The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 010: Nine Names

Ethan looked up at her, blinking against the light.

He tried to say something clever. What came out was a cough, long and wet, that bent him over the ladder. Smoke came with it, and a taste like burned hair.

"Give me your hand," Rhea said.

"I'm fine."

"You're gray. Give me your hand."

She hauled him out of the hatch one-armed, as if he weighed nothing, and set him down against the back wall of the tannery. The alley behind it was narrow and dim, hung with drying hides. It stank, but nobody lived there. Nobody would come.

Rhea crouched in front of him and took in the whole of it. The ruined trouser leg. The blistered skin. The shoulder, the blood, the burn marks on his hands. Her face didn't move, but her jaw did.

"Acid," she said.

"Slug."

"A Sump Slug." She said it flatly, like a person reciting a bad address. "In the city drains. Level 2s don't solo those. Level 12s don't solo those."

"I'm not sure what level I was," Ethan said.

"Right." She pulled a small tin from her belt, popped the lid, and began smearing something cold and pale-green across his calf. It stung like fire for three seconds, then went numb. "Hold still. It's a field salve. Not Hollis quality, but it'll stop the skin peeling."

[Rhea Kessel. Human. Level 28. Surface attitude: Concerned. Tense.]

He watched her work. Her hands were careful. She had a scar across two knuckles, white and old.

"How did you find me?"

"I went to your room at dawn. Wardens had been through it. Tore up the mattress, took the floor boards apart. They didn't find anything, because there was nothing to find, which I take as your doing." She smoothed the last of the salve. "Your landlady told me you'd asked about Candle Lane once, years ago. I went down there. Tomas Wren opened his door about as wide as my thumb, and when I threatened to arrest his mouse, he told me where to look."

"He'd never."

"He sent me a note. Left it at the South Gate before sunrise." She pulled a folded scrap out of her sleeve and handed it over. Tomas's handwriting, cramped and furious.

Boy is in the Drains. Will need a hand. If you hurt him I'll curse your descendants. T.W.

Ethan laughed, and that turned into another cough.

"I trust him," he said. "I think."

"You think." Rhea sat back against the opposite wall and drew her knees up. She looked tired. She was wearing her armor, but the left shoulder plate had a dent in it, and her hair had come out of its tie. "I need to tell you what I've been doing for the last day. It isn't going to be pleasant."

"Go ahead."

"I looked up that question I asked you. Who decided to route the nulls past the seal."

He waited.

"The Awakening Statute has a clause. Section Nine, Article Four. It's the one that sends failed candidates through the lower corridor 'for the preservation of family dignity.' Nice phrase. It was added twelve years ago, by amendment. Presented by the Council of Wards. Sponsored by Lord Maric Dorn of House Dorn." Her mouth twisted. "Witnessed by Garrick Vale."

Ethan said nothing. His hands lay in his lap, open, and for a moment he couldn't feel them.

"That's not all. I pulled the tower's incident ledgers. The ones nobody reads. Over the last twelve years, nine nulls have gone through that corridor and not made it home." She held up fingers one at a time. "Fell down the stairs. Drowned in the cistern. Disappeared on the way to the south gate. Two of them just, never arrived. Nobody investigated, because nobody misses a null."

"Nine."

"You'd have been ten."

He stared at the green salve on his leg.

You'll always have a place with us, boy. Garrick's hand on his shoulder, in the rain. Garrick's grey back going through the side arch before the examiner had finished his sentence. Garrick, in the third row, who had known exactly where the corridor ran. And exactly what waited at the end of it.

"They knew," Ethan said quietly. "He knew I'd go that way."

"I think someone wanted a Stalker to have a snack on a null. I don't know why. A test. A feeding." Rhea shook her head. "Or they didn't want you dead at all. Maybe they wanted you taken. That's what keeps me awake. A creature that grabs and runs would be quieter than a body."

"Taken where?"

"I don't know yet."

The hides rustled in a small wind. Somewhere up the alley a cart rolled by.

"There's one more thing," Rhea said. "And I need you to be honest with me, Ethan. Not because I'm going to arrest you. Because I've already lied for you once, to a superior officer, in writing, and I'd like to know what for."

Ethan breathed in. Out.

He had told Tomas almost all of it. The old man had a stack of books and no friends. Rhea had a badge and a sword and a post in a building run by the same people who had set him up. Telling her was dangerous.

But she had thrown a dagger through a closing gate. She had walked him past a Warden-Inspector. She had put her name on a lie.

"There's a thing in my head," he said. "It talks. It gave me something. A way to see and a way to grow." He kept his eyes on her face. "I killed the Stalker because of it. And the Slug. I don't know why it picked me. That's all I can tell you."

Rhea didn't speak for a long while. She didn't look surprised. She looked like a person adding a figure to a column and not liking the sum.

"Okay," she said at last.

"Okay?"

"I believe you. I can't see a better explanation, and I've been trying all night." She exhaled. "Prove one thing for me. The way you see. What do you see, when you look at me?"

Ethan hesitated, then told her. "Your name. Level 28. And that you're worried, but trying not to show it."

Rhea's mouth tightened. "Everyone is worried this week. Don't say that to anyone else." But she gave a small, grudging nod, the kind a soldier gives a decent sparring partner. "Does it hurt you?"

"It costs me things."

"What things?"

"I'm not sure yet. I don't think I want to find out."

"Then be careful what you say yes to." She reached into the pouch at her hip, and her hand came out holding a folded sheet of heavy paper. "Because the Wardens have stopped being polite."

She unfolded it and held it up.

It was a notice, printed on thick cream stock, with a wax seal at the bottom and a black key stamped in the corner. A drawing of a young man filled the middle of the page. Brown hair, narrow face, a nose that had been broken once. A decent likeness. Underneath, in big black letters:

WANTED FOR QUESTIONING. ETHAN VALE, CONNECTED TO THE BREACH OF THE ROYAL AWAKENING TOWER SEAL. REWARD: TWO HUNDRED GOLD CROWNS.

At the bottom, in a neat clerk's hand, was a signature. L. Voss, Warden-Inspector.

"They got the nose right," Ethan said. His voice sounded far away.

"It's a bad likeness."

"It's a good likeness." He stared at the number. Two hundred crowns. A year's wages for a baker. More than House Vale had ever paid for his whole room.

"They're pasting them on every wall in the city," Rhea said. "By noon, there will be a thousand people looking for you."