The worst part was that he needed them.
He needed the three men watching him across the fire, because he didn’t know which berries would kill him or which direction the river ran.
He needed the System.
It was the only thing in this world that knew his name, and the only thing that had ever said the word home back to him, even if it had stamped DENIED under it.
And he needed to get stronger, because the forest had shown him last night exactly what happened to weak things out here.
His attention hovered over the N anyway.
Refuse, he thought.
Tell them no, and find some other way.
There wasn’t another way, and the window had told him so in capital letters.
And if he wavered in front of them now, they’d see it.
The pact would keep them obedient for a while.
He didn’t know how long.
He didn’t want to find out what happened when they worked out that their terrifying master was an insurance adjuster who’d gotten lucky with a boulder.
“Master?” Lex’s voice was careful.
“Should we start to prepare?”
He’d been quiet too long.
All three were watching him, and the confusion in their faces was starting to curdle into something else.
“Okay.” It came out rough.
He cleared his throat.
“Tomorrow we raid Clearwater.”
He chose Y, and felt it go down like something swallowed wrong.
[SYSTEM] MISSION ACCEPTED!
GOOD LUCK, HUNTER!
FARMERS HIDE THE GOOD STUFF UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS
He didn’t answer it.
He was watching the men, because the moment he’d said raid, something had happened to them.
The threads in his head pulled tight, all three at once, and warm, and Hunter felt it land in their bodies like a hand closing around a throat.
Their faces went slack, then white.
Tao, who a minute ago had been leaning in eager as a dog at a door, was suddenly gray to the lips, and his hands were shaking.
It wasn’t fear of Clearwater.
It was the pact, reminding them what they were.
“Yes, Master!” All three were on their knees before he could say anything, foreheads down, voices loud and hollow.
He hadn’t meant to do that.
He hadn’t known he could.
He had given an order, and the thing he’d put in their heads yesterday had made sure they felt it.
He wanted to tell them he was sorry.
He wanted to explain that he was trapped too, that there was a window in his head with DEATH written on it.
He couldn’t say any of that without telling them the truth about how weak he was, and they would be the last people on this planet he told.
So he said the only thing he could think of that was his, and not the System’s.
“Get up,” he said.
“Tonight, before any of that, you take me to see it.”
Lex blinked up at him.
“See it, Master?”
“The village. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
I’m not going in blind.” Nobody settled a claim without seeing the property.
“Tonight you show me, from somewhere they can’t see us, and then we plan.”
They looked at each other, and something in the threads loosened, just slightly, a held breath let go.
It wasn’t gratitude so much as confusion.
The old master had never asked to look at anything first.
They left after noon.
His feet, which had bled all the way to the cave the day before, barely noticed the forest floor now.
Ten miles went by in trees and mostly silence and the steady pressure of a mile-deep sense he still didn’t know how to put down.
Around the fourth mile Xuan asked, in the careful voice of a man requesting a raise, whether Master wanted to stop and rest his feet.
“I’m fine.” His feet had stopped filing complaints at the second mile.
“Keep walking.
If I stop, I’ll start thinking, and nobody wants that.”
Xuan nodded like this was sound management, which, Hunter supposed, it was.
The sun was going red by the time Tao led them up the last slope and flattened himself behind a lip of rock.
Hunter crawled up beside him and looked down.
Clearwater was smaller than he’d imagined: a ring of stone wall, twenty-odd roofs with smoke rising from them, and a granary on the far side, fat and square.
Fields ran out from the wall in pale stripes.
Someone was bringing in a goat.
By the gate, in the last of the light, five or six children were playing some game with a ball made of rags, shrieking every time it got away from them.
One of them, a little girl with her hair in two tails, kicked it straight through the open gate and ran after it, laughing.
Hunter lay on the cold rock and watched her, and couldn’t look away.