Chapter 4: What a Stone Costs

The guard on the ramp watched him approach with the flat stare of a man counting how many days a stranger's backpack could feed him.

"Stop there."

Caleb stopped.

"Hands where I can see 'em."

He raised both palms. The machete swung at his hip, and he felt the guard's eyes follow it. "I'm just here to trade."

"Trade what?"

"Supplies."

The guard's gaze dropped to the pack, then to the boots, then back to Caleb's face. "You're not from around here. Where are you from?"

Do not say Ohio.

"Far away," Caleb said.

The guard grunted. "Weapons stay with me. You get 'em back when you leave."

Caleb hesitated. The machete was the only thing standing between him and the world. But a man with a machete in a room full of strangers was not a customer. He was a problem. He unclipped it and handed it over, hilt first, and the guard slid it behind a stack of crates, nodded once, and waved him through.

Inside, the garage was dim and loud. Lanterns hung from rusted pipes, and the air was thick with smoke and the murmur of dozens of voices. People moved in tight clusters, whispering and bargaining, glancing sideways at one another with open suspicion. Caleb felt like an exhibit. He straightened his shoulders and walked, because shuffling felt like a confession.

He passed stall after stall: a one-eyed man selling bullets by the handful, a girl no older than fourteen hawking cans of beans with a tiny pistol tucked into her belt, a bearded man behind a table piled with expired antibiotics, clean needles, gauze, and surgical thread. Real medicine, he thought, and felt the hair rise along his arms.

He found what he was looking for near the back wall. It was nothing special, just a folding table, a lantern, and a wooden crate. Behind it sat a lean man in his forties with a grey-flecked beard and a shrewd, amused look. A cloth lay spread across the table, and on it, arranged in careful rows, were crystals. There were dozens. At the front lay a scatter of pale blue fragments no bigger than a thumbnail. Behind them sat a few the size of walnuts, clouded and faintly luminous. At the very back, in a steel box with the lid cracked open, was one almost the size of a fist, and it glowed. At first they looked like ordinary glass. Then Caleb noticed the way the light moved inside them, slow and fluid, like oil turning in water.

The man looked up. "You looking?"

"Maybe."

"New in town."

"Yes."

"Figured." He smiled without any warmth. "Name's Garrett."

"Caleb."

"Well, Caleb. Welcome to the only place in the district where a man can still buy a miracle."

Caleb tried not to look at the table. "How much?"

"For what?"

"A stone."

Garrett leaned back. "Depends which one."

"What's the difference?"

"Size." He tapped the steel box with a knuckle. "Big one's from something that used to be dangerous. You don't want to know what it costs. The little ones, the chips, come off the weak ones. Cheap enough that a man can scrape one together."

"And they all do the same thing?"

Garrett laughed. "Son, nobody knows what any of them do. A stone's a stone. Ain't no label. You swallow it and find out."

"Swallow it?"

"Chase it with water. Fast as you can." Garrett grimaced like a man remembering something sour. "Tastes like rotten meat. Don't chew."

So that's how it works, Caleb thought. Just like the books. He had read enough novels to know this part. The hero finds a glowing crystal, pops it in his mouth, and wakes up with an overpowered ability.

Behind him, someone cleared their throat.

A young man had stepped up to the table. He was twenty at most, a thin, sunburned kid in a hooded sweatshirt too big for him, clutching a handful of crumpled cans and a coil of copper wire. He set them down with both hands, as if they were something holy.

"One chip," he said.

Garrett looked at the pile, then at the kid, and sighed. "That's a week of food for you."

"I know."

"Nine in ten, nothing happens. You gag, you waste a stone. One in ten, maybe, it catches. And some of the ones it doesn't catch—"

"I know," the kid said. His voice cracked on the last word.

Garrett looked at him a moment longer, then picked a chip from the front row and set it on the cloth. The kid took it. It was pale as ice and fit in the hollow of his palm. He glanced once over his shoulder at the crowd, closed his fist around the stone, and hurried off to a gap between two concrete pillars a few paces away, where the lantern light barely reached. A safe spot, Caleb supposed. A man about to swallow something that might make him powerful did not want a room full of strangers watching, and he certainly did not want to find out afterwards who had followed him.

From the table, Caleb could see only a thin outline against the dark. The kid tipped his head back and swallowed. He gagged at once, a hard ugly sound, and doubled over with a hand pressed to his stomach and his breath whistling through his teeth. Caleb realized he was holding his breath too. A cold feeling had settled in his stomach, and he could not have said where it came from. He was only guessing, he told himself. Perhaps he was just being pessimistic.

Then the kid went still, and his head snapped up. Even from that distance, Caleb could see the shine of his eyes, and for one wild second the kid looked as though he believed it had worked.

Unfortunately, Caleb was right.

The shaking began in the kid's hands and moved to his arms, and then his whole body jerked, hard, as if something had grabbed him by the spine. A thin wet noise carried across the garage. When he stumbled into the lantern light, blood was bubbling at the corner of his mouth, bright red against his chin, and then he fell.

Nobody screamed. That was the part Caleb would remember. Weeks of scavenging and counting cans, of trading wire and saving, all for a chance to be someone in this decrepit, emptied-out world, and the kid's life had ended on a concrete floor in a corner nobody was looking at. A woman at the next stall turned her back. The one-eyed man went on counting bullets. It took less than a minute, and then the stalls on either side began to murmur again, as if a switch had been flipped. A woman laughed. Someone dropped a tin cup. The ordinary noise of the market closed over the spot where the kid had fallen, like water over a stone.

Caleb stood perfectly still with his own heartbeat loud in his ears. He had been about to buy one. He had stood right here, holding his breath, ready to put a thing in his mouth because every system-window story he had ever read made it look easy. Two guards came down from the ramp and walked past him without a glance, and a minute later they were far off across the garage, two figures carrying a thin shape toward a pit at the back like a rolled-up carpet. Garrett took a rag from under the table and wiped the zombie blood off the next stone in the row, the way a man dries a glass between customers.

You would not have died.

The voice was very quiet.

Universal Awakening removes your rejection. What happened to him is what a stone costs anyone else: a coin flip with your life, and a chance of less than one in ten that it was worth it. You do not pay that price. That is the entire value of what you were given. Do not buy one here. The price he named you is five times what it should be, and he named it because you are new. You can find your own stone. Trade for water tablets and a map instead.

Caleb swallowed. His mouth tasted like pennies.

He told himself he had not bought a stone because of the kid. Mostly it was because the price Garrett named for the smallest chip would have taken half his pack. He drew out a clear plastic bag.

"I have lighters."

Garrett's eyebrow rose. "How many?"

"Twelve."

"Working?"

"Brand new."

"Let me see." Garrett took one, flicked it, and watched the small flame jump. His expression changed. For the first time since Caleb had arrived he looked genuinely interested. "Where'd you get these?"

"Around."

"You've got a stash?"

"Maybe."

Garrett set the lighter down. "I'll give you a bottle of purification tablets for six."

"Two bottles."

"One and a half."

"There's no such thing as one and a half."

"There is if you split it."

Caleb almost laughed. They haggled. Garrett wanted eight lighters for two bottles of tablets, and Caleb wanted five, and they settled on six, plus a hand-drawn map that Garrett scrawled on the back of a grocery receipt with a stub of pencil. "Here's the market. Here's the freight yard," he said, tapping the paper. "Stay out of the freight yard. Big groups there. Over here, the old school, it's quiet. Not safe. Quiet."

"Thanks."

"Don't thank me." Garrett folded the map and slid it across. "Lighters are worth more than you think. Next time you come through, bring the rest."

"Next time?"

"If you live."

Caleb stuffed the map into his pocket. He walked the length of the garage once more, slowly, memorizing faces: the one-eyed man, the girl with the pistol, a woman nursing a baby behind a stack of tires. Any of them could be a friend or a threat, and he could not tell which. On the way out, he collected his machete from the guard. It was still there. He decided to count that as a victory.

Garrett watched the kid go, the clean jacket and the too-new boots dwindling toward the ramp, and turned one of the lighters over in his fingers until the flame jumped.

Strange one.

He had come in staring at the table the way every fresh face did, hungry-eyed, a man about to do something expensive and stupid. Then he had watched the boy in the sweatshirt die in the corner, and instead of reaching for his pack, he had traded for water tablets and asked for a map. A map. Garrett had drawn a few hundred of those in his time and sold maybe ten.

It was clever, in its way. A man who does not buy what you are selling and asks you for a small favour instead is a man trying to get on your good side, so that you will be kinder the next time he comes through. Garrett had played that hand himself, back when he was the one with the empty pack. He supposed it was a good sign, in a stranger.

The kid looked dumb, no question. His hands were clean. His boots had never seen a mile of mud. He had said "far away" like a man who had practised it badly in a mirror. But dumb did not last long in this city, and whoever the kid had been before, he had walked in here on his own two feet with a machete on his hip and all his fingers. Anyone who had lasted two years out there had learned a thing or two, or he would be lying in the pit out back with the boy in the sweatshirt.

Garrett scratched his beard and found, to his mild irritation, that he felt a little bad.

Five times the going rate. He had named it the way he named it for every newcomer, because newcomers paid it and the winters were long and a man had to eat. It had never itched before. It did now, faintly, the way an old injury does when the weather turns.

"Next time," he muttered, "I'll give him the honest number."

He pocketed the lighters, which were worth rather more than he had let on, and went back to wiping the cloth.

It was late afternoon when the dead one found him.

He had been moving through a residential block, scouting for a place to sleep, when he heard a low wet rasp of breath from behind a hedge. He froze.

Single. Twenty feet. Left of the fence.

He edged forward with the machete in his hand, and a figure stumbled out from behind the shrubs. It had been a man once, mid-fifties, heavy in the frame, wearing a torn flannel shirt. His jaw hung slack, and a dark glistening ribbon of something ran from the corner of his mouth to his collar. His eyes swung toward Caleb and sharpened. Then he lunged.

It moved faster than Caleb had expected, in a lurching, stumbling charge, and he barely raised the blade before the creature slammed into him and drove the air from his lungs. They hit the ground together. The smell was unbearable. Cold hands clawed at his jacket, and the jaws snapped inches from his throat, close enough for him to see the teeth, brown and cracked, and a tongue flicking between them. His arm was pinned. The machete was somewhere under his hip. He had one clear thought, enormous and stupid, which was that he was going to die with a bandana on his face.

Elbow. Jaw.

He drove his elbow up into the creature's jaw, and it staggered back. He rolled, found the handle, and swung. The first blow bit into the shoulder and stuck. The second struck the neck and went halfway through before jamming against bone. The creature gurgled. Caleb wrenched the machete free, braced his feet, and swung a third time, and the head came off. It rolled across the pavement and came to rest against a curb, and the body folded to its knees and pitched forward.

Silence.

He stood there with his chest heaving and the blade dripping and his ears ringing. His hands shook so badly that the machete rattled in his grip, and a thin sound was coming out of him that he did not recognize as his own breathing. He dropped to his knees. He had killed it. He had killed a person.

It was a corpse.

It was a person, he thought. It had a flannel shirt. It had somebody who bought it that shirt. The voice did not argue. It let the sentence stand and let him sit with it, and somewhere in that silence he understood that it had said what it believed and was not going to say it twice.

He sat for a full minute. Then, slowly, he understood what he still had to do.

It took three tries. He gagged through every one of them with tears running down his cheeks, the bandana pressed so tightly over his face that it hurt. The hatchet rang on bone. Something gave way. When it finally opened, he saw a small pale thing gleaming in the ruin, and he pried it out with two fingers, because there was no one else to do it.

It was a stone, a small one, smaller than Garrett's chips, hardly bigger than a pea, slightly cloudy, with a thin crack running along one side. It was warm, like a living thing. He held it in his palm and stared at it until the trembling stopped.

Okay, he thought. So I swallow it. Chase it with water. Like the books. He was already unscrewing his water bottle when the thought snagged on something. Tastes like rotten meat. He had thrown up at every bad smell since he arrived.

Do I just eat it? he asked, carefully, inside his head. Is that really how it works?

No.

The answer came at once, and then it kept coming.

The standard method is swallowing, and for you it would fail. The stone tastes of rotten meat. You have vomited at every unpleasant smell since you arrived. A vomited stone is a wasted stone, and this is the weakest you will find, so you cannot afford to waste it.

Universal Awakening does not require your stomach. The power system conforms to you, so contact is enough. Pull your shirt up. Hold the stone against the skin over your breastbone. Do not swallow it. Do not bite it. Let the warmth spread. It will dissolve into you. It will not hurt. This method would not work for anyone else, because anyone else needs the stone to survive the trip through the body first. You will not be told that again.

Caleb looked at the stone. He thought of all the novels, and of how many heroes had swallowed things. Huh, he thought. It was, he supposed, the first time the system had saved him from a mistake before he made it.

He found shelter in a concrete stairwell behind a pharmacy, a tight, windowless space with a steel door that locked from the inside. He wedged a piece of rebar across the handle, sat on the bottom step, and finally allowed himself to shake. He did it quietly, with his face in his hands. He thought of the kid in the oversized sweatshirt, carrying cans in both hands like a prayer, and of the sound he had made when he hit the floor. He thought of the man in the flannel shirt. When he finally lifted his head, his eyes were red but dry.

He pulled up his shirt and held the stone against his sternum. It felt like holding a coal that did not burn. For several seconds nothing happened. Then the warmth grew. It crept through his chest, slow and steady, like a bath filling in the dark, and spread to his arms and legs and the base of his spine, and settled behind his eyes in a soft golden pressure. He gasped. The stone dissolved. One moment it sat against his skin, and the next it was gone, a fading shimmer that sank into his chest and left a faint blue tracery along the veins of his wrist.

A new sensation rolled through him. It felt like hunger in reverse, as though his body had been starving for something for years and had only just realized it. His muscles twitched. His lungs expanded. His heartbeat slowed and deepened and steadied.

Ability acquired: Physique Enhancement.

It increases nutrient absorption, slows digestion so that energy releases over a longer period, raises stamina, and strengthens muscular structure. The improvements are permanent and cumulative. Rank One. In practical terms, you are about eleven percent stronger than yesterday.

Caleb stood. His body felt different, lighter and looser, as though he had been carrying an extra twenty pounds and had finally set it down. He rolled his shoulders, flexed his fingers, and took a breath. "Huh."

He bent and picked up a chunk of broken concrete from the corner of the stairwell. It was the size of a brick. Yesterday he would have needed both hands. Today it came up in one, and he turned it over like a loaf of bread, and then he set it down very gently so as not to make noise. It's not magic, he thought. It's just less heavy.

He sat back on the step, grinning anyway. He opened a can of beans and ate them cold, slowly, with the tip of his folding knife. They tasted better than anything he had ever eaten. He felt them settle in his stomach and spread through his body like warmth through a house, and he was full.

Outside, a long distant moan echoed through the streets, answered by another, and another. He listened for a while, and then he curled up on the steps with the machete across his knees. He had killed something. He had been given something. He had watched a boy die with material worth a week of food. And somewhere deep in his lower body, something quietly decided to wait. But something did not make sense. Why would metal be traded for food?