Valen
It finishes coming up.
All of it at once, everywhere in me in the same second, down both arms to the ends of my fingers and up through the back of my skull.
One second there’s a current coming out of the floor into me.
The next I can’t tell the difference between that current and me.
There’s still no pain in it. That’s the part I can’t get used to.
Every hard thing I have ever asked this body to do has taken something out of me.
This takes nothing. My hands are steadier than they were an hour ago.
I already knew I was a living lock. Nyxiana told me that in her own doorway and I’ve been carrying it around since. What I get now is the rest.
I know which tear I was made for.
Not in words. Nobody says it to me. The thing in me does one job in one direction, and I can feel exactly what it’s reaching for, the way you feel which way is downhill in the dark.
I was built to close a specific kind of tear.
The kind that opens when one of the founders’ locks comes apart.
One opened the day a woman at Ash Hollow came back from death with her soul put in by hand.
Harper.
I’ve stood on that perimeter for months with no reason I could name, and half of it was her.
I never looked at her twice. The other half was standing next to me the whole time.
I can’t get near that tear without Nyxiana.
She’s the door and I’m what shuts behind it, neither one of us is worth anything alone.
Whatever this is in me was pointed at the pair of them from the first night I stood in those trees, and I only ever felt the one.
Everything since has been that pulling on me.
The North Range. The founding stone under my palm with the ground lighting up around it.
Every night on that perimeter at Ash Hollow when I couldn’t have told you why I stayed.
I followed it here. I thought I was following her.
I did stay in that valley for her, hard enough that I should have walked out months ago and didn’t.
That was true. It was never the only thing that was true.
Under all of it there’s a cold part. Something has finally made room for me exactly where I’m standing.
Not a person. A job. I have gone door to door my entire life asking people to keep me.
Tonight the answer came out of a room instead of out of anybody’s mouth.
I fit here because of what I’m useful for.
Relief and grief come up in the same place at the same time and I can’t separate.
Bancroft comes forward, two steps and no more. Behind him the light where he was standing goes thin, and the other four brace harder to cover it. Having him this close to me takes something out of them. They hold it anyway.
I have to keep deciding to breathe, I make myself do it twice while I look up at him.
Past his shoulder Faelan hasn’t slowed for a second.
There’s a low sound coming from what he’s doing, steady, the sound something makes when it’s being torn along a seam.
These are the ones who made me. I don’t mean that the way people mean it.
Five of them stood somewhere and decided a lock would be needed one day.
They built one. They carried it north and put it down in a pack that ran boys out into the snow at thirteen to see which ones came back.
Then they left it there and went about their business.
“Why?”
I haven’t planned a word of it. I’ve had nights to put that question together and never have, because until this minute there was nobody to ask it.
“Why that pack? There were a hundred packs in that country.” My voice goes quieter instead of louder. “Why let me spend my life thinking there was something wrong with me? You could have told me. Any year of it. Any one of you.”
Nothing moves in Bancroft’s face. “The instrument had to be ready when the crack came.”
The floor shudders under a fresh tear somewhere behind him. Neither of us looks at it.
“Ready?” I ask.
“Placed. Hardened. Unremarkable.” He says all of it in the same register. “A lock that knows what it is announces itself, and anything that announces itself can be found. You were none of those things for your entire life. That was the design.”
“The design,” I repeat.
“A lock hidden inside a man who believes he’s broken can’t be turned early by anybody who wants it turned. Not by Faelan. Not by us.”
“So you knew this crack was coming.”
“We knew a crack would come.”
“And you let me live the way I lived because of it.”
“Yes.”
He doesn’t hesitate and he doesn’t soften it.
“I’m not a fucking instrument.” My hands are open at my sides and there’s light running under the skin of both of them. “I’m a person. How the hell do you get to do this to me, hand me a life like that, and then expect me to stand here and save your fucking world anyway?”
Bancroft looks at me. The pressure coming off him goes up.
That’s all I get, and it isn’t an answer to anything I said.
He doesn’t apologize but I stand there and wait for it.
One breath. That’s how long I give it, in a room coming apart, waiting on a word out of a man who was never going to say one.
Then I work out what I’m doing. I’ve done this my entire life.
Stood in front of a man who owed me a word and waited for it.
Every pack I ever walked into. Not one of them ever said it and I kept standing there for the next one.
I did it four nights ago on a porch at Ash Hollow with my hands split open. That’s the part that lands hardest.
Faelan’s voice comes down the chamber and the tear he opens with it runs longer than any of the others.
Constructs come off both edges, hold their shape, and start moving on their own.
Three of them, then five. The realm shudders hard enough that Bancroft’s wings snap wide to keep the floor under us.
There’s no time left to stand in front of this man.
Nothing about his silence changes if I stand here another hour.
So here’s the choice, and it’s the first one in my life that has ever actually been mine.
Every other choice I came to, somebody else had already made it.
Which pack would keep me. What work they’d let me do.
Whether anybody was going to tell me what I was.
I can be what they built. Placed, hardened, used, decided start to finish by what was done to me.
Or I can be what I am on my own terms and let that stand as the answer.
I turn away from Bancroft, without another word, with him still looking at me.
There’s nothing left in me that needs anything from him.
I turn what I am on Faelan. He tears a fresh wound into the chamber, wide, both edges gaping.
The light bleeds out of it and goes somewhere it has no business going.
I hold my ground and let something out of me.
It isn’t a strike. There’s no force in it, nothing hits anything.
It goes out low in all directions underneath everything else in this room.
The tear answers it. The edges come toward each other and stop.
Whatever’s in that opening is raw and it pushes back.
I hold the pulse steady on it until it stops pushing.
Then the edges meet and shut. The light stops bleeding out until where the wound was there’s nothing at all.
That’s the first time tonight this has felt like relief instead of danger.
Faelan stops. Whatever certainty he carried into this chamber cracks the rest of the way open in front of me. There’s alarm now, showing through centuries of control.
“Valen, behind you!”
She shouts it from across the chamber. Two of the constructs have come round on my blind side while I had my hand on that tear.
White flame flares up at the edge of my vision.
She takes the first one head-on with both hands out and it stops existing.
She’s already turning for the second. Her shoulder is still open, there’s blood all the way down her arm and she’s moving like there’s nothing wrong with her.
I turn and get the other one before it reaches me.
Then I’m between her and the worst of what’s coming off him.
I didn’t decide to be. It’s the only thing tonight that hasn’t needed working out.
There’s a tear running on the far side and two more constructs coming in on my flank. Both of those wait.
Faelan opens another one and it shuts under my hand before it’s finished running. One of the constructs goes into the edge of the next tear to hold it open. The tear closes, straight through the thing wedged in it, and the construct comes loose with nothing left to hold on to.
He tears. I close. He forces. I hold. When he goes at the far end where the Council is standing, I’m already there ahead of what he opens.
The fight is even. For the first time since I came through that door with her hand in mine, every part of it is mine to fight.