Chương 24: Going Dark

Kaito didn't take the hand. He didn't slap it away either.

"Riders coming," he said.

"You told me an hour. I don't trust your hour. We move now, we argue on our feet." Red held the hand out one more second, then let it drop.

"Smart enough," it said, and turned, and went deeper into the wood, sure of the ground the way it was sure of everything. Kaito went after it, and as he went he threw his Sight back through the trees the way they'd come, to see how much hour they really had. Not an hour. The riders were already in the field they'd crossed. Six of them, mounted, fanned out in a line, the warm red of them moving fast and even and not searching. Searching men wander.

These rode straight, all six pointed the same way, the way a man points when he knows exactly where the thing he wants is standing.

'They're not looking for me,' he thought, and his stomach dropped.

'They're tracking me. They've got my thread. They know right where I am.'

"They've got a lock on me," he said out loud, moving faster.

"Six of them, mounted, coming dead straight. We can't outrun horses on foot in a wood. They'll have us before the far side."

"Then we don't run to the far side," Red said.

"There's a stream past the next rise. Running water breaks a scent."

"It's not my scent they're following. It's the System. The god writes where I am into the world and they read it off the world. Water doesn't wash that off." He shoved through a stand of bare brush, breathing hard, the burn in his side screaming with every step.

"A stream's not going to hide a man the System's pointing at." Red didn't have an answer for that. For once. It just ran, and Kaito ran with it, and the drum of hooves got louder behind them, and he knew with cold certainty they had minutes, not an hour, not even close. Behind him a horse crashed into the treeline at the edge of the wood. Then a second. They weren't slowing for the trees.

Whoever had pointed them at him had pointed them exact, down to the tree he was standing under, because the god had told its people the road he took, and the road he took had a man on the end of it.

'Sable,' he thought, hard.

'You said you had one more thing. Whatever it is. I need it right now.'

'Not in front of—''It's a quarter mile back and it's gaining and there's no "not in front of" left. Talk.' She talked.

'The thing you've been guessing at,' she said, fast, all the careful gone out of her.

'The third door. Walking around inside the god's sight without it seeing you. It's real. It can be done. I know it can be done because it's the only thing I've done for ten thousand years.' A breath.

'I've never offered to teach you because teaching you means showing you what I am, all the way down, and I am not ready and there's no time and I'm going to do it anyway because the other choice is watching them run you down. So listen, and do exactly what I say, and don't think, because thinking is too slow.'

"Red," Kaito said, "the stream. Go. Get to it, find us a crossing, I'm right behind you." He needed it ahead of him and out of his face for sixty seconds, and the stream was the only errand that would do it. Red looked at him one beat too long, like it knew exactly what he was doing, then went, fast, gone through the trees toward the rise.

'Now,' Sable said.

'You read the whole world as threads. Values. You've read walls and wheels and a god's own floor. You have never once turned that around and looked at yourself. Do it now. Look at your own thread.' He'd never thought to. He turned his Sight inward, onto himself, on the run, and found the thing that was him in the System. It wasn't a clean red value like the riders. It was the wound. The same broken, blooming, never-resolving snarl of red error he'd watched the god hunt for in the cave and never catch.

That was his entry. That was what the System had where his name should be. A question it couldn't answer, sitting in his own chest, pumping out its location to anyone who could read it. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

'There you are,' Sable said, soft.

'That mess is you. That's what they're tracking. Now. You break things by pulling the slack until they tear. Do not tear this. Tear this and I don't know what's left of you, and neither do you. You're going to press it instead. Take hold of it, and push it flat, and thin, and quiet, until it stops shouting where it is. Hold it down. Like leaning your whole weight on a door somebody's pushing from the other side. It will want to spring back. Don't let it. Breathe slow. Go.'

He took hold of his own thread, the snarl of red that was him, and he pressed. It fought him. It wanted to be loud. He leaned on it the way she said, with everything he had, and it went thin under the pressure, dimmer, the shouting dropping to a mutter, and the muttering dropping toward nothing. And the second it did, the rest of the world went dark to him. He couldn't read the trees anymore. He couldn't read the riders.

Pressing his own eyes shut to the System shut them all the way, both directions at once, the same blindness Red had promised him at the end of the long road, except he was doing it to himself, here, holding it by main strength. His grip slipped. The thread jumped fat and loud under his hands for half a second, and somewhere off in the blind dark a horse wheeled and a man shouted, close, closer than he'd let himself think.

'Clamp it,' Sable snapped.

'Now. Hard. Stop being gentle with it.' He clamped it. He stopped holding it like a door against a push and started holding it like a fist around a wasp, all at once, no give. It went quiet again. The shout behind him turned puzzled and then turned away.

'It's working,' Sable said, and there was something in her voice he'd never heard, something close to wonder.

'They've stopped. Kaito, they've pulled up. They've lost you. The line's broken, they're milling, they don't know which way—hold it. Hold it. Don't let go yet.' He held it. It was like holding his breath with his whole body. His arms shook. The burn in his side felt very far away.

He couldn't see the world and he couldn't hear the hooves and he had no idea where Red was or whether the riders were ten feet away or a hundred, and he held the door shut on himself in the blind dark and counted his own slow breaths because they were the only thing left to count. He was blind, and he was helpless, and he was walking through a wood full of armed men on the word of a voice in his head, setting one foot down and then the next exactly where she told him to put it.

If she wanted him dead she could walk him off a drop or onto a blade and he'd never see it coming. He thought about that once, hard, in the dark. Then he kept stepping where she said, because she'd had a hundred chances to do worse than this and never once taken one, and trust had to start somewhere, and it turned out it started here, blind, with horses in the trees.

'A little more,' Sable whispered.

'Get to the rise. Get over it, out of their eyeline, and then you can let it go and they'll have nothing. Walk. I'll be your eyes. Left. Now straight. There's a root, lift your foot. Good. You're doing it. Nobody's done this. You understand? In ten thousand years, nobody alive has done what you're doing right now.' He walked blind through the wood with a dead voice for eyes, holding himself shut, until the ground tipped up and then down and Sable said, 'Over. You're over the rise.

Let it go, slow, don't snap it—' He let his thread go. Slow. It sprang back fat and loud and red and him, and the world came back with it, the trees and the cold and the stream right there below him and Red standing at the edge of it looking back up the slope at him with an expression he couldn't name. He went down on one knee in the leaves and shook and dragged in air like he'd been underwater. His eyes worked again. His Sight worked again. He almost laughed at that, with no breath in him to do it.

The blind door Red was selling him and the quiet door Sable had just shown him cost the exact same coin. Both of them took his sight. The only difference was how long it lasted, and how far it reached, and which of the two he might never come back from. He'd just paid the small version of the toll to dodge six riders. The big version was still standing down the road with Red's name on it.

"You went out," Red said. It came up the bank toward him, slow.

"I felt it. You were there, and then there was a hole where you'd been, and now you're back. She taught you that. Just now. Didn't she."

"Riders lost the track," Kaito got out.

"That's all that matters. Worry about the rest later."

"There isn't a later where that doesn't matter," Red said, and it wasn't angry, it was something quieter and more careful, and Kaito filed that under the long pile of things about Red he'd deal with when he could breathe.

"You just did the one thing in the world it's afraid of. You vanished out of its eyes. A waystone winks out, the god asks why. A man winks out—the Architect winks out—" He didn't finish. He didn't have to. The cold came down on Kaito's shoulders, all at once, full weight, the watching back and harder than it had ever been, and the flat voice opened in the back of his skull, and for the first time since the temple it did not sound like a thing reading out a fact. It sounded like a thing that had just been surprised.

[The Architect went dark.] A pause. The whole world seemed to hold still around it. [Find where it learned that. Find what taught it.] And Kaito, on his knees by the stream with the trick still shaking in his hands, understood that he'd just shown the god the one thing about himself he should have kept hidden longest, and that it had stopped watching the road he took, and started hunting the voice in his head.