My vision had been clearing ever since I had woken up. I had been certain, at first, that I was wearing a blindfold, or had a bag over my head, or something, but by the time I had Cadoc untied, I could see clearly. It made me seriously worry that I had taken a blow to my head, and it had scrambled my brain somehow. I’d never heard of someone going blind from a head injury, even temporarily, but I could imagine it being a thing that could happen.
But there wasn’t time for that.
We were in the back of a cart, which was covered loosely by a dirty tarp. Besides the two of us, the back was filled only with junk - scraps of leather, old tools, that kind of thing. I wasn’t sure if that was part of the disguise, or if our kidnappers had just stolen this cart without bothering to unload it. Very little light came in from the holes in the tarp, and the light was dim, more like that from street lamps than sunlight - which was strange, considering it had been morning when we had left. Was I out that long?
When Cadoc was free, we looked at eachother, both trying to communicate without words. He nodded, which I took to mean “thank you.” At least, it fucking better have meant thank you, because I could have left him behind in a second. I nodded back, which meant “yeah, I saved you, you owe me.”
He nodded again, this time motioning his head towards the back of the cart. That must have meant “well, are we getting out of here, friend?” I nodded back. We were creating our own nod-based language, it seemed.
Escaping, at this point, was less graceful than you might imagine. We rolled out of the back, first me, then Cadoc, landing with two consecutive splats into the mud.
“Did you hear something?” One of the guards asked, almost immediately, the voice growing more distant all the while. A chill ran down my spine. I didn’t wait to hear their decision, whether they stopped to check or not. I fumbled upright, and ran.
I had to take in my surroundings in an instant. First of all, there were street lamps, which deeply confused me as I thought about how they possibly got electricity here. I guessed magic was a pretty good explanation for anything in this dimension, but I hadn’t seen any magic, so far, that wasn’t personal, if that makes sense. Sure, Cadoc could summon a stick, and the stick stayed around without him using more mana, but electricity felt like something that required constant power, you would think. My nails wouldn’t keep burning without me feeding them mana, for instance. It could catch something on fire, and that fire would keep burning, but it needed some sort of fuel. Was there some guy powering all of these lights somewhere, half-electrician, half-slave in a hamster wheel? Again, no time for thoughts like that. In fact, most of these musings came later, the information filed away for a safer moment.
There were buildings lining the street on both sides. They were mostly wooden, though much nicer than anything in Dross. I couldn’t see beyond them on either side, but I saw a gap between two, and ran for it.
I was in an alley, darker than the street, and sprinted randomly down its twists and turns. I ran like someone was chasing me - which I supposed Cadoc was, after all - and I had no idea if the guards had started after us or not. I hadn’t heard anything after that first comment one had made. I ran until I was out of breath.
“I think we’ve lost them,” Cadoc said at last, breathing heavily. He had kept up after all. I could barely make out his figure in the moonlight. “But we’ll need a place to hide, friend. I imagine they’ll notice before too long that their cart is empty.”
I wanted to grab Cadoc and shake him, yell at him for getting us into this mess, but the adrenaline pumping through my veins kept me focused. We both peered at the buildings around us. There were backdoors into some of them, but besides that, there was nothing in the alley except trash, and rats who chittered away as we approached.
The longer we searched for something suitable, the more tense I grew. Finally, we decided to take our chances on a building that looked abandoned. I hoped that, if the owners were home, they would be the kind Christian-types who would shelter a lost soul, and not the paranoid type who would shoot us or eat us or who knows what. Of course, Christianity didn’t exist as a religion in this dimension, as far as I could tell, and this thought dashed my hopes slightly. Then again, Cadoc’s parents seemed to belong to some sort of pacifist belief-system. I prayed that any residents of the house we were entered held similar non-violent beliefs.
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It looked little different from many of the other buildings around - three stories high, with only one window we could see on the alley side. This window was broken, and there was more trash near the back door than near others. That was it. We were hanging our hopes on those small details.
We made our way inside as quietly as we could. The door was unlocked. It felt incredibly stupid, but there was little else we could do. We shut the door behind us, even though that left us in complete darkness in an unknown, possibly occupied house.
We decided to sleep in shifts near the back door, not daring to take more steps into the unknown than we had to. If the kidnappers came for us from the alley, we would jump them. If they came from the front, we’d slip back into the alley.
Needless to say, despite our plans, we did not sleep. Hours were spent looking uselessly into the darkness, jumping at the sound of every scurrying mouse, every creak made by the settling wooden frame. We didn’t dare speak to each other, or move from our spots on either side of the door.
I am a cockroach trying to outrun a boot. I was occupied by this thought for hours, shaking.
Even when the faint light of morning slipped under the gap beneath the door, we waited. Would the occupants be waking up? Would we soon be discovered, dirty strangers squatting and armed?
There must have been windows on the opposite side of the house, because distant reflections of sunlight started to illuminate our surroundings. We were in a sort of back hallway, with a wooden wall directly opposite our entrance. Light was creeping around either end of this wall, and we still heard no footsteps and saw no shadows moving.
Eventually Cadoc decided peek his head around, and told me the way was clear. Then we crept upstairs. If there was some crippled granny in a bed up there, what was I going to do? I had visions of suicidal arson.
There was no one upstairs. There was no one in the house at all. It was full of rat poop and decaying furniture, but no people.
Opposite the alley entrance was a door that opened into the street the kidnappers had been taking us down - though of course, we didn’t open it to get this information. We saw the road through the windows on either side of the door - broken, curtainless windows we avoided from then on. I was careful not to step on the broken glass.
Upstairs were a couple of bedrooms, and more broken windows overlooking the road.
“Who the hell were those guys?” I asked Cadoc, finally, as soon as the coast was clear.
“They sounded like hired men,” Cadoc said, stifling a yawn.
“Hired by who, exactly?” I asked, a barb in my voice. I asked it in such a way that said “I know this is your fault so there’s no use hiding it.”
“I don’t know for certain,” he said. “But I forsaw something of this sort on our horizon, truly.”
“Oh, you forsaw it, huh?” I asked. “Didn’t think you might mention that? The impending kidnapping didn’t seem important?”
“I mentioned it before, I believe. I said that making this much money would draw attention. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to cut themselves a slice of our pie.”
I scoffed. “So they were thieves? Not…”
“Not what, friend?”
Either Cadoc was egging me on, or he had no idea what I thought had happened. The look on his face was honest, and though I’d met good liars before, I couldn’t help but believe him. I sighed.
“Never mind. They said they were hired by someone. And they kidnapped us, to state the obvious. If they were thieves, shouldn’t they have just robbed us and been done with it?”
“Consider, friend, that they may have been watching us for some time. Perhaps they know that we don’t carry more than a few watches on us at a time, and perhaps they’ve even gained some idea of how we get more. They would want us alive. One of us, at least.”
“The golden goose,” I muttered to myself. “Fuck.”
I clenched my fists, and unconsciously began to grind my teeth.
“I need Tom,” I said to myself, muttering. “If I want to be successful. But I can’t just fucking find Tom, oh no, first I have to get money so that my tech billionaire boss doesn’t repossess my fucking life. So I have to waste all this fucking time making enough money to pay the payments before I can even think of finding Tom. Not that I’d even know where to begin looking.
“But now, hey, why not?! Let’s add another step. Before you go home, you have to find Tom. Before you find Tom, you have to make money. And before you fucking make any money, you have to figure out how to prevent being robbed, kidnapped, murdered… fuck! What am I supposed to do now, huh? If I train to get stronger, that’s time spent not making money. If I’m making money, that’s time spent not finding Tom. And if I search for Tom, I’ll end up homeless, AND I’ll still probably get killed by some wizard having a bad day. So what then, huh? What the hell am I supposed to do?”
Cadoc had sat down in a chair on the other side of the room, and it looked like something else was on his mind. Or he was ignoring me, letting me cool off, and something about that idea made me a little angrier, like Cadoc was unphased by me. Maybe he was even falling asleep. It was hard to see in the little light that made it into this upstairs room. But I wasn’t yelling at him, anyway. I don’t know who I was yelling at. Myself. RENA. God. Tom.
My anger didn’t subside, but sharpened to a point, and I let it. I dug my remaining fingernails into my palms, fists shaking, and let my anger guide me. It would tell me what to do.
“Who hired the kidnappers?” I asked at last. It must have been some time later, because Cadoc jumped a little. I think maybe he had nodded off in the chair.
“I have no idea,” he answered, yawning again. “They mentioned a name, but I didn’t recognize it. It isn’t as if I’ve ever been in Eraztun before, you know. Your guess, well, it isn’t ‘as good as mine,’ but it’s close.”
“Could we find him?”
Cadoc stroked his chin. “I suppose we could. The kidnappers will be looking for us, but they’ve lost the element of surprise. If we spot them first, well, they’ll have to report back eventually.” He shook his head, as if finally realizing what I had said. “But why would we do that, Miles?”
“He had enough money to hire goons, didn’t he? We’re going to take it. If we can’t sell watches anymore without drawing attention to ourselves, then I think it’s time we robbed a house. And there’s no one on this God-forsaken planet I’d rather rob. He’s going to learn what happens when you fuck with someone who has nothing left to lose.”