Chapter 1: Nine Names

CHAPTER ONE
Nine Names

A note before you start.

No harem. No chosen one. No system, no levels, no helpful blue boxes. Nobody here is invincible, nobody’s first plan works because he happens to be the one telling the story, and the people who live through this get through it on arithmetic, on their hands, and on whatever nerve they have left, which is not always enough. If that isn’t the ride you bought a ticket for, this is your stop.

He knew about the light before he knew about anything else. It came through his eyelids from every direction at once — not the way a lamp comes at you, warm on one side and dark on the other, but flat and level and white, the whole ceiling doing the work of one enormous bulb.

His mouth tasted like pennies. His cheek was on the floor.

He lay still and let himself come around in the order he always came around in: what was under him, what was over him, what was wrong.

Under him, concrete, cool through his shirt, a seam running beneath his hip. Over him, the light. His hands were flat on the floor with nothing in them. He turned them over anyway. Palm, back, palm.

Wes Corrigan. The rest of it took its time.

He put his head up.

The room was bigger than one bulb had any business lighting. He’d spent a lot of his life in rooms that belonged to other people, and he priced a room before he decided what to say in it — the run of the walls, the height, what it would cost to get the air moving. The habit ran out here and came back with nothing.

One cord came down from the ceiling. At the end of it hung a bulb in a wire cage. That was one light, and it did not account for the corners.

All four walls were the same pale gray. No window broke them. No switch, no outlet, no vent. Nothing on them but paint and dust.

He looked for the door first, because it was always first, in every room he had ever talked his way into or out of.

Nothing. Wall, floor, wall. The seam under his hip ran out to the base of the wall and stopped against it, and the wall went on past the place where it stopped, smooth.

He walked the far wall with his eyes and put a length on it, then went back and did it the other way and came out with a longer one. He let it go. The room was the size it was. He would settle it later, if later came.

The air was cold and it did not move, and it smelled of dust and old plaster and nothing else. He listened past the room, past the walls, for anything at all. Whatever the walls were made of gave him nothing back. No traffic. No pipes. No sound of a building doing its work.

It crossed his mind that he might not be awake. The concrete was cold through his shirt, and the seam had a shape, and the clock kept time. He had never had a dream that could hold three things at once.

The table stood in the middle of it.

Round, dark, heavy, the top scarred and the scars old. Dust had settled into the scars and outlined them, so that from down on the floor the whole surface read like a map of something that had already happened.

A clock sat on the table.

Small and brass, with vines or flowers or something crawling up the sides of it, a crowded ring of ornament around a plain white face. The hands were where a stopped clock’s hands usually are. Both of them on the twelve.

It ticked.

One a second. Even. No hitch in it.

He watched the minute hand for the jump. His eyes started watering before anything moved, and he wiped them on his shoulder and looked again, and the hand was still on the twelve. Still ticking.

He waited for it to strike the hour. It went on ticking.

He counted ticks after that, because ticks could be counted, and he got past a hundred before he understood that the counting was doing the opposite of what he had wanted it to do. It was not telling him how long he had been lying there. It was telling him how long he had been listening.

Then he saw the people.

They lay around the table and along the walls. Some on their sides with their knees drawn up. Some flat on their backs. One sitting upright against the far wall with his chin on his chest. None of them moving.

All of them dressed, which was the part his brain kept snagging on. A woman in a gray suit, good cut, one heel still on and the other heel lying next to her foot. A man in a black tee shirt and boots that had been worked in. Somebody in a white coat with a pen in the pocket. A big man face down with one arm under him and his shoulder blades pushing the shirt up.

Same gray dust on all of them. In the creases at the corners of their eyes, along the parting in the woman’s hair, in the seams of the white coat.

He watched the nearest chest go up. Then another one. After the clock, the breathing was the loudest thing in the room.

He stopped watching chests and looked at the floor between them instead. No blood on it that he could see. The dust lay even, and between the bodies it was smooth, and he looked a long time and could not find a mark in it from where he lay.

He thought about saying something out loud and decided to know the room first. Talking was how he found out about people, and there was nobody here he needed to find out about yet.

He got a hand into his front pocket. Then the other one. He rolled onto his hip for the back ones and came up with lint and nothing else. No phone. No wallet. No keys. No cash, none of the folded-small bills he kept in a back pocket.

He lay back down and thought about his phone the way you think about a tooth.

He’d had it in his hand. He was sure of that much. The flat cold of the screen under his thumb, the call he had been about to make. Then a doorway, and a step down, and the tape running out.

And there was money coming.

That was the word he had been using all week, to anybody who asked. Coming. He had said it in a kitchen and on a stairwell, and once into a phone that had already gone quiet on him.

Nothing hurt.

He checked it piece by piece. Head. Jaw. Ribs. The shoulder he had been lying on. The wrist. He ran his fingers up under his shirt and they came back dry. Nothing hurt anywhere, and he did not like that at all.

He started counting.

He did not decide to. His eyes were already going around the room clockwise from the woman in the gray suit, so he let them.

Gray suit. Black tee. White coat. The big one, face down. The one behind the table with his arm over his face. The woman in the work shirt with her hair pinned up. The man against the far wall. Two more he could not dress from where he lay, one folded up small and one with his legs out straight. And him.

Ten.

He went back around the other way to check it, because a number he had only gotten once was not a number. It was a guess with a good attitude.

Nine.

He lay still with the nine and did not take his eyes off the wall. Nine was the kind of number that gets into a room and takes a seat.

He went around again, slower, and found the one he had lost. The man against the far wall in the dark coat, chin on his chest, sitting so still that from where Wes lay the coat and the wall were the same dark and the same shape. He was there. He had been there the whole time.

Ten again.

He had counted wrong once already, and the wrong number had felt exactly like the right one the whole time he was holding it.

He started again at the woman in the gray suit, and this time he said the numbers out loud, quietly, one at a time.