Something Looking Back #3
Oliver paused. Kelm paused too. Marin looked at both of them. Oliver gave the horse the rest of the apple.
"Educational timing."
Kelm sighed.
"I dislike this investigation."
"It has improved you."
"Give me my apple back."
The horse had already swallowed it. They left one engineer with the animals and continued on foot. The road narrowed to a ledge before ending against what looked like solid cliff. Fresh boot prints crossed the stone and vanished. Kelm found the stairs by nearly walking down them.
"Here."
The descent had been cut into a seam between basalt and sea.
At high tide the first dozen steps would have disappeared entirely.
Now water withdrew from them in black sheets.
Barnacles crusted the lower rail. The old quarantine lantern above them had once marked the place for pilots approaching from the south and now marked nothing on any current chart.
Pell drove a testing hook into the first anchor point.
"Old iron."
"Do you say that approvingly?" Oliver asked.
"It knows what it is."
Marin looked at him.
"You'll like Pell."
"I already resent the competition."
Venn sent the engineers down first with a safety line.
Oliver waited at the upper step. The discipline hurt more than his ribs.
Below, one lamp descended until it became a small gold coin against black stone.
Then another. The engineers tested each step, each section of rail, each anchor ring.
Kelm leaned over the edge with the pry bar tucked beneath one arm.
Seraphine stood six feet away from Oliver.
Close enough to intervene badly. Far enough to show she knew it. Marin came beside him.
"Still want to go?"
Oliver watched the lamp reach the lower landing.
"Yes."
"Still think we need to?"
"Yes."
"Same strength?"
He considered. The distinction irritated him precisely because it was useful.
"No."
Marin waited.
"The want is stronger."
Seraphine inhaled behind them. Oliver did not turn.
"The evidence still gets me to the door," he said. "The rest is mine."
"And Bhodi?"
The shadow had pooled close around his boots.
"It wants the door too."
"Does that change your answer?"
"It changes how much I trust the pleasure of the answer."
Marin looked at him then. No smile. Something warmer and more dangerous than reassurance moved through her face.
"That's enough for me to keep walking."
She checked the clip at her harness and pulled the line once until the anchor answered. Oliver watched her make the next step physical before either of them could improve it with language.
"Your standards for courtship remain alarming."
"You knew that before you touched me."
"I had theories."
"Poorly controlled."
Below them, Pell called up.
"First landing holds. Lower six are wet. Door intact. Fresh scoring around the lock."
Venn began assigning order of descent. Bhodi looked away before Oliver consciously saw the shadow move.
Hunger's attention had been fixed down the stair with the same relentless closeness it had given him for weeks.
The pressure along the underside of his thoughts loosened and turned.
His shadow stretched sideways across the stone toward the sea.
Oliver followed it with his eyes. Nothing waited there.
Copper evening lay across the Strait. A low bank of cloud rested beyond the western water.
The tide moved around black shelves of rock with the patient sound of fabric being drawn over a table.
The shadow continued toward a shallow tide pool beside the top stair.
No lamp stood in the necessary direction.
No sun remained low enough to explain the angle.
"Oliver."
Marin had stopped halfway through tightening her climbing line.
"I see it."
The tide pool reflected a piece of dark sky.
Then the reflection changed without acquiring any new object.
The surface seemed briefly organized around an absence, as though the water had found the contour of something that was not there.
Oliver's chest tightened before thought caught up.
Hunger usually gathered around possibility as the clean pressure of more.
This pressure made the gap between here and elsewhere impossible to ignore.
Distance itself had acquired texture. Not miles, not direction, but the irritation of separation once separation had become important.
Oliver's pulse struck hard against his bruised ribs.
Bhodi stopped at the edge of the pool. For the first time since Oliver learned the texture of Hunger's attention, it was attending past him.
Perhaps through him. Toward something the water did not contain. The unfamiliar pressure shifted, and Oliver had the disquieting impression of almost being noticed by something indifferent to his body or his name and interested instead in the attention already gathered around him.
Bhodi did not recoil. The shadow snapped outward across the stone, not far and not physically, but wrong enough to make Oliver's injured hand close around the rail. Meaning struck through him with brutal simplicity. No. Then harder, stripped of every nuance Hunger had slowly learned from him. Mine.
For one stupid heartbeat, the response felt almost like being defended.
Then Oliver felt what lived beneath it. Hunger had not placed itself between him and danger.
It had denied another claim. Whatever had brushed the tide pool had reached toward something Bhodi had already decided belonged inside its appetite, and Hunger answered with the only exclusivity it truly understood: take, consume, leave nothing for another mouth.
The unfamiliar pressure held for one stretched instant.
Distance tightened until the space between here and elsewhere felt pulled thin enough to tear.
Bhodi surged closer around Oliver instead, darkness gathering at his boots and climbing the edge of one calf as though possession could be made legible by contact.
Whatever had looked toward them withdrew. The pressure vanished rather than faded. Bhodi remained, gathered close enough that Oliver could feel the claim without pretending it was protection.
"Can I touch you?"
Oliver looked at Marin's hand first. Then her face.
"Yes."
Her fingers closed around his left wrist. Warm pressure. Glove leather. Pulse beneath thumb. Ordinary enough to become precious.
"Tell me only what you can defend."
Oliver kept his eyes on the pool.
"Bhodi noticed something."
Marin's thumb remained over his pulse. "Toward the water? Anything audible, visible, familiar?"
Oliver checked each category before answering.
"Toward something I cannot locate. I heard nothing. Saw nothing. It did not feel like Hunger."
Seraphine came nearer and stopped before entering his reach. Venn had gone very still beside the stairs.
"Describe the difference," Marin said.
He searched for words and discarded the first three sets. Beautiful words were especially dangerous when evidence was small.
"Hunger makes more feel available. This made separation feel noticeable. Wrong, perhaps. Not morally. Structurally. Like the space between two things had become the only part of them worth noticing."
Marin watched the shadow gathered too closely around his boots.
"And Bhodi?"
Oliver's mouth went dry. "It told it no. Not in words. The meaning was simpler than language."
"No," he said. Then, after a beat, "Mine."
Marin's fingers tightened once around his wrist. "It protected you?"
Oliver looked down at the darkness. The almost-laugh that left him carried no amusement. "No. It refused to share."
"Share what?"
"Me."
Venn looked from Oliver to the empty water. "Threat? Effect on you? Anything repeatable?"
Oliver shook his head. "Nothing I can defend beyond the contact, Bhodi's response and the fact the other pressure withdrew."