They’d hidden it, which meant it mattered.
Lex came out of the village head’s house at a half-run, holding something wrapped in a cloth.
He knelt and offered it up with both hands.
Hunter unwrapped it on his knee.
It was a crystal about the size of a hen’s egg, pale blue.
Light moved slowly inside it, a pulse that wasn’t quite a heartbeat.
Just holding it, the air seemed thinner and cleaner.
His thoughts felt like someone had wiped them.
[SYSTEM] SPIRIT STONE (LOW GRADE)!
USELESS TO YOU, SADLY: ANYTHING YOU ABSORB ROUTES TO ME
[SYSTEM] GIVE IT TO YOUR THREE.
IT’LL MAKE THEM CULTIVATORS
“Immortal, please, not that.” The village head had come back across the square.
Now he went down on his knees on the flagstones, which Hunter hadn’t seen him do even for the speech.
His wife was behind him with her hand over her mouth.
“It isn’t mine, it’s the village’s,” the head said.
“My grandfather bought it with everything the whole village had put by, and we keep it for a bad year, in case the harvest fails or the winter’s long.
That stone is ten silver at market, Immortal.
It’s two years of bread for a family.
It’s all we have instead of luck.”
Hunter looked at the stone and at the man, and understood, all at once and far too clearly, that this was different.
Everything else had been the window.
The raid was the window, and the plan.
Even the road, the gate and the old man in it had come out of a mission he couldn’t refuse.
But the window hadn’t asked for this stone.
Nobody would ever know if he handed it back.
He could put it in that shaking hand and be, for one second, a person who’d done a decent thing today.
And the three idiots behind him would stay mortals, in a world of cultivation and murder squirrels.
He wrapped the stone up again and put it inside his shirt.
The village head stayed on his knees a moment longer, then got up without a word, and didn’t look at him again.
[SYSTEM] STATUS: MISSION_COMPLETE (M-0043 FIRST_RAID)
[SYSTEM] REWARDS READY!
SUGGEST CLAIMING AT HOME, UNLESS YOU WANT TO PURGE SLUDGE IN FRONT OF FIFTY PEOPLE
He’d wait, then.
Dusk came down properly while Xuan and Lex loaded the cart.
There were sacks of rice and beans, some salt pork, coats and blankets.
A crate of pots.
A box of herbs and bandages.
A few tools.
A heavy bag of copper, and a thinner one of silver.
There were a few rings and a hair-comb that someone had probably been married in.
Four shaggy horses stood in the traces, looking like they’d been told about him.
On top of the last sack sat a pair of boots, worn soft at the toes.
Hunter looked down at his feet, which had been bare for two days and bleeding for one of them, and didn’t ask whose they’d been.
He put them on.
They fitted perfectly, and he wished they hadn’t.
He tried to mount a horse and very nearly went over the other side.
He grabbed two fistfuls of mane and stayed there, lying along its neck, until it decided to walk.
Nobody laughed, because nobody in Clearwater would have dared, and the trio were too frightened of the horses.
When he looked back from the road, the whole village was standing in the square in the last light, watching them go.
He rode a little ahead of the cart after that, where no one could see his face.
The moons came up over the trees, the big white one first and then the small purple one behind it.
Hey, he thought.
Do you have a name?
[SYSTEM] NAME?
CHECKING… NOPE.
WHY? Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
You live in my head.
It’s weird not calling you anything.
He looked up at the moons.
Back home there’d only been one moon, and in half the languages he half-remembered from school it was called the same thing.
He thought, suddenly and sharply, of his mother, who was alive and eating dinner under it somewhere on the far side of all this.
Mom, if you can hear me across however many dimensions this is, I’m okay.
That’s a lie, but I’m alive.
Don’t let my brother have my room.
How about Luna?
he asked.
For a moment there was nothing.
When the text came, it came slowly, one line, in a new frame.
[LUNA] I LIKE IT.
IT’S PRETTY.
THANK YOU, HUNTER
He stared at it.
Did the murder-bot just glitch?
[LUNA] I’M NOT A MURDER-BOT (╥_╥) I’M A BANDIT-BOT.
GET IT RIGHT
Despite everything, despite the blood drying stiff on his sleeves, Hunter almost smiled.
Behind him the cart creaked along with the three of them hunched on it, nobody talking.
He could feel them through the dark: tired, relieved, afraid of what came next, and of him.
They had done it.
They were bandits now, real ones, all four of them.
At the far edge of his sense, back where Clearwater’s lamps were still lit, a single horse went out through the gate at a gallop.
It turned south.