The Page I Did Not Read Aloud

Twenty-two minutes.

I stand in the street that is one degree off true, holding a child's shoe with the lace still tied in a careful double bow, and I do the maths that grief does when it is too soon for grief. The Drowned King took Mira as the cost of a story I told to save her. Borrowed Pages does not bill you. It bills the room. The first time it took a paper cut off my palm. The second time it took the girl off my hip. I am beginning to understand the size of the account, and the size of the account is: everything, eventually, and it will always take the thing nearest to the centre of you.

So I stop telling stories.

That is the whole of my plan, for the next twenty-two minutes. Not a hero's plan. A reader's plan. I have read a hundred apocalypses and the ones who survive the first scenario are almost never the ones who burn brightest in the first hour. They are the ones who are still there at the end, having spent nothing they could not afford. The swordsman in the yellow coat did not draw until the last possible second. I took that to mean a technique. It was never a technique. It was a budget.

I put the shoe inside my coat, over the place where Mira had been warm, and I find a doorway with a solid wall at my back and a clear line to two exits, and I wait.

The Hound comes for me anyway.

I feel it before the light goes. Everything quiets first, the way it did in the stockroom, the crisp packet, the breath, the world holding still around the fact of being noticed. Up at the zenith the fang of bright stars with one red eye turns its red eye down, and the pale coin of sun behind the cloud is crossed, very neatly, by the shape of a jaw, and the cold patient pressure of being chosen settles over the street like a hand on the back of my neck.

[The Hound, a constellation of the hunt and the chosen quarry, has not forgotten you.]

[The Hound renews its offer: [Mark of the Worthy Quarry]. The bearer becomes interesting. The bearer is found. The bearer is chased beautifully.]

"Refuse it," I say, to the dim flickering nothing above the rooftops, the streetlamp at the end of its life, my poor washed-up star.

[Faded Lamplight: "i can't, sweetheart. i can't again. i spent it refusing him the first time. if i refuse another i go out, and if i go out you have no sponsor at all, and a survivor with no sponsor at the end of the first scenario is"]

[Faded Lamplight does not finish the sentence.]

I do not make it finish the sentence.

So the Mark lands. I feel it go into me, a brand with no heat, just a sudden terrible legibility, as if I have been walking through the world in fog and someone has switched on every light in the building and painted me on the wall. The Hound, up in the dark, makes the sound that is not a sound, the pressure on the ears, and it is, I understand with a lurch, delight. I am interesting now. I am found. I am about to be chased beautifully.

Nineteen minutes.

I run.

I am not going to describe all of it, because some of it I do not have words for, the way the streets fold, the way a road I have walked to work for ten years becomes a thing with opinions, the way the Hound does not chase like an animal but like weather, like a season turning, always somehow already ahead of where I am about to be. I run, and I do not tell a single story, and that is the hardest thing I have ever done, because every doorway I duck through I know a page that would save me, I know a hero who could turn and end this, the borrowed sword is right there at the edge of my open mouth, and the cost of it would be whatever I have left that I love, and the only thing I have left that I love is a school shoe over my heart and a faded little star that has already given me a ninth of its light and a notch besides.

I keep my mouth shut. I spend nothing. I run on legs that are only mine, breath that is only mine, fear that is entirely my own and entirely free.

Eleven minutes.

The Hound corners me on the long pavement, the one that went thirty extra feet of itself before it remembered to meet the road, and there is no exit at the end of it, the geometry has eaten the exit, and the jaw shape comes off the sun and starts, slowly, the way a thing with all the time in the world starts, to descend.

And Faded Lamplight, above me, does the thing it is not supposed to be able to do twice in one night.

[Faded Lamplight: "shut your eyes, sweetheart. don't watch. i don't want you to watch."]

"Don't"

[Faded Lamplight: "i've had four thousand years of nothing. i would rather have had you for an hour. that is not a sad thing. i need you to understand that it is not a sad thing."]

[Faded Lamplight is spending: ]

The street fills with the light of a streetlamp at the end of its life, and this time it does not fade after a second, this time it floods, it pours, it gives everything it has been hoarding through four thousand lonely years all at once, and the jaw of the Hound flinches back from a poor dim star that has chosen, against every rule of the watching dark, to burn like something that matters.

The countdown hits zero.

[The First Scenario is complete.]

[Survivor located. Survivor sponsored. Survivor: ]

The system stops. The way it stopped over the cost of the Drowned King's story. The field where my name should be hangs empty, and flickers, and I realise, standing in the after-quiet with the Hound retreating and the geometry of the street slowly remembering how to be a street, that I cannot supply it. I reach for my own name the way you reach for a word on the tip of your tongue, and there is nothing there. A clean patch. Cleaner than the day it was poured.

That was the cost. Not the shoe. Not the star. Faded Lamplight gave its light to save me and the bill came to me anyway, the way it always does, and what it took was the smallest thing at the centre of a person, the thing you never think to guard.

It took my name.

[Survivor: UNKNOWN.]

[The First Scenario rewards its survivors. One name will be entered into the records of the watching dark, to be known by all Constellations, to be hunted and courted and bought.]

[This survivor has no name to enter.]

[Anomaly. Escalating.]

Above the rooftops my star is almost out. A coal. An ember. The last red of a fire somebody forgot. It flickers, twice, the way somebody flickers when they are trying not to cry in public and have nearly succeeded.

And in the slab of greenish stars in the east, where the Drowned King keeps the things he has taken, one very small, very new point, the colour of a school cardigan, leans down out of the dark as far as a captured star can lean.

It says one word. I do not hear it with my ears. I hear it the way Mira heard my poor star, in the place behind the place where hearing happens.

It says my name.

She gives it back to me. The girl the King took to keep, the only listener small enough to have heard my star in a stockroom, reaches down out of her prison in the east and hands me back the one thing the dark just stole, because somebody down here remembered her, and she has decided, in the way the very young decide everything, all at once and forever, to remember me too.

[Survivor: ]

[Survivor name restored by external source.]

[Source: unsanctioned. Source: a star not yet four hours old. Source flagged.]

[The Drowned King has noticed his newest star is speaking to the surface.]

[The Drowned King is displeased.]

Above me, Faded Lamplight catches one last spark off the name coming home, and steadies, just barely, an ember refusing the wind. In the east, a four-hour-old star the colour of a school cardigan glows defiant and bright and entirely too loud, while around it the long green sprawl of the Drowned King begins, slowly, to turn.

I have my name back. I have a star that won't quite die. And I have eleven seconds before I have to decide whether to run from the King's anger, or walk east, toward the slab of stars where they keep the taken, and start telling the most dangerous constellation in the sky the story of how it is going to give a little girl back.

I take a breath. I let the air in my fist remember being a sword.

"Once," I say, to the turning dark, "there was a king who kept things in jars."