Invitation #2
Pleasure tore along his spine hard enough to bend his knees.
The black water climbed to his throat. Sensation opened in several directions at once.
Rain on the Riptide roof, impossibly distant or perfectly remembered.
Plum cake Jasper had sent a sailor ashore to find.
Marin's fingers at the side of his neck though no hand touched him now.
The remembered weight of a pistol. Salt.
Blood. Coffee so bad Saint Orra ought to have been tried for it.
He heard the Maw's slow pulse somewhere beneath the world, or remembered hearing it.
The distinction was becoming difficult to defend.
Another sensation surfaced nearer. Seraphine's fear outside the chamber.
Oliver knew the shape because he had seen it on her face before he entered.
In here, Hunger offered the fear back as an absence waiting to be filled.
Take it away. The impulse did not use words. Oliver supplied those himself.
He wanted his mother unafraid and Marin unafraid.
He wanted Jasper's ship returned, Venn's report accurate and somehow harmless, Halvek alive long enough to answer questions and incapable of ever designing another room.
He wanted Anchor House destroyed. He wanted to understand it before anyone touched a match.
Bhodi thrilled to the contradictions while Oliver caught the desire to remove Seraphine's fear and held it instead.
"No."
Hunger recoiled from the denied opening, then gathered around the denial itself.
Oliver noticed the reaction and immediately wanted to test it, which created a problem of its own.
He chose something smaller. Anise, which he hated.
The thought remained hilariously, stubbornly specific in a chamber trying to dissolve location.
Badly sharpened knives. Rain beginning five minutes after laundry had been hung outside.
People insisting everything happened for a reason after events that had plainly failed to earn one.
Marin stealing blankets and denying jurisdiction.
Jasper keeping nails in teacups. Maeve writing grocery lists in three inks because organization, according to her, required aggression.
The Kraken's aft bilge pump lying. Tomorrow. With each distinction Oliver became easier for himself to locate.
He tested the effect rather than trusting it.
He thought of choices too small to carry symbolic weight.
Blue glass over green. Coffee before tea on mornings when he had slept badly.
The left bunk on the Kraken when he was fourteen because the right one clicked against the hull in heavy weather.
The private satisfaction of arriving five minutes early and pretending he had not.
The exact spice Maeve put in winter stew that he always identified incorrectly and she refused to name.
The details did not make the chamber kinder.
They gave Oliver edges. He could feel where one preference stopped and another began even when the black water offered no reliable body to contain them.
He became less interested in the possible selves because they lacked the annoying accumulation of trivial choices that made being one person so difficult to counterfeit.
Bhodi became easier to feel too, which was less reassuring. Hunger did not blur when Oliver sharpened. It gathered along the same distinctions, attentive to each preference as though every tiny refusal increased the flavor of the thing refusing.
Oliver resisted the urge to name the pattern.
Naming it would make it feel understood, and understood things were dangerously easy to trust. He remembered Marin's external reference pulling at him before the harvest cycle.
The same pull had sharpened the contact response.
Here, inside the dark, the relationship repeated without becoming clearer.
Oliver could make himself more distinct.
Hunger did not retreat when he did. It pressed closer.
"Unhelpful," Oliver murmured. Warm attention answered. "You enjoy when I choose." Bhodi gathered along his ribs. Perhaps. Or perhaps choice simply made the thing doing the choosing easier to find.
Oliver refused to promote either explanation merely because one frightened him more elegantly. The chamber shuddered. Marin's minute was moving somewhere outside him.
Possession entered the contact without needing a face. Bhodi pushed toward every available sensation as though an opened door remained open because nothing had yet forced it closed. The instinct carried no argument about fairness. Hunger did not need one. Access existed. Appetite followed.
Oliver thought of Merrow: mine, keep, refusal to release. Avarice had pressed preservation until possession became more important than the thing possessed. Hunger felt different beneath his skin. It did not want the door preserved. It wanted to keep going through it.
The pressure was different, but the distinction did not make the trespass less dangerous. Oliver smiled despite himself. "You think because I let you closer, closer continues to belong to you."
Bhodi pressed. "No." It pressed again, and Oliver nearly yielded from curiosity alone, a response inconveniently his.
He laughed into the dark. "This would be much easier if I were better behaved." Hunger warmed around the thought. "Unfortunate for both of us."
He searched beneath the appetite for the older bodily strangeness that did not feel like Bhodi.
Salt and breath marked the older bodily strangeness, the sense of distance crossed by sound.
The siren inheritance remained distinct enough that he could recognize its shape even when everything else blurred.
He had used it at Saint Orra to make himself audible farther than he should have been. There was nowhere obvious for sound to travel now.
Oliver drew breath anyway. "Come closer." He did not push resonance into the words. The phrase was invitation, not command. Bhodi rushed toward him. Oliver raised one hand. "There."
Hunger stopped because the interruption surprised it, and Oliver felt the surprise clearly enough to become encouraged and suspicious at once.
He did not immediately offer another invitation. He waited until impatience developed inside the contact. Some of it was his. He wanted to know whether the stop would hold without reward. Some belonged to Bhodi, a pressure gathering against the point where Oliver had interrupted it.
Five breaths, perhaps. Time had become unreliable enough that counting was vanity, but the rhythm helped.
Bhodi did not cross. Oliver's pulse quickened. The pleasure of success arrived, and Hunger noticed that too. It leaned toward the pleasure without moving past the line.
"You are insufferably interested in being rewarded," Oliver said. Warmth answered. "Unfortunately relatable." He lowered his hand. "Again."
Darkness moved along his ribs. The contact became memory: knife pain, Marin cleaning blood from him, the joke he had made because fear had been inconvenient.
"Stop." Bhodi stopped later than Oliver wanted. He waited until the line held, then said, "Again."
Closer. Along his spine this time. Pleasure arrived with it, hot and immediate.
"Stop." A hesitation passed through the contact before Bhodi became still.
Oliver's breathing roughened. He waited again, longer.
The contact at his spine pulsed with wanting.
Bhodi did not retreat, but neither did it continue.
The distinction was imperfect and therefore more convincing than perfect obedience would have been.
Hunger had not become a servant because Oliver discovered a word it respected.
It was making a calculation with an appetite instead of numbers.
He shifted the boundary. "Back one." Confusion moved through the dark. Oliver almost smiled. "Yes. Conditions can change after access begins. Terrible system." For several breaths nothing happened. Then the pressure along his spine eased only slightly, but the difference was enough to feel.
Oliver closed his eyes against the sudden tenderness of being obeyed by something incapable of understanding the reason for it. The feeling was dangerous precisely because it resembled trust from the inside. He did not let resemblance become conclusion.
"Again."
Bhodi moved to the new line and stopped without being told.
That frightened him more, and Oliver's breathing roughened.
He could have mistaken the behavior for obedience if he wanted certainty badly enough.
He did not. Bhodi had discovered only that stopping resulted in another invitation while pressing past the line ended access.