People fear many things. The dark. Silence. Betrayal. The eyes that watch when no one is looking. But in this age, the thing people feared most could be summed up in a single word: Shadows.
They came back to camp with nothing.
Lussal reported to Dusk — prints into a cave, communication device dead, no visual on the creature, came back. Dusk listened, looked at the northeast tree line for a moment, and said tomorrow, in daylight with the specific finality of someone who had assessed the situation and was done assessing it. Then he went back to his tent.
The camp settled around the fire. Milo was writing. Gus had produced something warm and was distributing it without making an event of it, which was how Gus distributed most things. Shirou had his pipe going. Raphael was talking to Betham about something that had apparently been funny before it became an argument and was now somewhere between both.
Cain was not at the flat stone.
Nobody mentioned this.
Eren sat near the fire for a while. He picked up a stick and held it without doing anything with it and then put it down. He looked at the river.
After a few minutes he got up and walked toward it.
Cain was at the water's edge.
Not at the camp's boundary — further in than that, far enough that the voices were below the level of distinguishable words and the fire was orange through the trees and not much more. He was sitting with his knees up and his hands loose in his lap, looking at the water moving in the dark. His sword was on the ground beside him. His face was doing nothing in particular.
Eren stopped when he saw him and almost turned back.
He didn't turn back.
He found a rock a few meters downstream and sat on it and looked at the water too and said nothing, because nothing was what the moment called for and he had enough sense to know it.
Cain did not acknowledge him.
The river moved.
His father had been a carpenter.
This was the thing Cain's memory always started with when it started without being asked to — not a dramatic beginning, not the particular image that should have been the one to stick. Just that. The fact of the man's work. The smell of the workshop on a warm afternoon, sawdust and resin and the particular damp of fresh-cut wood. Cain had been seven or eight the first time he was allowed to stay in the workshop for a full afternoon. He had sat on an overturned crate and watched his father fit a joint with the patience of someone for whom patience was not a virtue so much as a working method, a thing the craft required and that the craft had therefore built into him over years until it was simply how he existed.
He had been a quiet man. Not the way Cain was quiet. His father had been quiet the way water was quiet when it was deep and slow — the quiet of something at ease with itself, the quiet of someone who had no particular need to say things because the things that needed saying had mostly been said and the rest could wait.
Cain had never been able to explain to anyone why he remembered the workshop more clearly than he remembered his father's face. The face was there, was accessible, but it was still in the way that old photographs were still — accurate and slightly wrong. The workshop was there the way a place you had lived in long enough was there, which was completely and with all its textures and its smells and the specific sound the floorboards made in certain spots.
The sickness had started when Cain was ten.
Not dramatically. A cough that did not go away. Then a tiredness that sat differently than ordinary tiredness. His father had kept working for most of the first year, which Cain had understood later was not stubbornness so much as the particular calculation of a man who understood that stopping would mean things he could not afford to have mean. He had kept working. He had coughed into a cloth and put the cloth away and kept working.
The second year was different.
By then his mother had brought in a second person to help with the household — her first husband's son from an earlier marriage, a man some years older than Cain, someone who had appeared at the door one autumn and had been let in because the household needed help and help had arrived and these were not the conditions under which you examined the quality of what arrived too carefully.
Cain had not liked him from the first week.
This had not seemed important. Cain was eleven years old and he did not like many things. The not-liking was filed alongside the not-liking of rain and early mornings and the particular noise the neighbors made on certain evenings, which was to say it was filed and left there.
His father died on a Tuesday in the early spring when Cain was twelve. It was not dramatic. He had been in his bed for the last four months and had been getting smaller in a way that was visible week to week if you were paying attention and Cain had been paying attention because he could not stop paying attention. He had been there when it happened. His mother had been there. The stepbrother had not been there, which was either because he had not known it was happening that particular morning or because he had known and had made a decision about where to be.
Cain had never figured out which.
The workshop had been sold within the month. The tools. The wood stores. All of it converted to money in the specific efficient way of someone who understood that sentiment was a resource with a cost and was not interested in spending it. His mother had said nothing. She had looked at the empty space where the workshop had been and had said nothing and Cain had understood, at twelve years old, that she was doing the calculation too — what they had, what they needed, what the math said about whether they could afford to object.
The math had not supported objection.
He had left when he was fourteen.
Not run away — left. Told his mother he was going to look for work in the outer district, that he would send money back. She had looked at him for a long time before she said anything. When she said something it was: be careful, which was what she always said, which was what mothers said, and he had said he would and he had meant it.
He had found work. Labor, mostly. Loading and unloading at the docks, then building work when there was building work, then whatever else could be found. He had sent money back every month without fail. He had not been back to the house himself because getting back meant losing the work and losing the work meant no money sent and the money mattered more than the visit.
Three months in, he had come back.
He had come back because a man at the docks had said something about the outer eastern roads being rough that autumn, some trouble with night creatures on the routes, and he had thought about his mother and had thought about the money he had been sending and had thought: I should go back. Just to see.
He had come back.
The house was there. The stepbrother was there. His mother was not.
She left, the stepbrother said. He had said it easily. With the particular smoothness of a sentence that had been prepared. She just left one morning. I don't know where she went.
Cain had looked at him.
When?
Three weeks ago, maybe four.
Cain had looked at the room. At his mother's things, which were still there — her cup on the shelf, her coat on the hook by the door, her book on the table she kept it on. He had looked at these things and then at the stepbrother and had said: she left without her coat?
The stepbrother had said it had been a warm day.
Cain had believed him for two weeks.
Not fully. Some part of him had not believed it from the first sentence. But believing it was the version of events that had a manageable shape, that could be held and examined without requiring anything from him yet, and so he had believed it in the way that people believed things when the alternative was too large and too cold to look at directly.
Then he had been in the market and had heard a woman from their street talking to someone he didn't know.
She had not been talking about his mother specifically. She had been talking about the stepbrother — about how quickly he had settled things up, about how efficient he had been about getting a price for everything he could get a price for, before he moved east himself. Everything he could get a price for, she said. Moved fast. There had been something in how she said it. A flatness. The voice of someone who understood what they were describing and did not want to be more specific about it.
Cain had walked away from the market.
He had walked for about an hour.
He had come to understand, over the course of that hour, what everything he could get a price for meant in practice when a woman had no living husband and no official standing and the man who had legal authority over the household had decided to move east.
He had come to understand it the way you came to understand things that you had already known and had been keeping at a distance — all at once, without warning, the distance collapsing and the thing arriving at full size.
He had been fourteen years old and standing in a street and the thing had arrived at full size.
He had looked for the stepbrother for a year.
Not continuously — he had kept working, kept looking, asked questions where he could ask them, followed the threads that appeared and went quiet when they went quiet and found new threads. The year had been the year it was, which was long and cold and produced nothing for most of its length and then, eventually, produced an address.
A rooming house in the outer eastern district. Three days' walk.
Cain had been fifteen when he arrived.
He had knocked on the door.
The stepbrother had opened it. He had been older, a little heavier, the same face. He had started to say something — Cain did not remember what, some ordinary thing, the beginning of whatever a person said when they opened a door and found someone on the other side.
He had not finished saying it.
What happened after that was brief. Less than a minute, probably. The specific mechanics of it Cain remembered with complete clarity and had never described to anyone and was not going to describe to anyone. When it was done he had walked back out through the door, down the stairs, out to the street.
He had stood on the street for a while.
Then he had started walking.
Seven years.
That was how long he had been looking since then. Eastern routes, the networks that didn't use real names, the places where people became other people if the money was right and the questions were wrong. He had found leads that went somewhere and then went nowhere. He had found people who knew people who might know things and some of those things had led to more things and some of them had led to walls and he had turned around from the walls and found new leads.
He had not found her.
He was still looking.
This was not hope in the ordinary sense. Hope was a thing you held in front of yourself, a thing you moved toward. What Cain had was different — it was the absence of the alternative. He was looking because not looking was not a thing his body was willing to do. He would find her or he would keep looking until he did. These were the only two options he was working with.
He sat at the river's edge and the water moved and the fire was orange through the trees.
He had needed twenty minutes.
He had been here for twenty-five.
That was fine.
He heard the footsteps before he heard anything else.
He knew who it was. He did not turn.
Eren stopped somewhere behind him — not right behind, off to the side a bit — and then there was the sound of him sitting down on something, a rock probably, and then nothing.
Cain looked at the river.
Eren looked at the river.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
Cain was moderately aware that Eren was going to say something eventually and was waiting for it to come in the specific way you waited for rain when you could see it building on the horizon.
"I'm sorry," Eren said.
Not cleanly. The two words came out a bit fast, like they had been sitting at the front of his mouth waiting and had gotten out ahead of whatever careful arrangement he had been planning.
Cain said nothing.
"That was — I shouldn't have said it. In the cave. Zerith told me something and I—" Eren stopped. Started again. "I knew it was your business. I knew that. And I said it anyway because I wasn't thinking and I—" He stopped again. "That's it. That's what I wanted to say."
He stopped talking.
The river was there. The fire was through the trees.
Cain looked at the water for a few more seconds. Then he said:
"Of course it was sensitive."
It came out harder than he had intended. He could hear it come out harder than he had intended and he did not take it back. Taking it back would mean explaining why it had come out that way and explaining that would mean going somewhere he was not going.
Eren went quiet.
"Seven years," Cain said. The words were coming now and he had not fully decided to let them come but they were coming. "Seven years I have been looking. Every lead that goes nowhere, I find another one. Every time the trail stops I find where it starts again." He looked at his hands. "And I come back to camp and some first-year who has known me for four months—"
He stopped.
The sentence had nowhere useful to go.
He let it end where it ended.
Eren did not say anything. Which was — that was the right thing to do, actually. Cain was aware of that. Saying anything right now would have been wrong and Eren apparently had enough sense to know it.
The problem was that the silence that followed was the specific silence of someone sitting nearby who was doing you the courtesy of not filling the silence and you could feel them doing it.
Cain looked at the water.
The anger was still there but it had the quality of something that had been at full heat and was now going through the process of not being at full heat, which was not a quick process but was at least a process.
He breathed out through his nose.
"I was harder than I needed to be," he said. "In the cave."
It came out stiff. He was not good at this. He knew he was not good at this. He was doing it anyway because the alternative was letting the thing sit there between them getting worse and the thing sitting there getting worse was not useful.
Eren looked at him.
"Zerith shouldn't have told me," Eren said. "I'm not—" He stopped. "I'm not saying that to make you feel better about what I did. He shouldn't have."
"No," Cain said. "He shouldn't have."
A beat.
"I'll talk to him."
"Okay," Eren said.
Another silence.
This one was slightly different from the previous ones. Still uncomfortable, but less like something with pressure behind it and more like two people who had said the things they had needed to say and were now figuring out what came after.
Eren picked up a stone from the bank. Turned it over in his hand. He had the expression of someone who was not sure whether the conversation was finished or whether there was something else and was giving it time to clarify.
"She might still be out there," Eren said. He said it carefully. Not carefully in the performative sense — carefully in the sense of someone choosing their words because the wrong ones would be wrong and the right ones might not exist but he was going to try anyway. "Seven years is a long time to still be looking. Most people would have—"
"I know what most people would have done," Cain said.
"Yeah." Eren put the stone down. "I know you know."
He looked at the river.
"My father was killed in front of me when I was eight," he said. "I don't know why it happened. Someone told me it wasn't what the report said but no one ever told me what it actually was." He paused. "I've been carrying that since I was eight. So I don't know if that's the same thing or a different thing but." He shrugged slightly. "I know what it's like to have something that doesn't close."
Cain looked at him.
Eren was still looking at the river. He was not performing the vulnerability of what he had just said — he had just said it, flatly, the way he said most things.
Cain looked back at the water.
"It doesn't close," he said.
"No."
"You learn to carry it differently."
"Sometimes," Eren said. "Sometimes you just carry it the same way and get better at pretending otherwise."
Cain almost said something and did not say it.
They sat there.
The camp was audible through the trees — Raphael's voice, then Betham's, then something that sounded like Gus telling someone to stop touching the food. The ordinary sound of the camp going on. The river went on too. The fire through the trees was low and steady.
Cain looked at the device Lussal had been carrying, which was sitting on the bank between them — he had apparently set it down at some point without Cain noticing, which meant Lussal had been here briefly and had left, which Cain noted and filed and did not comment on.
The device was not working. Stone walls, Milo had said. The rock blocked it.
He looked at the northeast tree line.
"The prints went in," he said.
Eren looked up.
"The cave has more than one exit," Cain said. "Or it has one exit and the creature came back out of it after we left." He looked at the trees. "Either way it didn't stay in there."
"No," Eren said.
"Dusk said tomorrow."
"In daylight, yes."
Cain was quiet for a moment.
"The creature has been here for days," he said. "Moving parallel to the camp. Learning the patterns." He looked at the prints in the soft soil at the river's edge — one of them was visible from here, a deep claw-marked impression in the bank. "Something that hunts the way the Nightmare Stalker hunts does not rush. It moves when it's ready."
"Which means we have time," Eren said.
"Which means we have tonight," Cain said. "Tomorrow in daylight, with a full group, is the right call. But we know the direction it came from and we know roughly where the cave is and Dusk said not to engage alone." He looked at Eren. "He didn't say not to look."
Eren looked at him for a moment.
"You want to go now."
"I want to do something with the next two hours," Cain said. "And you came out here for a reason and it wasn't to sit on a rock by a river."
It was not elegant. Cain was not particularly interested in elegance. He had said the accurate thing and the accurate thing was: they were both restless in the specific way of people who had energy with nowhere to go, and the northeast tree line was right there, and the prints were right there, and the morning was a long way off.
Eren looked at the tree line.
He looked at the device on the bank.
"Communication's dead in the cave," he said.
"We won't go in," Cain said. "We find the second exit. Mark it. Come back."
Eren looked at him.
There was something in his expression that was doing a quick calculation — the kind that people did when they were not sure if a thing was a good idea and were deciding whether to do it anyway. Cain recognized the expression. He had that expression sometimes. Usually just before he did the thing.
Eren picked up the device and put it in his coat.
He stood up.
"Fine," he said.
Cain stood. He picked up his sword. He looked at the camp through the trees — Raphael's voice, Betham's voice, Gus's voice, the fire.
He looked at the northeast tree line.
He walked toward it.
Eren walked beside him.
The camp fell behind them as they moved into the dark, and the dark received them the way dark received people who knew how to move in it, and the river was behind them now, and somewhere ahead of them in the trees something very old and very patient had been walking for days and had not yet decided it was time.