Chapter 47: Strong

POV: Phoenix Kade

I stand in the middle of Blackflag Outpost and look at what I traveled to reach.

The slave trader's voice is still audible from here, carrying over the ambient noise of the thoroughfare with the practiced projection of his vocation, cycling back through his pitch for a new audience. The burnt stakes beside the stele are visible from this angle, the blackened shapes still chained to them, the old man's lesson about what rules mean when they're written in blood made concrete in a way no lesson could fully prepare for.

The electric windows of the commander's residence are visible above the roofline, steady and indifferent.

Somewhere behind me, in the alley between two buildings, something is decomposing.

And further back, outside the stall district, a woman is sitting against a building in the cold holding something she can't put down, and the foot traffic moves past her in both directions and nobody sees her because seeing her costs something and the Shatterlands has trained everyone here to spend only what's necessary.

I grew up with pictures of the First World. The old man's collection, faded and precious, handled with both hands and the particular reverence of people touching things that prove the impossible is possible. Cities with a million people who weren't afraid. Children running for fun. Tables covered in more food than I'd seen in a year.

I believed in them. That's the honest truth. Not as things I expected to find exactly, not as literal destinations, but as evidence that the world was capable of being something other than what I'd seen of it. As proof that the potential existed, somewhere, in some form, that the suffering wasn't the whole story.

Standing here now, in my first real settlement beyond the ruins, I understand something the pictures couldn't tell me.

Getting out of the ruins doesn't fix it.

The ruins were a symptom. The thing underneath them, the actual disease, is everything the Shatterlands has taught everyone living in it about what people are worth and who gets to decide and what the options are when you're at the bottom and someone at the top has decided you're useful. That disease came through the gate with the people who built this place and it lives in the stele rules and the burning stakes and the slave trader's pitch and the alley decompositions and the woman in the cold.

Walls don't cure it. Proximity doesn't cure it. Having more resources nearby doesn't cure it.

The only thing that changes the calculation is the thing Slyfox keeps saying, the thing Mad Max demonstrates with his bare hands, the thing the electric windows communicate from a distance, the thing the burning stakes enforce.

Strength.

Not the strength that I've been running on, the desperate improvised strength of a starving child making do with whatever is available. Real strength. The kind that changes what's possible for you in a place like this, that moves you up the hierarchy to the point where you are not the resource being assessed and traded and discarded but the person doing the assessing.

The jewel is warm against my hip through the cloth.

I put my hand against it from the outside, feeling the rotation of it through the fabric, the specific warmth that has been constant since the moment my fingers closed around it in the sweeper camp. A hundred times the commission. The masked man's filtered voice, that controlled wildness underneath the control, asking about it with the specific careful casualness of someone trying not to reveal how much they want something.

I don't know what it is. I don't know what happened to me in those tunnels, what the alien world with two suns was, what the blood-red veins mean, what Slyfox's cut arm test actually revealed about what I've become.

I know the woman with the dead infant.

I know her face, the one eye visible above the sarcoma, looking at something that isn't there. I know the smell of the bundle she's holding and the posture of a person who is still performing protection for something that no longer needs it and cannot stop because stopping means putting it down and she cannot put it down.

I know what it looks like when the Shatterlands finishes with a person.

I know that I am one bad sequence of days away from it. I have been one bad sequence of days away from it my entire life. The sequence was different yesterday, in the ruins, and it's different today, in the outpost, but the proximity is the same. The gap between where I am and where she is has never been as large as I needed it to be.

Something hot moves through my chest, not the cold filing rage that I've been accumulating all day, but something rawer, something that doesn't have the patience for filing, that wants to be felt rather than stored.

I grip the jewel through the cloth.

Whatever this is, whatever power it holds, it is the only thing I have that belongs to a different scale than the scale I've been living at. The only thing I'm carrying that a man in a breathing mask is willing to pay a hundred times a half-year commission for. The only thing that might be the distance between where I am and where I need to be.

I need to become strong.

Not as a preference. Not as an ambition. As a necessity, the same category of necessity as food and water and air, the things without which nothing else is possible. I need to become the thing that changes the calculation, that makes the math work out differently, that ensures the woman with the dead infant is not my destination.

No matter what it takes.

The outpost moves around me, loud and indifferent and alive, and I stand in the middle of it with my hand on the jewel and my eyes open and let the weight of everything I've seen today press down and do its work, let it write itself into me the way the Shatterlands writes everything that matters, deep and permanent and not subject to revision.

Then I take my hand off the jewel and I look at the commander's electric windows one more time.

Heaven for the strong. Hell for the weak.

I need to become strong. No matter what it takes.