Chapter Text
The first thing Dante noticed was that Mephistopheles was gone. The second was that everyone else had apparently decided to disappear with it.
For several seconds he stayed where he was, flat on his back beneath a sky that seemed much too large. Nothing interrupted it. No towers, elevated roads, advertisements, rails, smoke, or the distant glow of a Nest. Just blue overhead, a few birds riding the wind, and grass scratching softly against the sides of his coat. Waves broke somewhere nearby with a steady rhythm that would have been relaxing under almost any other circumstances.
Dante sat up and looked around. The land fell away toward a broad coastline on one side, dark rock breaking through pale grass all along the shore. Farther inland, an old road curved between low hills and disappeared from sight. There were no tire tracks, no wreckage, and definitely no red bus.
<...Where am I?> he asked, although the question disappeared into the wind without accomplishing anything.
He waited anyway.
Ryōshū came to mind first.
That was probably inevitable after everything that had just happened. Araya was still there in Dante's memory even if Ryōshū could no longer reach the same place herself, and Dante had not yet figured out what he was supposed to do with that. He had been there for enough of it to know leaving her alone right now was about the last thing he wanted.
Gregor was next, and that thought sat badly for a different reason. The last time Dante had seen him, "fine" would have been a generous description. The Roach Emperor and everything surrounding it had left Gregor shaken in a way even his usual jokes could not quite cover.
Then the rest followed all at once. Don Quixote should have made silence impossible if she'd landed anywhere within shouting distance. Heathcliff would have found something to complain about. Outis might already have three theories and a proposed search pattern. Rodya would want to know whether being stranded meant lunch had been delayed, while Hong Lu would probably have found something strange enough to wander toward before anybody could stop him.
Dante turned slowly, as if one of them might appear simply because he had finally remembered to look.
Nobody did.
He got to his feet and brushed bits of dry grass from his coat, then checked his pockets. One hand moved automatically toward the place he usually kept the PDA and found nothing. Dante checked again, because apparently optimism occasionally expressed itself as doing the same useless thing twice.
Still empty.
No Notes function, no stored information, no convenient screen he could use if he met someone who couldn't understand him. The clock had made the journey just fine, naturally. Whatever had brought him here had excellent priorities.
He checked the rest of himself and found nothing immediately wrong. Coat, gloves, shoes, clock. No obvious injuries. No weapon either, though that part was hardly unusual. Dante climbed the nearest rise and called for Faust first, then Heathcliff, then Don Quixote, because there was a reasonable chance she would answer somebody else's name anyway if it sounded like an adventure was happening. When none of them responded, he worked through the rest.
Nothing.
Without meaning to, Dante turned and looked behind him.
Nobody was there.
He had gotten into the habit of checking. Twelve Sinners did not remain twelve Sinners simply because a manager walked in a straight line and hoped for the best. Someone stopped to examine something, got distracted, picked a fight, wandered toward food, or decided the correct route was clearly somewhere else. Dante had spent enough time counting heads that sometimes he still did it even when everyone was standing directly in front of him.
There was nobody to count now, and two of the people he was most worried about were exactly the ones he least wanted out of sight.
<All right. First, figure out where I am. Then find everyone else.>
The water made U Corp territory the easiest guess. There were enormous stretches around the Great Lake he had never seen, and Dante had learned better than to assume the parts they crossed represented even a meaningful fraction of it. Waking alone on some forgotten coastline was unusual, but not yet unusual enough to demand a stranger explanation. How he'd arrived without Mephistopheles was harder. Dante decided to postpone that problem until reality provided something useful.
He chose the road and started walking.
Not long afterward, he found blood before he found another person.
Several dark streaks marked the rocks beside the road. Dante crouched, looked at the nearest one, then noticed more drops leading downhill. Bootprints crossed through them, mixed with deeper and wider impressions that definitely hadn't come from boots. The blood led away from the road and between two ridges.
Dante had no weapon, no Sinners, no idea where he was, and exactly one sign that another person had been here recently.
Unfortunately, that made the terrible idea his best one.
He followed the blood. Vergilius would be giving me that look.
The trail passed between two ridges where the sound of the waves faded behind stone. Salt stayed heavy in the air, and a different smell joined it after another minute, something wet and sour beneath the blood. Dante slowed when he heard scraping ahead and approached the edge of the rocks carefully enough to look down without making himself too obvious.
There were several bodies below.
Marine life was the first guess. It survived for perhaps two seconds. The creatures were pale, slick, and assembled according to rules Dante didn't recognize. Too many joints in the wrong places, limbs that folded beneath bodies which seemed to have changed their minds halfway through becoming anything familiar. One had nearly been split lengthwise. Another was crushed against a rock. A third was missing enough pieces that Dante decided reconstructing it mentally was unnecessary.
The fourth was moving, dragging itself through the remains of the others with slow, wet jerks. One side of it was open, dark fluid spilling over the stone, yet that did not appear to have discouraged it very much.
Then Dante felt something.
He'd stopped trying to explain that particular sense a long time ago. Some things simply registered differently. Abnormalities had their own presence. Distortions felt wrong in another way. Peccatula were different again.
This wasn't any of them.
Dante watched the creature pull itself another half meter and tried the categories that came naturally. Abnormality? No. Distortion? No. Peccatulum? Definitely not. The Great Lake came next: Whales, Mermaids, all the things Ishmael had taught them to avoid, fear, or preferably avoid while fearing.
Closer.
Still wrong.
<...A Whale?>
The creature stopped.
Dante immediately regretted saying anything as its upper body twisted toward him. Apparently whatever sense of hearing it possessed worked perfectly well. <No. You're not a Whale. That's good. Probably.>
It began pulling itself around. Dante backed away and checked the ground behind him: uphill path, loose stone, drop to the left, nothing nearby useful enough to pretend was a weapon. He briefly missed having twelve people who could solve the problem by hitting it.
The creature tensed.
Something crossed Dante's field of vision.
He heard the impact before he understood what had happened. The creature jerked sideways, its upper half separating cleanly enough that the pieces landed several meters apart. A woman stood on the other side of it with an enormous sword in one hand.
That part didn't impress him much by itself. The City had cured Dante of believing that weapon dimensions bore any necessary relationship to practicality. He'd watched Fixers do absurd things with worse, and Matthias had ruined several useful standards for what a human body was supposed to be capable of. What caught Dante's attention was how the woman finished the swing. She didn't brace, shift her feet to recover, roll a shoulder, or adjust her grip afterward. She simply lowered the weapon as though that had been the easy part.
Dante filed it away.
The woman looked down at the dead creature, then at him. Pale hair moved beneath a dark cap. There was blood across her clothes and more along the sword, though she didn't seem injured. Her eyes stopped on his clock, moved to his hands, and then checked the ridge behind him.
Dante raised both hands before she had to ask. <Hello.>
Her eyes returned to the clock. Neither of them moved for a moment before she asked, “Who are you?”
<Dante.>
Nothing happened.
Dante pointed at himself. <Dante.>
She watched the clock while he spoke.
He tried once more, slower despite knowing perfectly well that speaking slowly had never improved ticking. <Dante.>
Still nothing.
Right.
He hadn't needed to think about this problem in a while. The Sinners understood him because of the contract. Charon and Vergilius had their own circumstances. Dante had become accustomed to speaking and receiving an answer. Apparently that luxury had stayed behind too.
The woman tilted her head slightly. “You understand me?”
Dante nodded, and that got a stronger reaction than the clock had. Her gaze sharpened. “But I only hear ticking.”
Another nod.
There. One problem successfully identified and completely unsolved.
The woman looked him over again. “What are you?”
<Human. Obviously.>
She stared.
Dante waited for the sarcasm to accomplish something.
It did not.
Right. That's not making the trip either.
He pointed at himself, made the general outline of a body with both hands, then tapped his chest. It felt ridiculous immediately, but the woman's expression finally shifted.
“Human?”
Dante nodded harder than necessary.
She accepted that with surprising ease. He wasn't sure whether to be relieved or offended.
Dante mimed writing on his palm. The woman watched him do it once, then again, before scanning the ground and pointing toward a patch of bare dirt. She crouched, picked up a broken twig, and wrote a name.
Skadi.
Dante could read it without difficulty.
She tapped the name, then herself. “Skadi.”
Dante took the twig and wrote Dante beneath it before pointing at himself.
“Dante?”
He nodded.
Hearing his name spoken correctly shouldn't have been important. It was just his name. Still, something in his shoulders eased.
Skadi pointed toward the bodies with the end of her sword. “Sea Terrors.”
Dante looked at them, then wrote SEA TERRORS?
“Yes.”
At least the monsters had a name. He added COMMON?
Skadi read it. “Here?”
Dante nodded.
“Enough.”
He looked back at the four bodies.
Wonderful.
Dante added WHERE?
“Iberia.”
The name meant nothing to him, so he copied it down anyway before trying U CORP?
Skadi frowned. “I don't know.”
GREAT LAKE?
“No.”
That was more annoying.
Dante glanced toward the sea through the gap in the ridge. Local names could vary. There were places around the Lake no employee of U Corp had ever bothered explaining to him, and plenty farther out where Wings mattered less or not at all. Still, Iberia, Sea Terrors, and no recognition of the Great Lake made three things to add to the growing pile labeled deal with later.
Skadi pointed toward the road. “There's a settlement east. If you follow the road, you should reach it tomorrow.”
Dante checked the direction she indicated. East. Good. People meant maps, supplies, paper, and hopefully somebody with more geographical knowledge. He nodded.
Skadi turned and started walking west.
Dante stayed where he was for several seconds, looking first toward the eastern road she'd just pointed out and then after the woman steadily walking in the opposite direction. His gaze eventually settled on the dead Sea Terrors scattered among the rocks.
Ah.
With that calculation settled, he followed her.
Skadi noticed quickly and stopped. “The settlement is the other way.”
Dante nodded.
She waited for the part where he turned around.
He didn't.
Dante pointed at the dead creatures, then at himself, then tried to indicate getting torn apart. Skadi watched the performance with increasing uncertainty.
“You want to fight them?”
Dante stopped. <No. Very much the opposite.>
Blank look.
He shook his head, repeated the gesture with himself on the receiving end, and eventually Skadi said, “You think they'll kill you.”
Close enough.
Dante gave her a thumbs-up.
Skadi stared at the thumb.
Dante lowered it. Perhaps that hadn't crossed cultures either.
He crouched and wrote NO WEAPON. DON'T KNOW AREA. Beneath that he added SEA TERRORS “COMMON.” Skadi read the last line twice before Dante finished with I GO WITH YOU UNTIL MORNING.
“No.”
Dante underlined it.
“No.”
He underlined it again.
Skadi looked at him. Dante looked back. This was not entirely unlike negotiating with a Sinner, except the Sinners usually had more to say while refusing.
Her attention eventually moved toward the east road and then to the lowering sun. “Fine. Until morning.”
Dante stood and brushed dirt from his gloves.
Skadi started walking.
She never looked back to see whether he understood.
Dante followed anyway.
For the next hour, conversation became a sequence of very small victories and more frequent failures. “Wait,” Skadi said when the road narrowed around the hillside, and Dante waited. “Here,” meant stay. “Not there,” meant move. Simple instructions worked beautifully. Anything requiring an answer did not.
At one point Skadi said something Dante missed because the wind carried it away. He replied, <What?> and received the predictable blank look. Dante pointed toward one side of his clock, then toward her. Skadi stared. He cupped a hand beside the clock as though it had an ear, which somehow made her expression flatter. Eventually she repeated herself.
“Watch the loose stones.”
That had taken nearly a minute. Dante decided not to complain.
They passed a plant with broad dark leaves growing between two rocks. Dante didn't recognize it. That wasn't unusual; Sinclair would probably have known, or Faust, or Ishmael depending on where they were. Without thinking, he pointed at it. <Poisonous?>
Skadi stopped.
Nothing.
Of course.
Dante mimed eating one of the leaves, then grabbed his throat.
“Don't eat it.”
Not quite.
He shook his head and mimed touching it. Skadi tore a leaf off with her bare hand.
Dante looked at her fingers. Fine. One question answered.
He pointed at his mouth again, then the leaf. Skadi pulled it farther away. “No.”
Dante grabbed his throat.
She considered the plant. “Maybe.”
He stared at her.
“Don't eat plants you don't know.”
Dante spread both hands.
That had, in fact, been the plan.
Skadi threw the leaf aside and kept walking. Dante followed, then automatically glanced behind him.
Empty road.
He faced forward again.
That was going to take some getting used to.
As the afternoon passed, the sea bothered him more. It was too ordinary. Waves came in and went back out. Birds flew over the water. Nothing changed color midway across the horizon. No section of the sea appeared to be operating according to a special rule that would kill travelers for violating it, and no one had handed him a list of navigation taboos.
The water simply behaved like water.
Dante had not realized how unreasonable his expectations of oceans had become.
He decided Ishmael was responsible.
Skadi walked several steps ahead, apparently content with the silence. She hadn't asked much about him beyond the immediately useful questions, which Dante appreciated. Explaining himself would have been difficult even if she could understand him. He watched her instead.
The sword remained the obvious thing to notice, though after the first hour it became less interesting than the fact that Skadi never seemed to remember she was carrying it. She didn't change hands, roll out her shoulder, or slow on steep ground.
That still didn't tell Dante how strong she really was. He had seen too much to make that mistake.
It did tell him the sword wasn't close to her limit.
That was enough for now.
They eventually reached a damaged stretch of road near the cliffs where part of the ground had collapsed. The surviving path was narrow and littered with loose rock. Skadi crossed without hesitation while Dante stopped at the edge and tested the first step with one shoe. Several stones broke loose and bounced toward the water below.
Skadi looked back. “Come on.”
<Yes, I can see that you did it.>
She waited.
Dante stepped onto the path. More rock shifted beneath him, and he moved his weight back.
Skadi sighed and returned.
Dante held up a hand. <I'm fine.>
She ignored him.
<No, really. I can->
Skadi picked him up.
One arm went behind his back and the other beneath his knees, leaving Dante staring at her from a position he had not agreed to.
<Skadi. Put me down.>
Nothing.
She crossed the damaged path.
Dante looked down once and decided that was enough of that. Instead, he paid attention to Skadi. No strain in her arms. No change in pace. No careful redistribution of weight to compensate for him or the sword.
Interesting.
Not unbelievable.
Just interesting.
Once they reached stable ground, Skadi put him down and immediately continued walking. Dante straightened his coat, called after her, <Thank you,> and received no response.
One day I am going to have paper during one of these conversations.
The sun was low when Skadi finally left the road and headed toward a ruined stone building above the coast. Part of the roof had collapsed and one wall was mostly gone, but it offered more protection from the wind than anything else they'd passed. Skadi checked it before allowing Dante inside, walking around the exterior first, then through the doorway, then behind the building. Dante watched from where she'd left him.
When she finally waved him over, he caught himself looking behind her for the others.
There were no others.
Just Skadi.
He went inside.
They managed a small fire with dry grass and scraps of wood from the ruined structure. Once part of a branch had burned down to charcoal, Dante immediately stole it for writing.
THANK YOU.
Skadi looked over. “For what?”
Dante made a lifting motion with both arms.
“The road?”
He nodded.
“It was faster.”
Dante added STILL THANK YOU.
Skadi read it and gave him a small nod. “You're welcome.”
There.
A complete conversation.
Dante was absurdly pleased with it.
Skadi opened her pack and began eating. After a while she held some of the food toward him. Dante shook his head.
“Eat.”
Another shake.
She held it closer.
Apparently this counted as an instruction.
Dante took the charcoal and wrote I DON'T NEED MUCH FOOD.
“You already ate?”
He stared at the sentence for a moment, trying to decide how much explanation the situation deserved, then wrote MY BODY IS COMPLICATED.
Skadi looked at the words, then at his clock. “That seems obvious.”
Dante stopped.
Skadi resumed eating.
He wrote FUNNY.
“No.”
Dante left the word where it was.
The quiet afterward felt different from the silence that morning. Not comfortable exactly, but occupied. There was another person here, someone moving beside the fire, adjusting equipment, occasionally looking toward the entrance. That made a difference.
Dante started drawing Mephistopheles.
There was no good reason for it. Skadi hadn't asked yet. He had charcoal, a flat stone, and had begun sketching the bus while thinking.
The result was terrible.
Dante stared at it.
Mephistopheles deserved better.
Skadi noticed. “What's that?”
Dante pointed to the rectangle and wrote BUS.
She looked at the drawing again. “That's a bus?”
Dante slowly covered part of it with one hand.
Charon can never see this.
He added wheels in the hope that might improve things.
It did not.
Skadi was still looking, so Dante wrote BAD DRAWING underneath.
“Yes.”
He looked up.
Skadi's face remained perfectly serious.
Dante drew twelve small figures inside the bus out of spite, then added Charon near the front and Vergilius standing away from everyone else because that part at least felt accurate.
Skadi watched him finish. “The people you're looking for?”
Dante pointed at the figures and wrote MY PEOPLE.
Her eyes stayed on the words longer than he expected. “How many?”
Dante pointed at each figure in turn while Skadi counted. “Twelve?”
He indicated Charon and Vergilius.
“Fourteen.”
Dante pointed at himself.
Skadi corrected herself. “Fifteen.”
He hesitated, then nodded.
He wasn't sure why that answer felt stranger than it should.
“They're all missing?”
Another nod.
Skadi looked back at the drawing. “Do you think they're alive?”
The charcoal stopped against the stone.
Dante looked at the figures. They were terrible. Don and Meursault looked identical. Ryōshū was just a line with another line next to it because Dante had attempted a sword. Gregor's arm had come out much too large. Outis somehow looked angrier than intended.
He knew which one was which anyway.
Dante wrote I DON'T KNOW.
Skadi read it, and the fire cracked between them.
“They might be alive,” she said eventually.
Dante looked up.
Skadi wasn't looking at him anymore. Her attention had gone toward the opening in the wall and the darkening sea beyond it.
There was something there Dante recognized well enough not to touch. He'd spent a long time learning when asking another question helped and when it only made someone retreat farther.
He wrote I HOPE SO.
Skadi nodded.
That was all.
Later, Dante erased part of the stone and wrote WHAT ARE SEA TERRORS?
“Creatures from the sea.”
Dante waited for the rest.
There wasn't any.
He added THAT'S ALL?
Skadi looked at him. “For tonight.”
Dante considered pointing out that they were currently sharing a ruined building and that he'd already drawn most of his coworkers badly enough to qualify as an act of hostility.
He decided she still had a point.
Instead he wrote WHAT IS IBERIA?
“A country.”
NEAR GREAT LAKE?
“No.”
NEAR THE CITY?
Skadi frowned. “What city?”
Dante wrote THE CITY.
She waited.
He underlined it.
Skadi continued waiting.
Dante stared down at the words.
In retrospect, naming the City ‘the City’ had been an incredibly unhelpful decision.
He added 26 DISTRICTS. WINGS. NESTS. BACKSTREETS. U CORP.
Skadi read each term. “Never heard of them.”
Dante leaned back.
Well.
That was becoming inconvenient.
U Corp had been the first guess. Somewhere farther around the Great Lake had been the second. He could probably keep expanding the map indefinitely if he wanted to avoid admitting neither explanation was working very well. The Outskirts were enormous. There were ruins, unknown territories, and places beyond the parts of the world most people in the City cared about.
Maybe he'd simply been thrown much farther than expected.
Very far.
Skadi watched him thinking. “You're lost.”
Dante looked at her, then wrote VERY.
Skadi's mouth moved.
Barely.
Dante pointed at her.
Ticking.
No evidence survived.
When the fire began to burn low, Skadi moved closer to the opening and placed her sword within reach. The spot gave her a clear view outside and put her between Dante and anything approaching the shelter. Dante noticed but didn't decide what it meant. Sometimes people did things because they'd done them a thousand times before.
Dante understood that better than most.
He settled against the wall and glanced toward the empty space beside him. For half a second he expected Gregor to be there. Then maybe Sinclair. Somebody.
Nobody was.
The shelter should have been louder. Don talking over someone. Heathcliff complaining about sleeping on stone. Rodya asking if Skadi had anything better to eat. Outis insisting the entrance needed a second watch position. Faust explaining something no one had asked her to explain.
Dante missed all of it.
They'd better be all right.
“You should sleep,” Skadi said without looking away from the dark outside. “I'll hear anything coming.”
Dante reached for the charcoal and wrote THANK YOU again.
“You already said that.”
He added SAYING IT AGAIN.
Skadi looked over her shoulder at him. For a second Dante wondered whether he had somehow mistranslated something, but then she said, “Sleep, Dante.”
He put the charcoal down. <Good night, Skadi.>
Ticking filled the shelter.
Skadi looked at him anyway.
The silence stretched just long enough that Dante assumed the meaning had been lost with everything else.
Then she said, “Good night.”
Dante settled back against the wall. Tomorrow Skadi would continue west and he would take the road east. That was the agreement. At the settlement there would be people, maps, probably paper, and hopefully someone who recognized at least one term from the place Dante actually came from.
That was enough to work with.
He closed his eyes, then opened them again a few seconds later and checked the entrance.
Skadi was still there.
Dante closed them a second time.
Tomorrow he would go east.
Probably.