CHAPTER NINETEEN

  -Two Problems, One Knife

  I woke with the crack in the ceiling staring back at me. Same split in the wood. Same black mold feathering out around it. Same sour breath from the boy on my left. The air in the barracks sat on my chest with the same dead weight.

  Still here. The bell hadn’t rung yet. I lay on my back and followed the line of the crack down to the door in my mind. Bar. Brackets. Rust. Gap.

  The dogs were back outside. I could hear the faint clink of chain and the soft huff of a yawn through the wood. Whatever I’d done to them yesterday belonged to the pile of things only I remembered.

  Two problems. The dogs. The bar. I know how to break the dogs, I thought. If I have to. They get tired. They sleep deep. I can make that happen again.

  That left the other half. Rauk’s knife was the right shape for that. Long enough, narrow enough, strong enough to bite under iron and lift. It was also watched. The cook worked under the overseer’s eye, and I had no doubt what would happen if they caught a slave with a stolen blade in his hand. Back then I told myself if there was any other piece of metal in this fort that could do the job, it was worth spending a day to find it. One wasted loop cost me time. One bad grab at the knife could cost me my throat.

  The bell rang, iron on iron, rattling in my teeth. I got up with the others. Porridge. Line.

  Breath steamed in front of our faces in thin white streams as we shuffled out into the yard. Frost nipped at the soles of my bare feet. Chains tugged and scraped. Someone coughed up something wet and swallowed it again.

  I didn’t push to the front. I didn’t drag at the rear. I slid into my usual place in the middle and let my shoulders sag. Not first. Not last. Nothing to look at. Rule one still applied.

  My eyes did the work while my hands did the overseer’s. I carried sacks. I watched. The yard was full of iron. Nails in doors. Hinges on gates. Rings on chains. The pegs the dogs’ chains ran to. The chains themselves. Hooks where buckets hung. Bolts in the granary door. The fort was a cage built from wood and metal, and none of it had been new in a long time. Eleven was right, I thought. Iron didn’t care who pushed it. It cared how.

  From the river barges to the granary. That was the path I knew best now. I shouldered sacks, grain dust clinging to my skin, and let my gaze drag over every post and joint. By the river, the wooden posts that held the barges in place had iron collars bolted tight around them, dark with old water. The gangplank above was studded with nails driven deep. Nothing there was going to come loose if I pulled. All of it was built to hold fast, not to give a boy something long and sharp to steal.

  I stopped looking at the river and started looking at the fort. Here and there I saw flaws. A ring on a chain where the weld hadn’t taken cleanly. A joint where two iron bars met with a thin crack along one edge. A spike on the granary door hammered in crooked, rust blooming at its base. They were all wrong for me. Too thick, too fixed, too watched. Not the kind of metal I could slip into my hand and walk away with. Not unless I wanted a boot in my ribs, or worse.

  Everything stayed where it was. The stone in my real hand burned cold. For a heartbeat I wasn’t in the yard at all, just wedged somewhere between the memory and where my body really sat, hanging in the crack between them while the fort came apart like ash.

  Smoke hung over the cookhouse. A boy in the yard leaned into a step that never landed. Breath froze in a white smear in front of his mouth. The whole fort held still like someone had pressed a hand on the world and refused to let it move.

  Then the edges started to fray. Lines opened in the dark. Not cracks in the stone, cracks in the memory. Bits of wall and roof and boys peeled away grain by grain, drifting off like ash caught in no wind at all.

  "Boy," Iye said. "Listen to me. Whatever you’re watching is pushing back. And it’s strong.”

  She meant me-now, not the boy carrying sacks in the yard.

  “What was that?” My voice came out thin. “Everything went wrong. Like people were dissolving.”

  "Because whatever locked and erased your memories doesn’t want this opened again," she said. “I have not seen a seal this heavy in a long while.”

  “Then we stop,” I said. “Pull me out.”

  “I already tried,” Iye said. “You didn’t move. Seems I can’t drag you back either. So we stay. Until whatever you’re watching runs out, or your mind does. If you push against it, you might get stuck in here. Inside your own memories.”

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  My fingers tightened around the stone without me meaning to. “That’s not much of a choice.”

  "It is the only one you have. Either way, you are on your own in there. Just do not try to change anything.”

  "Very comforting," I said. "I won’t. Promise.”

  The cracks closed. The ash that had drifted away rushed backward, pieces of the fort snapping back into place. Sound came in a hard rush. Chains, dogs, boys, the scrape of boots on packed dirt.

  The world tipped. The fort rushed back up around me, the same morning still refusing to end. I could no longer hear Iye’s voice.

  If the memory itself was fighting me, whoever had locked this down really didn’t want me seeing what came next.

  By midday my shoulders burned. My calves felt full of sand. I kept looking. At the cookhouse, near Rauk’s block, I saw a strip of iron half-buried in old ash near the wall. Thin, about as long as my hand, one end bent into an ugly twist. Some broken bit of hook or hinge. No one was near it. My heart thumped once, hard.

  On my next pass with a sack, I stumbled, letting my knee buckle. My hand hit the ground close to the ash pile. My fingers brushed the strip. It was rough under my skin, the cold biting through. In the same movement I closed my fist and rolled my shoulder, hiding the piece inside my palm as I pushed myself back up.

  “Watch your feet, rat,” one of the wardens muttered, clicking his tongue before spitting into the dirt.

  I kept moving. The iron sat against my skin, an awkward weight, until my fingers ached from holding it. I didn’t dare shift it in full view. When the bell finally rang for rest and we were herded back past the barracks to get our bowls, I let the press of bodies hide my hand as I slid the strip into the cuff of my sleeve.

  By nightfall, I had two more pieces. A long nail I’d teased from a split plank near the granary when no one was looking, working it back and forth until the old wood let it go. A broken ring from a chain, worryingly thick but smooth on one end, that I’d found half-rusted through near the dog yard where rain had washed the dirt away. They clinked faintly when I shifted my arm. Each step back to the barracks felt louder than it should.

  Inside, the boys curled around what warmth their bodies made. Voices rose and fell in the dark, the same half-whispered stories I’d heard on so many of these nights. Forty-eight fretted about Baraks coming for sick children. Crooked Nose said the gods didn’t care what happened in forts, only to riders and chiefs and people who still had names. Someone muttered that Wolf Mother wouldn’t let monsters eat children.

  Outside, the dogs barked and snarled the way they always did when night settled over the yard. I let the words wash over me. I lay on my pallet stiff as a board, my arm tucked tight against my side, fingers cramping around the strip of iron hidden in my sleeve. No one asked why I didn’t speak. None of them would remember any of this when the next morning came. The day would snap back. Only the iron, and knowing where to find it, would still matter.

  I waited. Breaths deepened around me. The rustle of straw slowed. Somewhere outside, a warden laughed, the sound muffled by distance and walls. The cold worked its way in through the cracks. When I was sure, I rolled in one smooth movement, slipping my arm free and fishing the metal from my sleeve.

  The bar sat on the other side of the door, unseen but not unfelt. I could hear it in the way the wood had shuddered when we were locked in. I knew, from watching, how it lay along its brackets. I pressed my ear to the plank and listened. Nothing. Only the faint jingle of a chain as one of the dogs turned in its sleep.

  I slid my fingertips along the edge of the door until I found the gap where the wood didn’t quite meet the frame. I could still hear Eleven’s words in my head. Strong, thin, narrow point. Through the gap. Catch the lip. Move it a little. Let the weight do the rest.

  I tried the nail first. Lying on my side, I angled it into the dark line of the gap, feeling for the cold touch of metal behind the wood. Rust flaked under my fingernails. My wrist cramped as I twisted, trying to push the tip up. Something scraped. The nail hit iron, then skated off it. I gritted my teeth and adjusted, inch by inch. The muscles in my forearm began to burn. The nail bent, a slow, miserable curve. I drew it back.

  The broken ring went next. It was thicker. Stronger. Too wide. I could wedge it into the gap but not angle it enough to bite. I worked it anyway until sweat prickled along my spine and my breath came a little too loud in the quiet. At best, I made the bar shiver once in its seat, a tiny knock that could’ve been my imagination.

  The strip from the ash pile gave me more hope. It was long enough that I could hold it with both hands, using my palms to guide it while I lay on my back and braced my bare feet against the floor. I slid it into the crack and felt it catch, just for a heartbeat, on something solid.

  “There,” I whispered, barely shaping the word.

  I pushed. The strip flexed. My arms trembled with the effort. For an instant I thought I felt the bar shift. Then the thin metal gave. The end slipped, skidding along iron, and the force went nowhere. The strip sprang free. The recoil made my knuckles rap against the wood.

  I froze, breath caught in my throat. Somewhere to my right, a boy snorted in his sleep, rolled over in the straw, and went still again. The yard outside stayed quiet. No boots on the snow. No shouted orders. I lay on the floor by the door, chest heaving, fingers spread around the useless bits of iron I’d dropped.

  Not enough, I thought. Too soft. Too short. All of it. If I wanted the bar to move, I’d need real steel. Not scraps. Not broken nails. Rauk’s knife, or something like it. I didn’t want to reach for it, but wanting had stopped mattering a few loops ago.

  I gathered the scrap up again, rolling it back into my sleeve, and crawled to my pallet. My arms shook. My fingers buzzed where the metal had dug into my skin. I stared up at the crack in the ceiling until my eyes burned.

  At some point, sleep found me. I woke to the same crack in the ceiling. The same sour breath close by. The same cold seeping in around the door.

  The bell rang, iron on iron.

  Outside, dogs barked and chains clinked in the yard, the same ragged noise that had been waiting for me every morning since the knot first held.

  “The bell’s early again,” someone muttered from the dark, the same tired voice as always. “Means the overseer woke up angry.”

  “Up, rats!” a warden shouted from the yard. “Work waits. Move or no porridge.”

  I pushed myself up and got to my feet with the rest, already moving before the warden could shout again.

  The day began again.