Volume II Chapter 4
The days in Birnal had a rhythm that wasn't theirs.
The port woke before the sun and didn't stop until well past midnight, a machine of noise and smell and movement that existed in complete indifference to the presence of two strangers in a second-floor room of a rooming house near the east docks. Lin Feng woke with the port and stayed awake with the port and somewhere in between tried to find a reason beyond the most obvious one to keep doing what he was doing.
The most obvious reason was not dying.
It was enough. It had been enough his whole life. But there was a difference between surviving with an objective and surviving while waiting for an objective to appear, and that difference became more visible with each morning that passed the same as the one before.
They had a routine.
They woke. They cultivated, separately first and then together, the channel between them growing more familiar with each session, less like touching something foreign and more like using a muscle that had been dormant. They ate because they could and because it occupied time. They went out into the city with the servant's map overlaid on what they saw, learning Birnal the way you learn anything when you're not in a hurry, through small details, through the different smell of each district, through faces that began to repeat.
Every two or three days they found a target. The city had enough criminals that this wasn't difficult, and Lira read each one with her usual silent precision, never explaining the method, only pointing. The copper-gold coins accumulated in a bag under the mattress. Money for the week. Never for more than that.
Lin Feng didn't know what he was waiting for.
The Mother of the Abyss, he thought sometimes, staring at the ceiling at night with the chair refusing to be comfortable. Some sign. Something that explains why the portal dropped us here and not anywhere else in the world.
But the days passed and there was no sign. There was Birnal, which was a city like other cities, loud and indifferent and completely unaware that two people who weren't entirely people were sleeping in a rooming house near the east docks without knowing what to do about it.
Lira didn't talk about it directly.
She never talked about things directly. But Lin Feng had learned to read what she didn't say, and what she hadn't been saying for the past weeks was that she was restless in a way the routine didn't fix. He saw it in the way she stood looking at the port for too long. In the way she cultivated for more hours than necessary, not out of ambition but out of having nothing else to do. In the way she sometimes looked at Blink with an expression that was almost a question she had decided not to ask.
The cat didn't help.
Blink existed in the room with the imperturbability of something that knows more than it says and has no urgency to say it. He appeared, disappeared, ate when there was something to eat and ignored when there wasn't, and transmitted information with the patience of someone waiting for the right moment that never seemed to arrive.
Lin Feng had tried to press once.
He had picked up the cat, which Blink had allowed with the condescension of someone who merely tolerates being carried, and had stayed still waiting for a transmission, anything, a direction, a certainty, a fragment of something useful.
Blink had yawned and closed his eyes.
Fine, Lin Feng had thought. Then we wait.
* * *
It was in the third week that Lira said what she had been not saying.
They were in the room after a night that had solved the money problem for a few more days, the coins put away, the port making its usual noise outside.
"I need to go into the Abyss," she said.
Lin Feng looked at her. "Why."
"I don't know." She wasn't looking at him, she was looking at her own hands with the expression of someone trying to articulate something that doesn't yet have a clear shape. "Since I was rebuilt I've gone in a few times but never deep. I always came back before going too far."
"Why."
"Because I didn't know what was in there."
"And now?"
She was quiet for a moment. "Now I'm bored enough that it doesn't sound convincing anymore."
Lin Feng looked at her. It was the most honest thing she had said in weeks, and there was something in that honesty that was different from her usual armor.
"How long will you be in there?" he said.
"I don't know how time works there."
"Will I feel it if something goes wrong?"
"Through the channel, probably." She finally looked at him. "But I don't know what to do if it does."
"Neither do I."
They sat with that for a moment.
"Alright," he said finally. "Go."
She went slowly.
Her edges began to soften first, that quality she normally kept controlled deliberately released, and then there was a kind of inversion, like when you look at an optical illusion and the image shifts, and she was less present in the room, and then she wasn't there at all.
Blink came out of his corner.
He went to the place where she had been and stood still, looking at the empty space. Then he turned his head toward Lin Feng, eyes open and fixed, transmitting nothing.
Lin Feng stayed in the chair.
I know, he thought. I'm looking too.
* * *
The Abyss was different from before.
Lira couldn't explain exactly how. She had entered other times since the reconstruction, always quickly, always with a clear objective and a planned exit. This time there was no objective and no planned exit and the Abyss expanded around her like something that had been waiting for her to stop being in a hurry.
She stopped being in a hurry.
She stood in what wasn't exactly a place, letting the Abyss exist around her without trying to categorize it. It was more comfortable here than in the rooming house room. More comfortable than anywhere in Birnal, than anywhere since she had been rebuilt. There was something in the Abyss that recognized what she was in a way the world outside never would.
Because you're made of this, she thought. In part.
In part. Always in part. Three materials that had never been designed to coexist, stitched together by the will of something much older than her, and sometimes she wondered if there was a version of herself that existed completely, without the gaps, without the missing fragments, without the feeling that there were parts of her own past she would never recover.
The Mother of the Abyss hadn't appeared.
Three weeks. Lin Feng woke every day and stayed still for a second before starting to move, the kind of pause that wasn't residual sleep but unanswered expectation. She saw it every morning and said nothing because there was nothing useful to say.
Maybe she won't, Lira thought. Maybe we were thrown here and forgotten.
It wasn't a possibility she had seriously considered until now. She had assumed there was a plan, that at some point someone older and wiser would appear and explain what was happening. But maybe there was no plan. Maybe the Abyss had acted on its own instinct and nobody knew where they were.
Maybe they were simply lost on a continent that wasn't theirs with nobody coming after them.
She had been moving away from the point where she'd entered without noticing, drifting through the Abyss with the distraction of someone walking while thinking about something else. Normally she would have noticed and turned back. This time she let it happen.
The Abyss changed.
It was gradual, the texture around her growing denser, older, like entering a room that hasn't been opened in a long time, the air heavy with the weight of something that had been still for too long. Lira stopped walking.
Ahead of her was a structure.
Black stone. Not the kind of stone that exists in physical places, it was denser than that, more real than that, built from something she had no name for but recognized as intention. Someone had built it inside the Abyss deliberately, and had built it to last.
It was small. The size of a cell. A door that wasn't exactly a door, more an opening where the space behaved differently, the stone around it solid and the entrance with the texture of shadow, dense and present but not material.
Lira looked at it for a moment.
What is this.
The Abyss around her went quiet. Not its usual interior silence, but something more contained, more tense, the quiet of before a sound that hasn't arrived yet.
She extended her hand toward the entrance.
Her fingers touched the shadow and passed through.
And then the Abyss pulled.
* * *
In the rooming house room Lin Feng felt it when it happened.
The channel expanded all at once and the room was gone.
It wasn't gradual. It was the kind of thing that happens before you realize it's happening, like being caught by a current before you understand you've lost your footing. One second he was in the chair. The next he was nowhere he recognized.
In the empty room Blink stayed still.
He looked at the space where Lira had been. Looked at the space where Lin Feng had been. Looked at the ceiling.
Then said, for the first time since he had existed:
"Meow."