Chapter 37 — Inventory
There was a night, about a week after the frost depot, when nothing tried to kill us.
I want to record that, because it almost never happens, and because I've noticed that the stories people tell about the apocalypse are all monsters and never the other thing — the nights. And there was a night. Somebody had traded for a working generator and three strings of patio lights, and Halloran had decided this constituted a festival, and by dark the mall atrium was strung with warm little bulbs and smelled like whatever Reyes's people had done to the depot's frozen supplies, which turned out to be a lot, because it turns out a winter's worth of stolen medicine comes packed alongside a winter's worth of stolen actual food.
Nobody had eaten like that since the sky broke. I watched a hundred people who'd spent six weeks surviving remember, for one night, how to just live, and it did something to my chest I didn't have a skill for.
I found a spot on the atrium's second-level railing, above the lights, with a bowl of something hot that had corn in it — corn, like a civilization — and Priya found me there, because she always does, and dropped down beside me with her own bowl and her particular sixteen-year-old talent for arriving exactly when you'd started to feel things.
"You've got the roof face," she said. "The one where you go count your problems."
"I was going to count my skills, actually."
"That's the same thing for you, but okay." She stole a piece of my corn. "Go on then. Inventory. I'll grade you."
So we did the thing, up on the railing, over the warm noise of a hundred people being briefly happy, and I'm going to give it to you the way I gave it to her, because I hadn't said them all out loud in one place before, and it surprised me, hearing the list.
"[Straggler's Call]," I said. "The first one that was really mine. One percent of a monster's herding-voice." I held up a finger. "It doesn't command anything. It just says food's over here in a language the dumb ones can't ignore. Split a pack. Bait a horde into a bottleneck. Pull one thing off another."
"The 'wrong-way' thing," Priya said. "You used it on the Gaunts. And the Rimeclaw."
"That one earns its keep." Second finger. "[Clingstep]. Off a wall-crawler. Walk on walls and ceilings, and I hear too much." I tapped my ear. "It came with the hearing whether I wanted it or not. Took me a week to stop flinching at everybody's heartbeat. But it means nobody watches the ceiling, and I live on the ceiling now."
"That's why you're always up somewhere when a fight starts. I thought that was a personality thing."
"It's both."
Third finger. "[Threshold Hum]. Not off a monster — off a place. One percent of a Threshold's pressure. I can open a stuck seam or seal a small one. Feel where things are pressed shut." I turned my hand over. "It's the quiet one. It doesn't win fights. But it's how I sealed the depot behind us, and it's — " I stopped, because the next true thing about the Hum led somewhere I didn't take on festival nights. "It's how I'll get where I'm eventually going. Leave it there."
Priya, who knew exactly where I was eventually going and had the grace not to say it over corn, let it go. "Four."
"[Earthquake]." I grinned; I can't help it, with that one. "The famous one. One percent of a Tremor-Beast. Can't spill a coffee — but I don't shake everything, I shake the one spot. A puddle. A wet floor. A brittle strut. And if I hit a thing's own rhythm, on the beat, over and over — " I mimed it, tap, tap, tap — "it shakes itself down. Patience does the part the power can't."
"You spilled the broth on purpose. As a flex. In front of everyone."
"Best day of my apocalypse."
"It's a low bar."
"It's a spilled bar." Fifth finger. "[Overlooked]. Off the Forgettable — the drifty grey thing nobody can finish looking at. One percent means I'm slightly less worth noticing, which, on my face, rounds down to invisible." Priya snorted. "But placed right, it's one thing, one moment: a guard's eye slides off me, an enemy forgets my hand exists for the half-second I need. And—" I lowered my voice, because this was the one I didn't advertise. "It's the only thing I've got that turns me down. Everything else makes me brighter. Louder. Easier to — noticed by the wrong things. Overlooked is the volume knob. It's the reason I'm still here."
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Priya was quiet a second. She knew about the brightness. She'd seen the Redactor look past me on a street two miles from here.
"Six," she said, gentler.
"[Might]. Off a Bruteling — a bicep with opinions." I flexed, which did nothing, which was the joke. "One percent of super strength is a medium sandwich. But strength is just a rude way to move the world, and everything heavy is balanced on one small screw. A knuckle. An ankle. A cracked pillar. I don't lift the thing. I find the one place it's afraid of, and I push there."
"You put a four-ton Guardian on its back by poking its ankle."
"I asked its ankle nicely. It agreed to fall over."
"That's the most upsetting way you've ever phrased it and you've had a lot of tries." She stole more corn. "Seven."
"[Mend-Flesh]. Off a Knitfly." I turned my forearm over — the doorframe scratch was long gone, healed clean, unremarkable. "The least cool one. Heals slow. No trick, no keystone, no clever. A cut just closes a little faster and it never goes bad." I shrugged. "But it means I keep going when other people have to stop. And it doesn't cost Nour her gold to patch me up. Some skills aren't scalpels. Some are just — worth having."
"And the new one."
"[Chill]. Off a frost-scuttler." I made a tiny frost bloom on the railing between us, a delicate crackle of white, one percent of a cold that could freeze a building reduced to a party trick. "Officially, it makes a nice iced tea." Priya laughed. "Unofficially, I built a little fence of colder around Vess's arm and the dying part gave up trying to spread. That's the whole skill, right now. A drink, or a fence." I let the frost melt. "Give it a year."
Priya counted on her fingers, mock-serious. "So that's — eight things, each of which is, individually, completely pathetic."
"Correct."
"A coffee you can't spill. A sandwich's worth of strength. A slightly-below-average forgettable face. An iced tea."
"You're really enjoying this."
"I'm having the best time." She set her bowl down and looked at me, and the teasing went somewhere warmer, the way it does with her right before she says a true thing and pretends she didn't mean to. "And two weeks ago you took a pack of Gaunts, a shakedown crew, a Guardian, and a monster that freezes buildings — with eight pathetic things and a stubborn refusal to fight fair." She shrugged, elaborately casual. "It's kind of the most impressive thing I've ever seen. Don't tell anyone I said that. I have a reputation."
"Your reputation is 'teenager who insults me over noodles.'"
"Which I will lose if this gets out."
Down in the atrium, Halloran had climbed onto a table — seventy-four years old, fist unlit, a cup of something in his hand — and was making a toast that nobody could hear over the noise and everybody cheered anyway. Nour sat by the fever kid, who was up now, out of danger, playing cards with Corin's crew and losing on purpose to make Tam feel clever. Reyes stood at the edge of it all with his arms crossed, watching a hundred people he kept alive be happy, and — I caught it, just for a second — almost letting himself be one of them.
"You know what's strange," I said. "When the System told me my class was 'useless with scaling potential,' I thought the whole point was going to be getting strong. Beating the number. Becoming the guy who wins." I nodded down at the warm crowded light. "And it turns out the point was — I don't know. This. Eight dumb tricks that keep these idiots alive, and a night with corn in it."
"Careful," Priya said. "That's dangerously close to a feeling."
"I'll copy one percent of it. It won't take."
She laughed, and bumped my shoulder with hers, and we sat there on the railing over the lights for a while and didn't count anything.
Later, when the generator had been switched off to save fuel and the strings of bulbs had gone dark and the atrium had emptied to embers and sleeping shapes, Sprinkles found me still on the railing, and sat, and looked down at the last few people awake.
You listed eight, the cat said."I know."
You didn't list the pen."No." I hadn't. I never do, out loud, on nights with corn. "The pen's not a party trick. And it's the only one that scares me." I looked at my hand, where a splinter of the only pen there is sat quiet and off every ledger. "Everything else I copied to live, Sprinkles. The pen's the one I copied to — " I didn't finish it. To go back. To finish the sentence. To spend myself, memory by memory, on a truth the size of a hundred worlds.
Sprinkles didn't push. For once.
Eight small things that keep people alive, it said, watching the sleeping mall, and one enormous thing that might, someday, cost you everything you are. A pause. That's a good inventory, Leo. Most people only ever manage the second kind. You built the first kind first.Hold onto that. It's the part that comes back for you, at the end, when the big one asks for too much.I didn't know what it meant. I'd learn, eventually, the way I learn everything about the cat — much too late and exactly on time.
But that night I just sat over the dark atrium, full of corn, eight pathetic miracles in my pocket and a community asleep beneath me, and I let the to-do list wait.
It'd still be there tomorrow. It always was.
Tonight there'd been a night.