Chapter 19
Sela rises from the desk, picks up a stub of chalk, and under the old words on the board writes in the same neat capitals: WELCOME HOME, KOMPIS.
back against the wall, Ivar half raised. Ivar's ghost leans out of the barrel and squints at her.
Sela comes around the desk, slow and unhurried, tapping the pointer against her palm.
smiling the way a teacher smiles at a wrong answer.
The rose script on her forearms brightens and crawls another inch toward her elbows.
She moves. The pointer is a sword-cane, and a thin blade slides out of it. Kompis dodges left, the way he always dodges left.
One beat later she dodges left, with exactly his dodge, his weight and his angle, and comes around his own move from the other side. Her blade opens his sleeve.
He fires; she copies the way he rolls away from the recoil. He kicks a desk at her; she copies the kick and sends a desk back. Every move he makes comes back at him a heartbeat later, in his own style, out of a grey-haired woman in a grey coat.
Desks splinter. The little dog scratched into his old desk splits in two. Kompis is driven back across the room into the corner under the chalkboard, Sela's blade at his throat.
The golden pulse line wakes. Thump. The world goes grey.
Chalk dust hangs in the air like stopped snow. Kompis twists out from under the blade—
She is still in colour: rose-tinted, smoking faintly at the sleeves, but moving in the grey world beside him.
horrified.
The grey schoolroom, every speck of chalk dust stopped in the air. Kompis in colour, with a hundred gold-edged afterimages fanning out behind him; Sela in colour, with a hundred rose-edged afterimages behind her. Their afterimages clash across the whole room, every version and every try at once: a shot dodged, a blade blocked, a Kompis falling, a Sela falling, a hundred duels between the little desks.
Along the bottom edge of Kompis's half runs the steady golden pulse line: thump… thump…
Along the bottom edge of Sela's half runs a ragged rose line, sputtering and fraying, burning down like a lit fuse.
The price, visible and fast: her hair whitening by the second, the skin of her hands cracking like hot porcelain, smoke curling from her sleeves, blood at her nose. Far worse than his.
nose bleeding, knees shaking, watching her burn.
Sela sees it too. She lunges, not for Kompis but for Mingus, and lays one cracked hand on the golden head, the way Kompis does.
Her rose line flickers. The gold line doesn't come to her.
Mingus steps out from under her hand, unhurried, and sits down on Kompis's boot.
He sees the shape of the fight now.
cracking further, the white climbing her hair like frost up a window.
Sela's threads: forty slack grey threads running out of her chest toward forty children who aren't here anymore, frayed and dead at the ends; one taut leash climbing toward the Hall; and one thread that is neither. Thin. Warm. Gold. It runs straight across the room. To him.
Kompis lowers Ivar. In every try, he walks toward her with the rifle pointed at the floor.
In every try her blade comes for his throat, and in every try it stops one finger's width short. A thousand tries. It stops every single time. She can't make it go further. Her own thread won't let her.
Kompis drops out of Subtick. Sela, with nothing to copy and nothing to hold her up, drops out of hers. All the chalk dust in the room falls at once.
Kompis on his knees, blood on his lip, shaking all over, Mingus leaning his whole weight into him. Sela on the floor among the broken desks, smoke curling off her sleeves, her hair entirely white. Alive.
looking down at her ruined hands.
She tells him without being asked, flat and tired, like a woman setting down something heavy she has carried too long.
Kompis stops on his way out, Mingus beside him.
Kompis is gone. Sela sits alone among the broken desks under WELCOME HOME, KOMPIS. Slowly, she reaches out one cracked hand to pat a dog that isn't there anymore.
The crew waits by the sledge; the goats are eating a crate. Kompis walks in out of the dark with dried blood on his face.
reading Kompis's face, and deciding not to make a joke.
A long stepped street of the lower terraces, the Hay Stair, still asleep: shuttered bakeries, stable doors, washing lines frozen stiff in the cold.
Out of every shuttered window and every chimney, thin golden threads are rising, hundreds of them, lifting gently into the air like the strings of a harp being raised.
A tall, elegant man in a long coat the grey-white of Trisdel paperwork, wearing brand-new white gloves stitched with silver. Every thread on the street is gathered in his fists.
ORM · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #1,204 · the Reassigner