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The pork buns had gone cold, which didn't stop them from being the best thing Ren had eaten in recent memory, possibly because the body he was using was six years old and had not eaten since yesterday morning.
He sat cross-legged on the floor beside the bed. Sera sat against the headboard, blanket pulled up, her hands wrapped around her bun like she was still checking that it was real. Color had settled into her face properly now. Actual warmth, blood doing what blood was supposed to do.
"Where did you get these," she said.
"Market district."
"You said you spent everything on the doctor."
Ren hesitated. "I had a little left."
"How little."
"Enough for three buns."
She looked at him for a long moment. He looked back and did not add anything.
"Eat," she said.
He ate.
They sat in the thin evening light and didn't talk for a while. The room was the same room it had always been, cold hearth, narrow bed, chair with one short leg, but it felt different with her sitting upright in it. It had been a sickroom for two years. Now it was just a room.
"Tell me about the doctor," Sera said.
"I already told you."
"Tell me again. I was a little distracted at the time."
Ren picked at his bun. "He came through the market district a few weeks ago. I saw him fixing a man's leg, in the alley behind the grain merchants. He didn't charge anything. Just worked and left." A pause. "I watched him for a few days."
"And he was mute."
"Yeah. But he had paper so I wrote him a note about you. What was wrong with you, how long, all of it." Ren looked down at the bun. "He wrote back that he could fix it."
Sera was quiet. Her thumb moved slowly over the surface of her bun.
"And the money," she said.
"I saved it."
"Elias." Her voice had gone soft. "How long."
He shrugged. "Since last year."
She said nothing for a moment. He could see her working backward through the past year, all the times she had thought they were barely managing.
"You should have told me," she said.
"You would've spent it on me."
"Yes. Because that's what it was for."
"I needed it for this," Ren said.
Her eyes went wet. She held it together. He watched her hold it together.
"I thought I was out of time," she said quietly.
"You almost were."
"I knew." She looked at the far wall. "I kept thinking, one more week. One more week and I'll tell you everything I never told you. About your father, about where we came from, all of it." She stopped. "I kept moving that week."
"You can tell me now," Ren said.
She looked at him. "You're six."
"I know things."
She made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Yes. You do." She looked at the bun in her hands and then back at him. "Maybe not tonight. But soon. I'll tell you everything soon."
"Okay," Ren said. He took another bite of his bun.
She watched him chew. "You are the strangest child," she said, but the way she said it was warm.
"You always say that."
"It keeps being true."
They ate the rest in silence, and it was not a bad silence.
Sera asked about his week once they were done, the real version, and Ren gave her mostly the truth with the specific crime removed. He told her about the delivery merchant on Tuesday, the two copper job that took three hours. She told him about a dream she'd had three nights ago, a field with yellow grass and the smell of rain, how she'd woken from it more rested than she had been in months.
"Maybe your body already knew it was getting better," Ren said.
She tilted her head slightly. "That's a strange thing to say."
He shrugged. "I read a lot."
She laughed. Short, surprised, real. He had not heard her laugh in Elias's memories for a long time.
By the time the candle was down to its last centimeter her eyes were struggling. He saw her catch herself twice. He moved from the floor to the bed without asking, fitting into the space beside her. She didn't say anything. She shifted to make room and put one arm around his shoulders.
"Thank you," she said to the ceiling. Very quietly. "For not giving up."
Ren said nothing. He wasn't sure what Elias would have said and he wasn't sure what he would have said either.
She was asleep in under three minutes. Her breathing was deep and even. No pauses. No counting required.
He lay still beside her and listened until he was certain it would hold. Then he waited a little longer, just to be sure.
.
.
.
He slipped out at the second hour of the night, when the building was quiet and the street outside had gone down to the last few people walking home.
The alley behind the boarding house was empty. He sat on the same stone ledge where Elias had sat that afternoon, looked at the same strip of sky, and thought.
Gregory Hood. General Malvick Siven. Both of them Legendary rank. Both of them present when the crater formed. The question was whether they knew the secondary mask had survived, or whether they had looked at the crater, seen the primary mask in pieces, and concluded the job was done.
If they thought he was dead, he had time.
If they didn't, he had considerably less.
He couldn't know. He had no intelligence, no contacts, no way to reach anyone in the Empire from a border town in a child's body. He was operating completely blind.
So assume they don't know for now, he thought. Move accordingly. Stay quiet. Stay small. Don't do anything that would show up on a Legendary rank's detection range.
He looked at his hands. Small fingers. Scraped knuckles, already healed.
He thought about Gregory Hood walking toward him down that street, the scripture burning around him, his own Gatling dissolving in the man's grip like paper. He thought about Malvick landing in front of him at every exit, not chasing, just already there when Ren arrived. He thought about the sound the primary mask had made in the crater.
One day, he thought. One day I will make both of you experience something worse than death. I don't know what yet. But I will find it.
He held that thought for a moment. Not as rage, not hot and immediate. As a fact. Something filed away under eventually, to be returned to when the conditions were right.
He let it go and moved on.
The mask situation. The primary mask, his original face, was at ninety percent reconstruction. He could feel it the way you feel a bone knitting, a deep internal pressure that would resolve into something solid. Another few days, maybe less. When it finished, he could shift back to his original appearance. Until then, staying in Elias's body was the right call. A six-year-old in a border town was invisible. That was useful.
The secondary mask was now fused to the inside of his chest beneath the skin, had rebuilt itself to thirty percent. It would need longer. He had plans for it once it was functional, a new avatar body, properly prepared, something that could act independently without being traceable back to whatever he was now.
He took inventory of what he had lost.
The Gatling gun. The Umbral Gentleman attire. The plague doctor mask. The original body, fully equipped.
He turned each one over. The Gatling was a weapon, replaceable in principle, less replaceable in practice given his current resources. The attire was a loss but not a critical one. The plague doctor mask was the aesthetic layer over the white mask, cosmetic more than functional.
The primary mask itself was fine. Ninety percent was almost nothing to wait through.
Minor setback, he concluded. Significant, but minor.
Then the warmth pulsed.
He felt it in his chest, low and deep, a kind of warmth that had nothing to do with body temperature. He had felt it before, intermittently, since the night in the cult's sanctum. He pressed two fingers to the skin over his sternum.
The two fragments of the Law of Fertility. Shub-Niggurath's parting gift.
He had known they followed the soul, not the body. When the primary body died, they'd carried over into the secondary mask, and from the secondary mask into Elias's body when the assimilation completed. They were not attached to any physical location. They were attached to him, whatever him meant at this level.
The pulse came again, a little stronger than before.
You're merging
He could feel the edges of the fragments shifting, slow and continuous, two things becoming one thing. In a few days they would complete the process and whatever they became when they were whole would be inside him permanently.
He had no idea what that would do. The System had been silent.
So I wait and I see, he thought. And in the meantime I do not do anything that might trigger it in front of a Legendary rank hunter because that is the worst possible version of events.
He sat with all of it: the unknowns, the constraints, the things he had lost, the things he was waiting on. The border town around him, the cold night air, the sound of Sera's even breathing somewhere upstairs.
Then, in the back of his consciousness, something blinked.
A sound he recognized.
[System Reboot Complete.]
He went very still.
Hello, Ren. Did you miss me?
He stared at nothing for a long moment.
"So the day has come," he said quietly, to the alley, "that I actually missed your voice."
I'll try not to make it weird.
"You already made it weird by taking this long." He paused. "What happened."
Primary host body destruction triggered emergency shutdown. Secondary mask had insufficient capacity to maintain the interface. I've been running diagnostics since the blast. Everything is back online now.
"Everything."
Everything. Welcome back, Ren.
He leaned against the wall and looked at the strip of sky above the alley. The same strip of sky Elias had looked at, a few hours ago, thinking about dying.
"Yeah," he said. "Good to be back."