Chapter 55: The Jewel's Will

POV: Phoenix Kade

It starts in my chest.

Not the warmth I've been feeling since the sweeper camp, not the familiar pulse of the jewel against my skin. Something underneath that, something that was always there but had not yet been given the specific conditions it required to express itself fully. A resonance, like the vibration of one string setting off a sympathetic vibration in another, and the string being set off is something inside me that I cannot locate anatomically but can feel with complete certainty.

Then the surge hits.

It comes from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, heat and electricity and something that has no physical analogue moving through every pathway in my body at once, and for one fraction of a second I am aware of my body the way I've never been aware of it before, every cell of it present and accounted for and operating at a frequency I didn't know was available.

Then I'm watching from inside.

That's the only way to describe what happens. My body continues to exist and to act, to make decisions and execute them, but the part of me that usually makes the decisions has been moved to an observational role, watching from somewhere slightly behind the eyes while something else occupies the front, while something that is not exactly me but is made of me takes the controls.

The nightmare. That's what it feels like. The nightmare version of me, the one that exists in the place where everything I've filed away lives, all the cold rage and the grief and the fury and the accumulated weight of every person who has looked at me and found me wanting. It wears my body the way I've been wearing the chess piece role, from the inside, and it is not interested in chess pieces or patience or the long game.

The intruder's knife comes in its butterfly arc, beautiful and deadly, curving back toward my throat with the confidence of something that has never missed at this range.

My hand reaches out.

Not my hand making the decision. My hand being moved by whatever is occupying my body, faster than I knew my hand could move, the speed of it surprising even the part of me watching from inside, and it clamps around the intruder's wrist with a force that I can feel even from the observational distance, a force that communicates clearly through the grip that the person holding the wrist is not the same person who launched the failed counter-attack thirty seconds ago.

The intruder feels it too.

I can see the assessment shifting in his face, the first crack in the professional composure, the first moment where the calculation is producing a result he didn't plan for.

"You want to kill me?"

My voice. Coming from my throat. But the tone of it is not a tone I've used before, something that lives below my normal register, something that has the quality of the jewel's signal, the frequency that bypasses conscious processing and goes directly to whatever lives underneath it.

The intruder's eyes change.

He felt it, that voice. He's afraid, not completely, not yet, but the first molecule of it has entered the professional composure and it's enough to read.

My grip tightens on his wrist.

"You want to KILL ME?"

The second time it's not a question. It's a declaration, a statement of something that has found its conclusion, and what I do with his wrist in the same moment is CRACK and the sound fills the small room completely and the intruder's howl begins.

It lasts half a second.

The shortsword is already moving.

The shortsword breaks on the fifth stab.

I hear it happen, the metal giving way under the force being applied to it, the specific crack of something that was not built for this intensity of use, and the hilt falls from my hand and the blade stays in the body and the body is on the floor of my room and the room smells like the tunnels now, like the sweeper camp, like every place where the work of ending a person has been recently done.

I'm standing over him.

My face is wet. I know what with. I don't raise my hand to wipe it because the part of me that's been watching from inside my own body is still there, still at one remove from the controls, and I'm not entirely certain who's going to move the hand if I try to move it.

The heat is fading.

The surge that came through the jewel is withdrawing the way tides withdraw, pulling back from the extremities first, the hands and feet going from that extraordinary charged frequency back to ordinary feeling, then the arms, then the chest, and as it pulls back it takes with it the thing that was wearing my body and leaves behind just me, just Phoenix, standing in a dark room over a dead man with the hilt of a broken shortsword on the floor and the smell of fresh blood everywhere.

My hand tears the jewel from my waistband before I've consciously decided to.

I throw it.

It hits the far wall and falls to the floor and sits there, ordinary-looking, black stone with blood-red veins in the dim moonlight, rotating faintly on the floor, and the moment it leaves my hand the last of the heat goes with it and I am completely myself again and completely myself is standing here having just done this.

I lower myself to the floor. Not intentionally. My legs make a decision and I'm sitting against the wall with my knees up and my arms across them and my forehead going down to rest on my arms.

I killed a man.

Not the first time. The scavenger in the tunnel was the first time, and I filed that and moved through it because there was no alternative. But that was a mercy, a specific mercy asked for and provided, the old man's fast is kind operating in the most direct way available. What happened in this room was not that.

What happened in this room was five stabs with a shortsword that broke from the force I was applying, and a broken wrist, and blood on my face, and somewhere in the middle of it a part of me that felt something the darkness of the filing system has been holding for fifteen years let out into the open air, and that part felt excitement.

That's the ugliest thing. Not the dead man on my floor. Not the broken sword. The excitement. The specific aliveness of the jewel's surge moving through me and the body doing what it did with that aliveness and the part underneath all the filing that responded to it.

I sit with it the way the old man taught me to sit with the things that are true and uncomfortable. Without looking away.

What is that stone?

I get up and walk to it and pick it up carefully, holding it by two fingers at first, testing whether the contact produces anything. It doesn't. It sits in my grip ordinary and still, the warmth present but quiet, the pulse of it the same gentle thing it's been since the sweeper camp. Nothing of what just happened visible in it, no evidence that it contains anything beyond warm black stone with veins in it.

But it does contain something. I know that now with a specificity I didn't have before. Something old and deliberate, a will that is not mine imprinted in the stone by someone who understood exactly what they were doing and why, designed to activate under specific conditions and produce specific results and then subside, leaving behind the body it borrowed and the evidence of what the body did while it was borrowed.

It took me over. Completely, without asking, without warning, in the middle of a fight where the alternative was my throat cut in a dusty room.

It saved my life.

Those two things sit next to each other and neither one cancels the other.

I look at the dead man on my floor and I feel the grief settle in, not the sharp grief of the mercy kill in the tunnel, which was immediate and clean and understood, but something duller and more complex, another weight in the collection I've been building since the old man's grave. Another face for the dream to find, another presence for the filing system to hold.

I didn't know him. I don't know who sent him or why, whether this was personal or professional or something I can't yet understand about how this outpost works. I don't know if he had people who will notice he's gone, or if gone is a condition he entered so many times professionally that someone else was always ready for it.

I know he came here to kill me and I'm alive and he's not and the jewel made the difference and the jewel is something I cannot fully control and don't fully understand and am going to keep in my possession anyway because the alternative is being dead in a dusty room.

I clean my face with the cleanest part of my shirt. I look at the body and the blood and the broken sword and the room that has become something different from what it was an hour ago.

There really is something wrong with that rock.

And whatever is wrong with it, whatever ancient will it carries, whatever its former owner intended when they imprinted that brutality and that power into the stone, I am going to figure out how to use it before it uses me again.

I just need to learn how to control it before it controls me.