Five of Us, in the End

I woke up sore instead of wrecked, which was as close to recovered as I was going to get before lunch, and considerably better than the alternative.

Kou was already awake, wings hanging loose, watching Mori sleep with an expression I couldn’t read. Ryu was gone. The curtain was pulled back and the window stood open a hand’s width, and beyond it the grounds lay bare under a pale, low sun. Hunting, presumably, or wherever a dragon went when nobody had told him to stay.

Someone had left a spare winter robe folded at the foot of my blanket. Since there was only one possible answer and I wasn’t ready to thank anyone yet, I put it on without asking whose it was.

Running her thumbnail along the flap of an envelope until it stayed shut, Kathi-1 was up and dressed, at the desk with her back to us. Coursework, I assumed. She propped it against the lamp, face out, a name on it in tidy capitals that I didn’t bother to read, and turned around.

Before I’d finished stretching, she had a plan.

“I’m coming with you,” she said. “To find her. Whichever one’s next.”

“You’re not.”

“Then tell me this instead. If the warlock’s world is the point, why don’t we jump straight there?”

“A window only opens onto the world next door to wherever I’m standing,” I said. “I’ve never made one that reached past that, and I don’t know how. A crossing needs someone on the far side to land on, someone I can find. Next door, that’s another me. Further out, I wouldn’t know where to look. That’s a limit of my method, not of the theory, and I’d like that noted.”

Mori, who had apparently been awake for some of this, spoke without lifting his head. “I crossed two years in a single go, with Kou to land on. I nearly didn’t arrive.”

“So we go one world at a time,” I said. “Each crossing is how I find the next.”

Kathi-1 looked at Mori, then at Kou, and found nothing in either face to argue with.

“You need someone who can read a room better than you can. I’ve had more practice being me than you have.”

“I need someone I can actually carry. As far as I know, that’s two more, and it’s already spent.”

“As far as you know.”

“It’s the only version of the number I have to work with.”

“Leave one of them, then.”

“Which one,” I said, and let the silence do the rest of the arguing for me.

“Don’t look at me,” Kou said, from my shoulder. “I like our odds better with three.”

Mori looked between the two of us and said nothing more, the wiser choice of the two available to him.

Kathi-1 had no answer for Kou’s odds, and I didn’t make her produce one.

***

Because she said Ryu would come looking for her there once he’d eaten, we went back out to Kathi-1’s clearing first, down the same stair, along the rear of the halls and across ground frozen hard. Frost still lay in the shade under the trees. We searched the way we’d searched for her, location-anchored windows every few minutes, walking toward whatever angle the pulse pointed, except this time it was daylight and none of us were exhausted. The whole exercise felt nearly administrative for it. Kathi-1 came anyway, on the grounds that finding the point didn’t cost anything extra, and I didn’t have a good enough reason to say no to that part.

We were three pulses in, cutting through a stand of trees nobody had bothered naming, when the air ahead of us didn’t fold so much as give up being air at all.

It wasn’t like any of the others.

The one back home, the night everything started, had torn like a doorway. The one in the exam hall, the first I’d ever closed with Sikorska, had torn slow and deliberate. This one arrived already wrong, wider than anything I’d made on purpose, edges that didn’t hold still even once they’d stopped moving.

“That’s not us,” Mori said, already backing up. “None of us opened that.”

“I know.”

The first of them came through low and fast, faceless, the same wrongness I remembered from the astronomy tower in a world I hadn’t set foot in for what felt considerably longer than it actually was. Then a second. Then enough of them that counting stopped being useful.

***

Ryu found us before we’d thought to go looking for him, dropping out of the canopy with a sound like a bowstring snapping and putting himself, immediately and without asking anyone’s opinion on the matter, between the nearest one and Kathi-1.

“Left,” Kou said, and the word came with something riding underneath it, a note pitched low enough that I felt it in my back teeth rather than heard it.

I turned before I understood why.

Something came apart from the dark where the trees should have been solid, low and fast and wrong in a way my eyes kept sliding off of, and for one full stride it forgot which direction it had been going in, caught wrong-footed by whatever Kou had just done to the air around it.

That was the opening, not a weak point. There wasn’t one of those. Up close the things didn’t have eyes, no throat, no joint, nothing that read as a place a spell was supposed to go, and I’d have wasted the whole fight looking for one if Kou hadn’t just handed me a target that couldn’t dodge.

I brought the staff up and didn’t aim for a place. I aimed for a moment, the same lean I’d have used on a rift, except this time I wasn’t asking anything to close. I was asking it to slow.

It worked, more than I expected it to. The thing dragged through the air like it was moving through something thicker than air, and I didn’t wait around to find out how long that would hold before I threw the first spell that came to hand at it, ice, cheap and unspecial and exactly enough.

It went down.

I didn’t have time to feel anything about that.

Mori was already moving, no sound from him at all, and whatever silent version of Kou’s note passed between him and the thing reaching for Kathi-1’s back, it bought him the half-second he needed: his claws closed on a thin, reaching limb of shadow-stuff, and then he simply wasn’t where he’d been standing anymore, reappearing with nothing in his claws while it unraveled behind him into whatever these things unraveled into when something stopped them.

I didn’t have time to be impressed either.

Ryu breathed fire at the two that came for him together, close enough that I felt the heat of it from across the clearing, and didn’t wait to see what it did before he was already moving on to the next one.

Five of us, in the end. The only fight against these things I’d ever been part of, instead of watching from a window.

Slow, then strike, then find the next one before it closed the distance on someone who wasn’t looking. I settled into it somewhere around the third one, ice and then whatever came to my other hand when the ice ran thin, lightning once, cracked white and gone before I understood I’d used it. Each one cost more than the last. By the fourth my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and I honestly couldn’t have told you whether that was fear or just depletion.

Kathi-1 didn’t slow anything. She opened a seam directly above the thing coming for her with one short flick of her staff, small, exact, gone again almost before I’d registered it had existed, and the creature it opened onto simply wasn’t there anymore, folded into wherever a rift folds something that isn’t built to survive the trip.

I recognized the control in that before I recognized what it meant. Not a first attempt. Not something she’d stumbled into today, the way I had with mine. Whatever she told her professors, whatever she skipped, somebody had kept practicing on her own.

Watching her do it was the strangest thing that had happened to me since I’d landed in this forest, stranger than the dragon, stranger than my own face across a fire.

It went on longer than the fight I’d only ever watched from a window before this, or at least it felt that way from inside one instead of through glass. It ended the same way, near as I could tell: the rift narrowing, then gone, the last of them dragged back through it before it sealed, and the five of us left standing in a clearing that hadn’t asked to become a battlefield.