The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 039: A Stranger's Face

"Do I know you?" Mira said again.

Ethan opened his mouth and nothing came out.

He knelt in the mud with the dead chain in his lap and the wind cold on his neck, and looked at the girl he had known for a month. Her braid had come loose. There was a smear of ash on her cheek. She sat up slowly, rubbing her ankle, and the way her eyes went over his face was careful and polite and utterly blank, like a clerk looking for a name in a ledger.

[Mira Quill. Human. Level 12. True attitude: Confused. Wary. A grief she cannot name.]

A grief she cannot name.

He swallowed. It hurt.

"No," he said. "I don't think so."

"Oh." She frowned. "Only you were holding my hand just now. I thought..." She shook her head. "Sorry. It's nothing. I must have hit my head." She pushed up onto her feet and swayed. Ethan's arm came out on its own, and she looked at it, and she took a half step back.

He lowered it.

"Where am I?" she asked. "This is the ash flats. Why am I at the ash flats?"

"You followed someone out here."

"Followed who?"

"A man." He chose each word as carefully as a man crossing ice. "A Warden. A hunter. He had a chain. You thought he was..." He stopped. "You were trying to help someone."

"I don't help people." Mira scrubbed at her cheek. "I'm a thief. I only help myself." She glanced over her shoulder at the dark shape lying in the mud forty paces away, and her face tightened. "Is he dead?"

"I don't know."

"Gods." She stared. "Did you do that?"

"Some of it."

She looked at him again. At the rivet hammer on his belt, at the mud on his knees, at the grey F tag swinging on its cord. Slowly, something in her face shifted. Not recognition. Wariness, sharpened by instinct.

"You're a carrier," she said. "You were at the Yard. I've seen you in the line. You never get picked."

"That's me."

"Why are you out here fighting Wardens?"

"Because they were after me."

"Why?"

He couldn't answer. He didn't have an answer that wouldn't shatter something.

"That's a long story," he said at last.

"I'm not asking for the story." Mira folded her arms, hugging her elbows. "I'm just a girl who got hit on the head. But I've been in this town three months, and I know a man who's trouble when I see one." She gave a short, shaky laugh. "Thanks for pulling me out. I'll get out of your way."

Three months. She remembered the three months. She remembered the Yard, and Greywatch, and the ledger. She'd probably say she stole it all by herself. He could see it in her face, the neat, clean way her mind had filled the gap, as if he'd never been there at all.

"Mira," he said.

She stopped.

"It's a long walk back. I'll go with you. Only as far as the gate."

"I don't need an escort."

"I know." He met her eyes. "Please."

She hesitated. Wind pulled at her scarf. After a moment, something that might have been a reluctant smile touched the edge of her mouth.

"You're the strangest carrier I've ever met," she said.

Rook was still breathing when they got to him.

He lay on his back in the mud with his coat torn open and a ruin of grey fur and claw marks across his chest. The Ashwolf had come back for him. Ethan hadn't heard it return. He didn't need to see its tracks to know. The long gouges ran from collarbone to hip, and the dirt around him was black.

His eyes were open. They were a calm, pale brown, and they tracked Ethan's face with something almost like interest.

[Hunter Rook. Level 33. Vitality: 4 / 310. True attitude: Peaceful. Curious.]

Peaceful. The word turned Ethan's stomach.

"Mr. Vale," Rook said. His voice was a bubbling rasp. "How very strange. I thought that I should mind."

"You're dying."

"Mm." A faint, absent smile. "I've been collared four years myself, you know. In a manner of speaking. The key is a very patient thing." He coughed, and blood ran down his chin. "I didn't know you could take it. The Leash. It was mine for nineteen years."

"I'm sorry."

"Are you?" Rook's eyes drifted past Ethan, to the dark sky. "That is rather kind. Rather useless, but kind." His fingers twitched in the mud. "Tell them I was not afraid. At the end. I should like that to be true."

Ethan swallowed. "I'll tell them."

"And Mr. Vale."

"Yes?"

"He will know. Inspector Voss. He always knows." The pale eyes slid back and held Ethan's. "He has a little silver coin in every one of us. When we die, it sings."

Then the breath rattled out of him, and he did not take another.

Mira made a small sound behind Ethan. He heard her turn away, heard her boots scuff the dirt. He stayed where he was, on his knees in the mud, looking at the dead man's face. It was a gentle face. It would have been a good one to teach children.

I didn't kill him, he thought. I didn't. The wolf did.

It wasn't much of a comfort.

Rhea found them halfway back to the gate.

She came running across the flats with her sword half drawn and her face grey, and when she saw Ethan she pulled up so hard that her boots skidded. For a moment she just stood there, chest heaving, one hand flat against her side.

"You idiot," she said. "You idiot. I told you."

"You told me a man has to learn to carry his own weight."

"That's not the same." But her face was already changing, softening, and it hardened again as her eyes slid past him to the girl at his shoulder.

Mira lifted a hand in a small, embarrassed wave. "Hi, Rae. Sorry. I took a wrong turn."

Rhea went very still.

She said nothing for a long, long moment. Her eyes moved from Mira to Ethan, and what she saw in his face made her mouth thin. Then, slowly, she sheathed her sword.

"Mira," she said. Her voice was steady. "I'm going to walk you home. Come with me."

"You don't have to. I'm fine."

"Humor me."

Mira shrugged. She started ahead along the dry bed, kicking at stones, and Rhea fell in beside Ethan with her eyes on the girl's retreating back.

"What did it cost?" she asked, very softly.

"Her."

Rhea's breath caught.

"She doesn't remember me," he said. The words were a thin, flat thread. "She remembers the town. The ledger. Her sister. But not me. Not you, either, I think, not the way she did. She knows you as the farrier's aunt."

"Gods." Rhea's hand clenched on her sword hilt. "I'm going to find whatever put that in your head, and I'm going to break it in half."

"It's not the system's fault. I said yes."

"You said yes to save her."

"I said yes." He didn't look away. "It picked her. I don't know why. It could've taken anyone."

"It picked the one you'd mind most." Rhea's voice cracked. "That's what a bond is."

They walked in silence. Ahead, Mira hummed under her breath, off-key, a little tune Ethan didn't know. She'd never done that before. He realized, with a small hard pang, that he'd never heard her do it.

"Do you want me to tell her?" Rhea said at last.

"No."

"She has a right to know."

"She has a right to a life that isn't haunted by something she can't see." He swallowed. "If we tell her, she'll feel the hole. She'll dig at it. And I don't want her to be the kind of person who owes me something. She's got a sister to find." His voice dropped. "I can protect her without being known."

Rhea looked at him for a long time.

"That's the worst idea you've ever had," she said. "And you've had a few."

"I know."

She sighed, and slung an arm around his shoulders, hard and brief.

They had almost reached the walls when the light began.

It was thin, a pale silver glow at his hip. He looked down. Back on the flats, while he was closing the dead man's coat, his fingers had found a sewn pocket in the lining and a flat little disc of metal inside it. He had tucked it away without thinking. A coin, stamped with a key.

It was shining now. Faintly. Steadily. And from somewhere deep inside it, so soft he almost couldn't hear, came a high, sweet, endless note, like a distant singing.