CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  -The Day Didn’t Begin Again

  The wall spat me out into black water. I hit the ditch shoulder-first, the iron around my ankles dragging me down. I bounced off the frozen slope, tearing a groove through the crust of frost before the ditch swallowed me. I remembered the way this had gone the first time I tried it. I’d gone under and not come back up. That first loop had ended with my arms flailing and my mouth full of river and panic. Not this time.

  I kicked hard and got my toes under the bank. Mud tore under my feet. The chain between my ankles yanked me sideways and tried to fold me in half. I gritted my teeth, pushed off, and forced my body upward. My head broke the surface. Air hit my teeth like knives.

  I fought the pull of the water until my fingers closed on reeds, brittle with frost. I used them like a rope and hauled my chest out of the ditch.

  Behind me, someone yelped as they dropped through the gap. Eleven landed almost on top of me. He went under in a mess of splashing and curses that broke apart in the cold. His next sound wasn’t a word at all, more a strangled wheeze as the water closed around his chest.

  “Move,” I hissed. “Downstream. Stay in the reeds.”

  The fort loomed above us, a dark crown of logs against a darker sky. I could feel it at my back like a hand reaching. Watching that me now, I know it took work not to look up and check if the fingers had started to close.

  I pushed forward. Tall reeds rattled around us. Their dead heads brushed my face and shed icy seeds down my neck. The ditch water lapped at my ribs, then my waist, then my thighs as the bank shifted under us. Death’s Awareness spread out ahead of me, a thin, invisible fan. It caught the way the water moved, the places where it dragged harder, the spots where it whispered instead of pulled. Each change mapped itself in my mind as a curve or a snag. I stayed away from the middle.

  Eleven splashed along at my back, teeth chattering loud enough that I wanted to hit him. Forty-eight came last, the strip of blanket still jammed between his teeth. He made small, thin noises in his throat every time the water rose higher than his ribs. His cough leaked around the cloth in a thin cloud over the reeds, caught the cold, and came back worse.

  I didn’t look at them much. The ditch bent. I looked there.

  “Lower,” I said. “Keep your heads down.”

  They ducked. Reeds scratched my cheeks. My shirt stiffened as the water on it tried to freeze.

  We went on like that for a while. The fort grew smaller behind us. The noise of its yard faded into a dull memory at the edge of the night. Watching that me now, I can see how stubbornly I pretended distance meant safety.

  The ditch widened. The muddy shelf under my feet dropped away. For a moment I had nothing under me at all. The current grabbed my legs and almost took them out from under me.

  I hissed through my teeth and flattened myself, one hand on the bank, fingers digging into the roots that held it together.

  “Stop,” I said. “Here. Feel the bottom.”

  Eleven’s foot hit the drop and he swore under his breath. Forty-eight made a soft sound that could’ve been fear or pain or both.

  “We can’t stay in the deep part,” I told them. “You’ll go under. Move closer to the bank. One at a time. Hold the reeds. Walk, don’t jump.”

  “That sounds like the part where we die,” Eleven muttered.

  “Then let’s not,” I said. “New plan.”

  I edged along the shelf, keeping my toes hooked into what little mud the current left me. The others followed. The ditch pinched in again and gave us something like ground.

  After a while, my legs stopped telling the difference between freezing and burning. Each step sent a dull ache up to my hips. My teeth wanted to chatter as badly as Eleven’s, but I clenched my jaw until it hurt.

  The reeds thinned. I eased toward the bank and lifted my head just enough to look. We’d come farther than I’d managed that first run. The fort was a darker smudge now, hunched over its own wall. The yard side faced away from us. No lamps on this stretch. No barking. No horn. For a moment, hope tried to rise. Then I saw our tracks.

  Where we’d first tumbled out of the gap, three sets of prints ran from the wall to the water’s edge. Bare feet. Chains. Mud sprayed from the worst steps. Downstream from there, the reeds were bent and broken where we’d forced our way through. Even in the dark, the line our bodies had carved into the frost glimmered. Anyone with eyes could follow that path. I stopped.

  “Problem?” Eleven asked. His teeth knocked together around the word.

  We were still in the water, close to the bank now, half-hidden by reeds. I pointed with my chin toward the place where the prints met the ditch and the reeds lay flat.

  “Look at the bank,” I said quietly. “Where we came out. Where we pushed through.”

  Eleven turned his head and squinted back along the ditch.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Forty-eight’s breath hitched.

  “If the wardens come out,” I said, keeping my voice low, “they’ll see that. Even in the dark. In the morning it’ll shout at them.”

  “Then we need to keep going,” Eleven said. “Get far enough away that they give up.”

  “They won’t give up,” I said. “They’ll follow the tracks until they end. Right now they end at our heads. If we keep walking like this, we just drag that line farther along the ditch for them.”

  Silence for a moment. Only the water made any kind of sense.

  “What do we do?” Forty-eight whispered.

  “What we should’ve done from the start,” I said. “We walk where we leave nothing they can step into.”

  I turned and pushed back upstream, staying low so the reeds hid my head. Eleven hissed something that might’ve been a curse or a prayer and turned with me. Forty-eight followed because he had nowhere else to go.

  We went back until we were almost under the fort again. The wall loomed heavier there, too close. My shoulders tensed in spite of me. I forced my legs to keep moving.

  “Here,” I said. “This is where the gap is. This is where our tracks start.”

  “We already went this way,” Eleven said.

  “Yes,” I said. “On the ground. Now we go under it. Downstream. No feet on the bank. No broken reeds where they can see from the top. The river does the work for us. When the wardens look down, I want the tracks to stop at the water. I want the question to be ‘Where did they go?’ instead of ‘Follow that line.’”

  Forty-eight stared at me through the dark.

  “We’ll freeze,” he croaked.

  “We will if we stay here as well,” I said. “This way at least they don’t know which stretch of the ditch to search.”

  The water and the reeds did the work, chewing our words into nothing before they ever reached the wall.

  I didn’t tell him about the ways I’d tried the yard instead. Those had ended with arrows and boys’ bodies catching in the dark.

  “We go together,” I said. “Hands on the bank. Heads up. If your feet lose the bottom, you kick until they find it again. If one of you goes under, the others grab and pull. If you can’t do that, you can stay here and wait for the morning.”

  I heard him swallow.

  “I’ll go,” Forty-eight whispered.

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  “Good,” I said. “Then hold on.”

  We let go of the reeds we’d already broken and eased deeper. We’d already chewed up that trail once; pushing through from the water again would look like the same mess from above. We hadn’t erased ourselves. We’d only snapped the trail in half and thrown the broken end into the water. Sometimes that was enough. Sometimes.

  The cold hit new places. The water rose above my waist, then my ribs, then my chest. I forced myself to let my breath out in a steady stream instead of the sharp little bursts the cold wanted.

  “Hands on the bank,” I said. “Now.”

  We stretched out, three thin bodies half-floating, half-scrabbling along the slick mud.

  The current tried to pull my legs away again. I hooked my toes in where I could and let it drag only as much as I allowed. Death’s Awareness hummed quietly at the edges of my thoughts, tracing the way the water shoved against my shins, the way it curled around the reeds, the hunger in the deeper channel.

  “Left,” I muttered. “Stay left. Feel for the roots.”

  They obeyed. Eleven cursed under his breath every time a submerged branch scraped his legs. Forty-eight coughed more than he swore. Each cough sounded thinner. Downstream, the ditch would curl twice and pour into the big river. Once we reached that, even a fresh trail would turn into a dozen maybes.

  Time stretched. The night pressed down. The fort slipped backward into the dark. Seeing those tracks when we did felt like the only smart thing we’d managed; if a warden came looking, he’d follow that bright line down to the ditch and stand where we had dropped. After that he’d have to guess: left or right, this bank or the far one, a few dozen steps or all the way to the river. One line had turned into miles of maybe.

  Finally the bank rose a little higher and the ditch shallowed again.

  “Here,” I said. “Stop. Up.”

  We clawed our way onto the mud, dragging the ankle chains over the bank. My arms shook. My knees didn’t want to lock. For a moment the world tilted and tried to tip me back in. I caught myself on my hands and stayed there.

  The reeds here were taller, thicker. Trees leaned over the ditch. Their bare branches made a tangle even the lamplight from the fort barely reached. The frost under them was patchy, broken by old deer tracks and the drag marks of fallen branches.

  Our new footprints wouldn’t stand out as cleanly. From the wall, this stretch would look like nothing but broken ground and old tracks.

  “Out of the water,” I said. “Into the trees. Don’t trip on the chain. If you fall and break your leg now, I’ll leave you.”

  I meant it when I said it. Watching that me now, I can hear how much I wanted it to be a threat instead of a promise.

  We staggered up the bank and into the thin shelter of the trees. My clothes clung to me. Every movement peeled cold cloth off my skin and let new air in. I couldn’t feel my fingers properly anymore. My toes were just pain. The trees thickened a little farther from the ditch. Low branches grabbed at our shirts. The ground under the leaf litter felt less like frozen stone, more like something that could be dug into. I stopped when the trees hid the ditch from sight.

  “Here,” I said.

  Eleven made a hoarse sound that might’ve been a laugh.

  “Are we camping?” he asked. “Shall I lay out a rug, master?”

  “If you want to die standing, you can keep moving,” I said. “If you want a better chance, you sit and stay low and try not to sound like a dying pig.”

  Forty-eight dropped hard enough that the impact shook a little dust from a branch overhead. He pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. His cough rattled in his ribs.

  “We need a fire,” he whispered. “I can’t feel my hands.”

  “If we make a fire, they’ll see the smoke,” Eleven snapped. “The wardens will follow it like a rope. They’re not as stupid as you sound.”

  “If we don’t make a fire, he dies,” I said. “Probably both of you. Maybe me as well.”

  I scrubbed my numb hands over my face.

  “On the steppes,” I said slowly, “my clan didn’t like being seen either. When we didn’t want other riders to find us, we built the fire low and ringed it with stones. The smoke still rose, but it spread sideways before the wind could take it. From far away, you saw nothing.”

  “Do we look like we have stones?” Eleven asked. He waved at the leaf-littered ground. His hand shook from cold. “Everything here is stick and rot.”

  “Then we use what we have,” I said. “First we stay alive long enough to worry about who might be watching.”

  I started gathering. Not anything big. Not branches as thick as my arm. Those smoked too much and took too long to catch. I picked dry twigs from the lower branches where the snow hadn’t sat, old grass from under the leaves, bits of bark that flaked under my nails.

  Eleven watched me for a moment and then moved too. His hands picked cleaner than mine. He rejected anything that bent instead of snapping or that felt damp inside when he broke it.

  Forty-eight tried to help and managed to drag over an armful of half-rotten wood that fell apart in his grip.

  “Leave that,” Eleven said. “It’ll just choke the flame.”

  His mouth twisted.

  “The shaman in my village wanted me as an apprentice once,” he muttered. “My father said I belonged in the forge, not in painted robes. The old man taught me a few tricks anyway when he thought no one was watching.”

  He knelt by the small pile we’d gathered and pushed the finer stuff into a tighter nest.

  “Find me a straight stick,” he said. “Dry. About as thick as your smallest finger. And a flat piece of wood I can drill into.”

  I exchanged a quick look with Forty-eight, then went to work. We found a fallen branch that had died while standing and kept its heart drier than anything on the ground. I snapped a length from it as cleanly as I could, then shaved it down with Rauk’s knife until it was smooth and even. Eleven found a flatter, softer piece of wood full of old bug tunnels, more punk than solid.

  He set the flat board in front of him and carved a small notch near one edge, then set the spindle upright in the notch, cupping it between his palms.

  “What are you doing?” Forty-eight whispered.

  “Trying not to freeze to death,” Eleven said. “Shut up and wish for smoke.”

  He began to roll the spindle back and forth between his hands, pressing down. At first the motion was smooth and even. Cold hadn’t got all the way into his wrists yet. Dust gathered at the base of the notch, pale at first, then darker as the wood warmed. His breath grew harsher. The board squeaked. His hands slipped once, then caught again. The spindle wobbled. He clenched his jaw and sped up, driving it harder.

  Smoke came. Not much at first. A thin thread escaped into the air and was torn away by the wind. Eleven cursed softly and drove the spindle faster, shoulders shaking. The dust at the base of the notch darkened. It piled against the side of the groove, sheltering itself from the cold air.

  “Now,” he gasped. “Careful.”

  He pulled the spindle away and bent down, hands cupped around the tiny pile of warm dust. I leaned in with him. A faint red glow pulsed at the heart of it.

  Eleven breathed on it, very gently. The first breath did nothing. The second made the smoke thicken. On the third, the ember brightened and bit into the dry grass we’d pushed against the notch. A small yellow tongue of flame licked up.

  Forty-eight laughed. The sound came out half a sob. Eleven sat back hard, hands in his lap, palms raw, red.

  “There,” he said.

  For the first time since I’d met him, he sounded proud of himself.

  “Good,” I said simply.

  I fed the small fire carefully, adding twigs no thicker than my fingers. The flames grew from a trembling tongue to a fist-sized blossom of heat. We kept it low, tucked into a little hollow between two roots.

  Forty-eight held his hands out. He pushed them in so close I thought he’d blister. Color began to creep back into his fingers. His cough eased a little, less like tearing cloth. Heat stabbed back into his fingers in sharp little needles. He squeezed his eyes shut and rode it out, shoulders shaking, but the blue at his lips faded a shade.

  “If we leave it like this,” he said after a moment, “they’ll see the smoke from half the steppe when the sun’s up.”

  I frowned.

  “You said your people had a trick,” he went on, glancing sideways at me. “When they didn’t want other riders to see them. Stones and smoke. What rises breaks apart before anyone far away can see.”

  “We don’t have stones,” Eleven muttered. He looked at the damp ground, at the leaves and rotten twigs.

  I pushed myself up.

  “Then we make something that acts like them,” I said. “Wait here.”

  I moved through the dark under the trees, hunting by touch and shape. I found chunks of half-rotted wood that still had hard skin on one side, pieces of old root, nodules of dirt baked hard by some forgotten summer and then left under the trees where the frost hadn’t yet chewed them to crumbs. One by one, I brought them back.

  We ringed the small fire with them, building a low lip. Not tall. I didn’t want to choke it. Just enough that the smoke had to slide sideways along the underside of the makeshift roof before it found gaps.

  The flames changed the way they moved. They licked along the inner faces of the crude ring instead of jumping straight up. The smoke crawled out in thin sheets instead of a single thick column. When the wind took it, it tore it into strips almost at once. From a distance, in daylight, someone watching the horizon might see a hint of haze over the trees. They wouldn’t see the clean line that screamed fire.

  “That’ll have to do,” I said.

  We stripped only as much as we dared. I dragged my shirt over my head, the cloth heavy and cold, and wrung it out until my fingers hurt. Eleven followed, teeth bared, breath hissing between them.

  Forty-eight took longer. He kept his eyes on the fire, fingers bunching in the hem of his shirt without pulling. When he finally lifted it, he turned a little, angling his back toward us, gaze locked on the flame.

  The cloth stuck between his shoulder blades. I stepped in, caught the edge and tugged it free, keeping my attention on the knots of bone under his skin. We spread the shirts over a forked branch just inside the ring of stones, close enough to steam, not close enough to catch. Our trousers stayed on. Better wet cloth than bare skin if the fire died or we had to run.

  We settled in around the heat. I kept my eyes on the flame and my ears on the world beyond it. The river talked to itself in low phrases. The trees creaked when the wind pushed at them. Once or twice something small moved in the leaf litter and then went still when it caught our scent. Far off, a wolf howled, more statement than threat. I listened for heavier boots. For chains. For the rattle of wagon wheels or the jangle of bridles. Nothing came. The fire burned down to coals. We fed it just enough to keep it alive.

  At some point, Forty-eight’s head tipped forward and stayed there. His breathing turned slow and even, with only the occasional soft cough. Eleven nodded off in little jerks, his chin dropping and then snapping up again.

  I didn’t mean to sleep. I watched the embers. I listened to the water. My mind ran the paths in the fort again and again, as if waiting for the bell to ring and wipe all of this away.

  The night thinned. The sky lightened from milk to thin silver. The first pale hints of day seeped between the branches, painting the frost and the edges of the ditch. My shoulders sagged, just a fraction.

  Step by step, death after death, I’d escaped the fort at last.

  And this time, the day didn’t begin again.

  [Critical Error: First Passage log desynchronized.]

  [Requested action: purge corrupted record.]

  [Overriding request...]

  [Override origin: unknown.]

  [Log access maintained.]

  [Warning: Consequences cannot be calculated.]

  Everything went black. It felt like someone had closed a book around me and left me between the pages.

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