The green stopped. No fade. The edge of a cobblestone pressed a hard ridge into his cheekbone, the shivering already running through him. The cold had hours of contact behind it at the shoulder and the hip.
[ SLEEP STATE: FAILED ]
[ EXHAUSTION LEVEL: ONE OUT OF SIX ]
YOU WERE UNCONSCIOUS. NOT THE SAME THING. JUST SO YOU KNOW.
His ribs moved on the first breath, and the old fracture gave its standard objection before he'd finished the draw. His jaw was locked, clamped from somewhere deep in whatever had happened on Grygori's table, and opening it took deliberate effort, the joint aching through a hard arc before his teeth parted.
[ COMPOUNDING HYPOTHERMIA ]
[ STAMINA: CRITICALLY LOW ]
GOOD MORNING. SORT OF.
He got his palm on the cobblestones, slick with ground frost, and pushed. The push shook him through the first couple of inches before he locked it out, and he came up to sitting against the alley wall, the plaster cold through his coat, the alley tilting once on a long slow axis before it stopped.
The forearm was wrong. The sutures pulled at the wound's edges with every movement, the tissue under the new linen swollen hard against the bandage, and the cauterized floor of it sat at a level that wasn't exactly pain. The memory of it was still broadcasting well after the event.
[ WOUND: SUTURED. BANDAGED. ]
[ SEPSIS PROBABILITY: REDUCED ]
[ FIELD SURGERY: COMPLETE ]
[ VITALITY: CRITICAL > 31% - STABILIZED ]
GRYGORI FINISHED. THEN PUT YOU OUTSIDE. YOU WERE UNCOOPERATIVE.
Outside, it turned out, meant as far as someone had been willing to drag him: the alley under the inner wall, the same one he'd come down into. It ran between two walls in a gap barely wide enough to lie flat in, the eaves close enough overhead that the blizzard had left only its cold behind and not its wind. The smoke sat in a brown bank at roofline height, and below it the air held still. He got his left knee under him and hauled himself upright, the joint going through its full locked range. Four hours of frozen road and bog clay, then however many hours flat on cold cobblestone. He pressed his back to the plaster and the wall took the worst of it.
[ COMPOUNDING HYPOTHERMIA - STAGE 3: PERSISTING ]
YOU GOT NOTHING. ZERO. NOT ONE PERCENT.
Somewhere beyond the alley's mouth a cooking fire had been lit. Fresh burning peat cut through the stale air above him, and a pale grey light showed between the eaves where the blizzard had run itself out and left a dawn behind. His coat was wet through at the shoulder and the hip. The wrap around his forearm had settled its swollen edges hard against the suture line, and the swelling was going to be there for the duration.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The sun began its slow crawl above the eaves. Vane worked himself back down the wall until he was sitting again, coat riding up cold behind him.
[ SLEEP STATE: BLOCKED ]
WE RECOMMEND: WARMER SURROUNDINGS. FEWER RECENT MEMORIES.
Something ran in the space behind his eye sockets. Not pain: a tight vibration from the System at the jaw's root, radiating forward through the sinus bone on both sides. His shoulders wouldn't drop, and closing his eyes did nothing about that.
Red at every side. The System's threat indicators bloomed at both eyes in a hard blaze, and a phantom footstep struck the cobblestones south in the alley with complete conviction before his eyes had even finished opening.
[ PHANTOM AUDIO: ACTIVE ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: CHECKING. PROBABLY NOTHING.
The alley ran empty in both directions. He sat with the dagger hilt in his palm while the red display dimmed back to its translucent baseline. Thirty seconds of still air. His chest worked faster the whole time. Every muscle was braced against a threat the System had invented.
[ PASSIVE RECHARGE: HALTED ]
YOUR MUSCLES CANNOT REPAIR THEMSELVES WITHOUT SLEEP. WORKING AS INTENDED.
North in the alley, a boot scraped cobblestone. Real weight, this time: a man shifting his stance on icy stone and coughing into a sleeve. Then silence. Someone at the alley mouth who didn't come further in. Vane kept his back against the plaster and waited until the sound settled into nothing.
The muscle through his left thigh had locked in a half-contraction somewhere in the Slag-Roots. He pressed the heel of his hand into it and pushed toward full extension. He got three degrees of movement and held them briefly, then lost them the moment the pressure came off. The cold had packed into the deep tissue and the tissue couldn't push it out, not at this stamina floor, not without a repair cycle the System kept withholding.
[ MUSCLE REPAIR: UNAVAILABLE, WRONG CLASS TYPE ]
[ STAMINA CAP: REDUCED ]
SLEEP WOULD HELP. YOU'RE NOT SLEEPING. LOOP.
He counted his breaths instead, the way an old man had once taught him in worse cold than this. In for four. Hold. Out for six. It had never once worked against the System. He did it anyway, because the counting was his, and the System could have the rest.
If he got out of this winter, he wanted a room. Not much of one. Four walls that didn't sweat, a fire nobody else had already sold the heat from, and a door with the bar on the inside. He'd never had a door like that. He'd thought about it often enough to know exactly where the bar would sit.
He tried once more. Head back against the plaster, eyes shut, held closed through the System's first flare-up.
The vibration deepened, moving from the jaw down into the throat and along the whole neck at a level just above rest. The System kept the stress exactly where it wanted it, and the stamina held at its floor through the full run of the attempt.
[ SLEEP STATE: BLOCKED ]
[ STAMINA RECHARGE: 0% ]
THE NUMBERS REMAIN WHAT THEY ARE.
His thigh had gone back to its contracted position the moment he'd stopped pressing. Dawn settled grey above the eaves, the smoke from a cooking fire somewhere in the row thickening toward the roofline, and the System kept up its low buzz behind his eye sockets, with no interest in what any of it cost.