Chapter 181
The crew asleep in a row on blankets, the lantern-children curled up among them. Lanterns low. Only one person awake: Kompis, sitting at the water's edge, staring into the mist where the white barge went. Ivar across his knees. He hasn't moved in hours.
lying against Kompis's back, eyes open too. Watching him.
sitting down beside him without a word. A long silence.
One by one, the crew sits up on their blankets. Nobody was asleep.
The Marka gliding silent through the fog, no lanterns, Drekk steering by Ögar's soft directions from the bow: "…Port. A little more. There."
Out of the mist: the Futures House. A huge white archive-barge, three decks high, anchored in the fog, its windows lit, every deck lined with shelves of ledgers, thousands of them, leather-bound, dated by year. Seers on watch along its rails in silver veils.
The raid.
Rougeina Swaps onto the archive's deck with a lantern-moth and drops two watch-Seers before they finish swallowing their coins.
Isa, on the Marka's bow, holds the whole starboard rail, …ba—. These Seers didn't foresee her: they weren't expecting company.
Smurjan climbs the hull hand over hand, three shadows climbing beside him.
And Kompis, out in front of everyone, not using Subtick, not using anything clever: just going through the Seers one after another with Ivar's stock and his fists, straight toward the archive stairs.
a beat ahead, dodging Kompis's swing, and then not dodging the second one, because the second one came from a place even Kompis didn't plan.
fighting beside him, worried, watching his friend's face.
Long, low, lamplit, smelling of old paper. Shelves to the ceiling, ledgers by year, going back and back. Kompis walking down the aisle, running his finger along the spines. Twenty-five years ago. Twenty-four. Twenty-three.
stopping on a spine. Pulling the ledger out. Opening it. Turning pages. Faster. Faster.
Fine Guild script, a clerk's neat hand, a column of entries. And one of them:
VILLAGE: SNÖBERGA (north, seven houses)
VISION PURCHASED BY: ENGAGEMENT PROTOCOL, ARCHITECT THREE
SUBJECT: ELDER BOY, AGE 8. Hoodie. Dog-minded. Steady hands.
FORECAST: "EXCEPTIONAL ASSET."
SIBLING: ONE (AGE 5). NOT REQUIRED.
ACTION: ENGAGE.
YIELD: 1.
Clerk: SILVERSTEN.
on two words. NOT REQUIRED.
The ledger in Kompis's shaking hands, and rising out of it, filling both pages like smoke from the paper: the memory. A small northern village at night. Seven houses on fire. Soldiers in Trisdel grey walking calmly between them with torches, not fighting anyone, just lighting roofs. A roof coming down. A doorway full of flame, and a small hand held out of it, reaching. And in the foreground, an eight-year-old boy in a too-big hoodie being carried away by a soldier, kicking, screaming, reaching back toward the doorway.
Across the top of it all, in the clerk's neat script, enormous: YIELD: 1.
his face white, the ledger trembling.
in the doorway behind him, very still. She knows exactly what this is.
going gold, and then flickering, and then fracturing, the golden pulse-line along the panel border splintering into a hundred slivers.
a burning doorway, a small hand, a boy reaching, and failing. Failing. Failing. Failing. SUBTICK, turned on him, searching for a survivable version of a moment that already happened, and there isn't one.
on his knees between the shelves, eyes gold and unseeing, blood running from his nose, the ledger fallen open on the floor. His lips moving.
grabbing his shoulders, shaking him.
(Kompis doesn't hear him.)
shoving between them, putting both front paws on Kompis's chest, and barking, once, right in his face.
The crew's threads, tied since the Dawnstar, all pulling at once: Vigolas's, Rougeina's, Smurjan's, Öde's and Isa's, gold and taut, tugging Kompis back toward them. They feel him, and they let him feel them back: warm, solid, here.
the gold draining out of his eyes, the slivers knitting back into one pulse-line. He gasps like someone surfacing from deep water. Mingus licks the blood off his lip.
The crew leaving the Futures House, Kompis walking between Vigolas and Smurjan. Behind them, the bottom deck, shelves full of a thousand other villages. Öde looks back at them, and her hands curl into fists.
The crew back on the ledge. Kompis sitting alone with the torn-out ledger page in his hand, Mingus's head in his lap. Nobody crowds him.
sitting down next to him, a beat before he looks up.
looking at her for a long moment. Not angry at her. Past angry. Hollow.
the ledger page crushed in his fist, Mingus's head in his lap, his voice very flat and very steady.