Chapter 5. Rage and a Vow

The light was fading.

I lay in the wet moss and watched the steady pearlescent glow that had filled the world since my awakening slowly dim. It did not gather at the horizon the way sunlight did at home. It simply settled and drained away from every direction at once, like water leaving a bath. Above the black crowns of the trees, the sky deepened—not to black, but to a rich, ink-blue.

Stars emerged within it.

I lay on my back for a long time, unable to rise, searching for one familiar pattern. The Big Dipper. Orion's Belt. Anything my eyes could lean on the way one clings to a familiar face in a crowd.

I found nothing.

Foreign constellations stood above me, cold, orderly, and unknown. Among them hung two moons: one large and pale, its surface pitted and uneven; the other smaller and tinged with rust, trailing a little way behind like a child who had fallen back.

Two moons. Not one.

Even if some doubt had remained, that would have been enough. Home was so far away that not even its sky was visible from here.

With that realization came a simple thought. At first, I barely noticed it. Then I could not let it go.

Time passed here.

That endless noon which had pressed down on me all day was not a property of this world. It had belonged to my grief. While I came apart, the world had continued on its way. Now it calmly extinguished the day and lit the night without waiting for me to finish mourning.

It did not care about me.

Strangely, that was what began to lift me. Not at once, but it did.

Because if time was moving, then something could be done.

And doing things was what I knew.

By every reasonable rule, a night in that foreign forest should have broken me.

I lay on bare earth without fire or shelter, wearing only a torn shirt. The cold pressed down hard enough that an ordinary person's fingers would have gone numb before morning. I sat up with difficulty; every part of me had stiffened. I tore a long strip from the bottom of my shirt and wrapped it around my forearm. The three claw marks had already stopped bleeding and formed a dark crust. Even through the fog in my head, I knew the wound was closing far too quickly.

I noted it and set the question aside. It was not the problem in front of me.

Then I sat with my arms around my knees and waited for the cold to grow dangerous.

It never did.

The body that had frightened me all day was protecting me now. It held its warmth evenly and stubbornly, like a stove cooling long after the fire was gone. Beneath two alien moons, wearing a single torn shirt, I did not shiver.

As I sat there, the cold, heavy thing at the scraped-out bottom of me continued to cool and harden.

Hour by hour, through that long night, it acquired a name.

Rage.

Not the hot, muddled anger I had known before—not the kind that flared, said things it regretted, and vanished, leaving shame behind. This was made of something else. Cold. Level. Heavy as metal poured into a mold and allowed to set. It did not shout or fight to escape.

It laid itself inside me like a foundation and said, without drama, Very well. If this is how it is, then very well.

For a long time, I did not understand where the rage had come from.

Toward morning, I did.

It was my love for them. The same love as before, only now it had nowhere to go.

Love lived through action. I loved them by holding them, kissing the crowns of their heads, passing a cup from hand to hand, buying bread, promising the sea. Here, there were no hands I could reach, no small head to kiss, no bread, no sea. All that love remained inside me, whole and immense, with nothing it could do. Denied an outlet, it hardened the way water hardened in winter and became something new. Something that could act even here.

Rage.

Will.

The determination to return, whatever it required.

I had not stopped loving them. I had simply understood that, from now on, my love would look like this: not tenderness, but a crowbar with which I would force open the wall between us.

When the sky began to brighten again, slowly and from no direction at all, I sat upright. This time my body obeyed precisely, without rebellion or excess, as though sometime during the night we had finally reached an agreement.

It was no longer foreign.

It was mine.

The first thing in this world that was mine.

I no longer looked away from the lines of cold light. All day I had resisted them, closed my eyes against them, and backed away. Now I turned toward them willingly.

“Show me,” I said aloud, unsure whom I was addressing. My voice was rough from sleep and from shouting their names. “Show me what I am now.”

It did.

Not a single line this time, but an entire panel unfolded before me, calm, ordered, and divided into fields like some bureaucratic form prepared for the dead.

Adam
Level: 2
Origin: —
Class: Undetermined
Mark: Anomaly

It knew my name.

That was the first thing to catch my eye, and a chill traveled down my back. How did it know what I was called? I had told no one here. I placed the question aside, the way I set aside everything that did not fit the immediate task—but not very far aside. It carried the same wrongness as the car without license plates that had appeared from nowhere.

What came next mattered more.

Where another person might have seen something comprehensible—a homeland, a people, where he came from and to whom he belonged—I had a dash. Where the System ought to have said what I was and what I could do, it said Undetermined. Beneath that, in a separate line and without emphasis, stood Anomaly.

When I looked lower, at numbers I did not yet understand, each of them bore a small symbol—the same one that appeared beside Anomaly. It was as though the System were offering an embarrassed warning: I have counted him, but understand that he does not count correctly. He is not one of those these tables were made for.

I stared at the dash, at Undetermined, at Anomaly, and the cold rage inside me grew calmer and denser.

Because I understood one thing, the first truly useful thought I had possessed throughout that terrible day.

The world keeping score did not know what to do with me.

I did not fit its ledger. I had fallen outside its tables. Whoever had thrown me here had thrown me outside the usual rules, beyond the proper columns. That meant I had something no one else possessed: a crack in the wall, a gap, an advantage.

I did not yet know what it was or how to use it.

But I knew I would.

I had always found something solid to stand on.

I raised my hand and looked at the ring.

It was still on my finger, polished bright on the inside, the one honest thing in this world. I turned it with my thumb as I had done thousands of times—at home, behind the wheel, in my sleep.

Then I spoke. Not to the glowing lines. Not to the moons. To the ring, and through it to the two people beyond the white light.

“That morning,” I said quietly, “I promised him I would be home soon.”

My voice did not waver. That pleased me.

“I lied. I said soon the way I had said it a thousand times, without thinking. It became a lie when I failed to return, and even if I found a way back, I would never again be the same man who had walked through that door. I promised to take him to the sea. Promise-promise. For now, that is a lie too.”

I closed my fist, pressing the ring into my skin.

“But I do not know the word never. I do not know where I am. I do not know who dragged me here or why. I do not know whether there is any way out, or how long it will take me to find it—a year, ten years, this entire stolen second life.

“But I know this: I will learn. I will become strong enough that no wall between me and home can stand. I will find a way through it, and I will break it open with my bare hands if I have to. However long it takes.”

I opened my hand.

“I said soon, and it was a lie. I will make that lie true.”

It was not a prayer, and it was not comfort. There was no warmth in those words. They were a task I had assigned myself—the only task I had left, and the most important I had ever undertaken.

I rose to my feet.

My body rose easily, evenly, obediently. For the first time since the silent white light, it moved together with me. The injured arm barely hurt. Both moons were growing pale, dissolving into the brightening sky. Far away, the same foreign voices called to one another, but they no longer frightened me.

They were merely the sounds of the world in which I had work to do.

I looked around and chose a direction. There had to be people somewhere. A world that kept score and assigned levels and Marks could not be empty; someone had created all of this, and someone needed it. Where there were people, there would be roads, knowledge, and the first thread I could begin to pull.

I chose the place where the trees seemed to thin and started walking.

Not to remain where grief had left me. I could carry it and still move.

Not to seek comfort. There was none here and never would be.

To work.