Zelaine crossed the street toward Cale, who had his back to her, crouched down and talking to a fidgeting small girl.
He heard her footsteps and turned before she reached him. The look on his face stopped her half a step short.
"You cannot be serious."
Zelaine shivered slightly. Cale was one of those people, the righteous sort, the kind who talked about fairness and accountability with the sincerity of someone who had never once considered that those concepts might be inconvenient.
She always felt slightly cornered in front of him in a way she did not feel in front of most people.
"I can explain," she said. "I had no choice."
Cale looked at her for a long moment.
"So where is he."
Zelaine blinked. "Who do you mean?"
"Atiya. Your boyfriend."
"Atiya?" She shook her head. "I have not seen him since the attack at Ansep."
Something moved across Cale's face. The confusion arrived first, worked itself through several intermediate expressions, and landed on something that was equal parts shocked and deeply unsettled.
"So you cheated on him," he said slowly, "and gave birth to someone else's daughter."
Zelaine stared at him.
'Did I hear that correctly.'
"The fuck are you on about. I have not given birth to anyone."
"Then explain," Cale said, entirely serious, "why she pointed at you when I asked who her parent was."
Zelaine turned.
Mavine stood a few feet away, looking back at her with the particular stillness of a child who understood exactly what had just happened and had decided not to intervene.
The misconception assembled itself in Zelaine's mind in full and she felt heat crawl up the back of her neck immediately.
"That is not my daughter." She turned back to Cale. "Ah, fuck off." She turned to Mavine. "Hey. Mavine. Explain everything to him. I have something important to do."
She walked away at a speed that had nothing casual about it, her ears distinctly warm.
Behind her, Cale watched her go.
His face said everything his mouth had not.
Zelaine moved through the aftermath with a grim expression, watching the rescue efforts play out around her.
It had been roughly two hours since the great book vanished. In that time a handful of citizens had been found alive, pulled from hiding spots inside buildings and alleyways, pale and shaking and largely unable to explain what had happened to them.
The Ezhaloch family had taken charge of them quickly, offering assurances and organizing transport to hospitals with the practiced efficiency of people accustomed to being the authority in a crisis.
It did not account for the ninety percent of the town's population that could not be found anywhere.
'Sacrifices,' Zelaine thought, moving along another stretch of rubble strewn street, keeping her expression neutral. 'For a ritual related to a coding. It has to be.'
She kept her movements consistent with the search effort around her, giving nothing away, scanning debris and doorframes and the dark interiors of damaged buildings as she went.
After several more hours she had found around ten people. All of them dead.
She was making her way down a narrow alley when a sound came from beneath the rubble to her left. Faint, barely there, but present. She stopped and looked and saw a finger protruding from beneath a stack of collapsed debris.
"Are you there?"
She moved to the pile and began lifting manually. Her yai reserves were still recovering from the battle and she was not going to spend what little had returned on something her hands could manage.
She worked through it, piece by piece, until the upper half of a middle aged woman came into view.
The woman was in a bad state. Metal rods had gone through her in multiple places and the bleeding was considerable. Not a yai user. No capacity to stabilize herself.
"Sa...ve," the woman managed.
Zelaine looked at her closely.
"Ten seconds."
It was a skill she rarely mentioned to anyone. The ability to read the precise remaining time of a dying person, down to the second, provided it fell within a minute. The woman in front of her had ten seconds. Not enough time for anything that required time.
Zelaine pressed her palm to the woman's forehead.
Something moved through the contact, flowing from the woman into her palm, distinct and immediate.
The woman died instantly.
There were many reasons time manipulation was considered a sin. The central one was this: it did not run on ordinary yai. It ran on Time Yai, and Time Yai had to be taken from somewhere.
From someone. Zelaine had been taught early how that worked. Life force, specialized energy, the accumulated time of another living thing, drawn out and converted into fuel for her own craft.
She had spent a large portion of her stored reserves on the cause erasure strike during the battle. What she had left was thin. And so she had volunteered to search for survivors with the specific and practical intention of replenishing what she had lost.
In the silence of the alley, with the woman's body still warm beneath her hands, there was a word for what she was. She was aware of it. She did not spend much time on it.
The question of whether she was evil depended entirely on the framework being applied. In the traditional sense, yes.
By her own framework and point of view, the one she had constructed and lived inside along with it, the answer was more precise than that.
Life was most precious. She believed it genuinely and without any irony she applied it primarily to herself and to the small circle she had chosen: Atiya, Cale, Shilial, Inteja.
Everyone else existed on a sliding scale of relevance.
Taking ten seconds from a woman who had ten seconds left was not murder. It was recycling a resource that was about to dissolve into nothing regardless of her presence.
In a world built on coding and ascensions, on systems and optimization and the conversion of one form of energy into another, she was simply applying the same logic to the available data.
The flickering life force of the dying was data and a precious source of energy. She was using it.
If she were genuinely without restraint she would have taken from the living and became something like a mass murderer and she had not.
She had moved through the rubble for hours looking specifically for those beyond saving, those for whom her intervention changed nothing about the outcome and only shortened the interval of pain preceding it.
The woman with ten seconds had ten seconds of rods through her body and no yai to close the wounds. Zelaine's hand on her forehead had ended that in an instant.
A mercy, by one reading. An efficient transaction, by another. She did not particularly need it to be one or the other.
She pulled the last of the debris away, worked the rods free carefully, and lifted the woman's body.
She carried her to the center of town where the other recovered dead were being laid out with whatever dignity the circumstances allowed, and set her down among them.
"You are working hard." Cale's voice came from her left. "How unlikely of you."
She turned. He was standing a short distance away, watching her with an expression that was used to such sight but could not really get used to it and seemed to see considerably repulsed by her.
"I am just being a good citizen," Zelaine said, her voice steady despite the state of her reserves. "I have to replenish my energy somehow, don't I."
Cale stepped closer, his eyes moving along the row of bodies without particular reaction.
"Is that what you call it." It was not quite a question. He let it sit for a moment. "Cleaning up. Or balancing your ledger." He glanced at her sideways. "Anyway. I will fill in the details on the way. There are some people I want to introduce you to."
****
The half mile remaining felt manageable. His legs were eating the distance steadily and for a brief moment the exit felt like a real thing rather than a direction Leishna had given him in the dark.
Then something settled over him that had nothing to do with the cold.
Atiya dropped his gaze without fully understanding why, looking down at the snow covered floor beneath his feet as though he could see through it.
Something was rising from below. Not a sound, not a vibration he could name, just a pressure at the edge of his senses, vast like the way a shadow grows before the thing casting it comes into view.
'That is why there is snow down here.'
It was nott a cave, not a mountain floor. Something else was entirely beneath them, something that had its own temperature and its own depth and its own inhabitants, and they had been running across the surface of it without knowing.
He threw himself backward.
The glacial floor split open where he had been standing a half second before, and what came up through it defied any category he had a clean word for.
A maw appeared first, then its mass, rising from whatever lightless depth had produced it, water cascading off its bulk as it breached the surface. It was a damn Gargantuan.
Wrong in the specific way that things are wrong when they exist in a place they should not be able to exist.
'Curse it all.'
He landed hard and looked up.
Leishna was clinging to him. For once there was nothing dazzling or performative about her expression.
She was pale, genuinely pale, her eyes wide and fixed on the thing still rising from the breach. The gremlin energy was completely gone.
What was left was just a frightened girl holding onto the nearest solid thing.
The creature descended back into the deep, its bulk disappearing below the waterline as slowly as it had risen, the surface closing over it in dark churning waves.
Atiya exhaled once.
Then he saw it.
In the dark to the side, unseen until this moment, a tentacle had already moved. It was coiled around Leishna's body before either of them registered it, the grip complete and immediate, and then she was simply gone.
She did not scream and no warning came. Dragged straight down into the dark water without a sound, the surface swallowing her whole.
The only thing left was a long blade embedded in the bulbous flesh of the tentacle where it had pulled her under, jutting out uselessly from the water before that too disappeared.
Atiya stood at the edge of the broken floor and stared at the place she had been.
'No, no, no,....fuck, this can't be happening...not now.'
The glacial floor gave way beneath him and the cold hit him like a wall, total and immediate, he was feeling cold not just in literal sense but also in subjective sense.
He went under due to the pressure of the breaking ice.
For a moment he simply sank, the shock of the temperature holding him still.
Then he moved. He wrapped shadow around his body and swam upward, pushing hard against the current pulling at his legs, and broke the surface gasping.
He spun in the water, searching, blinking against the dark, looking for anything.
Undulating waves appeared too which made absolutely no sense in the glacial water where it was supposed to be still.
Twisting tentacles breaking the surface in slow rolling arcs. The sound of water moving against stone walls somewhere in the distance.
At first there was nothing else. Nothing that looked like Leishna.
Except.
Far ahead, at the limit of what the dark allowed him to see, a shape rose above the waterline.
Unclear at this distance, indistinct, but present. He strained his eyes against the dark and forced them to focus.
His heart stopped for a beat.