Chapter 113: What Returns With You

Forty seconds is not a lot of time to explain a mechanic to somebody who has spent the whole encounter looking for a lever to pull.

"Before you go," I said, "understand how this works, or you’ll build a plan on it and the plan will fail. I can’t call you. There’s no name I can say. Every use rolls a grade first, and S is under one percent, and it has come up once in thirteen tries."

"And if it comes up again?"

"Then the System checks whether it knows anyone in that grade already. You’ll be in there now. It’s a small chance inside the small chance." I shrugged. "That’s the whole of it. No message crosses. No object crosses. Anything I gave you would stay on this floor when you went."

"So there is nothing to arrange," she said.

"Nothing at all."

Something in her expression moved — not disappointment exactly. The particular annoyance of a professional discovering that a door has no hinges.

"You are of very little immediate use," she said.

"I’d noticed."

"You misunderstand me. That is the first half of an assessment." She looked at me over her shoulder, and for a moment the amber-on-black was steady and cold and entirely a ruler’s. "A man of no consequence who can reach into a sealed throne hall and remove its ruler is worth nothing today and possibly a great deal in thirty years. I have made worse investments in better-looking prospects."

"That’s flattering."

"It is not meant to be." Her voice sharpened. "And take this, because it is the only thing I can give you that survives the crossing. Your Charisma is not a pleasant face. To anything that reads souls, you are standing in an open field at night holding a torch over your head, and you have been doing it all this time without knowing that the field has anything in it. Guard your access. Do not let strangers look. Do not be flattered into being examined."

"By anyone, or by your kind?"

"By anyone who asks nicely," she said. "My kind at least have the honesty to be visibly hungry."

The air over the concrete began to fold.

[Manifestation duration complete.]

[Nyssara Vhal returned to origin dimension.]

[Return Point: Exact origin place and instant.]

[Origin-Time Elapsed: 00:00:00.]

[Injuries, healing, spent energy, and learned information retained.]

She went the way they all go — no flash, no wind, simply a shape that had been occupying a volume of my workshop and then a volume of my workshop with nothing in it. The last thing I saw was the black-crimson fire on her arm coming up to full, and her chin coming down, and the beginning of an expression that I think was meant for the man in her throne hall.

Then panels I actually had to read twice.

[Relationship parameters updated.]

Desire: 100/100

Trust: 5/100

Resonance: 5%

[Signature state updated: Preserved.]

[Repeat Selection Chance: 5% following an S-grade roll.]

[Blind Call natural recovery initiated.]

I sat against the bench for a while and looked at that.

Desire, one hundred. Trust, five.

It would have been easy to read that wrong, and when I first gained the class I probably would have. Desire is not affection and it is certainly not permission; it’s a number describing how strongly she is drawn to me, and given what her soul-sight found in me, one hundred was closer to a hazard rating than a compliment. It said the reaction that nearly killed me was not a fluke. It said if she stood in front of me again, she would want to do it again.

And trust at five said she knew that too.

The System doesn’t grade morals. It didn’t dock her for the domain, and it didn’t award me anything for the terms we’d agreed, because it can’t see a term and wouldn’t know what one was. Those numbers described a woman’s relationship to me, not my feelings and not a verdict. I was the one who had to do the verdict.

Five, I thought. And I’d have given her three.

❖ ❖ ❖

It took me eleven minutes to get to the gates.

I know that because I checked the time when I started and when I finished, and because I had to sit down twice on the way, once against the water tank and once, humiliatingly, against nothing at all, just the yard. I barred the vehicle gate. I chained the pedestrian gate and checked the chain twice, which was the weakness talking and not caution, and then I got back into the workshop, dropped both roller doors, and locked them from the inside.

Then I drank a litre of water and tried to eat, and my body treated the first two mouthfuls as a personal insult.

I got the rest down. I slept from mid-afternoon until an hour before dawn without moving, which I know because the blanket was exactly as I’d pulled it, and I woke up hungrier than I have been since the flat. I ate everything within reach and then went and found more.

The status screen said nothing interesting, which was the entire point of looking at it.

Level 16. Strength 15. Vitality 16. Agility 17. Charisma 100.

I checked it four times over the next day. The same numbers each time, and no debuff line, and no injury entry I hadn’t earned in the flooded zone. The palms had scabbed and cracked again and were healing at the ordinary irritating rate. The forearm cut was clean. The bruise had reached the green-yellow stage that looks worse and hurts less.

Whatever she took, my body was already rebuilding, exactly as she’d said. The only lasting damage was the kind that doesn’t get an entry.

❖ ❖ ❖

By the second evening I could work again, and I did, because standing still was worse.

The memory hadn’t faded the way a dream fades, either. That was the part nobody had warned me about. It sat in my body with the same weight as the flooded zone and the walkway rail — the heat of her mouth, the exact pressure of a hand at the small of my back, the sound she made. My hands remembered it. There was no drawer in me marked not real to put any of it in, because as far as the parts of me that keep such things were concerned, it had happened, and it had happened to us.

Here’s the thing I couldn’t get straight, and still can’t. I was angry with her — properly, coldly angry, in a way the weakness hadn’t taken with it when it went. She had opened a working over me that I hadn’t agreed to and drunk from me until she nearly hit something that doesn’t grow back, and no amount of her instincts, her hunger, her decades of control undid that. I meant every word of the terms.

And underneath the anger, in the honest part of the night where nobody’s watching, I kept turning over the fact that the Call had rolled S once in thirteen. That the chance of it rolling S again was under one percent. That five percent of that was a number so small it barely qualified as a number.

I did not know whether I wanted it to succeed.

I still don’t. That’s the whole truth of it. Somewhere on the other side of a wall I can’t see through, a woman with black-crimson fire on her arm was walking to a north stair pretending to be weaker than she was, carrying an idea I’d given her, and I had no way of ever finding out whether it worked.

The System doesn’t send letters. That’s not a flaw in it. It just isn’t for that.