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When the red haze dissipates, a different one takes a hold of Vander's mind: a shivering cold that radiates up from his wounded arm and heats to a violent fever.
He remembers going home—their home, his home—tasting the Pilt on his tongue all the while. He remembers strong hands lifting him up from where he collapsed, the metallic clink of scalpels, the bitter tang of alcohol, the belt between his teeth and the ache afterwards, in his jaw, from biting so hard.
Vander's body heals fast. He's always been unfairly strong and healthy. Thriving when his brothers and sisters struggled to grow at all. Yet his strength lacks resilience, and even as his wounds close and his fists regain their old vigour, his mind festers with an infection he has no cure for.
'Where is Silco?' people ask. 'Where is your shadow?'
'I don't think I've ever seen you alone.'
'Not here,' he says. 'Don't ask. Don't speak his name.'
But Silco is well loved, his cunning respected, his vision of the future Zaun's very own sun, casting light up from the bottom of the trench.
Silco is the waking sleeper who dreams for them all.
'What did you do?' Benzo whispers, because he knows Vander better than most.
'I did what's best for the Lanes. What needed to be done.'
'But at what cost?'
Vander wishes he knew the answer to that question. It shifts a little every day, a little heavier, a little harder to bear. It eats him up, slowly consumes him as he tries to find the words—none ever fit.
How do you map out a loss so momentous it has no discernible edges? How do you find your way back to normal, when it has been drowned and strangled by your own hands? How do you reconcile with yourself, when the monster inside of you won't listen to your pleas?
So Vander stays silent and throws himself into his work, the project that cost him so dearly. His dream for the Lanes is an offshoot of Silco's, more humble and localized. They were so close to it already, so few people oppose him now, and those he crushes ruthlessly.
He rallies who would listen or fear him and the Lanes take shape: run like a business and policed by his gauntlets. Vander stages ambushes, leads raids against enforcers, pillages warehouses, overtakes a mine, then a factory, reclaims cultivairs. They regain ownership of the Undercity. Enforcers begin to fear their streets. Invisible gears are set in motion, turning a tangible profit.
People stick together, and it's beautiful. Just as Silco said it would be.
'It was my father who killed the first overseer,' Silco had said around a mouthful of smoke, perched on a broken statue's plinth like a hasty replacement carved of basalt and grey flint; 'used a hauling chain with links as thick as your fingers. The man's face turned red and then purple, and the air so heavy, like we were all choking along with him. But every miner he looked at in his dying panic just... stared back unflinching. We all stood straighter when his body hit the floor. No one said a word to support Ahika's decision—it wasn't needed—they just picked up their tools again, and in those hands they were weapons.' His eyes had been blown so wide they were like chinks of obsidian in his chiselled face, gleaming with the intensity of the memory. 'We were like one body, like one mind. Working in silent cohesion, driven by a single goal, the same dream of freedom. It was beautiful.'
Silco had wanted nothing more than to recreate that moment for the whole of Zaun, and Vander nothing more than to give it to him.
'Do you see?' he asks the Pilt when he returns to the docks, driven by some faint hope he'll still be there, waiting on the pier—some faint madness that his lover will turn around and be whole and smiling at him. 'Can you see it from where you are? Does it feel the same?'
But the pier is empty and Silco nowhere to be found. In hiding or dead, Vander doesn't know which is worse. Anyway it can't be the same: Vander never tries to cross the bridge. That's where Silco's dream led them. It's the dream he drowned.
Even as he settles in new routines, Vander's mind stays inflamed. He backhands a man for asking if Silco betrayed him. Punches another for comparing them. His knuckles are raw with Silco's name, and soon people stop asking questions. They fear the Hound and his short temper, the monster he takes no pain to hide away and wears like armour; but fear breeds respect and Vander looks after them dutifully.
All is well, all should be well.
If only he could punch the traitorous voice inside his own head, the one that whispers Silco's name unbidden, that summons memories of softness—the silk of his hair running between Vander's fingers, the sting of a wound tenderly nursed, the susurration of hopes shared over a pillow...
It's in his dreams too, inescapable. It shows him the past and the might-have-beens. He wakes up crying or raging or painfully erect, depending. Always though he wakes up alone, and the ache grows, spreading like an oil stain over his soul.
'Time will help,' Benzo says, not unkindly. 'It's a hard truth, because nothing can make it go faster, but it'll help. You should be proud of what you've achieved here. We're united! You're leading us! We're fighting the pilties off. Isn't it worth it?'
Vander shrugs and downs his drink. Worth and cost, they're the same thing, and he still has no answer he can put into words.
Eventually he takes a bat to the head in a confrontation gone south. He collapses where he stands, confident his jaw is cracked and that the only reason he's on the floor coughing blood is because he's slow, slow because he's tired, tired because he spends his nights with a ghost on his mind. Sevika saves his ass but he makes the decision right then, out of desperation. When his jaw is healed and the Lanes can spare him for a day, he packs a bag, buys a new breather, and goes down.
Down, down, as far down as Zaun goes, and further down some more, on paths and stairways etched in steep cliffs, more suited to goats than men, that he hasn't trodden since his youth. He crosses thick clouds of toxic fumes, skitters around the chemical pools that birth them, and continues, far below the sump until Zaun becomes nothing and nothing becomes Oshra Va'Zaun.
The air is clean there, cold and musty. It smells nothing like upside, and it feels like a different world, dark, deserted and full of echos. The wind whistles as it runs through ruins and salient rock faces shattered by quakes and time. Vander knows his way around the abandoned homes, temples and tombs. He's come here before as a child, renting out nimble limbs and an already strong back to adventurers and treasure hunters of all stripes in need of a porter and guide.
Once more he passes through tall doorways, walks down empty halls carved out of sheer rock, frescoes long faded beyond recognition, bas-relief figures stretching out stumps and eroded faces.
It is said, between those who've visited Oshra Va'Zaun or are curious about it, that if you make your way to the Dancers' Courtyard and place your head between the hands of one of its statues, any words you speak there in confidence will be taken from your lips by the wind and carried away. A truth taken from you forever, held by the ruins, known only to the statue that cupped your face.
Young Zaunites don't care for that particular legend. Secrets aren't wearing them down yet, and the stories of old kings' buried riches hold greater appeal.
The dancers are made of polished black sandstone—greywacke, one of the explorers had called it, running his fingers over their shapes reverently—most of them are broken, fallen from their plinth, bits of them scattered on the marble floor. It isn't even a proper courtyard, and Vander suspects the statues aren't meant to be dancing. Poetic licence and all that.
He cuts the darkness with his lamp until he finds one that is whole enough, bending forward, her arms lowered, her face kind, smiling. She's missing her nose and her eyes are a sightless uniform black like the rest of her, boring into him blindly as he places his chin against her palms. One of her thumbs is gone, but it doesn't matter.
Vander speaks and the wind kisses his lips.
Silco, Silco, Silco.
A prayer rounded to a single word, a litany to his mistakes.
Vander pleads and the statue listens with stony patience.
All his guilt, all his anguish, he wants to bury at her feet. All his memories, and all his love, Vander would trade for forgetfulness. Let him live in a world where his arms are smooth and his hands clean, his dreams benign and his heart untouched. Let Silco be in the past, let him stay there. Let time march on, and take Vander with him. Let him lay his burden here and climb back without it. Let him speak this name one last time, let him not hear it again.
If he can't have Silco back, he would rather never have had him at all.