Free Web NovelChapter 1: The Worst Deal of His Life
Aiden had a year left to live, three copper to his name, and a route of lamps that would all outlast him.
He had made his peace with two of the three.
The third was about to get complicated.
The crystal was cracked again.
The lamp threw his face back at him through the crack, split in two. Average. Dark hair grown too long, the skin gone tired, the cheeks fallen in these last months where the illness was eating him. Not a face anyone looked at twice. He looked, because there was nowhere else to put his eyes.
He’d stopped minding the face. The crack was the problem. In the Lamplighter’s Assessment Rubric it counted as functional and didn’t qualify for emergency replacement. Four complaints, same argument, same results: nothing, nothing, a form letter, nothing. He fixed it with wire from his left pocket. Logged it in the complaint column. Moved on.
Seven down. Five to go.
The Outer Ring at second bell was wet cobble, shut shutters, and the line of his own lamps running off ahead of him. Each one a small cold circle of light with a long dark gap before the next. The gaps were where the budget had stopped. It smelled like the city had decided this section was someone else’s problem and then, years later, given up on deciding.
His chest caught between lamp eight and nine.
He stopped, got his hand on the wall, coughed until his ribs separated and something thick came up the back of his throat. He didn’t check his palm. He’d done that twice last week. The information hadn’t changed. The coat hung off him while he did it.
It was his mother’s. The wool had gone dark with four years of lamp oil, and it sat loose on him now, looser than last winter, the collar standing off a neck that had less to it every month.
Four months back, the physician had said it in the tone they use when the sentence has already ended before you hear it. Aiden had gone home and made soup.
Soup. Of all the responses to "you’re dying." Soup.
His hands had cut the carrots the way his mother had taught him to cut them. He hadn’t had to think about it. The knife had remembered the angle before his head had decided what to do with the news. He had come back to the route the next morning because lamp four on Aldgate Alley was dark, and dark lamps and progressive lung deterioration had identical solutions. Show up. Do the thing.
Nine. Ten. Eleven. Wire again, because the housing screw had been stripped since before he’d inherited the route from Marsh.
The baker at the corner of Welt’s Lane was closing her shutters when he passed. Her Hearthhound was asleep at the threshold, the way they slept when the oven was off and the residual heat in the stones was running out. The dog opened one eye as Aiden’s boots came level with the doorway. Tracked him for two steps. Closed the eye.
The baker had her hand resting on the dog’s shoulder without thinking about it. Eleven years he’d been walking past her shop. The hand had been on the dog the whole time.
Must be nice.
He kept moving.
Twelve was Sewer Row proper.
He was packing lamp thirteen’s housing when the sound came up through the grate beside lamp twelve. Not the gutters. He knew the gutters after four years and their specific knock of drainage against iron in different temperatures. This was organized. Multiple contacts on stone, moving with direction behind them. Then silence. The kind that understood it was being listened to.
He held still.
Nothing came back.
Gnawers ran the tunnels sometimes. The pack the notices warned about was three belts inward, clear of Sewer Row.
He gave the notice the respect of a full read anyway. Packs moved. Belts were a clerk’s idea of distance, and the tunnels had never once consulted a clerk about anything that mattered down there.
He moved on.
Thirteen. Fourteen.
He was repacking sixteen’s housing when the second sound came up from the grate beside fourteen.
Low. Wet.
He put the kit down and went back.
Between the bars: fist-sized. Sores across its back. Green light pulsing under the skin in the color of something that hadn’t decided what it was yet. Chest moving. Barely. Eyes open, still, aimed at him with a precision that had nothing to do with how rat eyes worked.
He looked at it.
Dying animal in a gutter on the worst section of his route. Man with one year remaining by a physician’s generous estimate. Both of them on Sewer Row at second bell running numbers that didn’t close.
Look at us.
He could see the similarity. He wasn’t going to make a thing of it.
"At least you’re uglier than I am," he said. "That’s something."
The chest rose. Fell. Rose.
The system was just there. No sound, no warning. Present the second he stopped moving.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[ LIFESPAN CONTRACT — BOND AVAILABLE ]
Beast: Unnamed (Rotfang Scavenger)
Affinity: Vesperian-Type
Tier: 1
Lineage: F
Lifespan Investment Required: –0.5 Years
Tamer Lifespan Detected: 1.0 Year(s)
[ Note: Terminal condition. Reduction in progress. ]
WARNING: Contract is permanent.
Severance results in destruction of bond and all derived forms.
Accept? Y / N
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
He read it twice. Once more in case the figures changed.
They didn’t.
Six months. Half a year. Spent on a Tier 1 animal the system is being polite about. By any reasonable standard the worst financial decision I’ve made since the Academy fee.
He looked at the figure on the screen.
Worse than the Academy fee. Quite a bit worse.
The thing in the grate was still looking at him. Still with that patience. Like it was waiting for him to catch up.
Three seconds. Maybe four.
Between slow decay and doing something, he had always done something. Even when something was just wire and a form nobody read. He had stopped understanding why around year two. The doing hadn’t stopped being true.
Fine. All right. Let’s see what you’ve got.
He pressed his palm flat to the grate.
The pull wasn’t pain. More like something subtracted. Clean, quick, already done. His vision greyed at the edges. Knees first, then his hand. He pressed his other palm to the cobblestone. One. Two. Three. The grey thinned. Gone.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[ LIFESPAN CONTRACT — BOND FORMED ]
Beast: Rotfang Scavenger
Affinity: Vesperian-Type
Tier: 1
Lineage: F
Lifespan Invested: –0.5 Years
[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 0.5 Years ]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[ LIFESPAN CONTRACT — TRAIT UNLOCKED ]
Source: Rotfang Scavenger — Initial Bond
Trait: TOXIN FILTER
Aiden’s body begins neutralizing weak toxins. Gradual detoxification of existing conditions over time.
[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 0.5 Years ]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
He pulled the grate up. Reached in.
She didn’t bite. He only noticed that after the fact.
She fit in his palm with room at the edges. Less weight than she should have. The sores had stopped pulsing quite so desperately, the green light organizing itself away from something ending and toward something he didn’t have a word for yet. He turned his hand once, slow. She stayed.
The tail hung off the heel of his hand, bare, segmented, the wrong-pink going grey at the tip. Two of the sores had closed at the edges. Not healed, just closed. Her ribs ran under his thumb like a row of matchsticks. The chest rose, held, came down short. The same short rhythm his own chest had. Strange to hold it in one hand.
She looked up at him. Not at his face. At him.
Hello, Miasma.
He named her with the breath he was already taking. The name arrived without his permission. He didn’t argue with it. He put her in his coat pocket.
Picked up his kit.
His name went on the Association board the moment it formed. Every new contract did. Field Provision 7, the line for a Tier 1 nobody walked down to read.
Lamp seventeen’s housing needed a new crystal. He fixed it with wire and logged the replacement. The form letter would arrive in three weeks.
The cough built between fourteen and seventeen the way it always built. Same location, same pressure, climbing toward the back of his throat.
It reached the place where it always finished climbing.
It stopped.
He held still at lamp seventeen. Breathed the slow way the physician had shown him. The pressure sat where it was. Didn’t climb. Didn’t produce the wet thing at the back of his throat that had been the diagnostic finale for four months.
He breathed in further than he usually risked.
The pressure sat.
His hands on the lamp kit had stopped shaking. They had been shaking through the cold every night for two months, the low tremor of a body running out of resources, rationing itself. Steady now. He flexed his fingers inside his glove. Once. Twice.
Oh.
The word didn’t have anything after it. He stood there with the wire in his hand and his chest doing what a chest was supposed to do. He hadn’t had an Oh in four months. He’d had the cough, the three-copper days, and the quiet inventory of which lamps would outlive him.
The cough should be here. It wasn’t.
His hand on the lamp closed once around the wire. Opened. He pressed his palm flat against the housing of lamp seventeen — the lamp he’d been packing with wire for two years because the depot wouldn’t issue him a replacement screw — and he felt the cold iron through his glove and his hand did not shake against it.
Something. Something is happening.
He didn’t let the word that was waiting at the back of something come up. He let it stay there. He logged it. Filed it the way he filed the lamp’s bracket issue: into a column he wasn’t sure anyone read, including himself, but the column was the only place he had to put it.
He finished seventeen. Fixed eighteen.
The route was done.
Two steps past lamp eighteen she pressed hard against the inside of his coat.
Not shifting. Pressing. Specific. Aimed at the sealed tunnel off Aldgate End. Guild-locked three years ago. A notice he’d read twice when it went up. A padlock he’d walked past two hundred times since.
He stopped.
The pressure came again. Patient. The same quality as her eyes when she’d looked up at him from the grate.
The padlock was a Guild Standard 4. GS4 stamped on the back, intended for people who needed to know what they were dealing with before deciding whether to deal with it. He knew the secondary tumbler tolerance issue from a maintenance circular he’d found lining a drawer in the lamp depot.
His route sheet said he was done for the night.
His hands were steady.
All right, Miasma. You and me. Show me what you brought me out here for.
He pulled the wire from his left pocket.
He walked toward the tunnel.
