THE SEVENTH FRACTURE

Chapter 2 — The Distance Between Feet

She kept exactly one foot behind him.

Not beside. Not two feet. One. He noticed it after the third mile — the specific, consistent gap she maintained, close enough to follow, far enough to run. He'd seen dogs do the same thing outside butcher shops. Present but uncommitted. Waiting to see which way it went.

He didn't comment on it.

The road north was unpaved past the village boundary, which meant ash-mud in the wet season and ash-dust in the dry and something in between in whatever this was. His boots were already ruined. He'd stopped caring about boots around year three of the job.

Mira was wearing one shoe.

He noticed that too. Right foot, old leather, laced wrong. Left foot bare, and the bare foot was the one with the arm — same side, the transformation working its way down from somewhere internal, the bark-texture ending just above her ankle. She walked on it without favoring it, which either meant she couldn't feel it or she'd had a long time to get used to the feeling.

He didn't ask.

The Warden station at Millford would have supplies. Boots, probably, in a box somewhere that Hesh called the charity bin and everyone else called the dead men's box, which was accurate and which Kaelen had stopped finding dark humor in sometime around year five.

Two miles. Maybe less.

Behind them, nothing followed.

She spoke first, which surprised him.

"Where are we going?"

"Millford. There's a station."

A pause. "And then?"

"And then I report in. Get you looked at." He kept walking. "Figure out the next part."

"The next part," she repeated, like she was testing the words for weight. "What does that mean."

"It means I don't know yet."

Another pause, longer this time. He heard her shift her pack — she'd had a small one in the basement, canvas, the kind children carried to school. He hadn't asked what was in it. Whatever it was, it was hers.

"Are they going to put me somewhere?" she asked.

"Probably."

"Like a —" She stopped.

"Not a prison," he said. "There are places. For people managing transformations." He paused. "They're not terrible."

"That's not very convincing."

"I know."

She was quiet after that. He could hear her breathing — slightly fast, slightly shallow, the way people breathed when they were keeping themselves very controlled — and the soft uneven sound of one shoe and one bare foot on ash-dust road.

He slowed down slightly.

Just slightly. Enough that the gap between them changed without making it a thing.

She didn't comment on it either.

The Millford station was a converted farmhouse, three rooms, a ward-circle burned into the floorboards so old that half of it had worn away and someone had painted the rest back in with what looked like house paint. Functional enough. The station-keeper was a man named Drav who had been stationed here for eleven years and had achieved the particular spiritual state of someone who had completely stopped expecting anything to be different than it was.

He opened the door before Kaelen knocked.

"Heard you were in the area," Drav said. He looked at Mira. Then at her arm. Then back at Kaelen with an expression that wasn't quite anything.

"She needs a room," Kaelen said. "And boots. And food."

"I've got two of those." Drav stepped back from the door. "Boots are a maybe."

The inside of the station smelled like old wood and the particular smoky-sweet smell of the grief-incense Wardens burned to keep the ambient Elegy from building up in enclosed spaces. Mira stopped just inside the doorway, taking it in — the low ceiling, the papers stacked on the table, the sword rack on the wall with two swords that weren't Kaelen's, the small window with its ward-stone on the sill.

She was cataloguing it. He recognized the behavior. Exit points. Threats. Objects that could be used for what.

He'd done the same thing at twelve, in different rooms, for different reasons.

"The room's through there," Drav said, nodding toward a door. "Nothing fancy."

Mira didn't move.

Kaelen set his pack down on the table. Opened it. Found the ration bar he'd been saving — good ones, the kind from the Spire commissary that actually tasted like something — and held it out without looking at her.

A pause.

She took it.

He heard her go through the door.

Drav poured two cups of something hot and set one in front of Kaelen without asking. He sat down across the table and looked at his own cup for a while.

"How old?" he asked.

"Twelve. Maybe younger."

"Transformation?"

"Early stage. Slow progression." Kaelen picked up the cup. "She's been managing it."

Drav looked at him over the rim of his cup. "On her own?"

"Seems like."

A silence that wasn't quite comfortable and wasn't quite uncomfortable. Drav had been doing this long enough that he'd lost the instinct to fill silences with noise, which was one of the things Kaelen tolerated about him.

"The village locked her in," Kaelen said.

"How long?"

"I don't know. Long enough."

Drav set his cup down. "Parents?"

"Gone. I don't know the details yet."

"Yet," Drav said, and it wasn't quite a question.

Kaelen didn't answer it.

Through the wall came a small sound — the creak of a bed, then nothing. Then the sound of someone eating quickly, the way people ate when they'd learned that food could be taken away.

Drav looked at the wall. Looked back at Kaelen.

"The assignment says fortnight," Kaelen said. "I've got three more incidents in the region."

"I know what your assignment says."

"She can stay here while I —"

"Kaelen."

He stopped.

Drav turned his cup in his hands. "She's been in a basement for — how long. She doesn't know you. She doesn't know me. You're going to leave her in a strange room in a station she's never seen and go work your three incidents."

"The Warden protocols say —"

"I know what the protocols say." Drav wasn't unkind about it. Just tired, the way people got tired when they'd had the same argument with someone many times and the other person kept not understanding that the argument wasn't really about protocols. "I'm just telling you what it'll look like. From her side."

Kaelen looked at the wall.

Through it: silence now. The particular silence of someone lying very still, trying not to be heard.

He picked up his cup. Drank. Set it down.

"I'll do the nearest incident first," he said. "I'll be back by morning."

Drav looked at him for a moment. "That's not what I —"

"I know," Kaelen said. "It's what I've got."

He knocked on her door before he left. Three soft knocks, which felt ridiculous, knocking on a door in a building he effectively controlled, and he stood there feeling ridiculous for a moment before the door opened.

She'd found a blanket from somewhere and had it around her shoulders. The ration bar wrapper was folded neatly on the windowsill.

She looked at him. Waited.

"I have to check something north of here," he said. "I'll be back before morning."

She said nothing.

"Drav is —" He paused. "He's fine. He won't bother you."

Still nothing.

"There's a lock on this door," he said. "Inside. Use it if you want."

She looked at him for a long moment. The wrong eye caught the lamplight strangely, the bark-texture around it making the light scatter in directions it shouldn't.

"You're leaving," she said.

"For a few hours."

"That's what —" She stopped. Started again differently. "Okay."

Just okay. Not fine or I understand or any of the things that would have meant she'd already decided he was the same as everyone else. Just okay, which was a door left slightly open, which was — he thought — more than he'd earned in a single evening.

"Don't —" He caught himself. Started over. "Keep the lock on."

"I know how locks work."

He almost said something. Didn't.

He left.

The incident north of Millford was a Weeper in an abandoned grain store — newly fractured, still half-aware, which made it worse in the specific way that half-aware ones were always worse. He dealt with it. Said what he always said after. Stood in the ash-dark for a while feeling the weight settle into his chest.

Stage 4. This is what it's for.

On the way back, passing the field where the woman with the ring had been, he stopped.

The body was gone — Drav must have sent someone, or the field had done what the Silent Fields sometimes did with the dead. He wasn't sure which and he didn't investigate. He stood at the edge of the wheat and looked at the place where she'd been and thought about a farmer turning a hat in his hands. Thought about a son in Korma who was going to get a Warden's report in a few weeks and learn something and not be ready for it.

No one was ever ready for it.

She used to sing.

He walked back.

The station was dark except for one window — hers.

He stood outside for a moment, looking at the thin line of lamplight under the door. Inside: no movement, no sound. Just the light, still on, which meant she was still awake, which meant she had been awake this whole time, which he had known and not let himself think about too carefully.

He went inside. To his own room. Lay down on a cot that was three inches too short and stared at the ceiling.

The lamp in her room stayed on.

He could see the light in the gap under the wall — the stations were built cheap, the walls didn't fully reach the floors. A thin line. Consistent. Not flickering.

He lay there and looked at it.

After a while it went out.

He didn't know why that made it easier to sleep.

He didn't examine it.

He slept.