The walk back was slower than the walk in, and it took him most of the first hour to work out why.
Going out, he'd had somewhere to be moving away from. Coming back, nothing was pushing or pulling him in any direction. At least he had managed to get some sleep in the cave, once Mahkir had promised him for the tenth time that it really was empty. He still wasn't completely comfortable, but exhaustion had that habit of not giving you much choice to argue. Still, Mahkir had sat guard while he slept, clearly sensing his discomfort. Any evidence of the storm had left by morning. The sky was completely blue, giving the wasteland a bit more colour, a lighter shade of grey perhaps. At least nothing, he hoped, was going to try to kill him today. Twice was enough for one night.
Mahkir padded alongside him, low to the ground, tail flicking with a rhythm that didn't match Ant's stride at all.
You've gone quiet, Mahkir said. It's unsettling. Say a word so I know your brain hasn't fallen out somewhere back there.
"Just thinking."
About the artifact you didn't find.
"About the fact that I don't exist anywhere," Ant said. "No chip, nothing on paper anywhere with my name on it. And now I've got a level and a sword and you, and none of it's written down either."
I'm not paperwork.
"You're the part of this that's going to be hardest to explain, is what you are."
Mahkir made a small, dismissive sound in his throat. Explain me however you like. I'll still be right here.
Ant almost smiled at that. He let the quiet come back for a stretch of road he didn't bother timing, and his mind went, unhelpfully, to Claire. Not warmth, exactly. She'd turned out useful despite not being built for the job, and that was the most he could say for it. She'd handed him a direction without meaning to. He pictured showing up wherever she was next, unveiling a Kithren she'd never seen a record of, and watching her work out where this fit without letting it show.
Who's Claire, Mahkir said, because apparently he'd been listening to more of that than Ant intended to broadcast.
"Someone from before. Not important."
You thought about her for four minutes. That's fairly important.
"Drop it."
Dropped, Mahkir said, in a tone that meant it absolutely wasn't, and left it there anyway.
The academies came next. They always did, once Ant ran out of better ideas: structure and instruction, the accumulated knowledge he had none of on his own. The problem wasn't the idea. The problem was that he was twenty-two and newly bonded, and every academy in the city was stuffed with seventeen-year-olds who'd had their Kithren for months and moved like it. He could take the looks. It was the questions that would follow him out the door, starting with how he'd bonded this late and not stopping there. None of them had an answer he could hand to an institution that wrote things down.
"I know a way to get you a chip," he said out loud, mostly to have something to say that wasn't about Claire. "It's not exactly official."
Unofficial sounds interesting. Not that I care about the chip, or that we need one. He paused while he considered. Still, I'm curious. How unofficial are we talking?
"Back-alley unofficial. There's a whole underground network under the city if you know where to find them. Apparently they can run their own ceremonies, insert their own chips, or pretty much anything that makes it appear like you fit in society. Ideal for people that clans wouldn't traditionally look twice at. I looked into it once a couple of years back, never went through with it, mind you."
Obviously. Why not?
"Because it's expensive, and what you get is usually a Kithren nobody else wanted, and I'd rather starve than let my old clan find out I'd gone crawling to a black-market bonder."
And now?
"Now I've already got the Kithren nobody else wanted to admit existed," Ant said. "So maybe just the chip part."
Mahkir was quiet for a few paces, which from him counted as genuine consideration.
And if the chip finds nothing about me. What then.
Ant hadn't wanted to say that part out loud yet, but there it was, sitting in the open now that Mahkir had asked. "Chips don't generate the system. They provide data, picking up whatever the bond has already changed in the body and letting it be displayed on a reading lens for others. For the individual, it's just a mental note delivered into the brain, providing level. No screens at all. In theory, slotting one in shouldn't step on anything you and I already have running."
In theory.
"In theory. What worries me is twofold. Firstly, there is you. I have been around Kithren all my life, studied them hard since I could read, but I have never read about or seen a Kithren quite like you before. Maybe your type is just rare, but there is a chance there is no record of you at all. Secondly, it's your level. The chip is supposed to identify the changes in the body to determine level and stats. But we are both already beyond level 1. I am not sure if the chip can factor that in, or if it will mess up the baselining." He kept his eyes on the path. "That's the version I can't walk into blind."
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"That's the plan. Find someone who actually knows how the thing works before we let them near either of us."
Good, Mahkir said. I'd rather not be logged as imaginary.
"You're not imaginary. You're just not anybody's problem yet."
I intend to stay that way.
Ant let out something close to a laugh, the first one that had made it all the way out since the chamber. He didn't know where he'd start looking for that kind of person; no book or academy hall was going to tell him. But he knew the district well enough, its alleys and half-lit corners, the market that woke at an hour nobody with somewhere better to be bothered attending. He'd spent years there. People who needed the unclanned path talked, because words were cheap and information was the only currency some of them had left. Maybe they'd let him work off the fee instead of paying it outright. It wasn't much of a plan. It was the first thing all day that gave him an actual direction.
"We'll start there," he said. "Once we're back."
Fine. But I choose the fights this time. Not you.
"Hey, I didn't choose the last fight. Technically, it fought you anyway, not me."
It regretted it, Mahkir said, sounding entirely pleased with himself.
They stopped for a while around what Ant guessed was midmorning, still deep enough in the wasteland that the ground hadn't started changing yet. He sat with his back against a low outcrop of grey rock and ate the last of the hard bread he'd carried out of the district, tearing off a piece and setting it down for Mahkir before he'd even asked.
Mahkir sniffed it once, unimpressed. This is terrible.
"It's what I've got."
I could catch something better.
"You've been picky about food since the day you hatched."
Standards. You should try having some. But he ate it anyway, methodical about it, and settled against Ant's leg once it was gone. For a while neither of them said anything, and the quiet sat easier than it had all morning, not the kind that needed filling, just two things resting because resting was, for once, allowed.
"You didn't answer me," Ant said eventually. "Back in the chamber. What you'll become."
I know what I'll become.
"Yeah?"
Better than I am now. A pause, tail giving one slow sweep across the dirt. You'll have to manage the same trick. Try to keep up.
Ant let out a short laugh and let his head fall back against the stone, eyes closed for a minute against a sun that had finally started to feel warm instead of threatening. He didn't sleep. He let himself sit there long enough that his shoulders stopped aching quite so insistently, and when he pushed himself back up, Mahkir was already on his feet, waiting, in no hurry to leave without him.
They kept walking.
The sun kept moving. Somewhere past midday, Mahkir gave up walking entirely, no announcement, just a determined tug against Ant's ankle that resolved, after a confused second, into Mahkir hauling himself up the inside of his coat by the hem.
"That coat wasn't even mine to start with," Ant said, watching him climb. "I'm not sure how I feel about it getting claimed out from under me."
It's warm. You're slow.
He settled somewhere around Ant's ribs and stopped moving, heat spreading through the fabric that was noticeably more than a body should put out on its own.
The ground gave the first sign the wasteland was ending: grey soil going from nothing to something, small variations underfoot where there'd been only flat and featureless before. Colour crept in after that, pale brown and distant green bleeding in at the edges of his vision, something the wasteland had been filtering out for days without him noticing it was gone. Trees arrived before he was ready for them. He registered he was noticing them a moment after he'd actually started. A line on the horizon resolved into trunks with real depth and real shadow, and below them a path worn down by enough feet over enough years that the scrubland had given up trying to reclaim it, nothing as formal as a road.
He stepped onto it without slowing down.
The trees closed in gradually, the light going from flat grey-white to something broken and dappled overhead, and the air changed with it: damp earth and green growing things, after two days of nothing but mineral dust and his own sweat, ever since he first entered the wasteland. He noticed the smell before he noticed he'd noticed it. The world had edges again. Landmarks. He was still turning the district plan over, working out where he'd actually start asking questions, when the Phantom Bunny stepped out of the scrub.
It came in from the left with the confidence of a creature that had already made up its mind about him, roughly the size of a large cat, pale grey with darker markings that seemed to shift as he watched, not quite transparent so much as unwilling to commit fully to being solid. The ears ran longer than a rabbit's had any business being, and the eyes sat too bright in its skull. Whatever aggression it carried had no business belonging to anything built like a throw pillow.
He ran the appraisal before it could finish whatever it was working itself up to.
[Phantom Bunny — Level 2. Common. Low threat.]
He looked at it. Looked at the lump in his coat.
"Mahkir. There's something here."
The lump gave a small, irritated wriggle, and a red head emerged from his collar with the put-upon dignity of an animal that had been perfectly comfortable and was now being asked to care about that. The amber eyes found the Phantom Bunny, took their time doing it, and came back to Ant already carrying the argument he was about to make out loud.
You want, Mahkir said, each word measured out carefully, working hard to keep his voice level, me to fight that.
He looked at the bunny again. Back at Ant.
No.
Then he sank back into the coat, slow and deliberate, all his earlier readiness folding back down without complaint.
The Phantom Bunny had been radiating intent to fight since the moment it appeared.
It stopped.
Whatever Mahkir had given off in that brief window, the Phantom Bunny's senses had caught it even though Ant's own couldn't, and reclassified the whole situation from winnable to a very bad idea. The posture came apart. It was still standing there, technically, working out how to leave without making the reason for leaving too obvious.
Four seconds. Then it was gone, back into the scrub faster than a dignified retreat should have looked.
Ant stared at the space where it had been.
"I think you scared it," he said.
Obviously, said the coat.
"You didn't even do anything."
I don't need to do anything. That's rather the point.
He was still chewing on that, a level-two common Kithren registering, in three seconds, enough of Mahkir to override every instinct it had, when a voice reached him from further down the path, behind him, pitched exactly the way he'd learned to dread.
"Oh, look who it is. And this time without his friend to help him out."