Chapter 17. The Boy

I first noticed him beside the contract board, and what I saw gave me little reason for optimism.

I had gone to the Guild office for another assignment while Dorn waited outside. A boy stood in front of the board—seventeen at most, painfully thin, wearing a jacket made for someone broader and boots near the end of their usefulness. His hand hovered near a notice far beyond his ability.

Clear a lair · Lower Verge · Required Rank: Silver

He reached for it like someone preparing to jump into freezing water.

“Leave it,” Kess's clerk said without looking up. “You're not ready. Copper would be too much for you.”

“I need it,” the boy said stubbornly. “I can do it.”

“You won't come back,” the clerk corrected lazily. “Go away, Finn. I don't have time for this.”

The boy—Finn—did not move. He stared at the unreachable contract with such hungry, desperate determination that I stopped despite myself. I knew that expression. It did not belong to courage. It belonged to necessity, and necessity was a poor adviser. It pushed people toward places from which they might never return.

Then he turned, saw me, and all that desperation transformed into something else.

Wonder.

“You're Adam,” he blurted. “The one who closed the northern dungeon with Dorn. Just the two of you.” He stepped toward me, eyes bright. “I've heard everything. You walked out of the Verge with nothing, and before winter was over, you made Bronze and started clearing dungeons meant for Silver ranks. Is it true? Tell me it is.”

“It's true,” I said and continued past him toward the board.

That did not discourage him in the slightest.

“Take me with you,” he said to my back.

I removed the contract I wanted and turned around. Finn stood with his fists clenched and his shoulders drawn straight, trying with all his strength to look older and sturdier. The effort only made him seem younger and thinner.

“Take me with you,” he repeated. “I'll do anything. Carry the sparks, haul the packs, guard the entrance—anything. I won't panic or complain, I swear. I'll only watch and learn. I need to learn quickly, do you understand? I don't have time to crawl up from Copper like everyone else. I need to start now.”

“No,” I said.

“I'll pay you. Later, I mean—with my first share—”

“No,” I repeated, turning toward the door.

“Why?” His voice broke, revealing the anger of someone who felt trapped. “Someone took you! Dorn took you when you were new and knew nothing! Why were you worth the chance, but I'm not?”

I stopped at the door.

It was a good question. Far too good.

“Because I'm not Dorn,” I said without turning, and stepped outside.

“What did the pup want?” Dorn asked when I joined him on the porch.

“He wanted me to take him along.”

Dorn looked past my shoulder through the open door, where the boy still stood before the board, and grunted.

“Ah. Finn. I know him. Or rather, I knew his mother. Good woman.” He spat into the dust. “The Verge took his father three years ago. Never made it back from a dungeon. His mother has been supporting four children since, and Finn's the eldest. They're barely managing. That's why the boy wants to become a Seeker. There isn't another way to earn real money around here.” He shook his head. “Few who rush in for that reason ever make the second rank. Need drives them into the Verge, but the Verge has no mercy for need. It favors patience and caution, and a hungry man has very little of either.”

We started toward the gate. I remained silent. Dorn glanced sideways at me, then added as though it meant nothing:

“You refused him. Good. He would be a burden. In a dungeon, you would answer for every mistake he made, and you have your own life to protect.” He paused. “I didn't always refuse. Once, I took novices under my wing. Felt sorry for them.” His thumb rubbed absently across the old damage to his hand. “Crooked Sam was a boy just like that when I found him. Fox too. I trained them. Guarded them as though they were my own. Then I lost them and buried what I could bring home.” He spoke evenly, looking at the road, and did not return to the subject. “Do you know the worst thing in the world? Burying someone you first met as a child after promising to teach them how to survive. So you did right. Don't take him. You'll both be safer for it. Without you, he won't dare enter a serious dungeon alone.”

It was reasonable. Every last word was reasonable.

Even so, throughout the day, as we counted tiers and cleared our contract, my thoughts kept returning to the thin boy beside the board. To his words: I don't have time. To the way he had clenched his fists and straightened himself to look larger. I knew what it meant to have no time. I lived with that pressure every day. I knew how it pushed at a man's back, toward risks he would otherwise refuse.

I thought that would be the end of it. Three days later, I saw him again, this time in The Grey Griffin.

I was eating alone in my usual corner when he sat across from me without asking. He placed a chipped mug of hot berry tea on the table, apparently bought with the last of his copper.

“That's for you,” he said. “Don't think I'm here to beg. I just…” He lost his words, drew a breath, then delivered the speech he had clearly rehearsed. “I understand why you refused. I'd slow you down. I'm new, and I'd be trouble. You're right. But I'm not asking you to take me into a dungeon. I'm only asking you to show me something. Once. How you move, how you read a creature. I learn fast, promise-promise. Show me once, and I'll—”

He stopped because I had looked up too sharply.

Promise-promise.

He could not have known what those words meant to me. He could not have known about the little boy in pajamas patterned with camels who said the same thing, small hands pressed solemnly to his chest as he promised not to get out of bed again after bedtime. Finn had simply spoken the words boys used in every world.

To me, they struck straight through every defense.

I looked at him—thin, hungry, eyes burning, his final coppers spent on a drink for a stranger in exchange for the hope of one lesson—and for a moment, I did not see Finn. I saw the boy Leo might become in ten years, or fifteen, if I did not return. Leo growing up without me, reaching for something the world refused to give him, with no one beside him to demonstrate, protect, or say, Don't go there, little one. It isn't safe.

I looked away. The familiar cold fist closed inside me, but this time it was not homesickness. It was something else, something I had tried to keep buried.

“Drink your tea,” I said hoarsely. “Then go home to your mother.”

“But—”

“Go home, Finn.”

He remained seated for another moment, shoulders bent, swallowing his hurt. Then he rose.

“All right,” he said quietly. The fire had gone out of his voice, leaving him weary in a way no seventeen-year-old should have been. That weariness twisted something inside me again. “All right. Sorry I bothered you.”

He walked toward the door, then turned at the threshold.

“I'm going into the Verge anyway. If you won't take me, I'll go alone. Next week. I'll choose an easy contract near the upper edge. I have to begin somewhere.”

He vanished into the night before I could answer.

I sat over a cooling meal and the mug of berry tea I had never touched, angry with him, with myself, and with a world that took fathers and left their children scrambling to fill the empty places. Most of all, I was angry that I could no longer walk past another person's trouble as easily as the old version of me might have done, back when my own life had been whole.

If you won't take me, I'll go alone.

I had heard those words before. I had said almost exactly the same thing to Dorn before the northern dungeon. Dorn had gone with me, not because he agreed, but because he could not allow a fool to descend alone. Now another fool had stood before me—seventeen, underfed, wearing someone else's jacket—and offered me the same choice.

I knew what such words could lead to when no one followed.

Finn would go. Alone. The upper edge of the Verge would seem easy until the moment it did not, and dungeons rarely offered a second chance.

I turned the ring between my fingers. I had taken it off before dinner, following my new habit.

Leo. Finn.

Two boys I could not save. One beyond a wall between worlds, the other three streets away.

No matter how badly I wanted to, I could not reach one of them.

The other was still within reach.

That was the trap. Attachment was a leash that fastened itself around you, not one you chose to wear. I had sworn not to take root here, to leave without burdens. Yet this hungry boy and his promise-promise had found something inside me that I thought I had sealed beneath stone. Now he was pulling it back toward the light.

I made no decision that evening. I went to bed angry.

But as I drifted toward sleep, I caught myself wondering which “easy” contract Finn would choose near the upper edge, and on what day.

Just so I would know.

Just in case.