The Grandmaster's Gambit

3. Someone Else's Hands

[Day-1 (15:41)]

(Weaver's Lane, Sector 9, Alexandria)

The first thing back was weight.

All of it at once: a ribcage that took air like a bellows, a spine laid along wet stone, hands that had closed on an object before he knew he had hands. Warm water, tasting of rust, was soaking through the cloth across his shoulders.

Overhead a split pipe vented steam into the alley with a long, leaking hiss. And a long way off, under everything, something was screaming without a break for breath. A sound with no words in it, and beneath that came a deep irregular crumping, like furniture being thrown down a stairwell by someone who owned a great deal of furniture.

Kai laid still and took inventory, because an inventory was something he could do.

Eyes: open. Sky: a strip of it between two buildings, white-grey, flat as an afternoon. Lungs: working, and nothing wrong with them. The ringing behind his left ear was gone. In the dark that had been a fact about not having a head. Now he had one, and it was quiet, and he laid inside the quiet for a few seconds before a brick came off the wall above him.

The body rolled left before he had finished seeing it fall.

He felt the roll as something done to him, like being sneezed through a door. The brick hit where his head had been and broke in two.

He sat up. The movement was easy in a way that offended him. His hands, braced on the stones, were not his hands: broader across the knuckle. Calloused along the base of every finger, a white scar across the ball of the right thumb. The right hand was holding a knife. A scavenger's hook-knife, the kind for cutting salvage straps, its grip wrapped in leather gone black from handling. The hooked edge was wet with something that was not water. It was black, and it smelled like singed hair.

He had not decided to pick it up. He did not put it down.

Five feet away, a man had been propped against the wall and had stayed there. He wore a tanner's apron, stiff with old dye. The apron said one thing and the rest of him disagreed: the arms ran on too long, the right hand had two sets of knuckles, as though it had begun to grow a second hand and thought better of it, and the face was wet. Black had run out of the throat in a wide fan and dried at the edges, and the wound there was hook-shaped.

Kai looked at the blade in his hand. He declined to follow that thought any further.

His shirt had been grey once. From collar to belt it was ripped in three long strokes and stiff with blood, brown-black, more than a person has to spare. He pulled the cloth aside. There was skin. Whole, not even pink. The tears laid across it exactly where the wounds must have been, like the chalk outline of something that hadn't happened to him.

He pinched the flesh of his forearm hard enough to mark it, and it hurt, which proved only that it was a forearm. He tried the one thing he was certain of, and said it aloud.

"Queen to g1. Rook takes. Knight to f2."

A voice answered from his mouth. It was lower than his, rougher, a tenor with grit in it, and it delivered his mate with the flat confidence of a man announcing a platform change. He shut his mouth on it. For some while he did not say anything at all.

The alley had one mouth, onto the lane, and one end where a collapsed stairwell had sealed it with its own rubble. It was a place to be small in. Plan: stay. Whatever was happening in the street, nothing in it needed him. He settled his back against the wall with the knife across his knees. The plan had one virtue, which was that it required him to know nothing.

Then the siren started.

It was three notes: two high, one low, a long drop on the last, and then a silence exactly as long as the sound had been. Then again. It did not sound like a warning. It sounded like a procedure.

He gave it four rounds. Then he stood, and the knife went into a sheath on his belt that he found by feel, without looking, because hiding from a place he couldn't see was not a plan; it was a mood.

At the alley mouth there was a shopfront, a narrow window lit from within and cracked across one corner, with lettering painted on the glass: WICKS & TRIMMINGS - TOKENS TAKEN. The glass gave him back a young man. Lean, twenty-three or twenty-four, black hair that fell across his eyes and wanted cutting, cheekbones Kai had never owned. Underfed in the way of someone for whom it was a habit, not an event. The mouth was set in a line that wasn't unkind. It was out of practice, that was all. It was not a face anyone had ever asked his opinion of.

He went through the explanations he had. A hospital, and a mind coming apart in it. A film set, on a budget he found hard to credit. The last productions of a tumour. Each failed on the same evidence, which was the smell: rust, ash, and somewhere close, onions frying in fat that had been used before. Nothing he had ever hallucinated had smelled of onions.

His right hand had come up on its own, two fingers, toward the collarbone. He watched it go. The collarbone it found was the wrong width, a narrower ridge than his own, and the gesture ran out of body to land on. Then the siren dropped its third note over him and he put the hand down. There wasn't time. There was going to be time later, and he could tell already that it would be bad.

Beyond the roofline at the end of the lane stood a wall. It was too tall for anything he knew how to call a wall: grey, flat, running off both ways until the haze took it, and along its top a row of lamps, small with distance, that had been white and were turning amber in step with the siren. Three pulses. A pause.

A man came round the corner at the far end of the lane, running.

He was thickset, in a leather apron with a pocketed front, and the forearm that pumped beside him was glowing under the skin: a dull brass light in a pattern of interlocking gears, like machinery seen through muddy water. A woman ran a step behind him with a girl of five or six clamped on her hip. And the girl's face was turned back over the woman's shoulder, toward what was coming.

What was coming came round the corner on three limbs and one that dragged. It was wrong-jointed and black at the mouth, wet in the face like the thing against the wall, and it carried its head at the angle of a man listening to a conversation in the next room. It was faster than the family, and it was gaining.

Two men were crouched behind a handcart on the near side of the lane with their hands over their heads. The thing passed them close enough that one of them flinched. It did not turn. It ignored two men who were, by any measure Kai could apply, entirely edible, the way a train goes past a platform it isn't stopping at.

"Left, Orla! Left!" the thickset man shouted, and the family broke left, and the thing broke left after them, and the lane was empty again except for the cart and the siren.

*It ran past two men. They weren't what it wanted. The arm, maybe.*

"Aeron!"

He didn't take it as a word. It was a sound with an edge on it, from across the lane, and his attention caught on the edge and not on the sense - until it came again.

"Aeron! Aeron, it's you - oh, thank the light -"

A woman stood in the doorway of the building opposite, one hand holding the door propped on a brick, her hair coming down. A flat, five floors of soot-dark brick, a plate over the lintel that said CHANDLER COURT. She was looking straight at him.

"Tomas went back up for his rabbit! He's on the stairs, Aeron, he's on the stairs -"

The name went past him. It took a full second to understand it had been aimed, and another to understand that the only thing he could do with it was nothing. He had no idea who she was. He did not answer. He stood in the mouth of the alley with his plan intact and his face arranged.

He had decided to stay in the alley. By the time he finished the thought he was on the second landing, and his breathing had not changed.