Chương 34: Chapter Thirty-Four: The Ordinary Business of Fear

Alice woke up gasping, the feeling of the wine bottle still slick and useless in her grip, the wet cold of the pavement soaking up through a coat she no longer owned into a body that had stopped being hers over two months ago.

It took her a long, disoriented moment, her heart hammering, sheets tangled wrong around legs that belonged to someone younger than she should be, to remember that Cora had already died, that a different knife wound had already healed, that she was lying in a narrow bed on Pell Street and not bleeding out on a London pavement that didn't exist here at all.

She lay still until her breathing evened out, and then, when lying still only made the dream appear more solid, she stood, threw a thick shawl over her shoulders and reached for her nightstand, picking up a glass of water. It felt cool in her hands, and even cooler as she sipped, as the sleepiness and the edges of her nightmare began to disappear in the morning light. Alice took a few deep breaths then decided to write in her notebooks instead.

Some quiet, insistent part of her was hopeful that the memories of that day would soften into something vaguer, less hurtful, if only she thought about anything else first. It was a ridiculous excuse even to her own ears, what was that old saying? That doctors make for the worst patients? The first notebook was under the floorboard. Before she'd even properly dressed, she sat cross-legged on the cold floor with it open on her knee, working the previous day into code.

It had only been a few days since she had started doing this, yet it already came with the satisfying care of a ritual that she had come to rely on for peace and order in her own thoughts. Guild. Pamphlet. Convergence, untested, left for another time. The plan, the marsh limit, the money.

She wrote down everything, whether important or not, into its Bible-keyed disguise, page and verse standing in for what it actually meant, and didn't notice the small notification until she paused to take another sip of water and raised her head from her writings. Skill [Cryptography] has leveled up. She sat back on her heels, faintly pleased. She could understand why people enjoyed systems like these. Playing games had felt too much like pretending to care for fake stakes for her to enjoy it, but… this?

Seeing your work mean something, and be rewarded immediately when done right… Who wouldn't enjoy this? Beneath yesterday's accounting, she wrote out her plans for the week properly, since she could no longer trust things to memory alone. Mon-Thu evenings: Lockpicking, own room, door locked. Fri evening, unscheduled, set aside for nothing but sitting and thinking, in case another [Cryptography] repeats itself. Mornings, she wrote last, marsh, physical skills, and underlined the number up to 3 beside it.

That line of writing led her elsewhere. Skills are the real power here, she thought, not levels. Levels seem to change little here. They are probably useful, somehow, but I don't see how yet. Rank barely seems to matter for anything except who's allowed to know what, and who gets summoned by the Church or the Crown when they cross a threshold. But a skill, the right skill, at the right level, is real practical power. A high enough [Maintain Alias] would matter more to me right now than a higher rank.

If that was true, the speed of the next ten levels mattered less than the strength and amount of the skills she filled them with. Class, rank, all of it, mere scaffolding. Skills were the building. The issue with that line of thinking, was that Alice didn't believe it to be true. The so-called Angel in charge of this, if there was a being like that, it wouldn't simply create a whole system, with parts of it completely worthless… would it?

Alice added one more line to the plan, almost as an afterthought, though she suspected it wouldn't stay a small one for long: buy language primers. Test Francian. She'd been passably fluent in French, once, in a life that no longer mattered, and if this world's Francian bore any real resemblance to it, that was levels of language skill sitting there for the taking.

She wasn't foolish enough to expect it to be identical, sixty years and God knew how many centuries of divergence stood between whatever old French had once been and whatever Francian had become in this strange alternate world. But even a rough kinship would save her months of slow, grinding, basic vocabulary work, and grammar, and pronunciation practice. This story has been stolen from Royal Road.

If you read it on Amazon, please report it She looked at her notes, took her other journal from her drawers and began writing the misleading diary pages accordingly. After she was done, she tucked the first notebook beneath the board where it belonged, placed the bible in a makeshift shelf, and left the journal on her nightstand.

Alice dressed, with a basket in hand, hiding her knife and lantern there, and went downstairs. She tied her coat tightly around her as winter here was harsh and it was fast approaching. She had not felt hungry enough for breakfast, and planned to buy some cheap sweetbread at the baker's for her midday meal. Her hand was on the door handle, when the thought caught her. He's out there. And stopped. It wasn't a new thought, not really. She'd had it before, but it wasn't like this.

It had been much like a bruise in her mind, aware of where it was and how it had come to be, and ever careful not to accidentally press it, because pressing hurt and there had always been something more immediately useful to do instead. She realized, standing with one hand actually on the door now, that she had not let herself think about it properly, not once. And she may have mistaken a badly-closed wound for a bruise. Was this hesitancy being triggered by her nightmare?

Or was this because she had done everything in the past couple months except sit with the actual, simple fact that she had died, had been murdered. Or that somewhere in this city was a man who had killed six women, likely seven, who now knew, or would know soon enough, if he didn't already, that one of them hadn't stayed dead. Her hand was still on the latch. Alice looked at it as though it belonged to someone else. Was she shaking? Or was she imagining it?

A fine, persistent tremor, the kind she might once have diagnosed in a patient without a second thought and now couldn't seem to still in her own wrist no matter how firmly she told it to stop. She did not open the door.

"Alice, love, is that you up already?" Mrs. Hatch's voice carried up from the bottom of the stairs, followed shortly by the woman herself, wiping flour from her hands onto her apron. She stopped at the sight of her.

"Well, now. You're never still standing about at this hour. Thought you'd have been out with the dawn, same as always."

"I was just leaving," Alice said, which was almost true, and let go of the latch as though that had been her intention all along.

"Have you had your breakfast already?"

"I have, thank you." The lie came easily, the way it always did now, smooth enough that Mrs. Hatch didn't so much as blink before nodding and turning back toward the kitchen.

"Well, have a good day at the pitch, dear." Alice stood in the hallway a moment longer, listening to the familiar sounds of the kitchen resuming behind her, the scrape of a pan, the low tuneless hum Mrs. Hatch always kept up over her work, and then, instead of opening the door, she turned around and went back up the stairs. She quickly locked the door behind her, basket thrown to the side, and sat on the edge of her bed, looking at her own hands properly this time, both of them, held out flat in front of her.

Still trembling. A small, involuntary, entirely honest thing, utterly unlike the calm she'd been performing for everyone, including herself, in this city for two months running. What am I afraid of? she asked herself. It is not of him, this man who killed Alice. It isn't. I am not afraid of that idiotic stalker who killed me either. But if not her murderers… Is it death I fear? Alice thought back to her nightmare. It didn't feel like the right answer. Not yet. She did not go to the marsh that day.

The knock came late in the afternoon, sharp against the quiet she'd let settle over the room, and every part of her went instantly, completely still. She hadn't lit a candle.

The light outside had gone thin and grey without her noticing, and she realized, in the second before the second knock came, that she'd spent the better part of the day exactly where she was now, sitting, doing nothing productive at all, which was so unlike her that the wrongness of it only struck her properly now, with someone on the other side of her door. Her hand found the knife at her side, before she'd consciously decided to reach for it.

"Alice?" The voice was muffled through the door, but familiar enough that her whole body loosened before her mind had even properly caught up.

"Alice, are you there?" Nell.