Rag first, then the shirt, and both of them hurt worse than the burn had.
Kael did it alone in the bunk-shed twelve hours after the yard, sitting on the edge of a cot that wasn’t his with a strip torn off the sheet and his teeth locked.
The fabric took skin off the blisters going on.
It would take more off coming away.
He wound it from the knuckles to just past the elbow and pulled the knot with his mouth, and then he put on a long-sleeved work shirt he had taken off the frame of somebody who went down the deep shaft two weeks ago and never came back up.
The dead man’s shirt fit.
That was the joke this world kept telling.
The tremors came in waves.
They started in the shoulder and ran out to the fingers, and while they ran there was nothing he could do but hold his wrist with his other hand and wait for the wave to finish.
Between the waves came the sickness, and it had nothing to do with his stomach.
It sat under the sternum in the exact place the cold thing lived, and it felt like a debt being called.
Sleep was worse.
Every time his eyes shut the arc came off his hand again on the inside of the lids, and three bodies went into the dirt, and the yard smelled of ozone, and he opened his eyes on the ceiling with his heart going.
⟦ASCENDANT⟧ ASCENT — EMBER I RESERVE — 5 / 40 AFTERBURN — TREMOR, SLEEPLESSNESS, NERVE-FIRE GATE.
NO SECOND STRIKE WITHOUT THE SAME RAGE DEBT.
SHE LIED FOR HIM; IT RUNS BOTH WAYS The inquiry opened at noon.
They ran it out of the mine office with the door propped for air, one man at a time, thirty men in a line across the yard in full sun with the scorched wheel still marked in the dirt forty paces away and nobody permitted to walk around it.
The man asking the questions had come in on a corporate charter that morning.
Clean tunic, soft hands, a data-slate he held at arm’s length.
He looked at the burn pattern in the dirt exactly once, and his face did what it would have done over a damaged loader.
Vos stood at the edge of the yard with the relic on her hip and watched the line.
That was the part that mattered.
The relic hadn’t found anything.
Kael had worked out why, lying awake with his arm on fire, and the reasoning had been the only comfort of a bad night.
The instrument read presence.
A soul standing in a yard.
It didn’t read discharge, and the arc had been too fast and too wild to leave anything the crystals were built to hold.
So the relic was clean.
Vos was not the relic.
Vos had spent four years learning what a thing looked like when it tried not to look like itself, and she had stayed on a mining world an extra day for a flicker.
The line moved.
Kael’s arm shook inside the sleeve and he clamped his left hand over the wrist behind his back and stood on a leg that had swollen again since morning.
“Next.” The bondsman with the split ear went in and came out in ninety seconds.
Then a man Kael didn’t know.
Then Mara.
She was third.
Kael was eleventh, and eleventh meant eight more men had to say the same thing before he said it, and any one of them could ruin all of it by saying it slightly better.
Through the propped door he could hear most of it.
“Name and years.” “Mara.
Three years.” “You were present in the yard.” “Second row.” “Tell me what you saw.” “I saw the foreman beat a bondsman to death over eight ration blocks.” Her voice came out steady and a little bored, which was exactly right.
“Man named Pell.
He’d been carrying food down to the half-shift crew.
Drest called it theft.” “That isn’t the incident I’m here about.” “It’s the start of the incident you’re here about.” A pause.
The scratch of a stylus.
“Go on.” “Pell’s crew went at him.
That’s four or five men, and Drest had a baton and they had what was in their pockets, and somebody down there works charges.” Her voice didn’t hurry.
“There was a blasting cap in it.
One of the deep-shaft charges, off the low drift stores.
Set off in the middle of a fight in the middle of a crowd.
Drest died and two of his own men died with him.” “You saw the cap.” “I saw the flash and I got a face full of dirt.
I’m telling you what was in the yard that could make a flash like that.
You’ll want to check your charge inventory.
I’d expect it’s short.” “It is short.” The stylus scratched again.
“It’s been short for some time.” “Then there’s your report.” “Who set it off?” “Somebody dead, most likely.
Everyone standing near Drest is in the ground.” A shift of a chair.
“Sir, if you want the truth of this camp, the foreman had a racket, and he ran it for years, and it killed a man this morning in front of thirty of us and none of us stopped him.
That’s what’s wrong here.
The cap’s the least of it.” The stylus stopped.
The administrator wanted an incident, a cause, a dead perpetrator, and no corporate liability, and she had handed him all four in one piece and given him a grievance he could file as an internal matter.
He wrote for a while.
“Thank you.
Next.” Kael let out a breath he had been holding for most of a minute and felt the tremor climb his forearm and stall halfway.
She had not done it for him.
He worked that through carefully while the line shortened, because getting it wrong would be worse than not knowing.
Drest had been skimming her rations the same as everyone’s.
She had hated him for three years without any leverage to do anything about it.
Now Drest was in the ground, and the lie that kept Kael out of a slaver’s hold was the same lie that kept the book closed on a foreman nobody would mourn.
She had bought her own quiet and paid for his with the same coin.
It wasn’t a gift.
It was a transaction, and he was on the hook for his half of it whether he liked the terms or not.
His turn came.
He walked in with his right hand behind his back and stood where he was told.
“Name and years.” “Dorne.
Three years.” “Where were you.” “Third row.” “What did you see.” “A fight, then a flash.” Kael kept it shorter and duller than Mara’s, one degree less articulate, an account from further back in the crowd.
“I was on the ground after.
There was a lot of dirt in the air.” “Anything strike you as unusual?” “The foreman using the baton in front of everyone.
He usually did that behind the shed.” The administrator glanced up.
It was almost a laugh.
“Noted.” He looked back down.
“That’s all.” Six seconds.
That was all a man was worth on this world once the paperwork had what it needed.
Vos was still at the fence when he came out, and her eyes came across the yard and rested on him.
Kael kept walking at the pace of a tired man on a bad leg, which cost him nothing, because he was one.
She stayed another day.
The relic pulsed at her hip through all of it, and she walked the camp twice, and she asked three men questions that had nothing to do with the inquiry.
He heard one of them from behind the drying racks.
“Before the flash.
Did anything go cold?” “Ma’am?” “Cold.
Or heavy.
A pressure behind the eyes.
Some people get a taste in the mouth, metal, like biting a coin.” “There was a lot of dust, ma’am.” “That isn’t what I asked, and you’re the third man to answer it that way.” A pause.
“Fine.
Go.” Kael stood behind the racks with his shaking arm pinned against his ribs and understood that she had stopped hunting a signature and started hunting a symptom, which was worse, because symptoms had witnesses.
Mara found him at the water line that evening and stood beside him without looking over, holding out a tin as though it were her turn.
“I didn’t do that for you,” she said.
“I know.” “Good.” “But you’ll want something eventually.” “I’ll want plenty.
And you’re going to be able to pay, which is new.” She took the tin back and drank from it and put it down on the rail between them.
“The arm’s showing.
Left side of the sleeve, when you reach for anything above your shoulder.
Fix it tonight.” “She’s leaving in the morning.” “She isn’t.” Mara nodded across the yard, where the guest quarters had a lamp on and the door standing open in the heat.
“She had her pilot pull the freighter’s landing struts down an hour ago.
Nobody does that for one more night.” Streets talk.
Want the next move before the cops, the heroes, or anyone else?
The Syndicate reads first.
Hustler.
$5.
Twelve chapters ahead.
Enforcer.
$9.
Nineteen chapters ahead.
Kingpin.
$15.
Twenty-six chapters ahead.
Drops are periodic.
Schedule’s on the page.
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ P.S.
— there’s a back alley where the rest of this story runs cold and free.
address: unwrittenrealm.com.
you know what to do.