Chapter 30: Cracks in the Wall

The rain made the eastern sector look even more like a weeping sore on the face of Zenith. The fog didn’t lift. It just got heavier soaking everything in a freezing metallic drizzle.

Vane burst through the rusted door of the triage ward like he was escaping a fire. He shook water off his Academy jacket like a wet dog.

“Gods,” he announced to the dim room. “If they are going to exile people out here they could at least install a roof over the path. I think I just drowned three times between the boundary line and here.”

Senna was sitting up in her cot wrapped in three layers of moth-eaten blankets. She looked sickly. Her skin was the color of old parchment but her eyes tracked him with a spark of anticipation that hadn’t been there a week ago.

“Stop whining rat,” she croaked. “Water is good for you. Washes off the stench of desperation.”

“Nothing washes that off. It is baked in.”

Vane pulled up his usual stool reaching inside his damp jacket. He produced two flaky sugar-dusted pastries wrapped in a cloth napkin. They were high-end treats from the faculty lounge that he definitely hadn’t “facilitated a donation” for. These he had just straight-up swiped.

He tossed one to her. She caught it with surprising dexterity for someone dying.

“Bribery,” she noted sniffing the pastry suspiciously. “Apricot?”

“Only the best for the general.” Vane took a huge bite of his own dusting sugar over his uniform. “You missed a banner day in Tactics class. General Kael finally popped a blood vessel.”

Senna raised an eyebrow around a mouthful of pastry. “Did he?”

“Oh yeah.” Vane stood up. He dropped into an uncanny imitation of the lion-man’s rigid explosive posture. He puffed his chest out and adopted a constipated scowl.

“’You call this a formation maggots?!’” Vane roared. His voice dropped an octave into a guttural bark. “’My grandmother moves with more cohesion and she has been dead for twenty years! Your chassis are weak! Your minds are pudding! If a dungeon breaks tomorrow you won’t be warriors. You will be hors d’oeuvres!’”

Senna let out a sharp barking laugh. It immediately turned into a coughing fit that bent her double. But when she straightened up wiping pastry flakes and black phlegm from her lip she was grinning.

“He still uses the grandmother line?” she wheezed. “Gods Kael. Get new material. He yelled that at my cohort fifteen years ago.”

“He also broke a training staff over a third-year’s helmet because the kid flinched during a charge,” Vane added sitting back down. “The sound was incredible. Like dropping a melon off a tower.”

“Good,” Senna murmured finishing her pastry. “Fear teaches better than lectures.”

She leaned back against the wall watching him. The tension that usually defined their interactions was absent. The master-student hierarchy and the predator-prey dynamic were gone. It was just two people taking shelter from the rain.

“You enjoy it,” she observed quietly. “Not the training. The performance. Being the rat in the walls.”

Vane shrugged licking sugar off his thumb. “It beats being the target. In Oakhaven if you couldn’t fight you had to be funny. Or fast. Or useful. Being able to mimic the biggest guy in the room buys you about five seconds before he punches you. Sometimes five seconds is enough to get away.”

Senna studied him. “You talk about running a lot. But you told me you ran scams involving fifty kids. You weren’t just running Vane. You were herding.”

Vane went still. The sugar suddenly tasted cloying in his mouth.

“Herding implies I knew where we were going,” he said. His voice lost its performative brightness. “I didn’t. I just knew where we couldn’t stay.”

He looked down at the floor. “There was a bad winter three years ago. Food riots in the upper districts meant the supply chain to the slums got cut entirely. The gangs were kicking in doors taking anything that wasn’t nailed down.”

He picked at a loose thread on his knee.

“I gathered up about thirty of the younger kids. Got them into an old sub-basement beneath a collapsed textile mill. Told them it was safe. Told them I had painted ’blood-wards’ on the door that would fry anyone who tried to get in.”

He looked up at Senna. “It was chicken blood and chalk. I just drew scary-looking squiggles.”

“But they believed you,” Senna murmured.

“Yeah. They believed me. Because I sold it. I stood by that door with a rusted knife and acted like I was holding back an army with ancient magic.” He gave a bitter crooked smile. “We stayed down there for two weeks. Ate rats and drank boiler water. But nobody panicked. Because the Great Vane had ward-paint on the door.”

“Did they all make it?” Senna asked softly.

Vane’s smile vanished. “Winter is long in Oakhaven. Pneumonia doesn’t care about chalk marks.”

He didn’t say any more. He didn’t have to.

Senna looked at him. Really looked at him. She saw the layers of bullshit and charm he wrapped around himself not as armor but as camouflage. He was a liar who lied to keep people from despairing.

“You aren’t a parasite Vane,” she said. Her voice rasped with a strange gentleness. “A parasite just takes. You… you sell cheap hope at a high markup because it is the only inventory you have.”

Vane snorted uncomfortable with the assessment. “That sounds way nobler than it is.”

“It isn’t noble. It is desperate. But it isn’t nothing.”

She shifted wincing as her back protested. “When I was a newly minted Rank 4 Adept they gave me a squad of green recruits to train. Nobles’ sons mostly. Soft hands. Loud mouths.”

She shook her head. “We were doing live-fire drills with low-level constructs. One of them… a Baron’s kid… got grazed. A little cut on his bicep. Barely bled.”

Vane leaned forward sensing a story. “Did he faint?”

“Worse. He started screaming for a medic. Demanded we stop the exercise. He was hysterical. Kept yelling ’Do you know who my father is?!’”

Vane grinned. “Let me guess. You comforted him.”

Senna gave a terrifying wolfish smile. “I grabbed him by the collar. I dragged him to the front of the line and told him that if he didn’t finish the drill I would open the cut up enough so his father could see exactly what a coward’s blood looked like.”

Vane laughed out loud. “Did it work?”

“He finished the drill. Crying the whole time but he finished. He ended up being a decent vanguard officer actually. Died in the Badlands a few years back covering a retreat.”

Her smile faded. “They always die Vane. The brave ones. The scared ones. The wall holds for a while and then it cracks. That is the job.”

Vane looked at her. He looked at the ruin of a great warrior decaying in a forgotten room.

“Maybe,” Vane said quietly. “But sometimes… if you draw the chalk marks right… they last a little longer than they should.”

The silence that fell wasn’t heavy. It was warm.

Outside the rain kept falling but inside the ward for the first time it didn’t feel like a tomb. It felt like a bunker where two soldiers were waiting out the storm swapping lies and truths to keep the darkness at bay.

Senna closed her eyes looking more peaceful than he had ever seen her.

“You bring too much noise rat,” she murmured sleep tugging at her. “Come back tomorrow. And bring more of those apricot things.”

“Yeah,” Vane whispered standing up to leave. “I will.”

He walked out into the rain no longer dreading the walk back. He realized with a jolt of panic that he wasn’t just waiting for her to die anymore. He was starting to worry about what he was going to do with his evenings when she was gone.

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