Invitation
OLIVER
A minute was not a unit of time inside Anchor House.
It was Marin's voice. One minute. The words remained somewhere behind Oliver after the chamber stopped having a behind.
He held to them because she had given the time rather than having it taken from him, and the distinction survived even when the floor did not.
The glass vanished next. For several unsettling breaths, so did any convincing location for his hands.
He could feel fingers. He remembered owning them.
When he thought of his right palm, pain answered from the healing cut beneath the bandage, but the pain arrived without a fixed place.
Knife. Rope. Glass. Marin's careful wrapping.
His own irritation at needing help with buttons.
History supplied the hand before sensation managed it.
Hunger liked the confusion. The pleasure of that attention arrived close enough to his own response that Oliver almost failed to separate them. Almost was becoming an unpleasantly important word.
"You have become very presumptuous."
Darkness answered by gathering nearer. No language.
Recognition. Bhodi knew the joke belonged to it, and Oliver disliked how satisfying that recognition felt.
A room assembled around him: the Riptide at three seventeen in the morning.
Rain silvered the harbor windows. Amber lamps burned low over tables someone had forgotten to wipe.
Half a bottle of red wine sat on the piano beside an unpaid supplier invoice Oliver remembered because Jasper had threatened to staple the original to his forehead six years earlier.
Behind the bar stood Oliver, older perhaps. Grey beginning at his temples. Dark waistcoat, sleeves rolled, forearms marked by scars Oliver did not recognize. A wedding ring occupied one hand. He looked older without looking settled, which was flattering enough to become suspicious.
Oliver looked down. His own hands had returned. No ring.
"Inventive."
The older Oliver smiled. "You wanted tomorrow." His voice was Oliver's with the smallest error in where the amusement lived. Bhodi had worn his face before. It had not spoken through one this cleanly.
Oliver walked toward the bar. "I asked for tomorrow."
"This is one."
"Is it?"
The figure glanced toward the invoice. "You still pay them."
Oliver leaned one elbow on the bar and felt polished wood beneath skin he was not entirely sure existed. "Thrilling."
"You still leave."
Beyond the windows, Caldris changed. White towers rose from green cliffs beneath three moons Serathis did not possess. The harbor was beautiful in the extravagant way of a stage designer who had recently discovered celestial objects.
Oliver considered the sky. "I doubt the moons."
"You like them."
"That is not evidence."
The older Oliver laughed. Oliver did too.
The sounds matched perfectly, which frightened him more than the impossible sky.
Bhodi could imitate a cadence because Oliver remembered his own.
It could reproduce the angle of a grin because Oliver had seen it in mirrors, in Marin's expression when she caught him performing, in portraits painted by artists who had improved his cheekbones and misunderstood his patience.
None of that required a future. None required another Oliver existing anywhere except inside an appetite with access to his memories.
He walked around the figure slowly. The wedding ring had no inscription.
The scars did not resolve into histories when Oliver looked directly at them.
One crossed the older man's forearm where Oliver had never been wounded, yet the skin around it carried no remembered pain.
The scar was decoration or speculation, and Bhodi had learned that a future looked more convincing when it came pre-damaged.
"Who gave you that?" Oliver asked, nodding toward the scar.
The older self looked down. For half a heartbeat, the room lost focus.
"You wanted tomorrow."
"That was not an answer."
The figure smiled again, less accurately this time. Oliver's unease eased by a fraction. He preferred monsters with limitations. Limitations could become doors of their own.
He let the laugh die. "What do you want?"
"Continue."
His heartbeat altered. The room seemed to breathe around it.
"That stopped being a sufficient answer several disasters ago."
The figure leaned both hands against the bar. "See."
Saltwater under moonlight entered Oliver's senses. Not memory. Something shaped like memory built from appetite and his knowledge of how moonlit salt should feel.
"Taste."
Marin's mouth after coffee. Warmth moved through him before judgment could catch up. Bhodi noticed the response. The attention around it sharpened.
Oliver's fingers tightened against the bar. "Careful."
The older face turned curious. "Love."
Marin asleep beside him. Marin furious in Vantrel.
Marin with blood on her hands and no patience left for his charm.
Marin laughing on the Kraken after he had nearly drowned and somehow discovered Saint Orra offensively interesting.
Marin saying enough. Marin saying more. Marin turning away because she needed space while every selfish part of Oliver wanted to follow.
Bhodi touched the memories all at once without erasing or altering them. The contact itself was enough. Violation and pleasure arrived too close together. Oliver staggered, hating the pleasure. Hunger became more attentive to the hatred because the hatred changed the experience.
The older Oliver came around the bar. "Mine."
The word came through Oliver's mouth. His body went still. He had not chosen to speak.
"No."
That answer belonged to him. He could tell because refusal required effort in a place where appetite had begun to feel like gravity.
Bhodi pressed nearer, puzzled rather than wounded. The word mine had existed between Oliver and Marin. He had wanted it there. Sometimes he had answered it with his whole body. Hunger had learned the sound and ignored everything that made the sound permissible.
"You heard the word," Oliver said. "You missed the condition."
The older figure frowned with an irritation Oliver felt inside his own chest.
"She can call me hers because I am still capable of leaving."
The Riptide fell away, and black water rose around Oliver's ankles, then knees, then waist without wetting his clothes.
Possible versions of him stood across the dark.
The unmarked Oliver from before Hunger. One with black glass beneath his skin and ecstasy emptied of caution.
A drowned Oliver with seaweed tangled through his hair and no fear left in his face.
An ordinary Oliver holding a payroll ledger.
An old Oliver alone aboard a ship whose sails had rotted around him.
And a boy of twelve on the Kraken, shadow falling wrong over Corren's chart. Oliver looked at the child. "You keep returning to him."
Bhodi moved among the figures. Wherever darkness crossed them, the impressions sharpened.
Oliver waited for an answer that did not arrive. The child preceded the exclusions, the Compact, Marin, and the near-constant shadow. That could indicate continuity. It could also indicate that Oliver himself had supplied Bhodi with a memory that frightened him and therefore remained easy to reuse.
"You don't get to become a researcher because Hollowfang annoyed me first."
The child's smile was exactly wrong enough to prove nothing. Oliver's unease hardened. "Stop wearing me."
The possible selves went still. Oliver walked among them before they could disappear.
The ordinary one with the payroll ledger looked almost bored.
He liked that version best, which was probably why Bhodi had given it so little ornament.
The ecstatic Oliver fascinated him and frightened him in equal measure.
The drowned one irritated him by looking peaceful.
The old solitary captain hurt for reasons the image had not earned.
He stopped in front of the boy. Twelve-year-old Oliver looked back with the particular hostility children reserved for adults who presumed to know what they would become. Corren's chart lay beneath one small hand. The shadow on the page angled away from the lantern.
"What did Corren say next?" Oliver asked.
The child tilted his head and gave him no answer.
Oliver remembered, of course. Corren had accused the lamp of being badly placed.
Gideon had laughed. Oliver had shifted the lamp and watched the shadow remain wrong.
Bhodi possessed that memory because Oliver did.
The mask did not prove access to anything beyond him.
"You keep using the part that frightens me," he said. "Effective. Lazy."
Darkness moved behind the child's eyes.
"Stop wearing me." The possible selves went still, then began to dissolve. The payroll ledger vanished first. The drowned Oliver next. The ecstatic one resisted long enough for Oliver to feel Bhodi's interest in the face, then folded into darkness. The child remained. So did the older Oliver.
Bhodi wanted the masks. They made Oliver look at it. They made communication easier. Wanting a tool did not make the tool truthful.
"You can stay," Oliver said. "They cannot."
The child disappeared. The older Oliver touched its chest, the question clear without language: You? Oliver's pulse accelerated. "Yes. Me too."
The face emptied. Its features collapsed like a reflection disturbed by rain, leaving darkness without borrowed eyes, mouth, or posture. Oliver breathed. For a heartbeat, the breath felt entirely his. Then Hunger breathed with him.