'It's redundant to look for profoundness in words of others if you believe that it is the only thing to save you.'
Freezing isn't a new sensation for Thomas. He remembers it with the same resistance that locks and categorizes everything inside his head. It doesn't soak him like raindrops in front of a hut now. It grips his bones and scrapes over them with the teeth of predators. It leaves a sensation of shivers on his spine.
Gisa was right when she told him to dress better and warmer and made sure to take at least care of the minor problems of his leftover dresscode. Even though he told her that he doesn't care, and that he was used to wearing uniform. At least he wears gloves for his burned digits. But she has wrapped a rubbed scarf around his throat. It winds in the color of dried blood down his burned chin and neck.
Now that he walks, the cold touches him with fingers that make the scar tissue over his face shrink. The wet beneath it creeps into his skull, below his brow, and into his joints. A good thing about the burned away nerves in so many parts of his skin is that is now almost resilient toward any weather. His body eases itself into the shiver, as it always does, as it has the last days. It fits into any weather, any march, and every step helps to acclimate.
He hasn't felt cold as much down here the last days.
But he wagers the cold doesn't exactly just come from the leaking hallways of this hideout.
Memories of children in a small home, huddling together under blankets that always were a patchwork of threadbare, salvaged bits of cloth. The warmth that comes only from hugging each other tightly, arms that are a patchwork themselves-it's going to be fine, we make it through the winter, and then we can laugh again, this is our palace, and they laugh and laugh because what is crying good for-
He shrugs the last shiver off as he brushes forward.
He has evaded Calore and Jacos as well as anyone else in the last twenty hours. You can count the time easy with the watch of the shifts, in the cycles that the people down here work. A day in the dim light is a day trapped underneath the earth, but people still eat and sleep, they work and cover up their jobs and duties.
Circling around the strange assembly of leftover forces are also two men with scars on their cheeks. Another batch of New Bloods, they say, but not scraped from the nortan landscape or recruited somwhere else. Not brought and scurried over from the Lakeland border either.
If Thomas head wasn't already scrambled and altered in ways that make everything strange, their synchronized movements would startle him.
Trapped in the base like everyone else now that one of the biggest assets is gone. Something in hims is very sure they came for a certain lightning girl. They must be distraught to instead meddle around here.
There's a whole assigned barrack for the leftover bits of the New Bloods. The unmarked grave for the queen and the burial of Gisa's brother were far from the only ones on Tuck. It isn't his place to stay.
He has come here once earlier the last day to pester Cole until she lashed out. She isn't around now, and that is for the best. He has not the energy to face her again. Not after spending the better part of an hour on the shoulder of a red-haired girl, sometimes whispering, sometimes silent. Alleviating his consciousness in a vomit of words that burn down his throat and hurt his facade.
Add it to the list of things he owes Gisa Barrow.
Ada is his age, approximately, give or take. At least the age that the boy Thomas could be if his birth certificates and identification numbers hadn't been pandered with by the will of a queen beyond recognition. A part of him thinks he may have been born in spring, but it's too far away to remember, and he has no interest in asking anyone to tell him. He'll have to ask eventually. The information has be somwhere in systems still. He's sure that Maven knows it. He doesn't want to ask for clarification now.
She sits on the table ramshackled into the small space between the old, rotten beds and bedrolls that litter the ground like a combat zone. It is some sort of tinkering, a radio, or other communication devices in broken pieces.
She doesn't look up from her work. But he is also very quiet. His feet barely make any sound as they step over the concrete ground.
It takes him a long, pondering moment to clear his throat.
"Hello."
Her eyes reflect a color that is lit by something golden, and she takes him in with mild interest. A person that compares numbers.
"Hello." She cuts the ontroduction short. "You are Thomas. I'm Ada. But we both know."
It is a little more complicated than that, because there is always more. He doesn't have the exact interest to tell her that, though. He is just Thomas to them. If introductions are unnecessary, all the better. So far, in the last day, it seems that even though Calore has broken his word to tell the other two, the information about his blood status or his past has not yet spread. Or if it has, no one has yet caught him.
Blood status. This is what is it. A status and a mutation in a list and in some hushed word-
"You remember everything. You never forget."
Her hands raise from the intricate mechanical puzzle of the device, one tweezer in metal pincers holding the smallest screw he has ever seen. "That's true."
"How does it work?"
She thinks about that for a moment. "It's just there. Like I see your face and already know everything I ever heard about you."
Thomas pulls at the scarf around his neck tighter like a noose and wishes she wouldn't.
"I see this screw and I read about the device it is implemented in," she holds up the metal pincer to him as if it would mean anything. He doesn't even know what she is building. "I will always remember how it is built. Yesterday I watched Cameron repair a circuit. I will always know how to do that now. "
"But doesn't it...hurt?"
She furrows her brow. "My memory is my strength. It helped me to remember every book in the governor's mansion I could get into my hand. It helped to learn piloting and shooting. It doesn't hurt to learn things."
"But personally? About the things you lost? You will always remember the exact same date and time you lost someone you loved."
Her face warps slightly as she looks at the screw in her hand, then back to him.
"Maybe. But if they are dead, most people agree with the sentiment that people remember their loved ones to honor them. Gradually speaking, names are often forgotten, outside of families. Who cares about the red population by names except for the wanted posters and denunciation right now?" It isn't the answer he hoped for. "Is there a reason you ask me that?"
"Personal interest." He takes a harsh breath. "I will leave you to your work."
Her eyes watch him still when he leaves the room.
One thing that at least helps. Down here, there is no birds. No way that a crow could slip in to remind him of eyes eaten and faces in feathered flurries.
It doesn't mean that now that the curse of whatever amalgation of both a dead boy and a Ghost he is becoming won't be painful. His deadman switch trembles in his control, ready to explode as fast as he lets go. If he let's the memories all loose now, no ability to survive saves him. Flecks appear before his sight when he presses his eyes together. It doesn't help.
His fingers squeeze weakly once, shaking burned digits with broken nails hidden under the gloves. He feels his pulse rushing along.
As the day continues on, counts off, 24 hours, 28, he tries to see what strength can even lie in remembering what he used to be and to not push it away.
What now? What. Now.
In the end, not Gisa nor Ada nor Cameron can't make a decision for him. He has to make it himself. He has made worse decisions. He left people behind. He left some to die. He left some to wither away and he left some alive.
"The offer for my gun still stands," he mutters in the hallway between the two of them. A discarded weapon ready for use and an exiled silver prince. A strange combination. "If you want to kill him, I'll march in there again. I would do anything to get out. But I think you know that."
The moment is stretching in a gauging , solid second of two people that are tired but don#t have the luxury to relax. "I do. What now?"
"I'm working with some options. I don't want anyone to lock me in. Sure you understand that. Give me a few days. Just some days. Just to see what they want me to do."
It doesn't escape him that thomas wears the red scarf, he looks at it until his eyes seem to burn new scars to the old ones. "I'm not forcing you to do anything. Yesterday was not about hurting you, Thomas."
"I appreciate that, Calore." He winds his eyes upward into the breath of their lungs puffing almost to clouds. Just a second of his nerves bathing in the sensation of the shiver again, before he needs to turn away "And maybe it needed to happen. Just so no one can force me. They never asked me the right questions. And I never had the right answers, I think."
The Ghost always declined belonging to the Guard because he didn't believe in heroes. He still doesn't, and it is far more intricate of a web. Every chamber is small and in bad shape, a rehearsed show of how drastically fast everyone had to flee the island. This room is no different.
"I'm here because I trust Gisa Barrow, and she told me to come to you."
Strange how both of them are equipped in the same getup of too wide coats and red scarfs, linked with scars and wounds that reach below some surface.
"If you'd asked me before I was repeatedly killed and maimed, I'd have told you something poetic about existence. That we are all mirrors to the same broken universe, Captain."
He blinks. She stares back at him.
"Poetry isn't exactly what I expected from you."
He stands very still, gloved hands behind his back. "And you won't receive any more. I knew someone that loved poetry and any kind of book. It's long time away since then. Words either fill silence or have a hard purpose. Cards on the table."
"Cards on the table," Diana Farley repeats.
