The grip came out of the nest with a dry sucking sound, like pulling a spoon out of cold porridge.
Gaara sat back on his heels and turned it over.
A knife. A real one, made by a person who had known what they were doing. Steel, the length of his forearm from pommel to point, single edged, with a shallow fuller running most of the way down. The leather wrap on the handle had rotted into black crumbs that came away on his palm, leaving bare tang underneath, and the whole blade wore a coat of rust like orange fur.
Under the rust the edge was still there. He could feel it catch on his thumbnail.
Something happened in his hand when he closed his fingers properly around it. A small correction, barely there, the way a good pen sits differently than a cheap one. His grip shifted a few millimetres without being told to, and his wrist found an angle he had not chosen.
Then the panel came.
[ Dagger Mastery, Rank E ]
Blade assessed.
Field knife, human manufacture. Heavily corroded. Edge geometry intact.
Structural integrity: adequate for soft targets. Avoid bone.
"Avoid bone," he repeated. "Noted. I'll ask them to hold still while I check."
He wiped the blade on his thigh and looked back down at what he had been digging through.
The nest was not just chitin and dirt. Now that he was in it up to his elbows, he could see the rest of it, and the rest of it had been people.
A ribcage, most of a ribcage, picked clean and gone the yellow of old piano keys. A jawbone with three teeth in it. Scraps of cloth so far gone they came apart when he breathed on them. A belt buckle. A boot, then, a metre away, the other one.
He sat there for a while and did not move.
They had come in here the way he had walked in here. Armed better than him, probably. Wearing more than a shirt and a pair of trousers. And they had gone into the dark and something had eaten them and dragged the leftovers home, and the ruin had gone on being quiet and pretty in the slanted light with nothing at all to say about it.
The panel that had congratulated him twenty minutes ago had not mentioned them either.
"Right," he said quietly. "So that's the deal here."
He took the boots.
He hated it while he did it, and he did it anyway, and he was aware of exactly how fast that decision had gone through him. Six weeks ago he had spent four days agonising over whether to let an intern go. Now he was pulling footwear off a stranger's remains and the entire process of deciding had taken less time than it took to lace them.
They were too big. Half a size, maybe more, the leather stiff and cracked across the toe. He shredded a strip off the bottom of his shirt, wadded it into the front of each one, and pulled the laces until his feet stopped swimming.
Then he stood on stone that had been freezing his soles for the last hour and felt nothing at all.
His eyes stung. He put that down to the dust.
"Thank you," he said, to the ribcage. "Sincerely."
The belt came too. So did a small pouch that had been under the hip, with a stone in it that struck sparks off the knife spine, and eleven coins, dull grey, stamped with a face he did not know and letters he could not read.
He weighed the coins in his palm. Money existed. Money meant trade, trade meant towns, towns meant people, and people meant food, which had just become a problem with a clock on it, because he had not eaten in this body once.
He put everything in the pouch, tied the pouch to the belt, and pushed himself up.
The status panel drifted patiently at the edge of his vision, the way it had all morning.
Unspent Attribute Points: 3.
He had been avoiding it. He knew he had been avoiding it, which is the worst way to avoid something.
He pulled the panel forward and looked at the numbers.
The reflex said DEX. He had spent the entire fight being slower than a large insect, and the only reason he was still breathing was that a ceiling had done the work for him. Three points into DEX and he would move like something that belonged here.
Then he checked the reflex, because he had learned the hard way to distrust any answer that arrived that fast, and because the last time he had trusted one it had cost him a company.
What does this place actually charge me for?
Not sprint speed. That was the fight talking, and fights were minutes. This world was going to bill him in days. Walking, and then walking further, because there were no cars and no trains and the smoke on the horizon was hours away on foot. Sleeping on ground. Carrying his own water. Wounds that had to close on their own, in a world with no antibiotics, while he kept moving anyway.
His old life had been built so that a fragile man could still function. Chairs everywhere. A lift in every building. Food that arrived at the door, a pharmacy on the corner, a bed always within twenty minutes. He had run a company on four hours of sleep with a body that was quietly failing, and it had worked for years, because the whole world was padded.
Nothing here was padded.
DEX decided whether he won a fight. CON decided whether he was still standing when the fight found him, three days into a march, wet, hungry, and healing.
And under all of that, quiet and patient, sat the other reason.
Five. The number that had run his life. The number that put a machine on his nightstand, turned stairs into a decision, and made a body that could press a hundred and forty kilos fold up like a deckchair after nine hours of work. Every single thing he had lost, he had lost through that number. The company had died of it. So had he, more or less, just slowly enough to be embarrassing.
He sat with that for a moment, because it made him suspicious. He wanted this answer. Wanting an answer was usually how you got a bad one.
He ran it once more, cold, and it came out the same both times.
"Two flies, one swat," he said. "Fine."
He put all three into CON.
[ ATTRIBUTES UPDATED ]
CON: 5 to 8
HP: 120 to 165
Recovery rate increased.
It hit him like a swallow of hot tea.
It started under the sternum and went out through everything, and it did not feel like power. It felt like rest. Like the third day of a holiday, the one where you finally stop being tired. The ache in his shoulder dulled. The stinging line the Crawler had opened in his calf stopped nagging and settled into a warm itch.
He stood in the wreckage of a chamber with two dead monsters in it and a dead man's boots on his feet, and for about four seconds he was so happy he could not speak.
He waited for the stupid feeling to arrive, the one that shows up after you buy something with your heart.
It never came.
Then he went to find the way out.
It took him the better part of an hour. The far end of the chamber had come down completely, so he backtracked, past the slab and the black stain under it, through the gap he had first crawled out of, and along a corridor that ran straight for sixty metres and had once had a ceiling.
Roots had come through the walls. Not thin ones. Roots the thickness of his thigh, splitting worked stone with the patience of something that had all the time in the world, and the stone had let them.
That was when he started revising his estimate of how long this place had been empty.
Light ahead. Real light, not the dusty grey shaft through the roof. He came up a fallen ramp of masonry, put his hand on the edge, and hauled himself out into the open.
And stopped.
The ruin was not a building.
It went on. From up here he could see it running away from him in every direction, street after street of it, broken walls standing in rows under a green tide of growth, avenues wide enough to drive four trucks abreast, all of it drowning slowly in forest. A stone thing that might have been an aqueduct crossed the middle distance on legs a hundred feet high, snapped clean in two, both ends reaching for each other over a gap the length of a football pitch.
He had crawled out of one room of a city.
He made himself look at it properly, the way he would have walked a factory floor. Stone on stone, cut and fitted, arch on arch. Lime mortar. Iron pins holding what the mortar could not. No rail, no pipe, no chimney stack, nothing anywhere in that whole drowned spread that a competent Roman would have found surprising.
Which meant these people had built all of this with hands, rope and patience.
Which raised the question he did not like.
Because the city had not simply fallen down. The aqueduct had a bite out of it, a clean gap with both ends still reaching, and the roof of the chamber he had woken in had come in the way roofs come in when they are hit from the side. That was not weather and not time.
Nothing these people owned could have done that to them.
So something else had. And it had either left, or it had not.
Beyond the last of the walls, hills. Beyond the hills, mountains, blue with distance, with snow on the high ones. The sun was where a sun should be. The sky was ordinary. A bird went over, high up, and it was just a bird.
That, somehow, was the thing that got him. Not the aqueduct. The bird.
Because the sky being normal meant this was not a hallucination and not a simulation dressed for his benefit. It was a place. It had weather and birds and people who minted coins and people who went into ruins and did not come out, and it had been getting on with all of that for a very long time before something dropped a thirty-eight year old man into the basement.
"Okay," he said. The word went out over the rooftops and did not come back. "Okay."
He sat down on the edge of the ramp, because his legs wanted it, and let himself look for a while.
Somewhere south, past the broken aqueduct, a thin line of smoke stood up out of the trees.
Not a fire in the ruins. Too straight, too thin, too steady. That was a chimney, or a camp, and either way it was people.
He looked at his hands. Black ichor dried into the creases. Blood, his own, crusted from wrist to elbow. He was wearing a torn shirt with a strip missing, a stranger's boots, a stranger's belt, and he was holding a rusty knife.
"Fantastic," he said. "First impression of my life."
He got up and started walking anyway, because the alternative was a city full of holes and whatever else lived in them, and because his stomach had begun a conversation with him that was not going to be talked out of anything.
It took two hours to get down and out, and every step of it his mind ran inventory the way it always had. Assets: one knife, one firestone, eleven coins, boots, a body that could work. Liabilities: no language, no map, no name he could give anyone, no idea what a person here would do with a stranger who came out of the dead city.
He was so far into that loop that he almost walked into her.
She came around the flank of a fallen wall twenty metres ahead, a bundle of cut branches on her back, and she saw him at the same instant he saw her.
Everything stopped.
She was young, mid twenties maybe, brown and weathered, hair tied back under a strip of cloth, sleeves pushed up over forearms that had done a lot of work. The bundle came off her shoulders and hit the ground. Her hand went to a hatchet at her hip and it was out and up in less than a second, and she did not raise it like someone who had been taught. She raised it like someone who had done it before.
He put his hands out slowly, palms open. The rusted knife was still in one of them, which he registered a half second too late.
She said something.
The sound of it was nothing, a run of syllables with the stresses in the wrong places, sharp and rising at the end.
Then the sound arrived in his head a second time, and it had words in it.
[ TRANSLATION ACTIVE ]
"Stop there. Not one more step."
He felt the moment it happened. It was not like learning. There was no effort in it, no reaching for meaning. Something had opened her language, taken it apart, and laid it into him while she was still finishing the sentence, and it had not asked him first.
A cold thought went through him, small and clear: whatever this system is, it can put things into my head.
He filed it. He would be taking that one out again later.
"Say something," she said. Her voice was steady, which was somehow worse than shaking. Her eyes went over him piece by piece. The blood. The ichor. The knife. The boots. "Say something or I'll take it that you can't."
He looked at her, and at the hatchet, and at the seven metres between them, and he thought about the fact that the first human being he had met in a new world had just pointed a weapon at him.
"Charming," he said. "Usually people at least buy me a drink first."
Her face did not change, but her grip did.
Because the words that had come out of his mouth had not been German.
They had been hers.