Chapter Text
The first thing Ren Amamiya noticed was that the light was wrong.
Not the colour of it. The angle. He had spent a year learning Tokyo's light: the way it came down between the buildings in Yongen-Jaya at four in the afternoon, the specific slant that meant he had thirty minutes before Sojiro started giving him that look about the dishes. Light had been a clock. He had gotten good at reading it.
Here it came in flat and low and from the wrong side, and it did not tell him anything at all.
He stood still for a while. That was the first useful thing he did. There was a version of him from eleven months ago who would have started walking immediately, and that version would have been dead inside two days, so he stood still and he looked, and he let the wrongness finish arriving.
Rock. That was most of it. A plain of pale broken rock running out to a horizon that was further away than any horizon he had seen in his life, so far that the haze ate it before the ground ran out. No trees. No poles, no wires, no roofs, no sound of an engine anywhere in the world. The wind came across the flat in long unhurried pushes and there was nothing for it to move except grit, and it moved that, endlessly, a fine dry hiss that he would come to know better than his own heartbeat.
The sky was too pale and too big and there was nothing in it.
"Ren."
He looked down.
Morgana was sitting on the rock beside his left shoe with his tail wrapped around his feet, which was what he did when he was frightened and did not want to be seen being frightened. His ears were flat.
"Ren, where are we?"
"I don't know."
"That's not... okay. Okay. Think. What's the last thing you remember?"
He thought about it.
The last thing he remembered was the train platform at Shibuya, going home, the second week of April. His probation had ended eleven days earlier. Sojiro had made a thing out of it and pretended not to have made a thing out of it. Sae had shaken his hand like he was thirty. Everyone had a plan. Ryuji had a plan, Makoto had a five-year plan, Futaba had a plan that involved a great deal of equipment. And Ren had been standing on the platform with a duffel bag and a cat and absolutely nothing scheduled for the rest of his life, and he remembered thinking, with something that was not quite panic, what now.
And then the light had been wrong.
"The station," he said.
"That's what I've got too." Morgana's tail moved once. "That's not how this works. There's supposed to be a reason. There's supposed to be an app, or a door, or somebody standing there with a stupid grin telling us what the rules are —"
Ren was already taking out his phone.
No signal. He'd expected that. The battery was at sixty-one percent, which was exactly what it had been on the platform, and the time said 4:52 PM, and it had said 4:52 PM for what he was fairly sure was longer than a minute.
He swiped through the home screen twice, slowly, checking.
The Nav was gone.
Not moved. Not greyed out. Gone the way a thing is gone when it was never installed, no ghost of it, no gap in the grid where the other icons had shuffled to close the space. He looked for a long moment at the smooth ordinary rank of apps that had rearranged themselves as though nothing had ever been deleted, and something in his chest went very quiet and very cold.
"Mona."
"I see it."
"It's not coming back."
"You don't know that."
"No," Ren agreed, and put the phone away, and did not say the other thing, which was that he did know it, in the specific way he had learned to know things in the last year, the way that had kept seven people alive.
Then he checked for the Velvet Room.
He did it the way you check a tooth with your tongue: not moving, not closing his eyes, just reaching inward toward the place where the blue door had always been waiting to be found. There had always been a pressure there. A held breath. Some part of the world keeping his seat warm, always at a slight angle to wherever he was standing, always outward and slightly to the left of everything.
It was not outward anymore.
It took him a moment to find it, because he was looking in the wrong direction, and when he did find it he stopped breathing for a second and a half.
It was low, and it was behind his sternum, and it was warm.
Not a door. Not a room. Something the size of a room folded down very small and put somewhere it did not fit, the way you fold a map wrong and it never lies flat again. It did not open. It did not answer him. It sat there under his ribs with the patience of something that had been waiting a great deal longer than he had been alive, and when he pushed at it, gently, the way you press a bruise to find its edges, it did not move and he came away with the distinct impression that it had noticed.
He took his hand away from his chest. He had not been aware of putting it there.
"Ren?"
"Nothing."
"That was not a nothing face."
"It was a nothing face."
He was eighteen years old, he was standing on a rock plain under a sky with no aircraft in it, and for the first time since a rainy April night in a back alley outside a bar, there was no one on the other side of him.
That was not, he was fairly sure, the same thing as being alone. He set the distinction down carefully, unexamined, in a folder he was already thinking of as later.
"Right," he said.
"Right?" Morgana's voice cracked. "Right? That's it? That's your whole —"
"Walking's better than standing." He shouldered the duffel. "You want to ride or walk?"
Morgana looked at the rock, which was hot, and looked at the distance, which was infinite, and made a sound of enormous wounded dignity.
"Ride," he said.
They found the road four hours later, and it took Ren a while to understand that it was one.
It was not a surface. Nobody had laid anything down. It was a pair of grooves worn into the rock and the packed grit, running roughly north-northeast to south-southwest, and each groove was as wide as a traffic lane, and the two of them together were as wide as the street outside Leblanc.
He crouched at the edge of the nearer one and put his hand flat in it. The rock at the bottom was polished. Not scuffed. Polished, glassy, the way stone gets when something enormously heavy has been passing over it in the same line for a very long time.
"That's not a truck," Morgana said from his shoulder.
"No."
"Ren, that's not a building either. Buildings don't have treads. What leaves a track like that?"
"Something with treads." He straightened, brushing his palm off on his thigh. "Something with treads that's about sixty metres across, and it comes through here often enough to wear rock."
There was a silence.
"I hate it here," Morgana said.
They followed the grooves northeast, because that was the direction the wind was going and Ren had decided, on no evidence at all, that this was a reason. It was the kind of decision you made when you had no information and standing still was the only thing worse than being wrong.
The sun went down about a third of the way through, and it went down fast, and it got cold fast, and he learned that he was not dressed for this.
He smelled the wreck before he saw it.
It was well after dark by then. The grooves had become hard to follow and he had been navigating by the feel of the ground under his shoes. The smell arrived on one of the wind's long pushes and was gone again, and then came back. Burning. Not woodsmoke. Something chemical under it, sharp, with a metallic edge that sat at the back of his throat and stayed there.
Morgana's claws went into his shoulder through the coat.
"Ren —"
"I know."
"That's not just burning. There's blood in that."
He kept walking. He was aware, distantly and with something like clinical interest, that his heart rate had not gone up. A year ago it would have. A year ago he had been a person who could be startled.
The glow came up over a low rise about ten minutes later: a dull orange smear on the underside of the dust, not flames, just heat still working through something that had finished burning hours ago. He went up the rise flat and slow and looked over the top of it before he let his silhouette break the line, and then he lay there on the cold rock for a full minute and made himself look at all of it before he moved.
A convoy. Six vehicles, or what were left of them: heavy things, flatbeds, high-sided, on treads rather than wheels, strung out along the grooves in a line that had come apart in the middle. The third and fourth had gone over. The rest had stopped in the positions of things that had tried to turn and had not been quick enough.
The load was scattered across sixty metres of rock, and the load was ore.
Even in the dark he could see it. Black rock shot through with veins that caught the residual firelight and threw it back in a colour he had no name for, somewhere between blue and violet, a colour that seemed to come from inside the stone rather than off its surface. Great broken slabs of it. A ruptured container had spilled the fine stuff, a low drift of blue-black powder that the wind was working at, lifting in slow rolling veils and setting down again, patient as tide.
On the bed of the third vehicle, under a tarp that had burned back to its ribs, there was something else: a long crated machine, precisely made, all housings and mounts and a lens assembly at one end the size of a dinner plate. Somebody had pried at its crate and given up. Whatever it was worth, it was not worth what it weighed.
And people. Eleven that he could count from the rise, laid out in the shapes that people are laid out in when nobody has arranged them.
They had been robbed. That much was obvious even at distance: the containers pried, the bodies turned over, the tidy secondary chaos of a place that has been searched. Whoever had done it had been gone long enough for the fires to die.
Ren lay on the rock and looked at it and felt his hands go steady, the way they did.
"We should go around," Morgana whispered.
"Yes."
"You're not going to go around."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because somebody's alive down there," Ren said, "and they've stopped calling out, which means they've been calling out for a while."
Morgana was quiet.
"How do you know?"
"I don't." He got his knees under him. "Stay on my shoulder. If I put you down, run."
It took him twenty minutes to find her, and he found her by being methodical about it, which was the only thing he had.
He worked the line from the rear the way you clear a room: near side, far side, under, behind. He did not let himself hurry, because hurrying was how you missed things, and he did not let himself stop at the bodies, because stopping was how you stopped. He noted them. A woman in a canvas coat with the sleeves rolled. A man who had been young. Two who had died within arm's reach of each other and had not quite made it.
They were not shaped the way he expected people to be shaped. He registered it and set it aside for later, filed under later, along with the moons and the treads and the colour of the rock, in a folder that was getting very full.
He found her under the fourth vehicle, the one that had gone over.
It had come down on its side and the high wall of the flatbed had made a wedge against the ground, a triangular space maybe a metre deep at the mouth and tapering back into black, and she was at the back of it where the space was smallest. She had crawled in as far as a person could crawl and then some.
She was not crying. That was the thing that went through him like a wire. She was perhaps five years old and she was jammed into the dark at the back of a hole under a burnt-out vehicle in the middle of nothing, and she was not crying, she was not making any sound at all, and she was watching him with both eyes open.
There were long ears folded back flat against her hair.
Ren stopped moving. He crouched at the mouth of the wedge and put both hands where she could see them, palms out, empty. He did not go in.
"Hey," he said.
She did not move.
He did not know a word of whatever she spoke. He understood that with total clarity in the same instant that he understood he was going to have to do this anyway, and something in him that had been standing in a Shibuya station four hours and one universe ago finally, quietly, sat down and got to work.
He kept his hands where they were. He made his voice do the thing it did: the low flat register he had used on Futaba through a door for three weeks, the one that promised nothing at all except that he would still be there in a minute.
"I'm not going to touch you," he said. "I'm going to sit here."
He sat.
The wind moved over the top of the wreck. Something in the engine block ticked as it cooled.
"You're doing this right," he said. "Whatever you did to get in there. That was right."
Beside his ear, very softly, Morgana said, "Ren, look at her hands."
He looked.
She had them curled against her chest, and along the back of the left one, from the wrist up to the second knuckle, there was a rime of something that was not skin. Small. A scatter, more than a growth. In the light of the dying fires it caught and threw back the same colour as the ore.
Ren looked at that, and then he looked past her at the drift of blue-black powder that the wind had been walking across the ground all night, and at the ruptured container forty metres away, and at the fine haze of it hanging in the still air under the vehicle where she had spent the last several hours breathing.
He did not know what it was.
He understood, immediately and completely, that it was the reason nobody had come back for her.
"Okay," he said.
And he went in and got her.
She weighed almost nothing. She did not fight him and she did not hold on; she went stiff and small and turned her face into his collar, and he backed out on his knees with one hand flat on the back of her head to keep her from the metal, and the powder came up around them both in a slow blue-violet cloud and got in his mouth and his eyes and the weave of his coat, and he did not know, and so he did not hold his breath.
That was the whole thing. He would think about it for years afterward, and it never got any more complicated than that.
He did not know, and so he did not hold his breath.
"Put her down."
Ren turned.
There was a figure standing at the edge of the firelight about fifteen metres out, and he had not heard them arrive, and he had been listening.
Hooded. Long dark coat, the hem of it grey to the knee with the same dust that was on everything. He could not see a face. He could see that they were not holding a weapon and that they were standing with their weight even, and he could see that they had been there for some time, because there were footprints coming in behind them that went to a stop and then paced a short deliberate arc, the marks of somebody who had watched the whole thing.
Ren did not put her down.
"She's alive," he said.
"I can see that." A pause. "How long have you been in that dust?"
It was not the question he had braced for. He had braced for who are you or what are you doing here, and had a set of answers ready that were mostly true, and this one went straight past all of them.
"I don't know what that means."
The hood tilted.
"It means," the figure said, "that I would like to know how long you have been standing in a ruptured Originium spill with an open mouth, because it is not a difficult question and your answer is going to determine what happens next."
"Twenty minutes," Ren said. "Maybe thirty. I came in from the south end."
"And her?"
"She was under there when I got here. Hours."
Something happened to the set of the stranger's shoulders. It was very small. Ren caught it because catching that was the last useful skill he had left.
"Ren." Morgana's whisper, right in his ear. "Ren, I don't like this. He hasn't asked about me."
Ren went still.
The hood came up. Turned. Fixed, unmistakably and without hurry, on the cat sitting on his left shoulder.
"No," the stranger agreed. "I haven't."
Morgana's whole body locked.
"You can hear —"
"Yes."
"Nobody can hear me! Nobody's supposed to. Ren, he can hear me, he answered me —"
"I noticed," Ren said.
The stranger crossed the fifteen metres. Ren made himself hold his ground for all of it, which was harder than it should have been, and up close the coat smelled of antiseptic and old smoke and the hood was deep enough that there was nothing under it but shadow and the faint suggestion of a mask.
Two fingers went, gently, under the child's jaw. Found the pulse. Held it.
"She's five or six," the stranger said. "Cautus. Rim Billitonian, going by the convoy plates. Her parents are in the second vehicle." A beat. "You didn't look in the second vehicle."
"I was working from the back."
"Mm."
The hand withdrew. Then, without any change in tone at all: "Give me your hand."
Ren shifted the girl's weight onto his shoulder and held out his left hand.
Something cold and flat touched the inside of his wrist. He did not look at it. He watched the hood instead, and the way it stayed very still for a count of about eight, and then a fraction longer, and then a fraction longer than that.
Then the stranger took the thing off his wrist, turned it over, did something to it Ren could not see, and put it on the other wrist.
They waited again. Longer, this time.
"Hm," said the stranger.
"Is that bad?"
"No." The hood did not move. "It's familiar."
"That's not an answer."
"It wasn't meant to be one."
The device came away. The stranger held it for a moment at the level of the hood, and did not look at Ren at all, and when the voice came again it had changed in a way Ren could not have described and did not like.
"This measures how much Originium is in a person's blood," the stranger said. "It has a floor and a ceiling. Below the floor it reports the floor, because there is no such thing as a person on this continent with less than the floor. It is not reporting the floor."
"Then what is it reporting?"
"That there is nobody standing in front of it."
The wind came across the top of the wreck and moved the dust and set it down again.
"You waded through a class-two spill for half an hour," the stranger said. "You carried a child out of the middle of it. You have it in your hair and under your nails and I can see it on your teeth from here." A pause. "She was under a vehicle, sixty metres from the rupture, downwind, for perhaps six hours. And she will be dead in eight years."
Ren stood in the cold with a child asleep against his neck.
"Say that again," he said.
"You heard it."
"Say it again anyway."
The hood did not move.
"There is a disease," the stranger said, "and it is in the rock, and everyone who is in this line of work knows exactly what it costs, and we do it anyway because the alternative is that nobody eats. You walked through it and it did not touch you. She breathed it and it will kill her." Another pause, shorter. "I have been doing this for a considerable time. I don't often see either half of that. I have never seen both in the same hour."
"That's not —" Ren stopped.
He had been about to say that's not fair, which was a thing an eighteen-year-old says, and which he had personally stopped believing in some time around the second week of a train ride and a woman's hand and a police report with his name on it.
"No," the stranger said, not unkindly. "It isn't."
They turned and started walking north along the grooves, without checking whether they were followed.
"There's a vehicle a kilometre up," they said over their shoulder. "It's cold in it, but it's less cold than here. Bring her."
Ren did not move for a moment.
"You haven't asked who I am," he said.
"No."
"Why not?"
The stranger stopped. Considered it, apparently seriously.
"Because you're going to lie," they said, "and I'd rather find out later, when it costs you something."
And they kept walking.
Ren did not follow. Not yet.
He went to the second vehicle.
It took him ninety seconds and he did it with the girl still on his shoulder, because putting her down anywhere in this place was not a thing he was going to do, and because he had a rule about looking, and the rule was that if you did not look you got to keep believing whatever you liked, and he had given that up a long time ago.
They were where the stranger had said. The man was in the cab, and had died there, and had not been moved since. The woman was not in the cab.
The woman was forty metres away, face down on the open rock, arms out ahead of her, with the whole of that distance behind her and nothing in front of her but the fourth vehicle, lying on its side, and the black triangular mouth of the wedge underneath it.
She had been going back.
Ren stood and looked at that for a while. It was very simple and it did not require any interpretation at all. She had carried her daughter forty metres to the only hole in the world that was too small for a grown person to follow her into, and she had pushed her in as far as a child could go, and then she had turned around and gone back toward the cab where the man was, and she had not made it, and she had died on open ground facing the wrong way with her hands out in front of her.
"Ren," Morgana said, very quietly. "Ren, we should go."
"Yeah."
He did not say anything else. There was nothing to say that would have been for her benefit rather than his, and he had opinions about that particular kind of talking.
He went back along the line the way he had come, past the rear vehicles, and that was when he saw it.
The eleventh body was not where he had left it.
He had catalogued it on his first pass, near side, sixty seconds in: a big man on his back with one arm folded under him at an angle that arms do not fold. It was now nine or ten metres further out, past the last vehicle, out where the firelight gave up. The arm was no longer folded.
Ren stood in the dark with a sleeping child on his shoulder and looked at the space where a dead man had been and was not.
He did not go and check.
Later, when he could not sleep, he would be unable to decide whether that had been discipline or cowardice, and he would eventually conclude that it did not matter, because the result was the same either way: a man he never saw, who saw him.
He turned and walked north.
The girl slept. She had gone from rigid to slack somewhere in the last few minutes, the total collapse of a body that has been holding itself together past the end of what it had, and her breath was warm and slightly wrong against his collarbone, a faint catch at the top of each one.
Morgana was silent on his shoulder for a long time. Then, because he was Morgana and he could not help it:
"That guy's not going to explain anything, is he."
"No."
"He knew what she was. He looked at her for four seconds and knew where she was from."
"He knew the plates."
"He knew the plates." Morgana's tail flicked against Ren's neck. "Ren, that thing he said. About your blood."
"I heard it."
"You're not going to ask?"
"Not tonight."
"Why not?"
Ren considered how to put it, and gave up, and said the true version.
"Because he's already decided how much he's going to tell me," he said, "and asking now just tells him what I want."
About half a kilometre on, the child woke up.
She did not startle. She simply stopped being asleep, the way small children do, and lay against his shoulder with her eyes open and her chin on the bone of it, looking backward at the orange smear on the underside of the dust getting smaller.
He felt it when she understood where they were going, which was away.
She did not cry then either. Her hand closed in the fabric at the back of his collar and stayed closed, and that was all, and Ren stopped walking and stood there on the cold rock for a moment because there was nothing he could do about any of it and the least he could do was not do it in motion.
"I know," he said.
She said something. Four or five syllables, very small, in a language with no edges he recognised.
"I don't understand you," Ren said. "I'm sorry. I'm going to keep talking anyway."
She said it again. Then she pulled back a little to look at him, in the dark, the way you look at somebody who is being extremely stupid, and put her palm flat on her own chest.
Oh, he thought.
He put his own hand on his own chest.
"Ren," he said.
She watched his mouth. Then, carefully, the way you carry something full:
"Ren."
"That's right."
She patted her chest again, harder, with the hand that had the rime on the back of it.
"Amiya."
He got it wrong the first time. She corrected him, with the enormous scorn of the very young, and he got it right the second time, and she made a small satisfied noise and put her chin back down on his shoulder and did not say anything else.
Ren walked north with her name in his mouth, and did not think about the eight years, and was not entirely successful.
"Ren," Morgana said, after a while. "Look up."
He looked up.
The dust had thinned while they walked, and the sky had opened out, and it was full of stars in configurations that meant nothing, and low over the eastern horizon, clear of the haze, unhurried and enormous and entirely unarguable, there were two moons.
He looked at them for a long time.
"Mona."
"Yeah."
"Where are we?"
The cat on his shoulder did not answer, because there was no answer, and because he had been asking the same question of himself for six hours and had run out of ways to make it sound like it had one.
Up ahead, the hooded figure had stopped and was waiting, patient as the wind, at the foot of a machine the size of a house.