CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  -How Many Deaths Until It Sticks

  I reached the wall. The gap was narrow, lower than my shoulder. Mud crumbled under my hands as I dug in my fingers and dragged myself up. The shackle at my ankle clinked. Iron scraped wood.

  For a heartbeat I thought I’d wedge there, too big for the space. I bared my teeth and forced my body through. Splinters raked my back, tearing my shirt. Wood bit into skin, leaving long, burning lines as I shoved myself out.

  The outer ditch opened before me, a wide, dark cut in the ground. Ice covered the top in a thin, cloudy layer. Broken crates and an old cart wheel jutted from the frozen, filthy water. Beyond that, the land sloped down toward the river. Reeds stood tall, crusted white at the tips.

  I didn’t hesitate. I jumped. The fall stole my breath. I crashed through the skin of ice, shards slicing my shins, and plunged into water so cold it shocked a wordless sound out of me. It came up to my chest. My limbs went numb in a heartbeat. I kicked anyway.

  My feet slid on mud and hidden debris. The iron links snagged on something; I jerked my leg and felt rust give way with a grinding scrape. I pushed forward, teeth clenched so hard my jaw creaked.

  “Runaway!” a voice bellowed above. “In the ditch!”

  Of course they’d seen him. There was never as much shadow as that me hoped for.

  Something cold tapped against my chest, once, in time with my pulse. I clawed my way to the far side of the ditch, fingers digging into the frozen bank. Nails tore. Blood welled and washed away at once. I hauled myself up onto the outer slope, water streaming from my clothes.

  An arrow hissed past my ear and vanished into the reeds. Another thudded into the mud by my hand, quivering. I scrambled sideways rather than straight away, slipping, sliding. If I bolted in a line, they could sight me like a rabbit. If I stayed too close to the wall, they could send men after me. I needed cover. Something to break the line of sight.

  The broken cart wheel at the ditch’s edge caught my eye. I snatched it up. The wood was half-rotten but the rim held. I dragged it with me, angling it between my back and the fort. A third arrow struck, burying itself in the wheel’s rim with a dull, heavy thump. The impact jarred my arms. I almost laughed. Almost.

  My lungs burned from the cold air. My clothes clung to me, heavy with water. Each step on the frozen ground was a battle not to fall. The chain on my ankle smacked my skin, already numb, already bruised.

  “Shoot him!” someone yelled. “Before he reaches the reeds!”

  Too late. I hit the first line of tall, dead stalks and plunged in. They brushed my shoulders and face, cutting my cheeks with papery edges. The sound of the fort dropped away, muffled.

  I dropped the cart wheel and crouched, panting steam. The reeds hid me, but they were also a trap. If patrols came along the ditch in force, they would sweep through here. If I tried to push straight to the river, I might break through thin ice and be swept under.

  I needed distance first. A curve. I turned and began to move parallel to the wall, keeping low, letting the reeds hide me. Each step squelched. The mud here never froze entirely; the river kept it soft. My toes went from cold to nothing at all. I couldn’t feel where I placed my feet. I stumbled, caught myself on a clump of roots, moved on.

  Behind me, shouts blurred. Dogs barked, high, furious notes. Men cursed about bites and torn sleeves. The overseer’s voice cut through the noise, harsh as a whip.

  “Leave the runaway,” he roared. “Secure the yard. I’ll deal with him if he lives past the night.”

  They wouldn’t chase him far, then. Not yet. Watching that version of me slog through the reeds, a different fear crept in, a sliver sharp enough to cut. If I didn’t die quickly this time, what would Aldac? do? Would it grow bored and cut the thread entirely? The thought unsettled me more than the fear had when I’d first run it. I gritted my teeth. There was no point wondering. I had chosen. Run again, die again, until something changed. I kept going.

  The reeds thinned as the land curved away from the fort. The gray shape of the wall dropped behind me, vanishing in the mist that hugged the river. Ahead, the ground dipped into a shallow hollow and rose again, a low hill dotted with scrub.

  If I could reach that hill, hide in its folds until full dark, I might find a way to slip along the river and vanish into the countryside. Villages lay out there; I’d glimpsed them from the grain barges. Smoke columns, distant. Lights at night. People who didn’t yet know my face. That had been the shape of the hope in his chest.

  I took another step. The iron links on my ankle snagged. I jerked without thinking. Something under the mud held firm. The iron bit my skin, scraping already raw flesh. I staggered, arms windmilling, and went down on my knees with a splash of half-frozen water. Pain flared as my kneecap hit a buried stone. I swallowed a cry.

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  Here the outer ditch widened into a shallow pool where melted snow and waste from the fort met a narrow side-channel of the river. A thin skin of ice floated on top, reeds hiding the place where the bottom suddenly dropped away. The reeds around me whispered.

  I clawed at my ankle, fingers numb and clumsy. The chain had caught on a hidden root or buried plank; I couldn’t see through the cloudy water. I tried to feel my way along the iron links, but my fingers might as well have been wrapped in wool.

  “Please,” I breathed, not sure if I was speaking to the root or the chain or something else entirely.

  The chain didn’t care. Nothing here ever did. I yanked harder. Metal grated. Skin tore. Warmth slicked my leg. Something gave. For a heartbeat I thought I’d freed myself.

  And the world shifted. I hadn’t heard anything over the rush of blood in my ears and the distant echo of shouts from the fort. I hadn’t seen the thin line in the reeds where the pool spilled into the deeper channel, the water sliding a little faster. I only realized the river had crept under me when the ground vanished. The current yanked my legs out from under me. It felt like the dog had felt: pulled where strength didn’t matter.

  I plunged sideways into deeper water, arms flailing. Cold swallowed me whole. The world narrowed to pressure and black water, and the shock of it stole every breath. I opened my mouth on a scream and drank the river instead. The current spun me. The ankle chain dragged, now a weight that wanted to pull me under and keep me there. I thrashed, instincts clawing against reason, hands grasping at nothing. A root brushed my fingers. I snatched at it, nails breaking as I caught hold. For a moment my body swung in the current like a rag doll.

  For a heartbeat everything wavered, like someone had smeared my memory with a dirty thumb.

  [Warning: Unauthorized observer detected.]

  [Source: First Passage.]

  [Attempting to restore First Passage record.]

  [Error: First Passage cannot be found.]

  [Error: Intrusion.]

  The world snapped back into place.

  My lungs screamed. Need burned hot behind my eyes. I tried to haul myself up, but the chain dragged me down at the same time. The root creaked in the water’s pull. Images flashed through my skull. The punishment post. The granary ladder. Aldac?’s eyes in the gray sky of the Between. Black grass that didn’t move.

  That me refused boots, refused knives, refused rope. Fine. The river could have him instead. Bared his teeth in the water and let go of the root. The current grabbed at him and pulled. I felt us tumble, bump against something hard, a sharp crack along my temple. Light exploded and shrank to a single point.

  Green. The world folded in. Bell.

  I woke choking. The barracks ceiling hung above me, blurred by wet in my eyes. Straw scratched my neck. Boys swore and shoved at me.

  “Stop kicking, rat.”

  “You dreaming about pigs again?”

  One of the voices was the same thin one that had hissed my number the night before, the same one that had asked if I was all right by the granary door. Number forty-eight.

  The cough in the far corner hacked on and on, just as it had before. Yet the morning felt thinner, like some small, sharp sound that should’ve been there was missing.

  My clothes were dry. My skin was cold from the air, not from river water. My ankle burned with the familiar weight of the iron ring. For a moment, I wondered why the dark place hadn’t taken me again. The thought slid away. There were more immediate things to survive.

  My chest heaved. I rolled onto my side and retched onto the packed earth. Nothing came up. My stomach was empty. Still my body tried, muscles clenching until my ribs hurt. It felt wrong to wake up whole.

  No one offered help. They only moved away so I didn’t splash their bedding. I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand.

  The bell outside clanged again, hollow and impatient.

  “The bell’s early today,” someone muttered again. “Means the overseer woke up angry.”

  I’d heard those words before. Same tone. Same tired resentment.

  “Up, rats. Work waits. Move or no porridge.”

  The words dropped into place. They’d become the thing my days turned on. I pushed myself to sitting. My hands shook. I pressed them against my thighs until they stilled. My whole body felt bruised, each death leaving something behind in me.

  I closed my eyes and touched the jade-moon wolf. It burned against my palm. Death by boots. Death by water. None of them had stuck.

  How many more would it take? The thought should’ve broken me. A lifetime of dying in one cage. Forever. Instead something in my chest turned over and bared its teeth. The fort wasn’t forever. The men who owned me weren’t gods. They bled. I’d seen it. Felt it on my skin. Their bones broke. Their eyes could be gouged. Their throats could be cut. They could drown as easily as I had.

  I was small. Thin. Shackled. I was also the only soul in this place who’d seen himself die twice and kept going. That had to mean something.

  I swung my legs off the plank and stood. My feet met cold earth. Chains clinked. Boys shuffled toward the door, muttering. Outside, the day waited, exactly as it had the last two times. The ground felt a fraction less sharp beneath my soles. I braced for the usual bite of frost, the ache I remembered from the last time the day had started here.

  Something shifted behind my eyes, quick and clean, the same strange pressure I now knew wasn’t my own.

  [Skill acquired: Novice Dead Cold.]

  [Death comes in many shapes. Cold is one of them.]

  The words flickered through my mind and were gone. My toes still stung, but the cold stopped short of the bone this time. I remembered water closing over my head, the way it had chewed straight through me, and understood in a dull, distant way that whatever was changing me had counted that as a lesson too. Apparently drowning counted for something.

  Somewhere in the press of bodies, the same thin voice muttered. I didn’t know the boy’s name. I knew the number stamped into the iron at his ankle: forty-eight.

  The pattern held. For now. I’d learn it. Not to endure it, but to break it. I’d learn it until I could see every knot in the thread. Then I’d pull. Hard. Until something finally snapped that wasn’t my neck.

  I stepped into the yard with the others, head low, eyes open. This First Passage was supposed to stop here. Last time, those strange letters had gone dark right before I died. So why didn’t they now?

  Somewhere far away and very near, in a place of black grass under a gray sky, something that watched knots smiled without a mouth. I didn’t know it was there, but I could feel its amusement.

  The bell finished its echo.

  And I began again.