Chapter 149: Taken

Logan lay with one cheek pressed into the moss.

It was cold and wet against his skin, and it smelled of earth and the sweet rot of the glowing caps.

From where he lay he could see a narrow slice of the shelf between two stalks, a stretch of green-lit ground and the bare rock beyond it. He could see nothing of the sky.

He could hear it, though.

The sound of the wings came across the drop like heavy rain on a tin roof. Thousands of them were beating at once, and underneath that drumming he could hear the last of the mounts still screaming.

Then his panel lit up behind his eyes.

[ Grim Harvest (Lv3) ] [ Tracking: 10 beings below 23% HP. ]

He had not called on it. Grim Harvest tracked any living thing that fell below twenty-three percent health within three kilometers, and it did so whether he wanted it to or not.

The five riders and their five mounts had all dropped under that line together.

Each of them showed up in his mind as a small pale point of light, hanging in the dark behind his eyes where the panel lived. Logan lay perfectly still and watched them.

The points went out one after another.

He did not need anyone to tell him what that meant. When they finally stopped going out, only two were left. They were very close together, and they were falling fast toward the wall below him.

’A mount and its rider,’ he thought. ’Both still alive, and they are coming straight at us.’

The mount hit the front edge of the shelf.

Logan felt the impact through the stone under his chest, a heavy jolt that shook the stalks around him. He heard claws scrabble against rock and a thin, broken cry from a throat that was not human.

Then the scrabbling stopped.

The mount had not been able to hold on. It slid backward over the edge, and in his mind one of the two points dropped away into the dark below and went out.

A lighter body struck the moss and rolled through the stalks. It came to rest a few meters from Logan’s head, just outside the slice of shelf he could see.

[ Tracking: 1 being below 23% HP. ] [ HP: 6% ]

Six percent.

Logan went cold all over.

Grim Harvest did not only track. It could also execute anything below thirteen percent inside that same three-kilometer range, and all it took was his intent.

He had killed Rakhan Vurel with a single thought while the man was flying away from him hundreds of meters out over the sea.

Whoever had just fallen onto this shelf was sitting at less than half that threshold.

’Do not think about it,’ he told himself. ’Do not even want it.’

He made his mind go flat and empty and kept it there.

The hookwings came over the shelf right behind the fall.

The noise of them was enormous. Their wings made a dry rattling beat like dead leaves shaken in a sack. There were so many of them that the sound had no edges.

The wind they made pressed the stalks flat and tore at Logan’s coat. A wingtip or a hooked beak brushed across his back and was gone, and he never learned which.

A loose cap tore free from one of the flattened stalks and went tumbling across the moss in the gust. Four hookwings struck it at once. When they lifted away, there was nothing left of it but a smear of green light on the ground.

Alice was lying on his left, close enough to touch. Her hand found his in the moss. Her fingers were ice-cold, and they clamped down so hard that his knuckles ground together. He did not let go.

’Nobody catches anyone here,’ Logan thought. ’He said it on the ledge, and I thought he was being dramatic.’

A hookwing landed on Terry’s shoulder.

Logan could just see it at the edge of his sliver of view. Terry had knelt down with the others, and he was as motionless as a boulder.

The hookwing was grey and no longer than Logan’s forearm.

Its feathers were short and dense, like the pelt of a seal, and its beak curved down and back into a hook shaped exactly like a fishing gaff. Its eyes were small and black and did not blink.

It turned its head sideways and looked at Terry’s faceplate from a few centimeters away.

Terry did not move. He did not even let his plating shift.

The hookwing looked at him a little longer. Then it lost interest and leapt back into the air.

Near the middle of the shelf, where the dead crawlers lay, Vina was flat on her face with both arms over her head.

From where Alice lay, she had a clear view of the girl. Solveig was kneeling over her like a statue carved from light, his wings folded tight against his back and his burning blade laid flat on the moss beside him.

The hookwings split around him on both sides without touching him, the way a river splits around a stone.

Vina did not twitch once. Alice could see her small shoulders rising and falling, fast and shallow, but her hands stayed locked over her head exactly where Rishin had taught her to put them.

’She is a child,’ Alice thought, ’and she is doing it better than me.’

Then the sound began to lift away.

The wind eased off. The rattling of wings drew back across the drop and thinned, until Logan could hear his pulse again over it.

When he finally turned his head, the air above the shelf was empty. Across the drop, the far wall was covered once more in small grey shapes. Each one was settling back into its hole and turning its beak toward the stair.

"Slowly," Rishin said, somewhere to his left. "Get up slowly. They are still watching."

They got up as if the shelf were made of glass.

Logan pushed himself onto his knees one hand at a time. Around him the others were doing the same.

Helen and Daniel rose together, and Garen and Isolde came up from the stalks on either side. Billy’s great wheel turned a quarter of an inch and then stopped, as if he had caught himself.

The rider lay in the stalks where she had rolled.

She was a young woman with ash-white hair cut short at the neck. A line of dark scales ran along her jaw, and more scales ran down the backs of her forearms, overlapping like the skin of a snake.

Her flying leathers had been slashed to strips. Blood covered her, dark red and still running from a dozen places where the hooked beaks had torn her open.

Isolde was already moving toward her, placing each foot with care. She lifted one hand, and one of her units stepped out of a column of light beside her.

It was a slender Tier-9 healer with hands full of soft gold radiance. It knelt beside the fallen woman and laid both hands flat across her chest.

[ HP: 6% → 31% → 64% → 88% ]

The wounds closed while Logan watched.

They did not knit slowly over ten seconds the way Helen’s heal did. The torn flesh simply drew together, and then her skin was whole again under the ruined leather.

Helen had come to kneel on the other side of her. She did not speak. She watched the healer’s hands the entire time, and her lips moved slightly, as if she were trying to memorize the shape of what they were doing.

The woman’s eyes opened.

They were gold, with long narrow pupils like a goat’s. She saw the ring of strangers leaning over her, and she tried to surge up off the moss.

Rishin’s hand came down flat on her shoulder.

"Slowly," he said. "They are still watching."

She froze. Her eyes went past him to the far wall and to the thousands of grey shapes in their holes. Then she lay back down, very carefully, and her whole body began to shake.

"Where are they?" she whispered.

Logan knelt down beside her so that she could see his face.

"They did not come out," he said. "I am sorry."

He did not tell her how he knew. He did not tell her about the pale points winking out behind his eyes.

She looked at him. Then she turned her head toward the drop, and she did not look away from it.

Her name was Tavi.

She told them in pieces, in a flat voice that did not sound as if it belonged to her. There had been five of them on those mounts.

Her mother and her two brothers had ridden with her, along with a man named Ren whom she had been going to marry.

"Our scouts said the walls were quiet," she said. "They flew along the rim twice, and nothing came out. So we thought it was safe to go straight down."

"Your scouts flew slowly," Rishin said. "And they flew along the rim."

Tavi closed her eyes.

"Three hundred and sixty-five days," she said. "Everyone in our town said you cannot walk to the bottom in that. Everyone said the only chance was to go fast."

"Everyone who says that has never reached the bottom," Rishin said.

Tavi opened her eyes and looked at him properly for the first time. She took in the white hair and the lined face, and the plain robe with no armor under it.

"And you have?"

"Yes."

She wanted to go down after them.

She said it as soon as she could sit up. She said it with her hands braced on the moss and her gold eyes fixed on the edge of the shelf, as though she might crawl to it and go over.

"They fell," she said. "They fell down. If I go down, I will find them."

Rishin lowered himself until he was crouching in front of her, his face level with hers.

"The Abyss does not give back what falls into it," he said.

Logan saw Alice’s head turn sharply toward the old man. Across the circle, Garen and Isolde exchanged a glance over Tavi’s head.

Tavi stared at Rishin. Then her face crumpled all at once, like paper closing in a fist.

Helen reached her first.

She did not ask and she did not hesitate. She put both arms around this stranger from another world, a woman with scales along her jaw whom she had never laid eyes on before, and she held on while Tavi screamed into her shoulder.

Nobody told her to be quiet. On the far wall, the hookwings did not stir. They had no interest in screaming, because screaming was not fast.

Daniel knelt down on Tavi’s other side. He put one broad hand on her back and left it there.

When it was over, Tavi asked to go back up.

"I will go to the rim," she said hoarsely. "I will wait there. Maybe one of them..."

She did not finish.

Vina had crept up beside her mother. She was looking at Tavi with a very serious face, the way she looked at things she was trying hard to understand.

"There is a man on the rim called Oddren," Vina said. "He fishes off the edge of the town. He is waiting for his friends too."

Tavi looked at her. "Does anyone ever come back up to him?"

Vina opened her mouth. Then she turned and looked at Rishin. Rishin did not answer her, and Vina slowly closed her mouth again.

Garen sent Lisbell up the stair with her.

The small black cat walked beside Tavi one step at a time. Tavi walked slowly, because she had just learned exactly how slowly she needed to walk.

"She will find us again," Garen said, when Vina looked worried. "She always does."

They climbed the first switchback of the stair, and then the second. Alice watched them until the grey haze swallowed them.

’That is how it happens,’ she thought. ’That is how you make a stayer. You do not decide to stop. You just go back up to wait for somebody, and then you never stop waiting.’

Logan opened his panel without meaning to. He looked at the number of days left and closed it again.

"Come," Rishin said.

At the right end of the shelf, where the stalks thinned out against the wall, a path no wider than a cart ran on along the rock. It hugged the wall of the Abyss and bent downward out of sight.

Rishin was already walking toward it, with Vina’s hand in his.

They followed him one by one.

Daniel was the last of the family to leave the shelf. On his way past the dead crawlers, he bent down and picked up his rock.