Nox’s shoulder didn’t heal right.
That was the first wrong thing. Lisa cleaned the wound that night while I sat on the kitchen counter working a cold compress along the arm the construct had caught.
Neither of us said much. There wasn’t much to say that the wounds themselves weren’t saying.
It looked like a burn, but it didn’t behave like one. The edges didn’t redden, and the skin around it went grey instead, the dull colour spreading one centimetre past the mark and stopping.
The bruise on my arm had started fading at the edges, ordinary yellow-green, healing like anything else. His hadn’t moved at all.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“Yes.” He said it flatly, like admitting it cost him something. “Feels like frostbite. The bad kind, the kind that gets into the bone.”
He pulled his shirt the rest of the way off so Lisa could get at the shoulder, and for a second neither of us said anything, because there was more to look at than the new wound.
Old scars. A lot of them. Crossing his ribs, and one long pale line down his side. A cluster of smaller marks along his collarbone that hadn’t come from any single injury I could name.
I didn’t ask. I looked, and he clocked me looking, and that was enough for both of us that I’d noticed.
“Childhood stuff,” Nox said, before I could find a way to phrase the question that wasn’t rude. He said it the same flat way he said everything else. “Long story, and not tonight.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he agreed, and that was the end of it, for now.
Lisa pressed two fingers near the edge of the shoulder wound and pulled them back fast.
“It’s still there,” she said. “Whatever he hit you with. It isn’t fading like mana fades.”
The wound is honest, at least. It is telling you what I told you. That mana does not belong here.
I looked at the wound a moment longer. Then, without deciding to, I held my palm an inch above my own bruised arm, the same way I had over the mage’s body a few hours earlier.
Something answered, faint, a thread of it nowhere near what a fresh corpse gave up, but unmistakably there.
What are you doing?
“Testing something.” I hadn’t worked out yet whether it was a good idea. It felt like one.
I let it pull, slow and thin, up through my palm and into my chest.
[ Aether residue integration complete. The bar climbs by one percent. ]
[ Trace amount. Barely worth anything. But you’re not wrong that it’s there. ]
One percent.
There was something almost delighted underneath the dryness.
Efficient. I did not expect you to think of that.
“Try mine too,” Nox said. He’d gone very still, watching my hand. “If it’s sitting in there doing nothing, I’d rather it wasn’t.”
I held my palm over his shoulder next. The same thin pull, the same cold thread drawing up through my skin.
[ Aether residue integration complete. The bar climbs by one percent. ]
“One percent,” I said out loud, for Lisa’s benefit. “Same as mine.”
“That’s disgusting and also slightly impressive,” Lisa said. “You’re eating the thing that’s poisoning you.”
“It’s not poison anymore once it’s mine,” I said, and didn’t examine that sentence too closely.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
✦ ✦ ✦
By the next day, what was left of the grey had gone a faded brown. It looked like an old bruise finally deciding to leave.
Nox could lift his arm over his head again. We all pretended that meant it was over.
It didn’t feel over.
Doyle came to the flat. He never did that.
He counted us before he said anything. Three of us in a stairwell, and his eyes went left to right and back again, and only then did he start talking.
I put it down to a division commander doing what division commanders do.
That told me more than anything he said. Doyle lived behind a desk and a cigarette. He only came to your own stairs when he didn’t want the conversation recorded by a building.
Nox’s shoulder got looked at first. Doyle made him pull the collar aside. I looked at the brown mark for a long moment. I didn’t touch it.
“Three streets from here,” Doyle said. It wasn’t a question.
“Two,” Nox said.
“Two.” Doyle sat down on the bottom stair like the number physically cost him something. “I sent you to a gate in the Chilterns. That was a place. You went there. You came back.”
Doyle stared at the floor. “This time they came to where you sleep.”
“We noticed,” Lisa said.
“I’m not saying it to scare you.”
He lit a cigarette in a stairwell that had a clear sign about not doing that.
“I’m saying it because it changes what kind of problem this is. A gate is a thing you visit. This is a thing that visits you.”
He exhaled slowly.
“I can’t put a guard on a thing like that. I can’t file it. I can barely think about it without wanting to put all three of you on a train somewhere with no return ticket.”
“You won’t,” I said.
“No. I won’t.” He breathed smoke on the concrete. “The train doesn’t help. If they can find this building, they can find a different one.”
He looked up. “The only thing that helps is knowing what they want. We don’t know that. That’s the whole rotten centre of it.”
Nobody argued.
“The one that came.” Doyle turned that over. “The one that came. Right. Tell me again what it called itself.”
“Void Order,” I said. “That was the whole introduction. It didn’t give a name beyond that.”
Doyle turned the phrase over turning it for sharp edges.
“An organisation, not a person,” he said slowly. “It walked up to three hunters it intended to kill and told them who it worked for. That’s not carelessness. That’s confidence. It didn’t think saying it out loud could cost it anything.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way. I didn’t like that he had.
“And the thing it hit Nox with,” Doyle pressed.
This was the part I’d been deciding how to say since he walked in.
“It’s not normal mana,” I said. “Lisa felt it in the wound. I felt it on my blade. Whatever it’s, mana doesn’t behave like that.” I kept my voice completely flat, the specific tone you use when the truth would sound insane spoken plainly.
“A word for it.” Doyle rubbed his eye with the back of a knuckle. “Do you’ve a word for it? Any word.”
“Aether.” I let him have that much. “That’s as far as the word goes. I don’t know what it means beyond the name.”
Which wasn’t true, not quite, but it was closer to true than silence would have been, and it left the part that mattered still mine. The same way Azazel was still mine.
“You’ve seen a lot of mana,” Doyle said slowly. “Between the three of you. More kinds than most hunters see in a career.” He paused. “And none of you can tell me what it’s actually doing here.”
“None of us can tell you that,” I confirmed, and left the lie standing where I’d built it.
He smoked the rest of the cigarette down without saying anything.
When he spoke again, it was quieter. Quieter from Doyle meant worse.
“Right,” Doyle said. “Right. Then it’s new. Or it’s old enough that everyone who could explain it’s gone, which, no, that’s worse, isn’t it, that’s the worse one. I don’t know which of those I’d rather it be and I’ve been sitting here trying to decide for about a minute now.”
Tell him neither. Tell him the answer to that question is always neither.
I didn’t tell him. He knew.
Doyle left the flat shortly after.
He didn’t offer any empty reassurances on his way out. We didn’t ask for any. The rest of the evening passed in an uncomfortable quiet. Nox retreated to his own room. Lisa returned to her book.
Lisa found me in the kitchen afterwards, running water over a cup that was already clean.
“Aether,” she said.
“That’s the word.”
“That’s a word. You had about four more and you gave him one.” She leaned against the doorframe with her arms folded, in no hurry at all. “I’m not asking what the others are.”
“Then what are you asking.”
“Whether you’ve worked out what it costs to be the only one holding it.” She let that sit for a second. “Because I have. I held one for six years before I told you about the book, and I can tell you the exact week it stopped being a secret and started being a weight.”
I turned the tap off.
“If I tell you, it becomes yours as well.”
“Yes,” Lisa said. “That’s rather the offer.”
She didn’t push it after that. She took the cup out of my hand, dried it, put it in the wrong cupboard on purpose, and went to bed.
She is right, you know.
“I know.”
I am not going to say anything else about it tonight. I merely wanted it on the record that I noticed before you did.
✦ ✦ ✦
I lay down on my bare mattress and stared at the dark ceiling.
An organisation confident enough to introduce itself to the people it meant to kill. A shoulder that wouldn’t heal on Doyle’s own schedule, in Doyle’s own city, close enough to smell his cigarette smoke if the wind turned right.
Nox’s scars, and a two-word answer that told me nothing except that he’d decided I didn’t get to know yet.
And a lie of my own now sitting in Doyle’s file, filed right next to his, in the same drawer marked things I’m not ready to say out loud.
I hadn’t decided to lie to him. It had simply been easier than the alternative, as most lies are, right up until they aren’t.
You are still awake.
“Just thinking.”
About the lie, or about the scars?
“Both.”
Sleep. Whatever tomorrow decides to be, it will not wait for you to be tired.
I closed my eyes.