8. Brock
Brock
The Earth kit comes out of storage smelling like the last time we wore it — long enough ago that the jeans have gone stiff in the folds and nobody’s sure anymore whose boots are whose.
We don’t cross often. Every few years something drags one of us over and back, and in between the clothes sit in a box getting stranger, because every trip somebody adds to the pile and nobody ever throws anything out.
It’s less a wardrobe than a record. You can date our crossings by what’s in there, if you know how to read it, and I do.
Gunnar pulls his favorite free of the heap and holds it up for judgment. POWERED BY BACON, over a pig that seems pleased about the arrangement.
“The people’s shirt,” he says.
“You’ve worn that the last three crossings.”
“Because it works. Humans see it and they trust me.”
“Humans see it and cross the street.”
He pulls it on anyway, and I watch him do it — the small satisfaction of a man putting on armor he’s decided is lucky. Gunnar believes in luck, completely, and would deny it to his grave. It’s one of the more honest things about him.
Rayner’s already in his — jeans, a soft gray thing washed pale at the seams. KEEP CALM AND TAKE A NAP.
On anyone else it’s a joke. On the one of us who hasn’t slept right in a week, it isn’t, and he knows it isn’t, which is why he picked it.
He catches me reading the shirt, then reading him under it.
He grunts, goes back to what he was doing.
That’s Rayner telling me to leave it. I note that too.
On top of Leif’s pack, folded into a square with corners you could measure: the cat shirt.
Black, a cat on the front with lasers coming out of both eyes.
He’s brought it every crossing for as long as I’ve known him, and every crossing one of us starts in on it, and not once has he given us the reaction we’re hunting for.
Gunnar’s been at it for decades. He throws everything he has at that shirt and Leif just looks at him until he runs out of words, every time.
It is, without competition, my favorite part of going to Earth.
Mine says, accurately, I WANT TO BE A NICE PERSON BUT EVERYONE IS JUST SO STUPID.
Gunnar gave it to me two trips back as an insult.
He’s never once worked out that it just happens to be true, and I’ve never told him, because watching him wait for me to be offended is a small renewable pleasure and I’m not made of stone.
Leif isn’t dressed yet.
He’s at the table with the long case open — the one we don’t take on ordinary work — fitting the heavy comm down into the foam, slow, each catch seated by hand.
The one built to hold a signal through anything.
Through the disturbance. He hasn’t said it.
He doesn’t have to; I’ve been reading Leif for centuries and the man packs his conclusions before he speaks them.
If he’s bringing that case, then whatever’s wrapped around Erik is the kind of thing that swallows a signal whole, and he decided that hours ago, and he figures the rest of us will catch up eventually.
I hope the case is enough. I don’t say that either.
Nobody’s said the obvious thing yet. We’ve been circling it for an hour, all four of us.
Erik.
Gunnar breaks first. He always does. It’s not weakness, it’s just how he is — the man can’t help himself.
“He’s alive.” To the room. To nobody. “Three years, and the bastard’s alive.”
“Told you,” I say.
“You did not.”
“Six months in, you said—”
“That’s not—”
“—and I’m quoting — ‘we should clear his quarters.’”
“That’s logistics.”
“You wanted his boots.”
“They were good boots.” He jabs a finger at me. “And I took it back. Loudly. For two and a half years. That’s the part that counts.”
“Whatever helps.”
His ears go red, which is the tell he’s never been able to train out of himself, and I let it sit there glowing because I can.
And because under the boots and the bluster what actually happened is that Gunnar tried to bury a man he loved before the grief could get its hands on him.
He failed, and has been quietly ashamed of the attempt ever since.
I’m not going to say that. I’d never say that.
But I want him to know I saw it, so I hold his eyes just a little past comfortable.
He looks away first, and that’s the whole conversation without anything spoken.
The long case clicks shut.
Leif still hasn’t said a word — he doesn’t, much — but something in him eases when Gunnar says alive the second time.
Three years he carried this by himself and never once put it down where the rest of us would have to help hold it.
He won’t start now. He doesn’t have to. We’re loud enough that he never has to be, and that’s the arrangement, and it’s held for four hundred years because none of us has ever made him say so.
“What I want to know,” Gunnar says, swinging the pack onto his back, “is how it takes them three years to find one dragon one crossing away. One. We’ve found worse in less.”
“Because nobody looked,” I say.
It comes out flatter than I mean it to. Three years that fucker’s been within reach the whole time, disturbance or no disturbance.
And the thing I keep trying to figure out isn’t that it took so long.
It’s that nobody with the power to find him seemed to want to.
I keep that thought to myself. It doesn’t help anyone to say it.
Nobody would argue with it anyway.
We’re moving inside the hour, on foot, because the crossing doesn’t care how badly you want to reach it.
A day’s walk if we don’t stop, and we won’t, which sets us at the threshold near midnight on the far side.
Leif said the timing out loud twice. He doesn’t repeat himself unless he’s making a point, and he’s making one.
He wants dark on the other side. If the disturbance is the kind of thing that comes at you, we come at it first, out of the night, before it knows the door opened.
I’d have made the same call. I usually would. The difference between me and Leif is that he makes it and I agree a half-second behind. It’s how it’s always been.
It matters. Especially on Earth. Where our dragons can’t play.
We shoulder packs, check straps out of habit more than necessity, and file out one behind the other. Four men who have done this often enough that the work starts before anyone calls for it. By the time the city gates are behind us, the room’s already fallen away.
Then it’s just walking. The land out here goes empty fast — within an hour there’s nothing around us but cold and dark and the sound of four men on the move. A few miles of that and the talk loosens, the way it always does once the walking takes over.
A few hours in, it finds the disturbance. Took them long enough — I’ve been walking next to it in my head since the Embers.
“It’s a creature,” Gunnar decides. “Something crossed over and got its hooks in him. Big. Territorial. Probably been feeding off of him this whole time.”
“Could be the door,” Rayner says. “Something wrong with the crossing, not with him.”
“Could be something he caught over there. Humans have all sorts now. Last time I crossed they’d built a box that watched you back—”
“That was a hundred years ago.”
“My point is they’re inventive. No telling what they’ve cooked up since.”
The guesses just keep coming, and every one worse than the last. Inside twenty minutes Gunnar is somewhere in the territory of tentacles and committing to it hard.
I understand why.
It’s still funny.
“It doesn’t matter what it is,” I say.
And it doesn’t. I’ve turned it every way there is on this walk and they all come out the same place. We find him. We take down whatever’s standing between us and him. We bring him home. The shape of the job doesn’t change with the shape of the thing.
“He’s right.” Gunnar sounds almost let down about it. “Whatever it is, we handle it. Even if it does have tentacles.”
Leif almost cracks a smile. I catch the almost. He doesn’t hand many out, and I don’t think I’ve ever missed one.
Nobody’s scared. That’s the part an outsider wouldn’t read right.
Four of us walking into the dark toward a thing the oldest powers in the world looked straight at and couldn’t name, and the live debate is tentacles.
It isn’t bravado. The four of us have walked into impossible before and walked back out of it, enough times that the word stopped meaning much.
Rayner’s been quiet. Quiet even for him, and I’ve known him long enough to know the difference.
“Might see it before we get there.”
Gunnar snorts. “See it how. In your sleep?”
“Not the worst idea,” Leif says, even, “if you can manage it and come back.”
Rayner huffs something like a laugh.
The rest of us don’t.
Because we almost lost him to exactly that, once.
Dream walking sounds like a parlor trick until you remember that for Rayner the dreams are real places.
Real ground under real feet. Real things in them that can do real harm, and some dream walkers lie down one night and never find the way back up.
We’ve stood over a body that was still breathing and couldn’t be reached.
I don’t care to do it twice.
When I look up, Leif’s already watching him.
He clocked it the same second I did — Rayner offering to scout a place that nearly kept him, light, like it’s nothing, which from Rayner means the opposite of nothing.
Leif doesn’t say anything. Neither do I.
You don’t corner Rayner; he goes further inside himself, not less.
But I move my place in the line without making it look like moving, and now I’m walking where I can see his face.
It’s been off since the residence. Not afraid.
Pulled somewhere the rest of him hasn’t caught up to.
I’ve read this man for hundreds of years, and I can read him now, clean enough: something on the far side of this crossing already has a hand on him, and he either doesn’t know what it is or won’t say.
We’re coming back to that.
The crossing’s still hours off. The dark out here is the real kind — no towers, no glow but what we carry. The talk’s gone easy again, Leif walking us through the last time he went over, Gunnar accusing him of leaving out everything worth hearing, all of us loose with the rhythm of it.
All of us but Rayner, who’s drifted to the back.
I catch myself watching Gunnar. I usually am. He’s loud now, easy, the fear walked off him miles back, filling the quiet so nobody else has to. He’d hate that I noticed. I don’t say anything. Most of what I don’t say is about him.
Midnight, the far side. We’ll be there.
And so, I’m fairly sure, will whatever’s waiting.