The blow to the helmet had clearly stunned the man, and he stumbled. I took the opportunity to pounce on him, tackling him to the ground with a rattling of metal.

  Amaia was keeping the other man - Arlotto, apparently - busy, but I doubted that it would last long. I brought my hand over the helmet just above the slits made for vision, and a sudden sense of deja vu washed over me.

  I was surprised when the voice inside shouted out - I’d hoped for a moment that I’d knocked him unconscious - and I was even more surprised by what it said. “Arlotto! Just grab the slingshot and let’s go!”

  I glanced over at where I had dropped it, and caught sight of Arlotto and Amaia. Somewhere in the scramble they had swapped places, and there was nothing keeping Arlotto from grabbing it.

  But what did I care? There was also nothing keeping me from melting the attacker’s face off.

  “More fucking pirates, huh?” I said as the nail began dripping from my fingertips, thinking I had finally figured it out. “That’s it, right? Hoyom told you about us, said to watch for us, right? I’m going to get your friends too, y’know. I’m going to get all of you.”

  The man wrestled with me, trying to dislodge my weight and throw me off, but he had to have been dazed still from the blow. His own armor also worked against him, the weight of it making it easier to keep him down, it seemed, like a turtle unable to right itself. The molten nail poured in through the opening, and in exchange the man’s screams poured out.

  For a moment. Then I was in the air, launched off of the man like a leaf in the breeze. I caught a glimpse of the bridge, and of the manor further off. I landed with a splash in the warm water of the Blood.

  I did my best to scramble up to see what had happened but the water was deep enough that my feet couldn’t find any purchase. Eventually, sputtering, I righted myself.

  Just in time to see one man, then the other, sail overhead. From that distance I couldn’t tell the difference between the two, but I could tell immediately that one hadn’t jumped far enough. Perhaps he was low on mana - and maybe that’s why they hadn’t launched us into the river from the very beginning. One man landed ashore - just barely - while the other splashed into the water.

  I was busy swimming to shore so I didn’t catch the next part, but Amaia told me that the one who had made it stripped off his armor and dove in after his companion, who was sinking like a stone. She was able to see them from the spot she had been launched to, which was on dry land.

  The man was able to fish the other out. And no, Amaia did not recognize him underneath the armor. I had thought dimly that Arlotto could have been a code name, and it was Hoyom and Aster again, somehow, having joined the garrison in order to lay low.

  It took some time for me to swim back - I was surprisingly far from the riverbank. When I finally made it to shore, dripping wet, I found Amaia in a bush. She was just laying there on her side, only her head visible outside of foliage, watching the other side of the river.

  “You okay?” I asked, although she looked basically unharmed.

  “Fine,” she said. “Though that could have gone better.”

  I glanced across at where she was staring and saw the two glittering figures retreating into the distance. “Yeah,” I said. “Hard to argue with that.”

  “Alive, though,” she offered.

  -

  We retreated back to our little camp in the hill, knowing that we’d need a new plan and that we wouldn’t want to be caught out in the open air in the meantime. The two garrison men might come back with reinforcements, or, more likely, we could get caught flat-footed by some roaming monsters.

  I was shivering cold. I hadn’t noticed how much the temperature had been dropping the previous few days - and perhaps it had dropped further while we were in the tunnel - but it was a world of a difference from the previous time I stepped out of the river. The return hike was brutal, the wind blowing from the southeast biting at my wet skin. Getting back into the gap in the hill cut off the wind, but it also cut off the sun - all in all, little better than a wash.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Part of me wanted to dive back into the water, since I hadn’t been cold at all in the warm Blood. But I knew that was ridiculous.

  I also wanted, desperately, to start our fire back up, and Amaia had to remind me how foolish of an idea that was as well. In the end I had no choice but to strip off my wet clothes - I made Amaia face the other direction, though I caught her peeking once at my backside, and I could have sworn she blushed as she turned away again - and then wrap myself in Amaia’s long cloak which she had offered to me. It seemed to be made of wool, or something like it.

  “I want a warm shower,” I muttered under my breath as I sat there beside the dead fire, running my arms against my legs underneath the cloak trying to warm myself up more quickly. “I want a warm shower and a towel just out of the dryer and a heater blowing at full blast and I could stand beside the vent and drink hot chocolate and...”

  I’m not sure how much longer I went, but eventually I stopped mumbling, staring at nothing in particular.

  “What do you think?” I finally asked. Amaia had been sitting there without a word, and I think if I hadn’t spoken first she might have stayed like that for hours.

  “I think you made them mad,” she said.

  “So this is my fault?”

  She shrugged and didn’t look at me. “They seemed mad that you shot at them. They took your slingshot. Before that they were just going to leave.”

  “Yeah but that’s what I mean,” I said. “Why were they just going to leave us in the first place? Doesn’t that seem strange?”

  “Maybe they were going to get a boat,” she said. It was the second time she’d said it.

  “So you think that maybe they were actually going to help us, but then I shot at them - to get their attention, let’s be clear - so they decided to kill us?”

  Amaia shrugged again. “Could be.”

  “You know, you can be really fucking annoying sometimes,” I said. “You really think this is my fault. You really think that I fucked this up and now we’re stuck here and that we could be sailing back to Coernet right now if I had just been patient.”

  Amaia stood, and for a second I thought I had crossed some line, that she was going to shout at me or fight me or leave. Instead, she walked over to my pile of wet clothes and armor, picked them up, and said, “I’m going to go lay these out to dry in the sun.”

  She left, and I sat stewing.

  She’s probably right, I thought. It probably is all my fault. Pirates. As if. What an easy excuse. “All my enemies are pirates. There’s a vast underground network of pirates, and they’ve infiltrated the garrison and are making sure I never make it back to Coernet.” Compared to that, it sounds much more reasonable that I just made them angry.

  I miss Earth, I thought again. I miss being able to lie in my warm bed and fantasize about that fake photograph and fake women.

  Bed, I thought again. Floor, I mean. Fucking Tom. I miss being Tom. It was such lower stress to be someone else.

  But then I remembered what happened next whenever I was laying under the covers back on Earth, and just how lonely a place it was inside of another man’s skin, and I realized again that I was at least a little thankful to have something like friends.

  When Amaia returned I apologized. “You might be right,” I said. “I may have fucked things up. It just made me angry to think of it. I’m sorry.”

  Amaia shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re apologizing about, but OK. I accept.”

  “Do you do that on purpose?” I asked. “I know Naomi pisses me off on purpose, but I’ve always thought that you do it on accident. But now I wonder if you’re actually even better than Naomi at it.”

  She shrugged, but she was grinning while she did it. We both laughed.

  There was nothing to do for awhile but wait for my clothes to dry. We didn’t want to poke our heads out of the hole too much - certainly not clothed in nothing but a cloak, as I was - so we simply talked for awhile. Though I did most of the talking.

  “Do you think they could have been friends of Hoyom?” I asked after awhile, hoping once again to shove off the responsibility of our situation.

  Amaia muttered something noncommittally that I didn’t quite catch. I stared at her awhile before she spoke again.

  “Probably not,” she said. “They only mentioned one other pirate, and there were two who came from the garrison.”

  “True,” I said. “If they had other friends, they would have brought them when they tried to ambush me and Ikhamon. You think Ikhamon is alive?”

  “Unlikely.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Poor old man. Probably drowned or something.”

  We sat in silence for awhile. I was thinking about Ikhamon dying and how it was probably at least a little bit my fault, but I can’t say for sure that Amaia was thinking about anything in particular.

  “Still,” I said. “Some pretty aggressive guards, huh? To just attack someone like that. Even if they were pissed.”

  “I don’t know,” Amaia said. “Doesn’t seem strange to me.”

  “Really? Isn’t their entire job to protect the people of Coernet? I would think that attacking civilians is kind of out of the job description.”

  “They’re supposed to protect the people in the city,” she corrected. “Killing people who are out of the city is fine.”

  “Great,” I said. “I see the level of morals we’re working with here. And what about that ‘I told you not to talk to them’ stuff? That in the job description, too?”

  “No idea.”

  “Did you kill people when you were a bodyguard? Have I asked you that before?”

  “Yes,” she said, “And probably.”

  “Did you…” I thought of Nolan suddenly, and that look of shock and horror on his face as I launched myself at him and we fell endlessly down into that dark abyss. “Do you regret it?”

  “No.”

  I chuckled. “Great. Good talk.”

  Eventually my clothes were dry enough to put back on, but by then it was nearly night again. We ate a bit of our remaining rations - which were basically just scraps by then - and slept beside our re-made fire.

  In the morning, we talked again about our next steps.

  “OK,” I said. “This is going to sound crazy. Are you ready?”

  “Crazier than normal?”

  “Who are you and what have you done with Amaia?” I asked, smiling. “Snarky comebacks now, really? Did those shrooms fry your brain?”

  She shrugged.

  “Ah, no, it’s you. Yes, crazier than normal. Or… well, maybe not. Regular crazy.”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think the tunnel might go under the river? Like, I kind of remember some forks in the path down there, and I think at least one was on our left. I mean, I may have hallucinated it, but-“

  “You’re right,” Amaia said. “I remember that, too.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Then I think that’s the next step. Fuck the surface, fuck trying to swim across or build a raft or call for help again or make smoke signals or any of those other stupid ideas we had last night. Let’s go back into the tunnel.”