Chương 50: Halfway Mark

Domrek fed the fire and said nothing for a long time. That was one of his better qualities. He could sit with silence without needing to fill it. Most people, when conversation stopped, got uncomfortable after about thirty seconds and started talking to fix it. Domrek just waited. It ended when he said: 'What do you miss.' Not what do you miss about being alive, which would have been too much. Not what do you miss about Earth, which would have been imprecise. Just: what do you miss.

As if Kaito knew exactly what the question meant and didn't need it explained. He did know. He sat with it for a moment.

'Instant noodles,' he said. Domrek waited.

'The specific kind you got in a cup. You pour in hot water and wait three minutes and they're — not good, technically. I knew they weren't good. I ate them about four times a week for six years.' He thought about it.

'The office kept an electric kettle in the break room. Whoever got in first in the morning turned it on. By the time I arrived there was usually hot water waiting, and I'd make a cup and take it back to my desk and the smell of it meant that the day was starting. That I was awake. That there was work to do.' He paused.

'I miss that smell. Not the noodles specifically. The smell of them, at a desk, at the start of something.'

'You made things,' Domrek said. Not a judgment. Just a fact he was filing.

'For eight years.' Kaito looked at the fire.

'Air conditioning. I miss that too. My apartment had a unit that was five years old and made a sound when it turned on — a sort of shudder, like it was offended to be needed. But in a Tokyo summer, stepping inside and feeling the air change...' He stopped himself.

'That one sounds less dignified the more I explain it.'

'It doesn't,' Domrek said. Kaito looked at him. The big man was watching the fire with the expression he got when he was paying close attention without performing it. Just listening.

'My sister's laugh,' Kaito said.

'That one I don't need to explain. I just miss it.' He thought about her — Rin, twenty-five when he died, two years his junior, working a teaching job she half-complained about and would never actually leave because she was good at it and she knew it. Her laugh started quiet and then it didn't. It came out of her like she hadn't expected it herself. She laughed at things that were slightly wrong with the world — bad timing, small absurdities, moments that should have been embarrassing but weren't quite.

He remembered the last time he'd heard it clearly. He'd been at the studio until two in the morning and she'd called to complain that he'd missed her birthday dinner for the third year in a row. He'd apologized. She'd said it didn't matter, they'd get noodles next week. Then she'd added, in the flattest possible voice: "You did remember this time. You just chose the code." And then she'd laughed at her own observation, that particular laugh that started in her chest and came out sideways.

He'd laughed too, standing in an empty office with cold coffee in his hand, because she'd nailed it. He had chosen the code. She knew him well enough to say it plainly and laugh at it instead of being hurt, which was her specific talent. He hadn't gotten noodles with her the next week. Or the week after. Then the server rack had come down and there wasn't a week after that.

'She'd have found this funny,' he said.

'All of it. Not cruelly. She'd just — she'd have seen it.' He hadn't said her name out loud since he'd arrived in Eirath. Saying it now felt strange, as if the name belonged to a different language and he wasn't sure this world had room for it. He filed it away again.

Domrek was quiet for a while after that. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

'I don't know what I miss,' he said eventually.

'That's the honest answer. I was twelve when I went into the pits. By the time I came out I didn't have a clear picture of what I'd been missing, because I didn't have a clear enough picture of what was out there to miss it precisely.' He put another piece of wood on the fire.

'I missed the idea of an outside. Not a specific outside — just the concept of one. That there was a world past the walls and the crowds and the betting lines.' He paused.

'When I got free, the first thing I did was walk until I couldn't see a building. It took three days. I sat down in a field and stayed there until I'd run out of reasons to leave. Then I left, because there was nothing useful to do in a field.' He almost smiled.

'That's not missing something the way you mean it. That's different.'

'It's not that different,' Kaito said. Domrek looked at him.

'You had things worth missing. People who laughed in a specific way. Food that meant something. Temperature controlled to your comfort.' He said it plainly, without envy, like he was reading from a list.

'That means you were somewhere worth being. Most people don't know that when they're inside it. They only know it afterward, if they're the kind of person who gets an afterward.' He looked back at the fire.

'You're grieving something real. I just think that's worth naming.' Kaito didn't have a response to that. He sat with it.

'The laugh,' Domrek said.

'Your sister. She knew you well enough to laugh at you honestly.'

'Yes.'

'That's not a common thing.' He said it the same way he said most things — without sentiment, like he was reporting an accurate observation.

'Most people don't let themselves be known well enough for someone to get that close. You did.' He looked at the fire.

'So did she.' Kaito hadn't thought about it that way. He filed it.

'What about you,' he said after a while.

'Now. Not the pits. Is there anything you'd miss if it were gone.' Domrek thought about it seriously, which was how he thought about everything.

'The work,' he said.

'Having something that takes your full attention. In the arena it was the fight. Now it's this — whatever this is that we're building.' He looked at Kaito.

'And the people doing it with me. That would be a significant thing to lose.' Kaito had nothing to say to that either. He nodded once.

Sable had been quiet for the whole conversation. She was often quiet when Kaito and Domrek talked — she listened, but she stayed back, the same way a person stayed back from a conversation they weren't part of. He'd never asked her to do that. She'd worked it out on her own. He was almost surprised when she said: 'I miss something too.' Her voice was different. Not the precise analytical register. Something quieter. He waited.

'I've been trying to find the right word for it for a long time,' she said.

'I haven't found one. It might not have a word in any language I know.' She paused.

'There was a period — early. When I was first... separated from what I was part of. When I was still learning what I was. I experienced the Original Layer differently then. Everything was very large and very new and I didn't have a word for it either, but it felt—' She stopped. Started again.

'I notice I no longer have it. I notice when I think about it carefully that something was different then and isn't now. I think that might be what missing something is. Noticing the shape of what's gone.' Kaito said, 'Do you want to say what it is.' A pause.

'I would, if I could.' And then: 'It's all right. I'm not keeping it from you. I just don't have the words yet.' The fire burned. Nobody said anything for a few minutes. He'd expected the moment to feel like a door closing. It felt more like a door left standing open, which he found he preferred. She'd said what she could. There was more that she couldn't yet. That was a different thing from nothing.

Domrek checked the sky through the gap in the scrub above their shelter.

'Two hours before it's light enough to move safely.'

'Eighteen kilometers to the junction,' Kaito said.

'We should be packed.' He started rolling his bedroll with the efficient routine of someone who'd broken camp under worse conditions and would again.

'Sleep or ready.'

'Ready,' Kaito said. He packed while his mind stayed half on the conversation. On Rin's laugh. On the cup noodles going cold on a desk. On Sable finding the shape of something she'd lost ten thousand years ago and still not having a name for it. He was putting his pack together when Sable said, quietly: 'The entity in the Original Layer shifted while we were talking.' He stopped.

'Define shifted,' he said.

'Reoriented,' she said.

'The same way a person might turn their attention toward a sound in another room.' A pause.

'It was very still before. It has been very still since I noticed it. But for a period of approximately an hour, centered on this conversation, it was doing something different.' She was quiet.

'I can't tell you what. I can only tell you that it changed, and then it stopped changing, and now it is still again.' Domrek had paused in his packing and was watching Kaito's face.

'It was listening,' Kaito said.

'That's what it looked like,' Sable said.

'Yes.' He shouldered his pack. Whatever was in the Original Layer — whatever had waited for him to arrive and then sent a message signed with one letter and the word please — had heard them talking about instant noodles and air conditioning and a sister's laugh. It had turned its attention toward them for an hour, and then gone still. He didn't know what to do with that.

'Moving,' Domrek said, and they moved.