Chương 92: Domrek's Anchor

'You want me to tell you what I think,' Domrek said.

'Or you want me to sit here and let you carry it alone.'

'Tell me,' Kaito said.

'Please.' Domrek nodded once, slow.

'All right.' He didn't turn to face Kaito. He kept looking at the water. Kaito was grateful for that. He wasn't sure he could take being looked at right now.

'I heard your list,' Domrek said.

'You weren't there for the list.'

'I was there for the sound of you saying it. You were on the beach and I was on the ship. You weren't quiet. I didn't get the words. I got the shape.'

'Fair.'

'The shape was a man reading a bill and finding out it's bigger than his purse.' Kaito almost laughed.

'That's a good line.'

'I've had time to think about how I'd say some of this,' Domrek said.

'I never expected to say it to you. But I'd been sorting it out anyway. In case.' Kaito didn't answer. He waited. Domrek took a breath — the ordinary kind, from a chest that had spent fifteen years learning how to hide breath from a man who was watching.

'You designed a world,' Domrek said, 'where somebody like me could fight for his freedom and win.' Kaito stopped breathing for a second.

'That's the first thing I want to say,' Domrek said.

'Before anything else. Because if I don't say it first, everything else I say gets read wrong. And I want it read right.'

'Go on.'

'You designed a world where the people who took everything from me could be beaten. Not talked out of it. Not asked to be sorry. Beaten. And a man who was a slave could do the beating. That is what your world does. It doesn't do it because the world is nice. Nothing in it is nice. It does it because you built the rules that way. You built them so a man could level and a man could learn a skill and a man could stand in a ring and outlast the one who owned him. I've thought a lot about that over the last four months.

I did not know until Tessara said it that you built it on purpose. I thought it was luck. Now I know it's not.'

'It wasn't for you, Domrek. I didn't know you existed.'

'You didn't have to know I existed,' Domrek said.

'You knew somebody like me would. That's what a designer does. You knew there'd be people who came into this world with nothing, and you put the ladders in.'

'I put the pits in too.'

'You did.'

'You were in one for fifteen years.'

'I was.' Kaito looked at his hands. He'd been looking at his hands most of the afternoon.

'That's not okay,' he said.

'I don't get to be told it's okay because the ladders are also there. It's not a trade. I don't get to balance it out.' Domrek was quiet a second.

'Correct,' he said.

'You don't. That's not what I'm doing.'

'What are you doing.'

'I'm telling you what I know,' Domrek said.

'You didn't put the evil in this world to be cruel. You put it there because you wanted to show it could be overcome. That's what a good story does. It's what a bad life does too. I've been in the bad life. I know the difference between a man who put evil somewhere for fun and a man who put it somewhere so it could be met. You put it there so it could be met.'

'That's a generous read.'

'It's the read that fits what you've done since I met you,' Domrek said.

'Every time you had a choice between the ladder and the pit, you took the ladder and you tried to pull somebody else up with you. Pell. Halda's people. Aldric's succession. You do that every day. That's not a designer being cruel. That's a designer who built the thing he wishes he'd been shown.' The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Kaito didn't answer that. His throat was doing something he didn't want to notice. He shook his head once. Not disagreement.

Something else.

'Erebus,' he said.

'What about him.'

'I wrote his backstory to make the player feel bad about killing him. I killed his sister on paper to buy an emotion at the end of a boss fight. That wasn't a ladder. That was cruelty.' Domrek was quiet a moment.

'You want the honest answer,' he said.

'Or the kind one.'

'Honest.'

'Then I don't have one for Erebus,' Domrek said.

'I don't know what he is now and I don't know what you owe him. That one's yours. I can help you carry the rest. That one, I can only stand next to.'

'That's honest.'

'It's what I've got.'

'It's enough.' Domrek waited. He didn't push. He was very good at waiting.

'Say the last thing,' Kaito said, after a moment.

'You know what it is.'

'Say it anyway.' Domrek turned his head, finally, so he was looking at Kaito. Not staring. Just looking.

'I'm going to be angry at you for a while,' Domrek said.

'I want you to know that up front. Not today. Not tomorrow. But somewhere in there. You built the rules that let a man own me for fifteen years. I know why you did it and I know what came with it, and that doesn't erase the fifteen years. So there's going to be a night, probably a bad one, where I look at you and I'm going to have to work through it. And when it comes, I'm not going to pretend it isn't there.' Kaito nodded.

'But,' Domrek said.

'I am not going to let that anger make me stupid. I'm not going to leave. I'm not going to stop being useful. I'm not going to take one bad night and let it eat what we've built. That's what I want you to hear. If the anger comes, we go through it. We don't do anything about it that costs us the road.'

'That is more than I deserve,' Kaito said.

'That's not the currency,' Domrek said. Simple, flat.

'Deserving isn't the currency. Standing next to somebody who needs standing next to is the currency. That's what I've got. That's what I'm spending.' Kaito looked down. He tried to say thank you. It didn't come out. He said something else instead, because it was the only word his mouth wanted.

'Okay,' he said.

'Okay,' Domrek said. They sat. For a while, neither of them said anything, and the water kept doing what water does, and up at the top of the beach the door of the library was still closed and Tessara was still standing beside it with her book under her arm.

'Sable,' Kaito said, at last, under his breath.

'Yes.'

'Was any of what he said wrong.'

'No,' Sable said.

'None of it was wrong. Some of it was more kind than the whole picture. He knows that. He said it anyway. That is what a person does when they are choosing to stay.'

'Yeah.' He wiped his face once with the heel of one hand.

'Domrek,' Kaito said.

'Yes.'

'When the bad night comes. Don't hold it. Bring it to me.'

'I will.'

'Promise.'

'I promise.' Kaito nodded again. He put his hands flat on his knees and pushed himself up off the rock. His legs were doing their job now, which was surprising and also the right time for it. He stood a moment to make sure they were going to hold. They held.

'You eaten today,' Domrek said.

'No.' Domrek reached into his coat and handed over a wrapped bit of hard cheese and a strip of dried fish, both from the ship's stores. Kaito took them and ate the cheese and put the fish in his pocket because his stomach was not up to fish. Domrek watched him get one thing down and then looked away.

'Good,' he said.

'Now go up there.'

'She's waiting,' Kaito said, and jerked his chin toward the beach and the library and Tessara.

'She is,' Domrek said.

'The door won't open with just me. She's stuck there until you go up.'

'You noticed that.'

'I've been noticing things all afternoon,' Domrek said.

'It's what I do while I sit.' Kaito almost smiled. It wasn't a good smile yet. It was more of a rough one. But it moved on his face, which was more than his face had done in an hour. They walked up the beach together.

'Sable,' Kaito said, quietly, as they walked.

'What can you tell me about what's inside.'

'Not much,' she said.

'The registration is very dense and it's not registration I've read before. There are three distinct signatures in the building. One is Tessara. One is the building itself — the wood, awake. The third is smaller and quieter and it's the one I think Hana left. It has a marker on it that reads like a name tag, and the name tag has your name on it.'

'Her handwriting.'

'Something like that. Something written by her.'

'How much of it.'

'Enough to matter,' Sable said.

'Not so much you can't get through it in one sitting. She was thoughtful about that too.' Kaito breathed in.

'Okay,' he said. Tessara turned as they came. She didn't smile either. She looked at Kaito, then at Domrek, then back at Kaito, and she gave Domrek a small nod. It wasn't a nod of welcome. It was the nod of a woman clocking a man's weight for a purpose she wasn't going to explain.

'Ready,' she said.

'Yes,' Kaito said.

'Both of you.'

'Both of us.' Tessara turned to the door and put her hand flat on the wood. The door did not open. Kaito frowned. He'd been expecting a swing, or a click, or the small satisfied noise that a lock in a game makes when the right hand touches it. Nothing happened. Tessara looked over her shoulder at him.

'You,' she said. Kaito stepped forward. He put his hand on the wood. The wood was warm. Not hot. Warm the way a person's palm was warm when they'd been holding a cup of tea. He kept his hand there. Sable said, in his ear, in a voice she used almost never: 'Kaito. Whatever is inside was made to talk to you. Not to me. This is going to be new.'

'Okay,' he said. To her. To the door. To himself. The wood moved under his hand. Not the door — the wood. The whole surface flexed once, a breath in and a breath out, like something small and asleep had noticed him at last and was making room for him. Then the door opened.