodies. Pickaxes. Knives. Canteens. Salt pouches. Things nobody dead needed anymore and everybody alive would.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Useful, all of it. He'd get to it before Murren picked the good pieces clean. His gaze settled on the cavern entrance, the dark mouth of it swallowing whatever lamplight tried to reach it.

'We can't stay here. Surviving the roaches doesn't mean this place is safe. It just means we're still the ones it hasn't finished with yet.' He looked at Lere, sitting close beside him. The idiot who wouldn't shut up back on the surface. Still here anyway, after everything.

'What's actually wrong with this guy.'

"Lere." Flat, worn.

"Why are you helping me."

"Like I said. You remind me of my—""Don't give me that again." Another cough.

"Why." Lere looked stumped for a second.

"I don't know. Guess surviving with someone my age didn't seem so bad." Solstice didn't answer that. Didn't argue it either. It was as honest an answer as he'd ever gotten out of anyone, and he didn't know what to do with that either. Murren moved through the corpses, looting anything worth carrying, stripping coats and boots off bodies with the same detachment Solstice had used on that dying man not so long ago. Solstice almost respected it. Almost.

Solstice pushed himself up with Lere's help, testing weight on his bad leg. Pain shot straight through him, sharp enough to white out his vision for a second, but his toes still moved when he told them to.

'Not broken. Still bad enough that no one would waste medicine on a Nameless.' His jaw clenched.

'Fucked either way. Story of my life.' Murren straightened, goggles now pulled down over his eyes, the same ones that had hung useless around his neck since the mines. Blood crusted dark down the front of his coat, and the burned stump where his arm used to be still smoked faintly at the edges.

"I don't care if you rot here. I'm leaving. Slow me down, and I kill you." Silence answered him. Nobody argued. Nobody even looked like they were considering it. Then the masked man rose, posture bent and weak, hands still shaking at his sides.

"Sir. We don't intend to hold you back. We're depending on you. Entirely." Solstice watched the man bow, actually bow, to a one-armed lunatic drenched in monster blood and wearing goggles that made him look even worse than he already did. Nobody laughed. Nobody even seemed to find it strange. And somehow, he was still the strongest thing left standing.

'Wonderful. Our best fighter eats his kills raw and has one arm.' His eyes drifted to Lere.

'Our second-best gives his water away to strangers he just met.' Then the masked man, still trembling where he stood.

'And the last one looks halfway into his own grave already.'' Surrounded by geniuses. Truly blessed.' Murren slung the supplies over his shoulder.

"We're leaving." Solstice stared into the dark passage ahead. His leg throbbed. His ribs screamed with every breath. Starving, dehydrated, and apparently expected to march through more of whatever this cavern had left to throw at them.' Of course we are. Why would today get better.' They moved out, Murren in front.

Only two lamps still worked, the rest of the tunnel drowned in shadow, and Murren walked through it without a hitch, like the goggles had traded him a new set of eyes for the ones he'd lost the use of down here.

'Enchanted, maybe. Or something worse.' Solstice filed it away next to everything else he didn't have an answer for. Lere kept an arm under his shoulder the whole way, patient about it in a way that annoyed Solstice more than it should have.

"I can walk."

"You are walking."

"You're carrying me."

"Supporting you."

"Same thing."

"Then quit leaning on me." Solstice straightened, pulling his weight off Lere's arm out of pure spite. His leg buckled instantly. Lere caught him before he hit the ground, not even bothering to hide the grin.

"You were saying?"

"Shut up." Behind them, the masked man trailed close, hands shaking, rubbing them together like it might warm something that had gone cold a long time ago. The tunnel didn't run long before it opened again, into a cavern wider than any they'd walked through yet. Uron and copper threaded the walls alongside salt, and above them hung shards of ice, blue this time. Not the dark, dust-choked color from before.

Blue like the sky in a painting his mother used to show him, back when he still had a mother, and a home, and a reason to look up instead of down. Not the black, smoke-choked sky he'd known his whole life since. The one from before all of it, from a world he only half-believed had ever actually existed and not just something she'd made up to give him something to hope for.' Beautiful.' He caught himself staring, throat tight around nothing he wanted to name.

Lere had stopped too, mouth slightly open, looking up at it like a man who'd forgotten ceilings could be anything but a threat. The chamber stretched wide and untouched, no bodies, no wreckage, no sign anything had ever fought here. For the first time since the mountain swallowed them, nothing in the room looked like it wanted to kill them. Then he heard it. Drip. A pause. Drip.

A thin stream ran down a slab of blue ice and pooled in a shallow basin below, clear enough to see straight through to the stone underneath. Murren stopped. Lere stopped. Even the masked man lifted his head toward the sound, something almost like life returning to his face. Solstice's breath caught in his chest, every ache in his body forgotten for one full second.

"Water."