Chapter 50: Beyond Every Safe Zone
Chapter 50: Beyond Every Safe Zone
The white light spat the two of them out onto a hillside covered in wild grass, then went out as though it had never existed.
Ethan was the one who fell first. His body had run down to its last drop of strength, after the ruins, after the confrontation at the anchor point, after the transfer through some unfamiliar energy that even Damien hadn’t known where it would take him. He lay on his back on the carpet of grass, his chest heaving, every breath he drew in raw as swallowing sand, and he gazed up at a sky he had never seen in his whole life.
It wasn’t the dreary gray sky of the Anomalous Coordinate. Nor the sky of Safe Zone Number Seven, where there was always the faint glow of a protective field stretched overhead like an invisible dome, the kind of dome people lived beneath so long they forgot it existed.
The sky here was crystal clear. Deep and high. And wild to a degree that made him, for the first time in days, feel small.
Beyond every safe zone. Damien had said as much. A place that was on no map of humanity.
"Ethan." Laira dropped to her knees beside him, her voice raw. Her torn wing drooped to one side, and she herself was trembling with exhaustion, but she still forced a hand beneath his head to lift it off the cold ground. "Can you still get up?"
"Give me a minute." He squeezed his eyes shut, his throat so dry every word had to be forced out. "Just a minute."
The wind swept across the hillside, carrying the smell of fresh damp grass. And mixed within it, faint but unmistakable, was another smell.
The smell of cooking smoke.
Ethan opened his eyes.
Someone lived here.
...
He forced himself to sit up, leaning back against Laira, and looked down at the valley below the foot of the hill.
Nestled between two gently sloping hillsides was a village.
From the very first moment, Ethan knew this wasn’t a human settlement, though he couldn’t explain how he knew. The low, squat houses, built from boulders and driftwood, were arranged in a circle around an empty patch of bare earth in the middle. There were little vegetable beds. There was smoke rising from a few chimneys. There was every sign of a community that had put down roots in this place a very long time ago.
Only, the figures moving about between those rooftops weren’t people.
Across the distance, Ethan saw a tall, gaunt creature, its skin a pale jade green, laboring along under two buckets of water balanced on a pole. Beside it, something that looked like a wolf standing upright on two legs, wearing a cloak patched over and over, was climbing up to repair a section of roof that had been torn off. Farther still, a little girl with curving horns and oversized eyes was giggling, playing tag with some other children whose shapes were even stranger than her own.
Ethan had met enough kinds of Partner in his life to be unable to mistake it.
This entire village, from end to end, was Partners.
"Laira," he said, dropping his voice almost to a whisper. "Do you see?"
Laira nodded, very slowly. Her red-orange eyes traveled from one rooftop to the next, and rising within them was something Ethan rarely saw in her, a quiet, painful recognition, as if she were looking into a mirror reflecting the fate she had nearly borne herself.
"They’re like me," she said softly. "Every one of them."
...
They had no time to discuss it further.
Because someone was already standing only ten paces from them, and what made the back of Ethan’s neck go cold was that he hadn’t heard that person approach at all.
It was a creature bearing the shape of a woman, but her skin glowed with the color of the moon, soft and dim. In place of hair, threads fine as silk flowed down her back, drifting faintly though there wasn’t a breath of wind. Her eyes had no irises, only two pools of liquid silver, strangely gentle. And at both temples, where ears should have been, grew two delicate structures spread wide like butterfly wings, trembling faintly, both aimed toward him.
She was listening.
Not listening with her ears. Ethan sensed that clearly. She was listening to something deeper than sound, something that lay beneath flesh and skin.
Laira sprang up to shield Ethan, her palm already kindling fire by reflex, though she was so drained that the red flame only flickered like a match about to burn out.
The moonlike woman didn’t flinch at all before the flame. She only tilted her head to one side, the butterfly wings at her temples trembling more gently, then looked up straight at Ethan with those calm silver eyes.
"You don’t carry death with you," she said. Her voice was weightless, like a breath blown into the air.
Ethan froze. "What did you say?"
"I can hear it." She stepped forward, one pace, unhurried, both hands held out to her sides so he could see she hid no weapon. "Every creature that sets foot near this village carries something in its chest. Killing intent. Calculation. Hunger. I hear all of it, before they even have the chance to act."
Her silver eyes came to rest on him, gentle yet piercing. "But you have none of those. You carry only wounds. And exhaustion. Very, very much exhaustion."
Laira still didn’t lower the flame. "Who are you?" she asked, her voice wary.
"My name is Vesna." She turned to look at Laira, and as she did, her voice softened entirely, as if she had just recognized something. "And you, sister, you’re carrying a pain behind your back. One wing. I hear it groan every time you move."
Laira went rigid.
No one, except Ethan, had ever noticed how much her wing hurt. She hid it very carefully. She always hid it, even when every beat of the wing was like tearing flesh.
And yet this creature simply stood there, and heard it.
The flame in Laira’s hand wavered faintly.
...
Vesna led the two of them down to the village.
She walked ahead, her steps deliberately slow, so the two exhausted ones behind could keep up. Along the path leading down into the valley, she spoke, in the even, level voice of someone who had recounted this story too many times, to too many wanderers who had lost their way and found their way here.
"This place has no name on any map," she said. "We call it Springtide Village ourselves. Not because there’s spring here." The corner of her mouth curved up faintly, a wan smile that didn’t reach her eyes. "But because here, at least, nothing worse can happen anymore. We’ve hit the bottom already. And when you’re at the bottom, the only thing left to do is dream of some spring or other."
"You’re Partners," Ethan said. It wasn’t a question.
"Abandoned Partners." Vesna didn’t turn her head, her gaze still fixed ahead. "Every single creature in this village was once summoned out of a Blind Box by an Awakened. And every single creature here, for one reason or another, was cast off by that very person."
She stopped at the edge of the village, then turned to look at him, her silver eyes as still as the surface of a lake.
"Some were abandoned for being too weak. Some for low grade. Some for eating up too many resources to feed. And some, simply because their master found a better Partner." Her voice was still gentle, but beneath that gentleness was something heavy, sunk deep.
"You know, when an Awakened no longer needs a Partner, they don’t kill it. Killing a Partner would inflict backlash on themselves. So they choose the easier way. They simply sever the link, then leave us behind alone. Usually in wild places like this, outside the safe zones, where they’re certain we’ll quietly wither and die."
"But you didn’t die," Ethan said.
"No." A real smile, however fragile, flickered across Vesna’s moonlike face. "We found each other. And then we lived. Only..."
She left the sentence hanging.
"Only what?" Ethan asked.
"Only we can’t grow stronger anymore." She lifted her eyes toward the village, where the Partners were quietly living out their lives.
"A Partner needs a link with an Awakened in order to absorb energy, in order to evolve. Once that link is severed, that ability vanishes along with it. We can live. We can be free. But we’re frozen, permanently, at the exact level we were at when we were left behind."
She paused a beat. "A village full of creatures with no tomorrow."
She said that without any bitterness. Only weariness. Like a truth accepted so long ago that it no longer had the power to hurt her.
Ethan looked at the village once more, and this time he looked at it with different eyes.
Free, but with no future.
A gentle place of exile.