I'm going to die on a cliff edge above a river I never learned the name of, because rivers don't have names anymore, because nothing out here does.
That's the thought I have, clear and almost calm, as the fourth one circles in behind me and I understand, with the cold math this place taught me, that there's no version of the next thirty seconds where I walk away.
The wind comes off the gully cold and constant. The pines on the lip are the kind that grow where nothing else will. Otherwise the morning is quiet, the way places get quiet just before they finish with you.
I've been chasing a ghost for three hours, along the lip of this cliff, through trees thicker than they should be at this height. He wasn't running. He was leading me, and I followed, and now there are three more of them stepping out of the broken stone I walked past without looking up. The boy I was chasing turns around at last and looks at me with a flat, unhurried calm I know too well by now.
He's bigger than he should be. Bigger than my friend Renn, somehow, and where Renn's a door, this one's a wall. He carries it easy. That's the frightening part.
“You've been following me a long way,” he says. “Three hours of you on my line. You used to be cleverer than that, didn't you.”
I don't answer. There's nothing to answer with.
“Take him,” he says, to the three behind me. Not raising his voice.
They come.
And for about ten seconds I'm everything two and a half years of being broken and rebuilt and broken again has made me—I'm fast and I'm cold and I'm the one who gets up, and the first one comes in too eager and I drop my weight and put the left hook through his jaw the way I've done it a hundred times, and he folds, drops to the dirt at the cliff edge.
One.
That's as far as I get.
Because the one I dropped reaches up from the dirt with a blade and drags it across the back of my heel before I can move my foot. The tendon goes with a sound I feel more than hear. My leg stops being a leg, and I buckle.
Buckling is the end. The second one is on me before I'm down. A punch to my stomach that isn't a punch, too cold, too deep, going too far in, and when he steps back there's a dark wetness spreading through my shirt and a knife in his hand that's wearing it.
The body doesn't panic. That's the worst part. The training took the panic out of it long ago. It just runs the inventory of what's left: left arm, half a leg, no breath in the middle. Not enough. The mind, somewhere behind, says it back. Not enough. The third one is moving and I can't turn to face him because the turning is the leg I no longer have. He drives a blade in at my right shoulder while my arm is still up, takes it to the hilt at the joint, twists, and the whole arm dies, and I'm on one knee at the cliff edge with one working limb and a cold I haven't earned yet starting at the wet middle and going outward like ice on still water.
The wall hasn't moved. He didn't even need to touch me. He just watches.
And then a boot, almost gentle, against my shoulder. A push. Not even angry.
The cliff edge gives. I don't fall so much as the ground stops being where it was. For half a second the world goes perfectly still — the trees frozen against the dawn sky, my breath leaving me in a small white cloud, the four men at the lip already shrinking above me — and then the air takes me. The gully wall slides up past my face. The smell goes from pine-sap to river-air, cold and metallic.
I go over.
The fall is long and the air is cold and I have time, somehow, to hear them above me, getting smaller, already arguing, he was mine, that's a capture on my name, you've gone and gutted him, what's wrong with you, leave the dead fucker down there, and the voices go, and the water comes up to meet me, and the cold takes everything.
The bottom of the river is a long way down.
I sink. My blood unspools around me in the dark green water like smoke — my dead leg, my dead arm, the hole in my middle.
The river is colder than any of it, and it doesn't care which of us was right; it just takes whatever the cliff gives it. The light at the surface keeps getting further away. And somewhere in me — small and careful and undefeated by the last three hours — a fourteen-year-old is still pressing his palm to the iron wall of a train car, listening for the humming on the other side.
I close my eyes.
There's only black behind them.
That's not what I want, somehow. That's not the colour I want to go out on. So I keep them shut and I think, hard, the way you think to find a thing in a dark room—I think until there's something else, until there's something other than the black—
There. Green. The river-light coming through my closed lids, dim and cold and not quite the colour I'm reaching for, but close enough. Close enough that I can hold it. Close enough that if this is the way it ends, if this is what the dead lands and the cord and the cliff and the year have all been bringing me to, then this is what I want at the back of my eyes when it ends.
Not the black. The green.
I hold the green.
And the river takes me down.
So. Let me tell you how I got here.
Let me tell you how I lost my squad, because it's the worst thing I know, and I've been putting off saying it for a long time, and I can't put it off any longer. Let me tell you about the train. About the Pit, and the dark Below. About the man in pale shirts who watched me ripen like he owned the harvest. About a brother on the wrong track, and a mother in the ground, and a number on my chest that wasn't my name.
Let me tell you about Pip.
It starts, the way everything in this country starts, with a door opening onto a world nobody told us was waiting.
It starts on a train.