Falling is not what people think it is.
No life flashing. No peace. The body's machinery processes velocity and wind resistance and the arithmetic of what happens next, and the mind does the only thing available to it in the space between thought and impact.
It counts.
One — the cliff face blurred past, dark rock and ice, striations of geological time compressed into a smear. The soldiers' faces were already gone. Shoda's hand — the one that had created the opening — was already something that had happened to someone else.
Two — the borrowed body searched for a handhold, finding nothing, the fingers opening and closing on empty air with the frustrated efficiency of a system executing a solution the environment refused to provide.
Three — the valley floor was white and patient and vast and coming up to meet him at approximately fifty metres per second and there was nothing between him and it except cold air and the rapidly diminishing distance.
Four —
Something opened in his chest.
The warmth that arrived lived in the same register as the voice from the auditorium and the hollow where a name had always fit without his permission — below the marketing brain, below Anko's reflexes, below everything he had built or borrowed or accumulated in eighteen years of careful surviving. It had been there the whole time. It simply hadn't been asked.
His right hand opened without his instruction.
Three cubes materialised above his palm. Golden. Geometric. Their edges were sharp enough to make the air around them seem imprecise by comparison. They refused gravity with the casual authority of things operating under different rules — not floating, just not falling, the distinction carrying more weight than it should have.
He had no name for them. The marketing brain cycled once, found the category absent, and went quiet.
They hummed — in the bone, in the same frequency as the hollow. The same frequency as the shadows bending in the auditorium, as the space between deaths when something enormous occupied the place where he was supposed to be.
I—
The thought arrived from somewhere he didn't recognise and dissolved before he could hold it. His voice from a distance he couldn't calculate, from the other side of something without a name.
The ground was still coming.
He pushed the cubes toward the cliff face — instinct sourced from somewhere the marketing brain didn't have access to. They obeyed, drifting to the stone and pressing against the ice with the deliberate patience of things that understood what they were doing even if he didn't.
Contact.
The ice sublimated — solid to vapour, instantly, a circle of exposed stone where the cubes touched. Steam erupted. The rock beneath groaned, fractures racing outward from three points of golden light. His downward velocity began to argue with itself.
He was slowing. His right arm burned from shoulder to fingertip — the burn of something reopening after years of closure, circuits forced live that hadn't been asked to carry current. He pushed harder. The cubes flared. The cliff face smoked where they touched it and the wind dropped from a scream into something almost manageable.
Then the cost arrived, and it was nothing he would have known to anticipate.
A memory left.
Between one breath and the next — the park bench was there, and then it was gone. The old man with grey hair and the tree with the hollow core and the texture of bark under small hands and the sound of a voice saying something he would never now know — lifted out cleanly, the edges left smooth, the space where it had been large and exact and absolutely empty.
He understood what had happened. The understanding arrived without ceremony and without comfort.
His concentration broke. Gravity reasserted itself — three metres of freefall, five, the brief reprieve collapsing under the weight of what had just been taken.
He pushed the cubes back against the stone. The way you spend the last of something when the alternative is having nothing left to spend it on.
The cubes collided, rearranged, and in his right hand — the burning one — something formed.
An edge. Made of the same golden light as the cubes, consolidated into a shape that had weight without mass, warmth without temperature, the specific feel of something that knew what it was for even if he didn't. It hummed at the frequency of the hollow.
He drove it into the cliff.
The rock parted around the blade the way it parts around nothing at all — the stone reconsidering its options and choosing absence, the mountain receiving the conversation without comment. The deceleration was immediate and absolute. His shoulder wrenched. His tendons filed their objections all at once. The full kinetic argument of a falling body channelled through one arm and one impossible edge into stone that gave way without yielding.
He made a sound. Raw and animal and entirely his own — nothing borrowed, nothing performed. The sound of pain that had exceeded the system managing it.
His left hand hit the cliff face. Found a ridge of exposed rock, barely wider than a coin.
He grabbed.
Both shoulders sent signals that translated cleanly: this is too much weight for this arrangement and we would like you to know that before we resolve the question ourselves.
But he was slowing. The blade carved a descending groove, trailing sparks of dissolved light. His boots found the cliff face. Toes dug.
He stopped.
One hand on stone. One hand on light. A hundred metres above the valley floor, suspended by friction and something he didn't have a name for.
The blade held for three breaths. Then it flickered twice and folded back into him — the cubes separating, dimming, settling into his chest with the patience of things returning to where they live.
The hollow where the park bench had been was still there. Larger. Shaped differently now — the original absence he'd built around for eighteen years, and inside it a new one. Precise. Made by something that understood exactly what it was taking and considered the exchange complete.
His left arm had a report to file.
The shoulder was partially dislocated. The elbow had been extended past its design parameters. The hand — the one that had grabbed the rock ridge while the rest of him tried to tear free — was a specific kind of ruin, fingers at angles that suggested they had reconsidered their relationship with the knuckles, skin torn where ice had bonded to flesh and then separated, taking what it could.
He couldn't close the fingers. Could feel everything above them with the unwelcome vividness of nerves that had decided, having nothing else to do, to become very communicative.
Heat bloomed where the damage was worst — Anko's body doing what Anko's body did, cooking tissue from the inside, forcing flesh to hold past the point where holding made structural sense. The arm was trying to stop. The body was disagreeing with the rigidity of something that had been disagreeing for a long time and had developed a routine around it.
Below him, a dark opening in the cliff face exhaled steam into the grey air — a cave mouth, wide and irregular, the mineral breath of something geothermal. Heat. Shelter. A specific distance he could calculate if he chose to.
He chose to climb toward it instead.
The right arm did the work. Finding holds, pulling weight, accepting the full load of a body designed for two arms and currently operating on one and the decision, made somewhere below conscious processing, that stopping was less acceptable than continuing. His left hung at his side, sending its reports, receiving no reply.
When he finally hauled himself over the cave's lip — one arm pulling, legs pushing, the left arriving last like something that had stopped expecting to be included — he collapsed onto stone that was warm.
Actually warm. The heat came from below, mineral and ancient, the temperature a mountain maintains in its interior because the surface has always been irrelevant to what happens underneath. He pressed his face against it. Breathed the sulphurous air. Stayed there until the breathing steadied into something that resembled a pace.
The golden warmth was gone. The cubes were somewhere inside him — quiet, spent, patient — and their absence made the cave feel very large and very silent.
He lay still and let the inventory arrive on its own schedule.
One arm functional. One arm a question the body was answering without consulting him. The hip wound from the spear still seeping, managed with the same grim competence Anko's body managed everything. The memory of the park bench: gone. The shape of the old man's face, the sound of his voice, the specific quality of what it had felt like to sit on that bench under that tree — all of it absent, the edges clean, the space left behind exact and permanent.
He pressed his thumb against the small pouch at his belt. The cloth through the leather. Two figures beside something that might have been fire. A name he couldn't read.
Outside, the wind. Snow falling with the indifference of weather that has been falling since before anyone was alive to experience it as indifferent.
Somewhere above, twelve soldiers and an old man and whatever came next.
Somewhere in his chest, three cubes waiting for the next time the arithmetic ran out.
He closed his eyes.