'Being alive is a puzzle and a process.'


Sara Skonos hand tingles over his smashed-in face. The burning scars and tight skin stay, but the nose forms back and feels straight enough to breath in it, better than the doctors cared for in their provisional care that he let them enact.

Survival.

It is true.

Because all his body does is fight for it, always reliable to adjust, muscles moving and bending, senses always tingling in alarm.

Even his inner shield is a simple coping mechanism of surviving. Wired and filled with poisons and traps his mind has built the highest walls to seal them off. The deadman's switch works efficiently.

His eyes blink up to the single light bulb on the ceiling, with the whole hideout around them bustling and in some sort of attempt to smooth over the ripples. They try to work with what they have and keep themselves together even now. It's admirable, and it is something he knows. Maybe, every creature with a strong will has a gift for survival. Maybe this is not too special. It's true when he says he never will be as flashy and grand as anyone else. But if he is built around this now, if it flows through him and isn't something he chose but something he has had slumbering in his veins, just like Jon seeing the future or the others shifting their body, conjuring elemental powers, he can never escape.

It is a thought that could strike him as horrifying. Because powers flowing in your blood can be stopped.

What happens when you stop the powers of survival? Will his heart just stop beating? Will he break together and never recover?

"What happens if I get pushed into a cell with silent stone?" He slowly mutters, eyes bending back to Julian Jacos. "Or what if one of the silver silencers gets me? Will I just fall over and die? How far does that go?"

Will I just go mad in an instant? That is the question he doesn't ask.

"Does your heart only beat because of that ability?"

His heart used to beat for the relief of the pain. He used to be ready to go. It never worked in the end.

Not release. Nor afterlife. A shuddering fall from heights with his body bending and his bones brimming, faltering, flailing, rolling together to protect soft parts and the neverending pulse of his own blood as it beats while his eyes are wide open and he cannot close them, he never will close them-

"It keeps beating because of it. I was ready to die when I jumped off the bridge. I couldn't die." His eyes aren't accusing, he would if he could, and so he just stares as intensely as he can at the exiled prince. The only reaction he gets is crossed arms and eyes not exactly following his glare or reciprocating. "My body doesn't let me go. I was ready to die when you said we go to the Choke. That would have been my life, a full circle, even if your brother wouldn't have been there. Now look at me. Look at what I am. What does this make me?! I'm not red, and I never was."

The Lakelander called him a monster. Perhaps that is what he is. The others can make their peace with what they do. He can't fathom what peace would be even if someone offered it to him on the tip of a blade.

"What now?"

The woman introduced as Sara Skonos flinches back when he moves abruptly. He could just attack. But it doesn't change a thing. He is surrounded by silver people, his weapons kissed silver brains and silver blood.

Silver is silver, red is red, what is the rest- what does that make him and what does it mean in the grand scheme-

"What now?" The Ghost repeats. "Do you want me to trade myself in, Calore? I don't think I make a good offer. Maybe for someone less important than Miss Barrow."

A crack runs through the skin that has lost color in the single white lightbulb. "Do you think I would do that?"

This is why he doesn't trust anyone more than he can smell their sweat on their napes or count the ripples and rings of blood left under their fingernails.

No names, no faces, little words, it works, just drift along, it doesn't hurt, it doesn't sting if they fall and die and it doesn't hurt if they lose something they love and you don't trust them and it is for everyone's benefit- no-no stupid why would you fall back and try to be anything but fog-

"You already broke a promise once. I made you swear on your colors." The Ghost seeps himself in-breaths filled with dust, dirt and the salt on human skin. "I know everyone has seen the broadcast. I could hear you all, the shouting, the insults, the faint plans, the offers. A collar and a march of shame for her and a walk of triumph for your brother. So who do you tell next? What will they do?"

"If the Guard makes use of you-" Jacos starts.

"If they do. It better be in an ambush or attack. I'm a weapon."

"Thomas-"

Too many bodies clog the small space in too little air. He suffocates and rebirths himself , thoughts that sprout beneath his scars and tingle over his skin in an unwelcome sensation. And the serpent has the maw open and it bites, bites deeps, tail around his ankles ready to drag him beneath the surface.

He flees like he often does, he wanders off and no one can stop him. No one even tries to. The halls are empty, only a plume of watery fog escapes from a pipe, and he soaks his skin in it, hoping that it will just become him.


How deep does the blood keep his soul, or whatever is left of it, contained in his flesh?

There are some ways to find out. He rolls about the easiest.

"Silence me." He doesn't address her politely. No Miss Cole. No polite waiting. No "No words" policy.

Her hands were fidgeting with her long black braid. Now they stop and bend like crawling spiders tangled in her hair before sinking.

"Are you asking me to attack you?"

"I need to know something."

"No," She refuses. "And now leave me alone. I got other things to worry about."

What does someone provoke to snap? What does someone need to lose control?

He takes her in, steps too close, and he is ready to hit her if he has to. But there is something else that hurts more than a hit in the face.

"Why did you want to go to the Choke? Do you have family there?"

Something alarmed and snarling is mixing in her expression now.

"A father? A brother? They may be dead soon." The Ghost can't remember the last time he opted to hurt someone, to make them angry using just his voice. A boy named Thomas used to be good with it, mocking and biting when hurt, and he was hurt more often in between the love of a silver prince and circumstances in a warzone Always keeping it civil up until he snapped in the space between their bodies. "They are dead and you are useless, Miss Cole. You are just a useless girl that acts tough. You'll never save them. You'll never even see them alive to say goodbye."

She snarls. He moves one step. She flinches.

One more step, he wagers, and then she will bite.

So he takes that step. He lifts his hand. And there is what he has been waiting for as the physical confrontation lies ahead. It is mean, it is dirty, and it is not a nice thing to do.

The ghost never claimed to be a nice person, and he certainly doesn't consider himself a good person.

At first, his fingers go numb, his ears plop, turn deaf. The world loses scents, turns less sharp. He squints his eyes, his sight wavers. Then it starts to creep in his bones. He feels every bruise, he feels the muscles buckle. He feels weak. His whole body suddenly is not advised by pain but overpowered. His bones don't feel light and flexible, they are brittle. Like wood in a fireplace smoked to coal.

He holds his breath a moment. Waits for his inner walls to crumble and break. Now that surviving does not contain him, he will cry or yell or feel pain, isn't that right?

Every moment. Every moment his coping mechanism will break off. He feels it. He can feel how it worms into all his senses and it breaks his instincts, it snaps them in two.

Next thing, every scar will break open, until nothing is left but memories.

Nothing happens.

It starts to hurt. It starts to burn, and the memories are as threatening as they always are.

His head is still the same under the pressure of her tingling power.

He could almost be relieved if it didn't make him blind by now. It doesn't stop the other questions, the threatening fear and it doesn't stop that he can't think straight.

It stops just in time, a shaking pressure threatening to crush his head. No doubt it can kill easily.

The feet in boots and her long legs step back when he crawls one step and sits up.

"Fuck you." Her voice shakes a little. "You absolute, complete asshole."

"Thank you," He just says. "And I am sorry."

He isn't sure she heard it.


Just like there was a moment when a girl with a maimed hand caught his attention, her red hair is now burning in the light under the fog of the pipes.

"You're dirty." One of her hands smoothes over his shoulder. "Where have you been? My brothers said you were with them, but none of us saw you after that."

He doesn't wonder why she found him or why she is kind to him when he doesn't really deserve the attention.

The words that spill out of his mouth are not his own. They aren't the words of the Ghost, and they aren't the words of the boy that was Thomas. "I used to be something, and now I am a different thing. I'm not a real person anymore. I am not a real person anymore, Gisa, and I can never go back."

"No one can go back," she whispers. "We've all been something, Thomas."

"I haven't seen his family- my family in years. I don't know if they are dead. I had a sister. And you lost a brother. And you lost a sister."

A flimsy moment it looks like she steels herself to answer that as well. "It's not your fault."

"What if it is?" He asks. "What if I could have ended this long ago and failed? What do I do? What is my purpose? What if everything changes again? What if these thoughts-"

The answer is just arms that pull around him, and he lets that happen.

"I was just a boy when I died the first time," he whispers at her delicate shoulder. "I was just conscripted and I didn't want to fight. Then there was a boy. He was younger than me. But he was..he was a prince. And he was a friend. And I loved him. "