The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 005: Eviction Notice

Outside, the afternoon had gone grey.

The front steps of the Royal Awakening Tower were packed with people who had run out of the building and didn't know where to go next. Nobles stood in tight circles, talking loudly about nothing. Clerks clutched ledgers to their chests. Guards had strung a rope across the plaza, and behind it the families of the candidates pressed forward, all asking the same question.

Rhea walked through them like a plow through frozen ground. Ethan stayed close behind her.

Heads turned. He felt it before he saw it. A null with blood down his shirt and a Captain's cloak bandage on his arm, walking out of a tower that was supposed to be on fire. People nudged each other. A woman whispered something to her husband, and the husband said, "No. Can't be."

"Is that Vale?"

The voice came from the left, bright and pleased. Dorian Hale leaned on the rope with a few of his friends beside him, fire mark glowing on his wrist like a coal. "He's alive! The monster must have had standards."

His friends laughed.

"Next time," Dorian went on, "just stay down. It's tidier."

Ethan kept walking. A hot, ugly shape was rising in his throat, and he pushed it down, but the Hunger noticed it. It always noticed. His mouth watered. Dorian's neck was very warm and very close, and Stalker's Instinct showed him the pulse in it, quick and loud like a drum in a small room.

No.

He looked at Dorian anyway. Just looked.

Dorian stopped laughing. He took a step back from the rope, and he didn't seem to know why.

"Vale," someone said.

Seraphine Ward stood at the foot of the steps. She had a long white coat over her academy uniform and her hair pinned up, and she was out of breath, as if she had run to get there. The ice mark on her neck was the color of the sky before snow.

Something in Ethan's chest tugged toward it. Gently, the way a hand tugs a sleeve. It went nowhere. It felt like reaching for a word he knew he knew.

[Seraphine Ward. Human. Level 19. Surface attitude: Anxious.]

"You're alive," she said.

"Disappointed?"

She flinched. It was small, but he saw it. "I saw the gate come down," she said. "I told the marshal there was still someone in the lower corridor. I told him twice. They wouldn't-" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "I tried."

"You said it was always going to be this."

"I know what I said."

"You said it loud."

"Ethan." Rhea's hand settled on his shoulder, firm and warm. "Not here."

Seraphine looked at Rhea, then at the scar on his arm, then at his face. For a moment she seemed to be searching for something she couldn't find. When she spoke again her voice was low, meant only for him.

"Stay away from the tower. Please. For a while."

"Seraphine!" A man's voice cracked across the plaza from a black carriage with a gold crest. "Now!"

Her shoulders went rigid. "That's my father."

"Then go."

She went. She didn't look back. The white coat moved through the crowd and the carriage door closed behind it with a flat, heavy thud.

Rhea steered him down the last steps. "Friend of yours?"

"She used to be."

"Hm." It didn't sound like agreement.

Ethan lived on the third floor of a narrow stone house in the lower north ward, at the top of a staircase that smelled of boiled cabbage and wet laundry. The room had one bed, one table, one window, and a stove that worked only if you kicked it. House Vale paid the rent. That was the arrangement. A small allowance, a roof, and a promise that nobody would ask about it.

Rhea stood in the doorway and looked at it for a long second.

"This is where they put you?"

"It's fine."

"It's a closet with a window." She turned and put a card on the table. It had a barracks address on it, and nothing else. "South gate, ask for me by name. If anyone in a grey coat or a charcoal one comes here, you send somebody running. Understood?"

"What about the questions you wanted to ask me?"

"They'll keep. You've had enough for one day." She hesitated at the door. "Eat something. You look like you're about to bite the furniture."

He almost laughed. Almost. "Captain. Thank you. For everything."

"Don't thank me yet." She left.

Ethan locked the door and leaned on it until the dizziness passed.

Then he found the pot of cold stew on the stove, the one from this morning, and ate it standing up with his fingers. The Hunger didn't care that it was only bean and barley. It wanted meat. He ate the whole pot and a heel of bread and drank water from the jug, and finally the pounding in his head eased.

He sat on the bed and emptied his pockets onto the blanket.

A silver token with a key on it. A grey metal band with scratched letters. A pressed blue flower tied with a ribbon.

He put the token in a tin of salt on the shelf, closed the lid, and set the tin behind a stack of books. Maybe that would block a tracker. Maybe he was being stupid. The band he wrapped in a sock and shoved under the loose board by the stove, where his mother's old ring was kept.

The flower he held for a long time.

"Who gave you to me?" he asked it.

The flower said nothing. The ribbon had been tied by someone patient. He tucked it inside the cover of his mother's recipe book, between pages he'd never been able to read without crying, and shut the book.

A knock came at the door.

Three raps, evenly spaced. Not a neighbor. Neighbors pounded.

Ethan went still. Stalker's Instinct unfolded into the stairwell and found one breath on the other side. Steady, human, nervous. Not the Inspector's.

He opened the door a hand's width.

A thin man in a grey coat stood on the landing holding a sealed envelope. House Vale crest on the collar. Ethan knew him. Pell, Garrick's steward. He had delivered the allowance on the first of every month for six years and never once looked at the room.

"Master Ethan." Pell kept his eyes on the envelope. "I've been asked to deliver this tonight."

"Tonight?"

"By order of Lord Garrick." He held it out. "The house is withdrawing its support, effective immediately. The rooms are to be vacated by dawn. Your stipend is closed. I'm... instructed to say that the Vale name will no longer be extended to you, in light of today's record."

Ethan took the envelope. His hand didn't shake, and that surprised him.

"By dawn."

"Yes, sir." Pell shifted his feet. "I'm sorry. For what it's worth."

"It isn't worth anything."

"No, sir." Pell went down the stairs fast.

Ethan broke the seal. The letter was short, in Garrick's careful hand. Cold. Correct. Every line a door closing. At the bottom was Garrick's signature, and beside it, pressed into dark red wax, a second mark.

It was a stylized key.

He went to the shelf, opened the tin of salt, and took out the silver token. He held it beside the wax.

They matched exactly.