I woke on my back with a fern tickling my ear and a pain behind my eyes, as though someone had parked a truck on my head.
For a while I lay still and took inventory, the way I do at work after a bad audit. Hands: two. Knee: complaining. Hood: still up. Doll: clutched under my chin, her hard little shoulder having pressed a dent into my jaw. Light: slanting low and gold through the canopy, which meant hours had gone by. Sound: none.
That last one was the strange part. The forest had been noisy when I arrived. There had been birdsong, the creak of branches, insects ticking in the moss. Now there was only a thin ringing in my ears and the sound of my own breathing.
I sat up slowly. My stomach rolled, and I waited for it to finish its opinion. Then I looked around.
In every direction, as far as I could see, the ferns had gone gray. Not wilted. Gray, brittle, silvered, like they had been hit by frost in the middle of summer. Beetles lay on their backs in the moss with their legs folded. A small brown bird lay at the foot of a tree with its beak slightly open and not a mark on it. Further off, a long track of crushed ferns ran through the trees and away, the way a river leaves a mark across a field.
I stared at the dead bird for a long time.
I had been several trees away. The skeleton had not looked at me. It had not slowed down. It had walked by like a man crossing a parking lot, and every living thing in that whole stretch of forest had simply stopped.
The first thing I did was check the doll, because I am who I am.
The putty had cured while I lay there. I tilted her hip carefully, then less carefully, and it held. The joint moved smoothly and stopped where it should. That small warmth came again in my chest, quieter this time, as though it did not want to be noticed.
"Good," I said to her. My voice came out as a croak. "That's one of us."
Then the air in front of me lit up, as if the Registry had been waiting politely for me to recover.
Deed recorded: Survived an overwhelming presence (Skeleton, Lv. 56).
Experience gained: 0 XP
I read it three times.
"Zero?" I said. "I nearly died. I vomited in my own mouth. I would call that a deed."
The letters sat there. They did not reply, because they never did. I thanked them anyway, out of habit, and felt faintly stupid.
But the first line stayed with me. Survived an overwhelming presence. The Registry did not seem to think it was dramatic. It had written down the fact the way a bank writes down a withdrawal.
I am an accounts receivable clerk. When I do not understand a number, I find something to compare it to. So I sat in the gray ferns and did it properly.
The slime had been Level 1. I had been Level 1. One creature of exactly my level, a wobbling blue pudding the size of a beach ball, had nearly dissolved my arm and had needed a pair of pliers and a great deal of luck to kill. That was what equal looked like.
The skeleton was Level 56.
I tried to work out the ratio and gave up, because the units would not hold. It was not a stronger slime. It was not fifty-six times as dangerous. Whatever fifty-six meant, it was somewhere I could not follow, the way a number on a spreadsheet stops meaning anything once it has too many zeroes. A creature that high up did not need to fight me. It did not even need to notice me. It could walk past, and I would lie in the moss and stop working.
The Registry had said that most beings did not reach Level 10. I had assumed it was a statistic. Looking at the dead bird, I began to understand that it was a warning.
I was alive because I had been far enough away, and because the thing had been looking somewhere else. That was all. There was no skill in it, and no cleverness. Out of everything in this forest, I was a Level 2 clerk with a doll, and it had simply been kind enough to look the other way.
My hands started shaking again. I put the doll in my lap and held on to her until they stopped.
When I finally trusted my legs, I made a list. I always do. It is the only form of courage I am any good at.
1. Move away from that track. The skeleton had been walking somewhere, and I had no way of knowing whether it walked in circles.
2. Shelter. The light was going, and I had seen what a single night in this forest sounded like.
3. Water. I had not had a drink since a cup of tea that was now in another universe.
4. Food. Last, only because I could survive a few days without it, and I had already been wrong about how much I could survive.
I tucked my tool roll under one arm, picked up the doll in the other, and set off, taking care to walk perpendicular to the crushed ferns and as far from them as I could manage.
The gray patch ended after about a hundred paces. I noticed it the way you notice a sound after it stops. One step the ferns were silver, and the next they were green, and a beetle was walking across a leaf as if nothing had happened. A bird called somewhere above me. I nearly wept.
After that I followed the ground downhill, on the theory that water goes the same way I do, and the theory proved correct. Twenty minutes later I heard it: a thin, bright trickle, nearly a creek, running over mossy stones in a cut between two hills.
I knelt and drank from my cupped hands. It was cold and tasted of iron and leaves. I have since learned that the Registry does not keep track of dysentery, and I did not think of that then. I only drank, and drank, and I was alive.
The shelter took the last of the light.
I will not call it a good shelter. It was a lean-to of dead branches propped against a fallen trunk, lashed together with armature wire from my spool, roofed with moss and bark and the sleeves of my hoodie when I realized I needed a better angle for the rain. I was proud of the wire work, at least. My hands knew how to bind things. They had been doing it for thirty years on much smaller scales.
When it was done I crawled inside, with the knife beside me and the tool roll under my head. Then I propped the doll in the mouth of the lean-to, facing out, sitting upright against a stone.
"You're on watch," I told her.
She regarded the dark forest with her serene painted face. She did not seem worried at all. I found that this helped.
I lay there for a long time, listening. The creek murmured. Something clicked in the trees, and something else answered it. Far off, a long way beyond hearing, I imagined a skeleton in a rusted breastplate still walking through the ferns, going nowhere in particular, and leaving a silver track behind it.
Tomorrow, I decided, I would find food. Tomorrow I would also learn what else lived in these woods.
I should have wished harder for the first, and a great deal less for the second.