Into the Wrong Story

Chapter 6: Rain Check

“I gave him the good room,” Wren said. “The one with the actual bed. And he’s still—”

She stopped and looked at it.

−123,070. It had not moved since the tea.

“Right. At minus one hundred twenty-three thousand, everything I do is a plot.”

“Maybe he thinks you’re up to something,” Six said from the windowsill.

“I want him to eat breakfast like a person.”

“Nobody hands out a bed for nothing.”

“It’s a bed with a lamp next to it.”

Six made the small noise it made when it thought it had won.

Wren pressed two fingers into the spot above her eyebrow that had been ticking since she woke up.

“He’s in there right now,” she said, “walking himself through the ways he could kill me.”

“You’re underselling him.”

“A couple of times a day, then.”

“Four digits,” Six said. “Minimum.”

She dropped down cross-legged on the bed and pulled the covers over her knees, and the thing that had been sitting at the back of her head all morning finally got her by the collar.

“The whip,” she said.

“What about it.”

“Half a month until that thing comes looking through the walls, and I can’t use it.”

Six didn’t answer, which was the same as an answer.

Days ago she’d taken the whip down to the practice yard, because she was going to be a person who knew how to use it, and she’d stood in the gravel and let the arm do what it wanted.

And the arm had known.

That was the part she couldn’t get past. The shoulder had turned before she decided anything. The wrist had snapped the tip out and drawn it back with a c***k she felt all the way up through the handle, and it had come within a hand’s width of a post she hadn’t been aiming at.

Then she’d stood there holding the thing, breathing hard, with no idea what she had just done or how to do it again on purpose.

“It’s the last girl’s hand,” Six said. “Not yours. It’ll do what hers did.”

“That’s worse. I don’t know what hers did. That’s the whole problem.” She counted it off on her fingers. “Half a month, the thing gets in, and if I swing too hard I kill it and the book’s over, or I miss and it kills me. Both of those are bad.”

“You’re not going to die,” Six said, bored. “The last girl bought out the merchant district before you got here. Every ward she owned is top-tier. An Ascendant could come through that door and be busy with you until lunch.”

“So what do I do?”

“Lie there and wait for the heroine.”

Wren let herself sit inside that sentence for a while.

She’d read this book. All of it, in three nights, sitting up against a dorm wall with the hall light coming in under the door — the kind of book you read on your phone until the battery dies.

In the book, something gets into Greymoor meaning to make a real score. The lord isn’t an i***t, so he sends his people after it before it can do any damage, and they corner it, and it still doesn’t go down soft. It gets out of the city badly hurt, with a grudge and a plan, and on the way out it takes the lord’s sister.

The lord’s sister was three pages of work. She gets taken, she’s frightened, a handful of Unbound disciples happen to be on that road, they get her back inside a chapter, and one of those disciples is Eira Snow, and the book goes from there.

Wren was the three pages.

“So I lie down,” she said, “and I wait.”

“So you lie down and you wait,” Six agreed.

“Money’s nice.”

Six put a claw on its stomach and gave the sentiment the respect it was due. “Money’s nice.”

* * *

The next morning she was up before the kitchen and had them send breakfast up for two, which took an argument and a bribe and would take both again tomorrow, because a person cannot live like this.

She got three steps down the hall and one into the room.

AFFINITY — RHYS DARROW: −123,080

CHANGE: −10

Then again before her foot came down.

AFFINITY — RHYS DARROW: −123,090

CHANGE: −10

Then again.

AFFINITY — RHYS DARROW: −123,100

CHANGE: −10

Three of them stacked in the corner of her eye, one on top of the other, the way a phone goes off in a pocket and keeps going off in a pocket.

Rhys was across the room with his back to the window. He didn’t move. He didn’t look over. He had nothing in his hands and nowhere to be, and the panel had fired three times.

She looked at the distance between them, which was four steps, and took one of them.

AFFINITY — RHYS DARROW: −123,200

CHANGE: −100

(No action is required from you at this time.)

Her hands were still full of the tray. She stood in the doorway holding breakfast for two people who were not going to eat it.

“You moved,” Six said, from her shoulder.

“I took a step.”

“Yeah.”

She quit that afternoon, and she was thorough about it. Six meals a day, three bowls at each one. Stretches in the garden in the morning until her back stopped making noise. A wall of politeness down the middle of the wing that neither of them would be the first to speak across.

The half month went.

* * *

Then it was the fifteenth night, and there was no moon, and she’d been lying awake since the lamps went out.

Four hours flat on her back with the gauze down on all four sides of the bed, listening to the house breathe, waiting to be carried off by a monster she’d read about on a phone. Great.

The gauze moved.

Something was at the side of the bed. It had come in through the window and crossed the floor and she had not heard one plank of the way.

“Pretty thing,” it said, out past the netting. “Come quietly and I’ll keep you.”

Wren had both hands out before it finished.

“What are we waiting for?”

She’d thought about this. Two weeks of thinking about it, because a person wanted to get the first act right, and she’d landed on being helpful.

The shape didn’t answer. It turned and went out through the window, fast, the way a man goes who has just remembered an appointment.

“Hey,” she said, to the empty room. “You forgot something.”

From one room over, the same voice, the same words, pleasant as anything:

“Pretty thing. Come quietly and I’ll keep you.”

That direction was—

“Rhys!”

She hit his door at a run and it banged back against the wall. The room was full of black fog. It hung in ropes up near the ceiling, and inside it two shapes were moving, one man-sized and one not, and she couldn’t tell them apart except by which one was losing.

“Quit squirming,” the thing said, cheerful about it, “and I’ll keep you.”

“Wrong one!” Wren shouted. “You’ve got the wrong one! I’m the lord’s sister!”

It stopped.

It looked at Rhys, or at what the fog was letting it see of him. Then it turned and looked at her, standing in the doorway with her hands out, and it took its time about the decision. It took long enough that she was sure she’d gotten through.

“Rain check,” it said.

And it went out through the window with Rhys under one arm, both of them gone before she was halfway across the room.

She ran anyway. She got a foot on the frame of the bed and jumped, and her hand closed on a corner of his coat.

For half a second she had him. She had the coat and her weight going the other way and she was already working out how she would land.

The floor went sideways.

* * *

“—why would you hand me this?”

“Wren.”

She was in a chair. That was the first fact: a chair, a room, her hands empty in her lap, and a cold in the room that had put goosebumps down both her arms.

Outside the glass the leaves were oiled green with sun, so bright that the light coming off them made the room feel like the inside of a lamp. The air conditioning ran without a sound. It was June, and the air conditioning was winning.

She was back.

Oh, God. She was back.

“I read the whole thing,” her advisor said, “and all I got out of it was that there’s nothing in your head. Not one line of it shows any sign that you have ever been trained to do this.”

He put the paper down on the desk. He did it flat, with his whole arm, so that it made one sound.

“You’re not graduating,” he said.

The world came down.

She woke with her pulse going hard in her throat and her undershirt stuck to her back.

“Dream,” she said, out loud, to nobody. “Just a dream. That’s not even a scary one. That’s just true.”

Drip.

Water was coming down out of a c***k overhead, one drop at a time, into the same spot on the stone until the spot had worn itself a shallow bowl, and she was lying in the bowl. Her skirt was soaked through on one side and cold against her leg.

That explained the cold, at least.

She got her palm wet and put it on her face, and then stood up and wrung out as much of the skirt as she could.

It was a cave. A big one, with a ceiling that went up past the lamplight and walls that had gone green with moss, and a smell of wet rock that got into the back of her throat.

“Rhys?”

The name came back at her off three walls.

Nothing else did.

“Six.”

The bird came out of the air at her shoulder. “What?”

“Where’s Rhys?”

“Next cave.”

“Is he dead?”

“No. He’s got one breath left in him.”

She started along the wall with one hand on it, because the floor was slick and the light was bad and she wanted something to hold on to, and she went fast anyway.

“I should’ve put wards on him,” she said. “Two. Three. He dies down here and I’m finished.”

“You’re worried about him.”

“I’m worried about me. There’s a difference.”

Six said nothing.

“And why did it take him?” She got over a lip of rock and kept going. “It was supposed to take me. That’s the entire first act. It takes me, the Unbound get me back, and I’m fine.”

Six scratched under its wing.

“Maybe,” it said.

“Maybe what.”

“It’s a face snob.”

There had been no reason to ask.

The passage opened up.

This one was bigger. Somebody had put work into it — the walls were set with stones that gave off light, enough of it to read by, and along the far wall stood a bed with a frame cut from stone and hides piled on it, more hides than one person needed.

Rhys was on the bed.

He was on his back with his coat still on and his hands at his sides, and his face was the color of the walls, and his eyes were closed.

“Rhys.” She crossed the room and stopped at the edge of the mattress. “Rhys. Hey.”

Nothing.

She turned around. “Look at him. What’s wrong with him?”

Six landed on the bed frame and walked a few steps along it, and for once it didn’t say anything clever.

“He came through with nothing on him,” it said. “Not one ward. It got him on the way out, and whatever it used is in his blood now, and it’s working.”

“Bad?”

“Bad.”

Wren pushed her sleeve up and worked the first ward off her wrist. There were more. One at her throat on a cord. Two in the satchel. One sewn into the inside of her belt that she had to get out with her thumbnail, crouched over him, swearing quietly.

She put all of it in a pile on his chest.

“Does it still work if I’m late?” she said.

Six looked at the pile, and then at her, and took long enough about it that the water dripping somewhere behind them got loud.

“There’s one way to get ahead of it,” it said.

“What way?”

A feather came off its back and came apart on the way down, and the light went in between her eyes.

Her knees went.

She came down on the wet stone beside the bed, and the dark came in from the edges, and somewhere above her the water went on dripping into the hollow it had made.