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  ◆ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ◆

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  Level 7

  Death count: 10

  Way of death: Killed by Captain Aldous.

  [Iron Skin: Level 1 → Level 2]

  Would you like to learn the skill [Read Intent]?

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  Skill acquired: [Read Intent — Level 0]

  [???] — Locked.

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  Then he lay still.

  He did not count.

  He lay on the platform boards and looked at the pewter sky and let Aldous's sword sit in his chest where it had gone and tried to think about it honestly.

  The fungus had been retrieved. In the loop where he'd blackmailed Maret alone, she'd talked and he'd died and the party had presumably gone anyway, and in this loop he'd died and the party had presumably gone anyway — so the outcome, the thing he'd told himself the whole scheme was for, would occur regardless of whether he survived to see it. He had not needed to blackmail her. He had needed to make the case to someone with the authority to act, and he had gone to Maret because she had that authority, and instead of making the case he had found the threat and used it, because the threat was faster and more certain and required less faith in another person's judgment.

  He had not trusted her to be persuadable.

  He had been wrong.

  She had told Aldous — which was not the action of a person paralysed by shame and complying under duress. It was the action of a person who had been threatened and had chosen to tell the truth to someone she trusted rather than absorb the threat alone. She had taken the worse outcome, personally, because it was the more honest one. She had behaved better than he had.

  He lay with this.

  He thought: in the next loop I go to her with the truth.

  He thought: and if she says no?

  He thought: then I find another way. One that doesn't require me to become the kind of person who treats people as levers.

  He thought: I'm not sure I remember exactly where that line is anymore.

  He thought: that's the problem.

  — ? —

  He sat up.

  Aldric was below, the chain loose.

  "The Baron—" Aldric began.

  "In a moment," Josh said.

  He sat on the edge of the platform with his feet dangling and looked at the camp — the tents, the mud, the pennant — and tried to locate the version of himself who had made the decision this morning, who had stood outside Maret's tent composing the approach and thought about her competence and her constrained situation and then set both observations aside because they were inconvenient.

  He could locate that version easily. That was the problem. It was not a different person he was looking at. It was himself, operating efficiently, and efficiency had made it easy to not stop.

  He climbed down from the platform.

  Aldric was watching him with the adjacent-to-concern expression, slightly more pronounced than Loop 6, as if it had been growing incrementally and was now beginning to take up more of his face than he intended.

  "You look like something went wrong," Aldric said.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  "Something did."

  "The forest again?"

  "No." Josh looked at him. "Something I did."

  Aldric was quiet for a moment. He seemed to be deciding something.

  "The scholar," he said, finally. "Pereth. Did he—"

  "Pereth was fine," Josh said. "Pereth was the least of it."

  Another silence. The farrier's hammer rang out across the camp, three beats, a pause, three beats.

  "I've been in this camp four years," Aldric said. Not looking at Josh — looking at the middle distance, at the camp itself. "I've watched men come in as one thing and leave as another. Usually it goes one way." A pause. "Usually by the time they notice it's happened, it's too late to do much about it."

  Josh said nothing.

  "I'm not saying that's you," Aldric said. "I'm saying I've seen the shape of it before and I recognise the early part."

  He said it in the same way he said everything — flat and direct, as a fact he was extending the courtesy of sharing. Then he picked up the loose chain and coiled it over the post and walked away, and Josh stood in the cold morning air and watched him go.

  — ? —

  He went to the Baron.

  He went to Vorse and trained for an hour.

  He went to Pereth and had a brief follow-up conversation that cost him another lost card game, this time while pretending to be drunker than he was.

  Then he went to Maret's tent and lifted the flap and waited to be acknowledged.

  She looked up from her catalogue. Sorted him, same as before, the quick professional categorisation. He watched a second sort happen immediately after — a recategorisation, adjusting for new data. He understood he was not a stranger to her anymore. He was a category she'd created after the last time and was now filing him back into.

  "You again," she said.

  "Me again," Josh said. "I owe you an apology."

  A pause. She set her quill down.

  "I'm listening," she said, carefully.

  Josh came in and sat, without being invited, on the stool beside her worktable. He sat because standing felt like the posture of a person managing a transaction, and he was done managing transactions.

  "What I said to you before," he said. "The approach I used. I had information I needed you to act on and I didn't trust you to act on it without leverage, and I was wrong about that and I used the information badly. I'm sorry."

  Maret studied him.

  "Before," she said. She did not ask which before. People who were lying about something usually specified.

  "It felt like before," Josh said. "To me. I can't explain that."

  She looked at him for a long moment — the expression moving through its rooms, not Aldric's rooms, different ones, the rooms of a precise and careful person applying precision to something that resisted it.

  "What was the information?" she said.

  "That the village has a problem I think we can partially solve with the Bleeding Brake. I know what's in the village. I know what it does to people and what it feeds on and what slows it down. I need you to submit a requisition for the fungus because the Baron trusts your professional judgment in a way he won't trust mine and I don't have another path to get it done before the march."

  Silence.

  "Tell me about the village," she said.

  Josh told her.

  Not everything — not the loops, not the deaths, not Pereth or the rune or the specific mechanics of what fed the beast's level, none of the things she couldn't use and would only make her doubt his sanity. He told her what a careful scout would have observed: the bone patterns, the stopped clocks, the animal bones arranged in cult formation around the well, the thing he'd seen and its mark, the warding well's limited radius, the way the corruption spread and what broke it.

  He told her the truth and let it be what it was and said nothing else.

  When he finished, Maret was quiet for a long time.

  "If what you're describing is accurate," she said, slowly, "the standard scouting formation will put people inside the corruption radius before they know it."

  "Yes."

  "And the Bleeding Brake metabolises in approximately four hours."

  "Yes."

  "So they'd need to take it immediately before entry."

  "Yes."

  She looked at him. He looked back.

  "How do you know all this?" she said.

  "I listened to people who knew things," Josh said. "Carefully."

  It was not quite a lie.

  Maret picked up her quill and opened her catalogue to a fresh page.

  "I'll submit the requisition this afternoon," she said. "I'll recommend it as a standard prophylactic for cult-adjacent operations." She paused. "The Baron won't ask questions if it comes from me in those terms."

  "Thank you," Josh said.

  She did not look up from the page.

  "The apology was clumsy," she said. "But it was real. I could tell the difference." A pause. "Don't make me need another one."

  Josh stood. Nodded, though she wasn't looking at him. Crossed to the tent flap.

  "Kaelen," she said.

  He stopped.

  "Whatever happened to you before you came to this camp," she said, still writing, "and whatever is happening to you now. Be careful it doesn't finish the job before you've done what you came to do."

  Josh stood in the tent entrance for a moment.

  The camp spread out beyond it — the mud, the tents, the farrier's hammer ringing in the cold air, ordinary and entirely strange. He had died ten times. He had a week, a requisition, a rune he understood, and a question about himself that Aldric and Maret had both asked in different words and that he did not yet have an answer to.

  "I'll try," he said.

  He stepped out into the camp.

  He thought about the word try — whether it was honest or whether it was the kind of word you say when the honest answer is harder to live with. He turned it over on the walk back to the training ground, examining it, and by the time he reached Vorse and picked up the sword he still hadn't decided.

  He filed it anyway.

  And then, because there was always more to do, he got to work.