Chapter 35: Terms of Travel

Chapter 35: Terms of Travel The morning packed itself in tight, like an ulcer or a secret. Apollo woke to the sound of boots hissing over wet grass, Lyra’s silhouette already moving among the shadows, double-checking nothing and everything at once. No sentimental farewells; Nik and Yiv exchanged a handshake that could have been a threat, or a bribe, or just the minimum pressure required to keep the world from splitting in two. Cale did not pretend at camaraderie. He shouldered the majority of their combined gear without complaint, as if the burden was a privilege he’d earned. The party snaked out from beneath the canopy, dragging after them the raw nerves of too many recent betrayals. The trail was an afterthought, a rut between a sickle of mossed-over boulders and a stand of saplings whose branches bled an improbable blue. The sky overhead was white, dry, and hollow, and the air inside it tasted more of memory than weather. Nik shuffled next to Yiv, the two of them orbiting in a dance of mutual suspicion. Apollo caught fragments of their banter: the time Yiv blew a safe and instead vaporized an entire cellar, the week Nik soldered a tripwire so finely he caught only the toes of the mark’s left boot, picking it clean with a thief’s pride. "Explosives are an art," Yiv declared, voice shrill with conviction. "You just paint with a bigger brush." Nik’s laughter came brittle and too loud, but the cadence underneath was genuine. In a brief, unguarded glance, the two sized each other up, each recognizing the other’s skill set as a mirror with a slightly different fracture. Apollo watched rather than joined. He walked mid-pack, careful to keep evenly between Lyra’s perimeter sweeps and the unyielding choreography of Cale and Thorin at the rear. Renna haunted the gap behind Lyra, every few minutes glancing back sharply, as if expecting to be followed by someone who had not yet decided whether to attack or apologize. The tension in her movements suggested she was betting on both. No one asked if this was a good idea. Even if they had, Apollo doubted he would answer. The memory of Torgo and the river was still raw, a throb in the knuckles of his right hand where the gold had started to show itself even in daylight. He flexed the fingers, feeling the pulse of latent power run up to his elbow and then vanish like a nervous tic, always gone when he tried to catch it. He wondered if that’s how it would be, from now on: power always a rumor, never a fact. They moved through the ridge, sun crawling slow enough that every minute lasted twice as long. The world grew swampy; dew turned to mist, the ground to a slick, uncertain membrane. At the bottom of a slope, Lyra paused only to nod at an obvious snag in the route, an old rope bridge, its struts draped with what looked like the desiccated pelt of something once-ambitious but now thoroughly dead. Nik considered the span with the fatalism of a man who had already practiced his own last words. "You suppose that’s load-bearing?" he said. "It’s not even self-bearing," Yiv spat, arms folded. "I’d sooner trust fortune cookies for structural advice." Lyra gave the bridge a cursory test with her sleeve-wrapped hand. "We’ll walk the bog," she said, which in the hierarchy of Lyra’s language meant the matter was closed. The alternate path was not a path; it was a trough of peat and standing water, thin ice at the edge, the whole of it humming with the intent to pull you under if you so much as glanced away. Yiv groaned, but Cale was already moving, boots breaking the ice in a rhythm that turned his progress into a kind of challenge to the world: See if you can stop me. When he reached the deepest part, he stopped. Turned. "It’s fine," he called. "Nothing bites unless it can win." This was not strictly reassuring, but Lyra went after him. Nik and Yiv and even Thorin followed in silence. Apollo hesitated only a beat, then stepped onto the crust. The cold seeped in immediately, up through the boot and into the marrow. At the halfway point, the bog flexed but did not swallow him. Still, something shifted beneath his foot, a suggestion, not a certainty, of movement. He did not look down, but focused instead on the line of Cale’s back, the way the man moved as if he belonged to every place and none. It was a trick Apollo recognized. Nobody brave ever wore it so convincingly. Halfway across, something slick brushed Apollo’s ankle. He kept moving. The next moment, it happened again, firmer, wrapping a millisecond and then gone. He heard nothing, but the impression of being measured, tested, perhaps, nearly stopped him. Only the fact that Lyra was now on the far side, watching him with a look of not-quite-pity, kept him in motion. On the other bank, they caught their breath and wrung out sleeves, unwilling to talk about what, if anything, had accompanied them through the water. Yiv, whose legs were thin as wire, plopped down and began to tinker with the bindings on his boots. Nik offered a canister of mash, which Yiv accepted with a grunt. They shared it, and Apollo noticed the way Yiv’s eyes lingered on Nik’s hands, measuring the scars, cataloguing the precision, and understood that a bargain had been silently struck. Lyra checked their direction, then swept ahead. Renna shadowed her with a patience that was almost predatory. The terrain turned rougher, chunks of quartz and frostbitten shrubs thrown over the ridgeline like afterthoughts. Around noon, they came to a place where the trail vanished entirely, replaced by what the map in Apollo’s mind called a "survey station", a ruin of old walls and a ring of blackened stone where fire had once been a luxury, not an indictment. It was here they stopped, at Cale’s silent suggestion. The group fanned out in a semi-circle, each facing outward, as if waiting for the perimeter to announce itself. They said little as they ate, and less as they prepared for dusk. Here, the cold was not the kind that numbed but the kind that woke every old injury and called it back by name. Thorin, who had spoken less than twenty words the entire day, broke the silence by pointing at Cale’s left hand, the way the knuckles had never quite reset, the pinky angled wrong. "You were army," he said, not as a question. Cale flexed the hand. "Once." Thorin nodded, then went back to chewing. Apollo watched the exchange and felt the old itch return: the certainty that every person in his orbit was hiding a kernel of their original self, some splinter that, if pulled, would unravel the entire project. He sometimes wondered if this was just how exiles recognized each other; maybe all the restlessness in the world was just fragments trying to migrate home. That night, Cale took first watch. No one argued to the contrary. The fire was small and mean, but Apollo had the sense that it was not meant to illuminate so much as to remind the world they were, for the moment, still dangerous enough to be left alone. The group curled around the embers. Nik and Yiv traded stories too quietly to hear, Lyra and Renna hung back to back, each pretending to sleep. Thorin pulled his coat over his head and entered a hibernation only the truly exhausted could manage. Apollo did not sleep. He sat with his back to the ruins, the pulse in his wrist now a steady glow, the gold visible only if he squinted. He watched Cale at the edge of firelight, unmoving, gaze fixed outward. There was something in the stillness of the man that made Apollo nervous, the way he seemed to blend into the environment and yet declare, with every breath, that he was nothing of it. He wondered, for the first time in days, what it would take for someone like that to break. Or, harder still, to admit to being breakable at all. When the last of the fire became memory, Apollo let himself listen to the night. The wind chafed the station’s old stones; far off, something howled, then stopped. In the silence that followed, he watched Cale, not for signs of betrayal, but for the moment something in the world decided to challenge the thin perimeter they had drawn around themselves. It never came. The morning, as always, arrived without permission. Apollo wiped the frost from his sleeve, stood, and looked over the valley below. The sun bled out over a new horizon, throwing shadows thin as wounds down the hillside. When he glanced back at Cale, the man had not moved, had not even blinked. Behind them, the others roused themselves. Nik whistled softly and began packing up; Yiv ratcheted his toolbox and tested each hinge as if planning to set the entire world into a trap of his own making. Lyra and Renna avoided even the pretense of civility, but in their mutual silence Apollo recognized something like respect, or at least the hope of someday earning it. They set off down the ridge, the river a new suggestion in the hollow below. For a moment, Apollo’s mind flashed on the priest in the nave, on Torgo’s last laugh, on the way the city’s illusion had tried to bind him in with nothing but hunger and a geometrical lie. He reached into his pocket and touched the fragment of amber Torgo left behind. It was cold, but the cold felt like company now. He closed his hand around it and followed the others into the bruised dawn, thinking that, if nothing else, the perimeter would hold, at least for another day.