Hospitals run on a rhythm, and by the fifth day I knew every beat of it.
Check-ups at six. Breakfast I didn’t taste at eight. The long silence until Lisa arrived at ten with coffee she wasn’t supposed to bring in, drinking half of it herself.
The walk to the window and back was my whole physical achievement for the day. Twelve steps each way. I did it leaning on the drip stand like a spear, and Lisa walked half a pace behind me the entire time without touching my arm once.
She was ready to, every step. That was the part I made myself not mind.
“You’re listing left,” she said, on day five’s second expedition.
“The floor is uneven.”
“The floor is a hospital floor. It’s the most even surface in Britain.” She pulled the chair out for me at the window anyway. “Sit down before your body files a complaint.”
The body had filed several.
The ribs were knitting. The arm was knitting. Those were ordinary injuries doing ordinary things, and the doctors were happy with them for that exact reason.
The core was the other thing.
I had reached for Umbra on the second night out of habit, reaching for a light switch in my own home. What answered felt like dragging my hand across broken glass on the inside of my chest.
A panel of pale light unfolded before I had even finished flinching.
[ Don’t. ]
[ The vessel’s core is cracked, and before you panic about it, it is not broken. Cracked. There is a difference, and the difference is you get to keep it if you stop poking it. ]
“How long,” I whispered to the dark ward.
[ Longer if you keep asking. Small draws only. Healing, and nothing else. If you try anything funny before I clear you, I will let it hurt as much as it wants to as a teaching aid. ]
Listen to the spirit.
Azazel said, and there was no joke anywhere in him.
I have felt this frame from the inside. It is a very good frame. It is not an infinite one. I learned that in the clearing, at your expense, and I do not intend to learn it twice.
[ While I have your attention and you are not physically able to leave, we are going to talk about the takeover. ]
“It saved my life.”
[ It did. I wanted that said out loud before I ruin it for you. ]
[ When he takes the frame completely, the frame cannot hold what he is at the stage you are currently at. So it stops trying. It drags itself up to his instead. ]
[ For as long as he is driving, this body runs one full evolution above where it has actually got to. It is not a boost and it is not borrowed. The body is operating at a stage it has not earned and has no structure for. ]
“One full what.”
[ Evolution. ]
“That isn’t a word you’ve used before.”
[ It is a word I am using now, and it is not the conversation we are having today. Ask me again when you can stand up without help and I will draw you a diagram. ]
“That’s the arm.”
[ That is the arm. And the ribs, and the core, and four days on your back while I did structural work I do not enjoy discussing. A frame running a stage above itself pays the difference on the way down. Every time. ]
[ So. Rarely. ]
“Define rarely.”
[ Less often than you are going to want to. ]
It is a fair account.
“You knew.”
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I knew the frame was paying for something. I did not know the cost.
A beat.
I would have used it again in that clearing, and I am not apologizing for it. I am telling you the price is real so that you stop treating it as mine.
The panel stayed up a moment longer than it needed to.
[ One more thing, and then I am going to sleep for a week. The body remembers what it was made to be. Even after it goes back to being what it is. ]
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I put it where I put everything I couldn’t use yet.
That was the closest he had come to an apology since the woods. I let it count as one.
So the days went by. Twelve steps, the window, twelve steps back. Small draws, threading warmth along the cracked ribs, a teaspoon at a time from a well I used to pour.
Nox appeared on the sixth morning without the door seeming to open, carrying a battered laptop under one arm.
He set it on the rolling tray.
“You stare at the ceiling like it insulted you,” he said. “Fix that. It’s starting to affect morale.”
“Whose morale?”
“Mine. I sit in that corridor.” He flipped the laptop open. Stickers sat half-peeled on the lid. “It’s old. It runs. The password is taped underneath, which Lisa says defeats the purpose of a password. She’s right, so don’t tell her.”
He was gone again before I had finished saying thanks. He always left a room a moment ahead of any gratitude aimed at it.
I stared at the login screen for a long time.
What is it?
“It’s nothing. It’s a game.”
You have not made that face about nothing once since I have known you.
He wasn’t wrong. He usually wasn’t, which stayed annoying.
The Tower of Genesis still existed. That was the first small shock. A tower I had spent half my old life climbing was still standing while I died and came back as someone else. The client downloaded on hospital Wi-Fi at a pace that would have embarrassed a glacier.
The login screen asked for a name I hadn’t typed in three years.
C-REAL.
My hands remembered the password before I did.
The account loaded. Floor ninety-one, where I had left it. Three years of dust sat on a record nobody had taken down.
Correction. Someone had taken it down.
The leaderboard sat where it always sat. The name at the top of it was VANTA, and next to the name was a floor number that would have made the old me put a fist through a wall. Ninety-four.
Explain this tower. Azazel leaned in from wherever he leaned from. Why are the floors numbered? Who lives in it? Why is that name above yours?
“Nobody lives in it. You climb it. Each floor is a puzzle that’s also a fight, and the fight is also a puzzle. The fastest clean climb holds the record.”
And the name above yours?
“The only climber who ever kept pace with me.” I looked at the number for a while. “Then I stopped logging in, and they kept climbing.”
So they won against nobody. Azazel considered that. In Elysia we would not count such a victory.
“Neither would they, apparently,” I said.
A message request had just arrived, followed by four more in the time it took me to open the first.
VANTA: no
VANTA: no way
VANTA: three years. THREE YEARS
VANTA: you don’t get to just log in like nothing happened. where were you
VANTA: answer me or block me. pick one. coward
I sat looking at the screen with something moving in my chest that the ribs couldn’t account for.
Nobody from the old life knew I was alive. A whole world had held a funeral for a name and moved on.
Yet one anonymous stranger at the top of a tower had noticed the silence, counted it, and grown angry on my behalf without ever knowing my face.
C-REAL: hands got wrecked. long story. couldn’t play
VANTA: for three years??
C-REAL: for three years
VANTA: what happened to your hands
C-REAL: bad accident at work
VANTA: what work breaks somebody’s hands for three years
C-REAL: the kind you don’t go back to
There was a pause, long enough that I thought they had gone.
VANTA: 94 means nothing btw
VANTA: everyone said i took your record. i didn’t take anything. you left it on the floor. it isn’t a win if the other person doesn’t show up
VANTA: so get your hands fixed and climb. i beat you at full strength and THEN it counts
VANTA: that isn’t a request
I like this VANTA, Azazel announced. They have the correct attitude toward you. Also toward victory. Are all the climbers in this tower like this?
“No,” I said. “There was only ever one like this.”
C-REAL: deal. it will be a while. hands are still healing
VANTA: i have waited three years. i can wait a while
VANTA: don’t sandbag when it happens. i will know
C-REAL: you would know
VANTA: obviously. i know how you climb better than anyone alive. big fan of your floor ninety one clear
I closed the laptop lid slowly.
You are making the door face again.
“I know.”
Good doors, or bad?
“One good one,” I said. “I had forgotten there were any left.”
The evening came, and I did the twelve steps twice more. The tower had reminded me what a climb was for.
At the window, I did the other thing I had started doing with the quiet hours. The Association ran a public notices feed, and the missing-persons section updated every evening at six.
I read it line by line, hunting the change, looking for the pattern underneath.
Colt had no poster and no feed entry. Nothing in the record of the Zodiac Gate beyond a line item marked deceased.
I had been the only person on this side of the world who knew that line was a lie.
He knew the mask, Azazel said.
“He knew the mask,” I said to the glass. My own face came back at me off it, thinner than a rebuild had any right to look.
He knew what a scorpion mask meant. He did not enjoy knowing it, and he answered you anyway. A beat. I have been turning that over ever since. He gave it away for nothing, which is not what men like him do.
“He gave it to you. Not to me.”
Yes. Azazel didn’t decorate it. I have not decided yet whether that ought to worry us.
Two new names appeared on the feed tonight. Neither fitted. Both would matter enormously to someone, and neither was the one I was looking for, because the one I was looking for wasn’t on any list at all.
We will find the boy. Quietly. He said it as he said very few things, with nothing underneath it but itself.
“I know.”
When the frame is mended, and not one hour before. He would not be helped by a rescuer who arrives broken.
“I know that too.”
Lisa came at seven with coffee. Nox came at eight and took the laptop’s empty chair like he had never given anything away in his life.
Doyle called at nine to say the paperwork would spring me in a few days, and to sleep, and to stop making the nurses nervous by watching the door.
I slept better than I had all week.