Chapter 13: She Is Back

He turned around.

She floated a few inches above the ground, feet not touching it. The hem of her robe stayed dead still even as the draft through the tunnel brushed his arms and stirred the dust along the floor.

"I..." His voice cracked. "Please. Forgive me. I did this."

He dropped to his knees. His shoulders pulled in on their own. His eyes stayed dry, scraped past the point of having anything left to give. ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

He hated himself. Not the vague, sorry-for-himself kind of hate he’d felt before over ordinary things, a bad grade, a stupid fight. This was specific and total, a hate with a name attached to it, and the name was his own. He had pressed yes. Nobody had made him.

He had wanted her back badly enough to not ask what it would cost, and now the cost was standing in front of him with her feet not touching the ground, and there was no version of this where he got to feel sorry for himself instead.

He couldn’t look at her face.

"Lian. Look up."

Her voice arrived late, trailing half a beat behind itself, the way it did now.

He forced his head up, because refusing to look felt like one more thing he was doing for himself instead of for her.

"Forgive me."

"You did it for my sake." Her face had gone thinner than an hour ago, worn down to something softer. "You wanted to see me again. That’s all this is."

"That doesn’t make it right." The words came out rougher than he meant them to. "You’re dead and I still made you into whatever this is because I couldn’t stand losing you. That’s not love. That’s just me being selfish and calling it something better."

"How did you end up like this?"

"I should ask you that." Her head tilted sideways and stopped at an angle no living neck could hold without snapping. "What did you do?"

The words stuck in his throat before they came out broken.

"There was a shape. Rectangular. It appeared in front of me. It said it could bring you back if I gave you up. I touched yes."

"Don’t," she said, quiet. "It’s fine."

"Did it hurt you?" The question tore loose before he could catch it. "When I did that?"

She stayed quiet long enough that the silence started to feel wrong on its own.

"I can’t answer that," she said finally. "Because of the bargain. What you made a deal with, I don’t have a name for it. I’m not sure one exists."

His stomach dropped.

"What was that thing," Lian said. "You have to know something. Anything."

"I know enough to be afraid of it."

"That’s not enough."

"It’s what’s safe to tell you."

His hands started shaking against the ground. He pressed them flat and let the grit bite into his palms.

The air beside her shifted.

A rectangle unfolded low to the floor, thin reddish static crawling its edges. Under his skin the mark pulled once, cold instead of hot, the cold climbing past his wrist into his forearm.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Pr□cessing Result: B0und

Name: Wen Ruo

Type: ___

Ability: r1tual kn0wledge rem4ins

B0und t○: Lian

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Lian stared at the floating text. "Can’t you see this?"

Wen Ruo tilted her head. "What? I don’t see anything."

He looked at her, then at the shape hanging between them. She stood close enough to touch, close enough that he could have found out whether his hand would pass straight through her.

He didn’t try.

The mark tightened again, harder this time, and something answered it from thirty miles away.

At home, in a drawer he hadn’t opened in days, the book reacted.

The drawer jerked hard enough to rattle its handle against the wood. Dust lifted off the desk in a thin grey breath. Light bled under the lid, unsteady, flickering the way a dying bulb flickers right before it decides which way to go.

A blank page turned on its own.

Characters rose out of the paper, dark and uneven, ink pooling thick at the start of each stroke and thinning toward the end, like whatever hand had written them had gotten tired halfway through. The same red static crawled the margins that had crawled the edges of the window in the tunnel, the same pulse, the same source, however many miles sat between them.

...sp□rit b○und...

...Wen Ru○o...

...tied t○ Lian...

Back in the tunnel, Lian was still staring at the window.

Then the static flickered once and the shape folded in on itself and was gone.

Wen Ruo didn’t ask what it had shown him.

He stayed on his knees, looking at the empty air where it had been. His palms ached where the grit had cut in. Somewhere behind him water hit the ground in a slow uneven rhythm, the only thing still moving in the whole tunnel.

She hadn’t said anything since the window disappeared. He wanted her to say something now, anything that wasn’t this quiet.

She didn’t.

He pressed his forehead against the ground and breathed in dust and old damp air. He stayed like that a while, chest tight enough that pulling in a full breath took real effort.

When he finally pushed himself up, his shirt caught against the places that still hurt. He winced once and kept moving anyway. His legs held, unsteady but holding.

The light at the mouth of the tunnel had thinned to almost nothing, the sky beyond it gone the bruised purple that comes right before full dark. A weak, cold wind reached in far enough to lift the torn edge of his shirt off his back.

He stood there. The coldness under his skin hadn’t left. It had settled instead, low and constant.

He looked down at himself for the first time since any of this had happened. His shirt gaped open in two long tears across the front, the fabric stiff where blood had already dried. More of it streaked his forearm, ran down one leg of his jeans, dark against the denim in a way that wouldn’t wash out easy.

None of it was actually his anymore. The wounds underneath had closed hours ago, clean, no trace they had ever opened at all. But he could still feel where each one had been, the way you can feel a missing tooth with your tongue long after the socket’s healed.

"What am I supposed to do," he said, mostly to himself. "My parents are going to see this. They’re going to ask, and I don’t—" He dragged a hand down his face. "I don’t even know what I’d tell them."

"Tell them you were attacked." Wen Ruo said it plainly, like the answer had been sitting there the whole time. "Some thugs. Jumped you on the way home. People believe it because it’s ordinary."

"But I’m not hurt, though.""But I’m not hurt, though." He held his arm out so she could see the dried blood over skin with nothing wrong underneath it. "I don’t get why. Everything just closed. My mind went blank for a second, and then I woke up and you were right in front of me. Dying."

She didn’t answer that.

She hadn’t been awake for any of it either. She’d gone under the same way he had, same blank stretch of minutes neither of them could account for.

"I felt like someone else was in me," he said, quieter now. "Just for a second. Driving."

Nothing from her on that either.

Then a different thought caught up with him.

"Wait." He looked at his own unmarked skin again, then at her."If I don’t have any wounds, how am I supposed to look like someone who got jumped? I can’t walk in perfectly fine, covered in blood, and say a bunch of guys beat me up."

Wen Ruo smiled.

It wasn’t a comforting smile. It didn’t reach her eyes, and something about the shape of it, on a face that had died less than an hour ago, put a fresh line of cold down the back of his neck.

"Then we make sure you get hurt."

Some small, ugly part of him didn’t flinch at that the way it should have. Some part of him thought, distantly, that he’d deserve it.

"W-what—"