Easier
OLIVER
The headache had become polite enough to negotiate with.
Oliver distrusted that immediately. It sat behind his right eye like a tenant who had stopped throwing furniture only because the landlord had arrived.
Every hard footfall on the old cliff path reminded him it was still there.
His ribs joined the protest whenever he breathed too deeply, and his bandaged hand had begun to pulse again beneath the wrap Marin had redone beside the ruined bridge.
Naturally, this was when the path decided to fall into the sea.
Jasper stopped so quickly Oliver nearly walked into him.
Ahead, the old smugglers' track narrowed between a black wall of stone and a drop that went down through wind, spray, and approximately three hundred feet of regrettable choices.
Fifty yards farther on, a section of the trail had sheared away.
Loose shale still ticked into the surf below.
Yselle looked back from the lead. "That wasn't gone yesterday."
"Comforting," Oliver said.
Marin touched two fingers to the inside of his wrist as she passed. Not checking his pulse. Not only checking his pulse. Her eyes went to his pupils anyway.
"Still equal," he murmured.
"I hadn't asked."
"You have an expressive silence."
"Walk straighter."
He smiled because she had not told him to stop walking, and the relief annoyed him.
The less romantic problem was remaining useful while his skull objected to light, elevation, and apparently the continued existence of gravity.
He tested his right hand inside the bandage as they walked.
Flexion pulled at the healing knuckles but held.
His ribs complained when he breathed too deeply.
None of it made him helpless. It merely converted every movement into information, which Marin had spent months teaching him was different from permission to ignore it.
Behind them, somewhere beyond the switchback, a rifle cracked. Stone jumped beside Jasper's boot. The conversation ended.
"Down," Marin snapped.
They dropped against the cliff. Jasper dragged the wounded Hollowfang operator with him, one fist knotted in the man's coat.
The prisoner made a sound that might have been pain or objection.
Jasper did not inquire. Oliver looked back.
The path curved out of sight twenty yards behind them.
The shooter did not have a clear line yet.
That would change when whoever held the rifle reached the upper bend.
"Options," Marin said.
She did not mean his options. She meant all of them. Yselle was already studying the broken trail. "We can cross that. One at a time. Rope along the wall."
Jasper looked at the prisoner. "Not with him."
"Then leave him," the operator said through his teeth.
Marin's gaze cut to him. "No." The man laughed weakly. "You're going to get shot because you have principles about captives?"
"No. We're going to get shot because someone is shooting at us. Your existence is incidental."
Oliver loved her a little more for the precision. Another shot struck the bend behind them. Closer. Yselle pulled a coil of line from her pack and passed it to Jasper. "Anchor there."
A weathered iron ring had been driven into the cliff at shoulder height, probably when the route still moved contraband instead of injured scholars, murderous researchers, and men with regrettable relationships to causality. Jasper tested it with both hands.
"It'll hold."
"That confidence is almost offensive," Oliver said.
"You can go first."
"I withdraw the criticism."
They worked quickly. Ordinary work. Rope through the ring. Second line around a natural spur of stone farther ahead. Yselle crossed with her back to the cliff and both hands on the line, boots finding the remnants of the ledge one deliberate placement at a time. She made it. Jasper sent packs next.
Oliver took the loose end and fed it around the spur twice before tying it off with the ugly, reliable hitch Jasper had taught him on a storm night years ago.
He leaned his weight into the line rather than trusting the cliff ring, watched the fibers settle, then shifted the knot half an inch away from a sharp edge in the granite.
No magic. No cleverness. Friction, leverage, and the accumulated wisdom of sailors who preferred not to die for preventable reasons.
The rope answered with a low creak. Better than silence.
Oliver watched the upper bend. Near possibilities pressed at the edge of his attention. Not futures. Never clean enough for that. More like the world had become transparent in a few local places, thin enough that he could sense where one choice wanted to become another.
The shooter would reach the bend. The prisoner could cross with help. The anchor might hold. The anchor might not. A small stone broke loose beneath Jasper's heel. It bounced twice and vanished into white water.
Oliver rubbed his thumb against the side of his forefinger.
His bandage rasped softly. He could feel the exclusion waiting.
It did not arrive as a voice or command.
That would have been easier to distrust. It arrived as familiarity.
His attention found the vulnerable branch of possibility the way his hand found a door latch in the dark, without needing to search for it first. The sensation was intimate enough to make his stomach turn.
Power was supposed to announce its cost before a man mistook convenience for entitlement.
That was new in the most unpleasant way possible.
Before Second Frostglass, using it had felt like forcing his arm through a closing door while the world objected.
Reality had resisted him. Possibility had possessed weight.
Choosing one thing to remove had required reaching into a field of near outcomes and committing violence against one of them.
Now the nearest wrong answer sat beside his hand. Available. He hated the ease of that word.
"Oliver."
Marin had seen his face.
"Not yet," he said.
Her attention sharpened, but she nodded once.
That was all. They moved the prisoner next.
Jasper tied a support loop around the man's chest and injured thigh.
The operator had lost enough blood that his skin had gone waxy beneath the road dust, but he remained conscious.
Hollowfang would have called that viable.
Marin had used a different word while checking his dressing ten minutes ago.
Patient. The man crossed three steps. The iron ring tore halfway out of the cliff. Jasper swore and seized the line. Oliver caught it with his left hand. Pain flashed across his ribs when the prisoner's weight swung outward. The wounded man struck the cliff and shouted.
Another rifle cracked. Yselle fired back from the far side without a visible target, buying sound and hesitation. The old ring moved another inch. Oliver saw it then. One immediate possibility.
The iron failed. Jasper lost his footing. The prisoner went over the edge. Marin lunged for Jasper and all three of them followed because momentum had no respect for affection, competence, or what any of them wanted. The possibility was brutally clear.
There were other outcomes around it. Jasper held. Marin found leverage. The iron survived another second. Yselle reached the secondary line. A hundred small variations spread through the moment.
Oliver did not choose the one he wanted. He chose the one he refused. No. The answer moved through him without sound. The world yielded.
For the smallest fraction of a second Oliver expected the old resistance.
The pressure behind his eyes. The sense of pushing against something vast, indifferent, and entitled to remain itself.
He braced for it so completely that his body supplied the recoil before reality did.
His shoulder tightened. His teeth clenched. Nothing met him.
That was the horror. No grinding pressure. No sickening sense of tearing something out by the root. No moment in which reality seemed to recognize his hand and fight to keep its own shape. The failure simply ceased to be available.
The iron ring jerked and held. Jasper found his footing. Marin's hand closed around his shoulder instead of empty air. The prisoner swung against stone, alive and swearing with surprising creativity. Oliver staggered.
Pain struck a heartbeat later. Not nothing. His vision whitened at the edges, his injured hand clenched involuntarily, and something cold moved behind his sternum with the unpleasant intimacy of a swallowed blade. His knees nearly folded. Marin reached him before they did.
"Sit."
"We are being shot at."
"Crouch, then."
He crouched. A third shot struck stone above them. Jasper and Yselle hauled the prisoner the remaining distance. Marin remained between Oliver and the open angle until he caught her coat and pulled her lower.
"Do not turn yourself into cover."
"Then recover faster."
"Terrible bedside manner."
"You're not in bed."
He almost laughed. It made his ribs hurt. The cold behind his sternum spread into his shoulders, then receded. Strain, perhaps. Something adjacent to Strain. He knew the taxonomy was inadequate before Marin looked at him and arrived at the same conclusion.
"Tell me exactly."
"Visual flare. Cold pressure. Hand spasm. No loss of time."
"Nausea?"
"Some."
"Headache?"
"Worse."
She did not say I told you so. Marin reserved cruelty for people who had earned it.
"And the exclusion?"
Oliver looked at the iron ring. It remained embedded in the wall. Bent, shaking under load, but intact.
"One possibility," he said.
"Which one?"
"The anchor failing in that moment."
"Did you choose a replacement?"
"No."
"Did you alter Jasper? The operator? Me?"
"No."
"How many exclusions?"
"One."
Her next question arrived more quietly.
"What changed?"
Oliver wanted to lie. Not because he thought she could not bear the answer. Because saying it aloud would make the answer belong to the world.
"It was easier."
The gunfire above stopped. That should have relieved him. It did not. Marin's eyes stayed on his. "Less Strain?"
"No. Less resistance."
He disliked how clinical the sentence sounded.
It suggested a machine wearing smooth with use.
A hinge oiled by repetition. Neither image belonged comfortably beside reality itself.
At Second Frostglass, choosing had felt like trespass even when the choice saved lives.
This had felt closer to recognition, and recognition implied a relationship he had not agreed to have.
He saw understanding reach her by degrees. Not conclusion. Marin did not confuse those.
"Like the possibility was already loose?"
"No." Oliver swallowed. "Like it recognized me."
For once, she had no immediate correction. Jasper reached them from the far side and looped a second line around the rock spur. "Conversation later. Move now."
"A stirring philosophy," Oliver said.
"You look terrible."
"Marin has been saying the same thing with greater intimacy."
"I said walk straighter."
"See? Devotion."
The humor bought exactly one breath. Then they moved.
Oliver crossed last before Jasper. He kept both hands on the rope despite what that did to his right knuckles.
The sea pulled at the cliff below, blue-black water breaking white against submerged stone.
He did not look at the space where the failed possibility should have been.
He could still feel its absence. The clean fit was what he could not explain to Marin while they were still moving.
He had removed one failure and nothing more, yet his mind kept reaching toward the place where the rejected outcome should have been, expecting rough edges.
There were none. The remaining world fit around the missing possibility too neatly.
He had spent his life distrusting perfect accounts because somebody always paid the hidden cost. Reality had just balanced one in front of him.
Not a Hollow. Not here. He did not sense the same wound left by Hunger consumption at Second Frostglass. The world appeared intact. That did not mean the act had been free.
Nothing interesting ever was. They cleared the break and descended toward a stand of wind-bent cedar where the path widened enough to run.
Yselle took point again. Jasper half-carried the prisoner.
Marin stayed beside Oliver, close enough to catch him if his balance failed and disciplined enough not to touch him when it did not.
The distinction became another thing he loved her for. A mile farther south, the path entered a cleft between two slabs of granite. The wind dropped. Gunfire had not followed. Yselle raised a fist.
Everyone stopped. Blue glass hung from a branch ahead. A narrow shard, polished by the sea, threaded through black cord. Not abandoned. Placed.
Marin approached first and crouched without touching it. Oliver watched her examine the knot, the bark, the mud beneath the branch, the angle at which the shard had been tied.
"Recent," she said.
"How recent?"
"Hours. Maybe less. No weathering on the cut cord."
Jasper looked back the way they had come. "She saw the ambush?"
"Unknown."
"She set it?"
"Probable, not proven."
Oliver leaned his shoulder against the granite. The headache had settled back into its earlier territory, which Marin would call encouraging and he would call insufficiently fatalistic. The blue glass turned slowly in air that no longer seemed to move.
His shadow stretched beside him. Then continued. Oliver stared. The sun was behind the western ridge. Every other shadow in the cleft fell east at the same shallow angle. His reached farther, a human outline drawn one fraction too tall across the stone.
It stood with him. Not exactly as him. The shoulders were wrong. More relaxed. The head tilted slightly toward the blue glass while Oliver's remained still.
Marin saw it a breath later. Her face emptied of everything except attention.
The shadow's hand lifted. The movement was smoother than the earlier lags.
That frightened him more than if the thing had lurched or distorted.
A mistake could be dismissed as instability.
Practice could not. The shape beneath the branch seemed to understand not only that hands reached, but when a reaching hand should hesitate.
Oliver did not move. It did not touch the glass. It could not. The dark suggestion stopped beneath it, fingers long enough to be almost his. Then the shape settled back into ordinary geometry.
Jasper had turned too late.
"What?"
Marin remained crouched. "Nothing we can use yet." Oliver looked at her. She looked back. It had become easier for him to remove a possibility.
And afterward, whatever lived in his shadow had become better at being him. The blue glass turned once more between them. South, beyond the cleft, smoke rose from a chimney hidden among the coastal trees.