Chapter 40: Day 1

The first thing he knew was that his skin was on fire.

Burning would have been simpler. This felt as if every inch of his skin had been peeled off, hammered flat on an anvil, and put back on while it was still hot. It pulled tight over his ribs and prickled along his arms and legs like a thousand tiny needles going in and out. When he tried to move his fingers, the skin on his knuckles creaked, actually creaked, like old leather.

He lay there breathing and waited for it to stop, and it kept going. After a while he understood that it wasn’t going to stop any time soon, and that lying on his back wasn’t helping.

Finally, he opened his eyes.

He was lying on sand, and it was grey. It wasn’t the white sand of the arena or the yellow sand of the river beaches in the lower city, but grey like ash, fine and cold and very dry. It stretched away from him on both sides, a long empty shore curving into the dark.

Beyond the shore there was water, black and perfectly flat, with no waves and no sound. The water simply lay there like polished stone, going out and out until the darkness swallowed it. He watched it for some time and never saw it move.

Above him, where the sky should have been, there was only dark, high and endless. But the dark had things in it. Small soft lights, pale blue and pale green and the size of his fist, were floating slowly through the air high overhead. They pulsed gently, brighter and dimmer, like something breathing. When one drifted lower he saw that it had a body, a thin clear bell like a jellyfish with long glowing threads trailing beneath it. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, drifting across the dark in slow, silent herds, and their faint light was the only light there was.

’The Abyss. I’m at the bottom of the actual Abyss. Mira is going to kill me.’

The thought nearly made him laugh, and then it nearly made him do something else, so he stopped thinking it.

He sat up slowly while his skin screamed, ignored it, and took stock of what he had.

His clothes were torn but mostly whole, and his boots were still on. The knife was at his belt, the one he had carried since the lower city, with a nick in the blade from the Vat Mother. The soldier’s sword was back in his room under the mattress, where he had left it on the morning of the final. He had brought nothing into the arena except a sword case, and he had dropped that.

He had no food, no water, and no light of his own.

He looked at his hands. In the faint blue light of the drifting jellies his skin looked wrong, paler than it should be and slightly shiny, like polished wood. He pressed the point of his knife against the back of his left hand, gently at first, then less gently.

The point dented his skin like thick leather and stopped there. When he took it away there was a small white mark and no blood at all.

A window opened in front of him.

[Rank D: Skin Tempering.][Progress: 3%.][Host’s body is being reforged. This process will continue until complete.]

Three percent! And it already felt like this.

He remembered Crane in the basement classroom, saying it in his bored voice. It isn’t comfortable. Some people don’t survive it.

Then another window opened beneath the first. It was longer than any window he’d seen, and divided into lines.

[Host has reached Rank D.][Levels no longer apply. Body Tempering begins.][Physical attributes may now be measured.][Strength: 92][Agility: 148][Endurance: 104][Perception: 171][Essence: 233][Will: 206]

He stared blankly at the numbers.

Sir Bram, standing in front of the Measure in the Great Hall, had shown fourteen hundred strength. The Rank D students had shown a few hundred in each line. Aren had always known he was weak, but seeing it written down was a different kind of knowing.

He looked again, more carefully this time, and the picture slowly changed.

His strength was low, obviously. He had never trained his body properly in his life. But his perception was higher than most of the Rank D students he’d seen measured, after all those weeks of watching people and learning to see the weak side and the bad habit. His agility came from the Moonlit Step. His essence was the highest of all, higher than he would ever have guessed. And then there was his will.

He had no idea what will was, really. He supposed it was whatever had kept him walking down the hill to the healer house every night, and whatever had made him stand behind a rail while Vivienne fell.

’Badly balanced. But I’ve started with worse portfolios.’

There was one more window, small and plain, at the bottom.

[Rank D reached. Second Class Skill unlocked.][Write-Off (Lv. 1).][Once per day, the Host may reduce a wound already received to zero.][The wound occurred. Its value is erased.][Cost: The Host loses one memory. The Host does not choose which.]

[Lv. 1: Wounds.][Lv. 2: ???][Lv. 3: ???]

[Every debt can be written off. Every debt has a price.]

He went over that one several times, very slowly.

He knew the word from his old life. A write-off was what you did with a debt that would never be paid. You drew a line through it and it was gone, as if it had never been owed.

Once a day, he could draw a line through a wound. And every time he did, he’d lose something without ever knowing what it was.

He closed the window quickly, because he didn’t want to look at it anymore.

The last thing he checked was the one he was most afraid of.

[Investment Board.][Hostile individuals within range: none.][Anchors within range: none.][Anchors: Vivienne Ashgrave (Primary), Rook. Out of range.][Anchor slots: 2/3.]

None.

He sat on the grey sand and looked at that word. Nobody down here hated him. Nobody down here even knew he existed. There was nobody to invest in, nobody to help and nobody to grow. For the first time since the rain in the courtyard of Highcrest, the System that had made him strong had nothing to give him.

Rank D had opened a third slot for him, and there was no one in the whole Abyss to put in it.

His left side was cold.

He had noticed it when he woke, under the burning of his skin, and had deliberately not let himself think about it. He thought about it now. It was a deep, quiet cold along the long scar from his ribs to his hip, like snow in an empty room. When he pressed his hand against it through his torn shirt it didn’t hurt. It felt like pressing on the lid of a box.

A very small window appeared in the corner of his vision.

[Familiar of Nothing: resting.][It is hungry.]

He took his hand away carefully.

"What do you eat?" he asked it quietly. His voice sounded strange on the empty shore, thin and much too loud.

Nothing answered. The cold under the scar stayed exactly where it was.

’A pet that won’t tell me what it eats.’

He wanted to keep count of the days. He knew enough about being lost to know they would blur if he didn’t. But marks on a stone would tell anything that could read them that someone was down here, and that someone was alone. He looked up and down the shore. There were no footprints in the grey sand except his own, and nothing moved but the jellies.

He decided to risk it, and to choose the stone very carefully.

He walked along the shore until he found one, a flat grey rock as big as a door, standing alone at the edge of the black water. He went around to the side that faced the sea, where nothing walking along the shore would see it, knelt, and scratched a small cross into the stone with the point of his knife. Underneath it, in small careful letters, he wrote what he knew.

DAY 1. RANK D. NO FOOD. NO WATER.

Then he stood up and looked along the dark shore, curving away in both directions under the slow herds of glowing jellies.

No food, no water, no weapon and no light, and nobody up there knew he was alive.

’Every market has a bottom. This one’s mine.’

He picked a direction and started walking.