Chapter 33: The N/S

Chapter 33

Somewhere inside the Animus, a man pounded up the stairs on feet that felt like lead. He burst through the door, breath heaving, eyes wide. “Doctor!” he barked, clutching at the doctor’s sleeve as if the man were the only solid thing left in the world. The doctor looked up from his notes, calm like always. “There’s good news and bad news,” he said. He paused, waiting. “Give me the good news first,” the man demanded. “You’ve fathered three daughters before,” the doctor said quietly. “This time it’s a boy.” Relief washed across the man’s face and he laughed, a small, shaky sound. “That’s the best news.” “And the bad?” he asked, bracing. The doctor’s eyes hardened. “Your son has a condition. His skin will not remain as it is. It will grow darker and darker.” He searched the man’s face for comprehension and, finding none, said the name the hospital had given the affliction,half-medical, half-superstition. “He will become what our folk call a Nagro.” The word landed with the weight of a stone. The man’s smile crumpled. He sank to a chair and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes until stars swam behind the lids. “Tell me like a man,” he whispered. “Don’t cloak it in that” “He will change,” the doctor finished. “We do not yet know if it is reversible. It will change how others see him. It will change his life.” Anger flickered, then something colder, harder. The man pushed himself up. He ordered a servant,his butler,into the room with a flat, dangerous voice. “Take him. Throw him somewhere far. Do not bring shame on this house.” The butler’s face tightened, but he obeyed. He wrapped the newborn in the coarse blanket the house kept for emergencies, tucked him into a sack, and when the world still slept he carried the child to the edge of the estate. He found a copse of trees and left the sack beneath a low branch, the wind moving the leaves so the world around the baby breathed and hid him at once. It took the butler two hours to ride back. He told himself he had done what was required. Rynor would remember later,after a night of sleep that brought nothing and then a waking full of strangers,how there had been nothing at first but wind and the hush of the wood. Then people came, cloaked in long, black cloths that wrapped them like shadows. Their faces were masks; their hands were gentle. Rynor would remember only the cool of damp leaves and the quiet faces that bent over him, and a name spoken like a promise: foundling. Elsewhere, a nine-year-old stood frozen in the doorway of his family’s small kitchen, the edges of the world narrowing to the sound of his father’s voice. “What are you doing to my mother?” he cried, voice trembling. The father’s hands were on the mother’s throat. His eyes were wild, possessed by something the boy would never understand. The younger sister burst forward, trying to pry his fingers away. On the table lay an axe, its shadow long and innocent. The father grabbed the axe and in a single, terrible motion struck. The boy did not see the struggle in detail,only the sudden fall of bodies, the smell of iron and panic. Adrenaline shoved him toward the only weapon he could reach: a small kitchen knife. He stabbed at his father, a child's blind flail of fear and fury. For a moment there was silence, awful and complete. Then the father screamed,words that could have been in a language of rage and grief. He lifted the axe again, aiming not at him this time but at something more terrible. The little boy watched as his family was torn apart, as the terrible loop of violence closed on itself. When he came to, the house was a hollow shell filled with echoes. He crawled away on knees that would never again be just child-knees. He clung to the memory of one line: “You damned bastards, you all should die,” and he would learn later that the man was named Server. Days crawled by. Server did not leave the ruin. He sat among the wreckage of his life and said things the wind swallowed. Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes he sobbed. He told anyone who would listen a story dusted with terrible pride,five families he had taken, he said. He spoke of blood and a life that had been earned by his hands. Olies,the peacekeepers who wore pale badges and kept the city’s law by slow, methodical steps,found the scene. Olies 024 was the first to step through the doorway, boots crunching on broken pottery. Olies 923, weathered and hard, had been an Olies for a long time; the sight of Server’s face set old cogs into motion. “I’ve seen this one before,” Olies 923 muttered. “He moves like the sort that kills for coins.” Server’s hands trembled as he stood up. When the Olies approached, his posture changed,not from dread but from calculation. He tried to slip away, murmuring excuses, saying he needed to use the washroom. But men who have killed do not pass unnoticed among those trained to see, and an Olies who had worked the streets for years recognized the way a killer tried to make his gait ordinary. “You’re the one,” someone said. The house held its breath. “How do you know?” Olies 024 asked. “Because I saw him four years ago,” Olies 923 answered. “His face in the crowd. The way he carried himself. He’s been on my list.” They moved in. Server’s eyes darted. He had never expected to be found because he had never stopped leaving the pieces of himself scattered where he thought no one would care to look. But the Olies had patience like knives; they pried at the seams. One of them found a small poke knife tucked under a floorboard, a tool of crime. The evidence sat heavy on the table. Server tried to run. He stumbled into the yard. Olies 024 called out: “Stop! You’re under arrest for the murder of your family and other charges.” For a heartbeat the world still moved in staccato,feet, voices, the clink of metal. Then men in black and grey closed in. Server gave a sound like a laugh and something that might have been a prayer. He did not fight beyond the will to live. Back in the forest, the infant’s fate hung like a page waiting to be turned. Rynor’s memory pulled threads at random,black cloaks, rain on leaves, the damp smell of roots. He remembered, too, the sudden hush later in the Animus where some things were forgotten by design. He could not shake the sense that small tragedies collected like seeds in the world, and that from them would sprout events far larger than any single heart could understand. Olies took Server away into the slow bureaucracy of the city. The butler returned at dawn to his master’s house as if nothing had happened. And somewhere under the trees a child slept, ignorant of names and verdicts. The world closed its fist around these three small acts,abandonment, murder, and arrest,and folded them into the long, gray book of what had been done. Rynor sat up in his sudden rememberings and whispered into the dark, as if the trees themselves might answer: “Why does it always happen like this?” The wind answered with leaves, and the world went on turning.

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