They are on his heels.

He can almost smell them.

It's the wild odor of a hunt, and as a hunter, he knows it very well. It is the whiff of chaos and chase, sweat and blood, mixed with the sound of feet catching on tempo. The world unfolds in those sounds and smells.

His muscles are drilled to run and move after all the traveling. Wiry tense curled up, ready to leap and jump wherever his reflexes and instincts will make him.

This time, he is not the one waiting in a trench, hiding behind trees, he is not the one with any kind of advantage.

He doesn't know the city well enough.

He has not enough ammunition to shoot them all and he does not have any back up that would at least distract the force that will crush him if he dares an open fight.

And then there is also the life in the city itself. All the people around him that do not know about a boy that sat at a windowsill like stone the last two days, watching and waiting.

They follow him since he has started to run. No doubt that his failed attempt to shoot the mind reading Queen has drawn her attention enough to make sure he gets captured.

He has been prepared for a situation in which he is captured. Or he was before he failed to pull the trigger. Since pulling the trigger was his only option.

You will go to Archeon and take a shot.

Jon had been wrong. No bullet had been sent flying. Curious. The ghost was sure he was not lying at all. Intentions of people have rewarded him with marks and scars that whisper about violence and death, and this one is no different.

When people have been trees before, now they are flesh building obstacles. He moves as fast as he can in the streets, but it doesn't mean much.

He knows they'll catch him soon enough.

He flies from alley to alley, and eyes follow him everywhere.

He needs to trust his instincts. They tell him to run. And so he does. Even if it seems hard to determine where to go. And why, even.

One last shot. He couldn't do it. But that is the purpose of a gun. That is what his finger has been doing all along. It sends the bullets flying with aim and deadly purpose.

Spinning, kicking, fighting, with a heart pumping, beating, alive, because he is, he is. This is survival at the finest, in a fight that proves- proves what..? He cannot afford to think about the reasoning while he moves. But he remembers, he remembers the night he first stared at the face on the strip of paper he would wear next to his heart. The words he whispers with spite and hate and anger and -

You left me. To die. And so I did. But I couldn't stay dead. Death wouldn't have me.

Everything bites on his senses, and it leaves a wrong taste on his tongue, heavy with defeat, and the worst, with fear. He is not used to this fear. This fear comes with the pulls and leaves in the morning. It is the fear of a child, the fear of a boy, a friend, a lover and it is the fear of the heavy substantial knowledge that now he is prey.

Thomas is scared.

The Ghost finds the notion of knowing that appalling.

The backpack and the book are long left behind, just like the rifle. The only things he does carry are his knife and his gun. He does not feel safe with them at all.

Instead, it makes him feel even more exposed.

He runs and hides, stops and waits, climbs and falls.

He can always see them, rounding up, circling, coming even closer.

Four hours of cat and mouse. Hide and seek.

The Ghost sees the sun wander from afternoon to evening.

At the worst moments, he feels weak, and at the best, he feels nothing. Now he is not at his best.

Grueling, as if a dog is nagging at a bone until he smashes it between his teeth into tiny pieces.

Then, when the lights are starting to brim in the arriving darkness of an already grey, thinly veiled sky, he has to make a decision again.

Darkness is good, darkness helps to hide. And no one sees better in the darkness than a ghost. But a city is never quite as dark. Never quite as soundless. Never quite as asleep.

The decision is regarding the bridge that spans in a cruel line over water like a thread that holds a wound together. A bridge lying very silent, and very empty. A monstrous thing made of stone and metal, one side half destroyed and still not completely repaired.

The decision is easy.

Pass the bridge or turn around.

The Ghost looks back. Takes a long breath. And the whiff of the hunt is still in the air.

It could very well be a trap. An easy one, at that.

There is no other way.

No chance to turn around.

After hours of the chase, his head pounds, and he still does not fully recognize the twitching shakes of his head.

He is like a fish in a net, neatly pulled on land. He fidgets and shakes.

A figure emerges from his right next to the bridge abutment.

His old friend the iron lover is heavy when he swings around and with a leap of fate, a flick of his hands, he shoots. The pistol screeches and obeys.

Nothing but air and stone falls to the bullet.

They move too fast. And maybe there are even some that can simply steer and redirect the bullets.

That is what he meant when he told the Ghost named Thomas he would take a shot in Archeon. He has known it all, really.

Everyone is a liar in their own way. Jon has just said the things that were true in the wrong order.

It is a very technical way of speaking both the truth and not speaking the truth at all.

A sound emerges from his throat. It spills over his tongue hoarse and strangely unfamiliar. It leaves his body with an eruption of air from his lungs.

He laughs. He laughs so loud and so hard as he has never in his life. He can't stop the shrill sounds.

Right, hunters. Left, hunters.

Uniforms.

A fire has started the cycle of death. It is almost absurdly poetic that water will end it.

The water is not cleansing at all. It is not the well of life. The rushing stream will tear him apart.

He jumps down legs first, body straight, with his hands over his head. As if he was about to just drop off a wall onto the ground as he has done so often. This fall is ultimately longer. The air soars over his ears. His hair gets tangled and pushed back when he moves his head. Just a little.

His body is still moving and stumbling in the air, it doesn't fall perfectly straight despite his efforts to keep his legs down.

He isn't exactly sure why he still cares. Jumping off a bridge hunted by people after failing an assassination and wanting to survive?

His instincts and reflexes fight his tired mind on that.

The impact is not peaceful at all.

It is an explosion in his stomach like someone has shot him in the belly.

He can't scream or breath. Air is a construct void of any meaning under the water.

And with the world above left, he closes his eyes. He lets the air out. He lets the pulls in. And they tug and yell and sing.

A smiling face framed by two long rays of yellow warm light, sneaking through a makeshift curtain in the only room they have and share, she has a birt mark next to her ear, he sees it because she pushes her hair back before she picks him up and they spin, spin, and he wishes he could spin forever because they laugh, and hearing his mother laugh is precious.

Throwing stones into the water, with a pair following him in some distance, not speaking at all, watching the silent pond, and he is sure is doing it wrong, that spending time is not helping anymore. Because it won't change a thing and they won't be friends, and it makes him angry. He cannot make the stones jump. He tries again and again and fails. But the blue eyes still watch him. Maybe that is all that counts. In between the two of them.

Laughter and Crying and Pain. Pain is the only real thing that stays. Accompanies him like a loyal friend and a true advisor.

And the pain continues to advise him. It wants him to breathe and move.

He floats along somewhere, through heavy rushing masses of water.

This is not release. Nor afterlife. The Ghost was trapped in this world for so long he recognizes the sights of pain that flares through his nerves at all times.

Even when he loses consciousness, he is aware through the pain, the veil of blackened sight, that this cannot be the end.

If it is, it takes too long. Longer than he thought it would.

Yes, jumping off into the depth was a sentence calling for pain to begin with. But was that pain at least not supposed to end somewhere?

And suddenly there is something that tugs at his physical form. Voices real and alive, human, not from the afterlife, the other side.

Seconds go by. Or an eternity. His lungs burn when he coughs and the pain swells again. he wishes he could stop breathing.

"Don't move him too much, his head could be hurt." It is no voice he has ever heard. After the lovely laughter of his mother it seems rough and wrong. It is speaking with some sort of accent too.

"His ribs are broken, I think. Maybe his back too."

His hand snaps alive weakly, trying to reach out to the figure speaking, fingers clawing. To fight, to ask for help. He is not sure about it. Still not yet ready to give up.

He groans, a single low sound indicating that he is awake.

Eyes find him. Watchful eyes.

"Welcome back to the living fogland soldier," a voice behind the daze of pain and the pounding of his head greets him. Unfamiliar, with that accent again. "You didn't think no one would notice you traveling through half a country and trying to kill a Queen right on her doorstep, did you?"

He would laugh if his lungs would work properly. His ribcage is an explosion of pain when it moves up and down.

He would perhaps cry if he knows how to do that.

The Ghost just closes his eyes again, not trying to get up again.

"Where am I?" He whispers.

"Safe for now. We'll be moving soon. You impressed some people." The voice says. "Sneaking around in the capital? Acquiring that rifle? And almost taking the shot. All alone."

He thinks about the cryptical words about peace and death, a place to be, and the so very precise premonitions that guided him to the window, mixed with the lies that made him more certain. Is that why you told me to go instead of stopping me? So I would end up with these people, Jon?

The Ghost should have known. Someone that sees everyone's future plays the long con.

"What now?" He asks, and the world shakes around him, even behind closed eyes. If it is because of the pain or if he is on some kind of boat, who knows?

"Catch some sleep."

If he knew what a boy named Thomas dreams about, he would not wish sleep on him.

But for now, he is right. There is nothing to do but sleep and wait. Wait to be fixed. Wait for assistance. Wait to see where he will go.