Rules of Survival
871 Words
The well was colder than the water had any right to be.
Kali learned this on her third trip down, when the rope slipped half an inch through her palms and the bucket dropped the last foot into the dark with a sound like a struck bell. She hauled it back up anyway, arms burning in a way they hadn’t since the one disastrous month she’d tried rock climbing at twenty-three and quit after deciding gravity had personal opinions about her.
“You’re doing that wrong,” Devi observed.
“I’m doing it functionally,” she said, not looking up. “There’s a difference.”
“Bend your knees. You’re going to throw out your back hauling like that, and then you’ll be useless to both of us.”
“Noted,” she said, and didn’t bend her knees, mostly out of principle.
The innkeeper — a broad, unsmiling woman named Maren, Kali had learned, somewhere between trip one and trip two — didn’t look up from the bread she was kneading when Kali set the sixth bucket beside the kitchen door. She only grunted, which Kali had begun to interpret as a kind of grudging approval.
Six buckets. Her shoulders had opinions about that number, all of them bad.
“How many more,” she said quietly, straightening.
“Two. Then breakfast.”
“You’re very precise about a number you didn’t announce until I’d already done six.”
“I find information lands better in installments.”
A pause.
“You’d have stopped at four if I’d told you it was eight.”
She didn’t answer because it was true.
She went back to the well.
✦
By the time she carried the eighth bucket through the kitchen door, the sun had committed fully to the sky and the square outside had filled with the low roar of a market waking up.
Maren set a bowl in front of her without comment.
Some kind of porridge, grey and unglamorous, with a heel of bread on the side.
Kali ate like she hadn’t eaten in a day and a half, because she hadn’t.
She slipped into the square afterward.
✦
The market had a logic to it that took her exactly four minutes to map.
Vegetables and grain toward the fountain. Meat and fish along the shaded north wall. Cloth and dye toward the eastern edge.
She kept her sleeves pulled down.
The green awning came into view.
Behind the dye-stained table sat a woman somewhere past sixty.
“That’s her.”
“I remember,” Kali murmured.
She approached.
“Morning,” the woman said. “Looking for color, or looking for something else?”
“I was told,” Kali said carefully, “you might have ink. Something suitable for marks that need to last.”
The woman’s hands stilled.
“Permanent marks,” she repeated.
“I don’t have coin,” Kali said. “But I can read.”
Something shifted behind the woman’s eyes.
“Can you.”
“Fluently.”
The woman produced a battered ledger.
“This has sat unread for nine years. Read me the third page.”
Kali opened it.
The script should have been unreadable.
It wasn’t.
She read.
Debts.
Dye recipes.
And a final line.
Forgive me, I couldn’t stay.
She read it aloud.
The woman took the ledger back gently.
“Sit.”
✦
It took nearly an hour.
“Hold still,” the woman said.
The forged seal bloomed under her wrist.
“It won’t survive close inspection,” the woman warned. “Days, not years.”
“Days is more than I had.”
The woman almost smiled.
“Mind the cloth doesn’t come off.”
She paused.
“Trust carefully whoever sent you here.”
Kali thought of Devi.
“I’m aware.”
✦
She made it three streets back before Devi spoke again.
The laziness in his voice was gone.
Entirely.
“Stop walking.”
“Why—”
“Now.”
Flat.
Immediate.
Nothing playful.
Kali stopped.
“I don’t see anything.”
“You’re not supposed to. Not yet.”
A pause.
“Something is tracking you. It has been since the market.”
“What does that mean?”
“Kali.”
She froze.
Her name.
Not Reader.
Not once before had he used it like that.
“Walk. Don’t run. Toward the inn, the long way. Do not look behind you.”
Each word landed clipped and exact.
“Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
She walked.
Pulse rising.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
That was somehow worse.
“That has never happened to me before.”
Behind her, something shifted.
A crate of onions moved two inches without being touched.
Kali did not look back.
“Devi,” she said evenly, though her hands shook, “tell me you have a plan.”
The pause was brutal.
“I have several theories and no good options.”
A beat.
“Walk faster, Kali. Not running. Faster.”
She obeyed.
Behind her, the street had gone very quiet.
The listening kind of quiet.
The kind that meant something had decided to pay attention.
- Writer
