Chapter 17. The Wall

  Bruno took a day to develop a training plan. According to him, Jeremiah could pass for a second-story man, “with a little work.”

  “First I need to assess your skills,” said Bruno. He had cleared all of the furniture from their living room. “Climb up the wall here and traverse around the room.” He patted the smooth plaster.

  Jeremiah looked at the flat gray wall. He looked at the other three flat gray walls. “Just…hop up? And climb around the room?” asked Jeremiah. He had to be misunderstanding something.

  “Well, try anyways,” said Bruno. “I don’t expect you to make it the whole way around, the part near the door is going to be tricky, but let’s see how far you can get.” He patted the wall again. “Up, up!”

  Jeremiah placed his hands against the wall. The plaster was cold and unyielding. He tried to dig his fingers in but there was nothing there save for the bumps. He placed one foot against the wall. Still no miracle appeared.

  “Ambitious choice, but I approve,” said Bruno. Jeremiah had no idea what he was talking about.

  Lacking any other guidance, Jeremiah hopped and threw himself flat against the wall. He slapped his cheek against the plaster and dropped unceremoniously back to the ground.

  Bruno chuckled. “Yeah that was inevitable. Don’t try to impress me now, keep it simple. Go ahead, try again.”

  Jeremiah moved over a step and bounced uselessly off the wall again.

  Bruno’s amusement became tinged with annoyance. “Why don’t you try starting here?” He pointed to a spot on the middle of the wall that was indistinguishable from the rest.

  Jeremiah braced his foot at the spot Bruno had pointed, jumped, and again splatted against the wall. Bruno just stared.

  “I am so excited to learn the answer to this riddle,” said Jeremiah sarcastically. “Is the real climb metaphorical? Do I ‘climb’ into a sense of—”

  “I get it, you’re incompetent,” said Bruno, all traces of amusement gone. “You seriously can’t climb this?”

  “Climb this flat vertical wall? No, I’m not a bug,” said Jeremiah.

  Bruno nodded, and gently pushed Jeremiah aside. He did exactly the same thing Jeremiah did, placing his hands and feet against the wall, but when he hopped up, he stayed aloft.

  “No. How are you doing that?” asked Jeremiah. Bruno was just floating in the air.

  “Take a closer look," said Bruno.

  Jeremiah crouched to inspect. He could see, once he got close enough, that Bruno’s feet were braced between two minuscule bumps in the wall. Bruno's fingertips gripped the tiniest crumbs of plaster.

  "That's insane.” Even seeing it, Jeremiah couldn’t believe it.

  "That's second story work,” said Bruno, "climb the unclimbable. Where a normal person sees a wall, you see a ladder. Where people see a window, you see a door. You grant your people access to a whole new dimension."

  “Why would you even ask for gloves that stick to walls when you can do this? I actually started looking into how to do it,” said Jeremiah. It was theoretically simple—If Contact, Adhere. He’d found instructions in one of his books about designing diagrams that would only activate when a certain rune came into contact with something. If he could weave that into a glove, all he’d have to do was slap his hand against a wall and it would stick.

  “Jay, focus. Climbing, glass cutting, lock picking, burgling—all of these are complex skills you need at least the basics of just to pass as a second story man. And that's the easy part. The hard part is, I need you to pass as one of us."

  “One of us?"

  “The survivors.” Bruno dropped off the wall and advanced on Jeremiah. “The forgotten. Street folk. Urchins. Someone that knows the struggle.” He jabbed Jeremiah in the chest. “I’m going to teach you what matters.”

  "What is it that matters?" asked Jeremiah.

  "Desperation," said Bruno. The intensity of his glare was making Jeremiah uncomfortable.

  Delilah entered, and Jeremiah was grateful for the distraction until he noticed what she was holding. “Hey guys!” She showed them a sickly yellow strip, mottled in black spots. It looked like a bad moldy cheese. “This should take care of his teeth. Won’t last forever, but he can do a reapplication if needed.”

  “What is that?” asked Jeremiah with dread. The very sight of it made him nauseated.

  “You took very good care of your teeth when you were younger, and I thank you for that. You have no idea how many infections I see spread from gums to hearts. But Bruno thinks a more lackadaisical attitude would have served you better here.”

  Jeremiah unconsciously ran his tongue over his teeth. Whenever he’d complained about brushing as a child, his mother would lean in and smile, revealing the blackened crumbled mess inside her mouth, more like charcoal fragments than human bones. The sight had always terrified Jeremiah into obedience.

  “Open,” said Delilah.

  Jeremiah opened his mouth. Delilah lay one strip across his upper teeth, and one across his lower teeth. She closed his mouth for a few moments, then removed the strips and inspected her work.

  "Gross. Good work," said Bruno.

  "I agree," said Delilah. “I thought the color depth was too far, but I’m glad I went with it."

  She held up a mirror for Jeremiah, and he nearly gagged at what he saw. His teeth had been stained a multitude of yellow and orange hues, with deep pits of black settling into some of the spaces between and in the pits of the molars. "This is temporary, yeah?" he asked.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  "Should be," said Delilah.

  Bruno sighed. "I still think-"

  "I am not removing any of his teeth!" said Delilah.

  Bruno’s methods of instruction turned out to be demanding one impossible task after the other. Bruno would place a tiny bell in Allison’s pocket without her noticing, and it was Jeremiah’s job to swipe it. But Allison’s situational awareness was flawless to anyone that wasn’t Bruno. Jeremiah practiced lock picking on a training lock that stabbed his fingers with a lightning-fast needle every time he messed up, which was often, and made picking the lock even harder. And he came up empty when Bruno interrogated him on the minute details of a scene after being allowed to study it for less than a second.

  Every day he asked Jeremiah to attempt to climb the wall, and every day Jeremiah failed. He had never known a vitriolic hatred toward a wall before, but this was the worst wall there had ever been.

  But worse than anything was the hunger. It gnawed at him day and night, keeping him at the edge of rage. As the weeks passed, Bruno would allow him scraps here and there while the others ate normal meals at the same dinner table. “We need to get rid of the baby fat on those cheeks,” Bruno had said. Jeremiah often had nothing to occupy himself besides staring and salivating at the others’ plates.

  He sensed the others’ patience dwindling. His patience with himself was dwindling—it had been weeks already. They could not stay here forever and wait for him to achieve competence. Outwardly, they were all as encouraging as ever, but Jeremiah wasn’t fooled. His chance to prove himself, to really make a difference, was running out.

  A knock on the door well after dark made them all jump. Bruno peered through a crack at the visitor, then leapt to the table, draped himself onto the chair, and started shuffling cards as though he hadn’t a care in the world. Allison rolled her eyes and opened the door to reveal Spymaster Ka, leaning against the wall in a mirror of Bruno’s posture.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” said Bruno. He started dealing solitaire with precise flicks of his wrist.

  “Good evening, Spymaster Ka,” said Delilah. “How can we help you?”

  Ka thrust a bundle of envelopes towards her. “Did you have your mail forwarded to the palace?”

  “I did, yes,” said Delilah. “I have some critical correspondences to maintain.” Bruno abandoned his devil-may-care routine and sighed heavily.

  “Right, we're putting a stop to that,” said Ka. Her gaze lingered on Bruno a beat too long before she said, “Goodnight,” and left.

  “Were you supposed to deal her in?” asked Jeremiah. Any opportunity to rib Bruno was too good to pass up. “She looked like she wanted to play.”

  “She knows she’s-wait, what? Deal her into solitaire?” said Bruno.

  “Oh,” said Delilah. It was a tiny squeak of a sound, almost a gasp.She held an open letter in her hand, the paper limp. Jeremiah thought he saw the tiniest quiver in her lip.

  “Hon? What’s going on?” Allison asked, crossing the room to see the letter.

  “I, umm. I lost the house,” Delilah took a halting breath. “We knew this was coming, but…”

  “Oh, Delilah I’m so sorry,” Allison gave Delilah a hug, but Delilah didn’t return it.

  When Delilah spoke again, her expression was placid. “That house was the last one my family owned. It was the house I grew up in. They’ll come for the fortress next, and once I’m no longer a land owner, I’ll be stripped of my title. After that, I’m sure my law and medical licenses are next. Then, assuming they aren’t satisfied, I’ll be placed in a debtors' prison of some sort.”

  “We’re not going to let that happen,” said Allison.

  “And there is no debtors prison that I can’t get you out of,” said Bruno.

  “Enough,” said Delilah. “None of you know how this works, this isn’t your world. If you’ll excuse me.” She pulled away from her friends, gathered up the papers, and disappeared into her room, pulling the door closed with a soft click behind her.

  The soft whistle of Bruno’s breathing had been steady for half an hour before Jeremiah made his move. He tucked Gus into the pocket of the threadbare tunic they had chosen, slung the satchel containing a set of lockpicks and a few enchanting tools over his shoulder, and crept out of the room.

  The apartment was bright enough from moonlight that he could cross it without worrying about bumping into anything, but he still nearly collided with Bruno blocking the door.

  “What the—how did you…?” Jeremiah head swiveled back towards the bedroom where he’d been sure Bruno had been fast asleep moments before.

  “Go back to bed, Jay.” Bruno had his arms crossed casually as he leaned against the door.

  “Let me through.” Jeremiah kept his voice low to keep from waking the others. “This is happening.”

  “The hell it is. You’re not nearly ready. I made a promise to Allison—do you have any idea what she’ll do to me if you get yourself killed out there?”

  “I don’t care. Jeremiah squared his shoulders. “We’re out of time and I have to try.”

  Bruno chuckled and shook his head. “I know you want to play at being a hero, Jay, but this isn’t a game. You’re not going, so just forget it.”

  Jeremiah’s temper flared. “The only one treating this like a game is you! You failed, so you don’t believe anyone else can do it. But it isn’t up to you anymore, it’s up to me. So let. Me. Though.”

  Bruno’s good humor disappeared. “You don’t have what it takes. You’re never going to have it. You’ll quit this when the going gets tough, just like you quit necromancy. Only this time, we won’t be there to coddle you.”

  Jeremiah gaped at him. “I quit necromancy because I was getting people killed!”

  “You quit necromancy because you’re a coward!” Bruno advanced on him. “You had everything, and you threw it away. Do you know what happens to cowards on the streets? I do. And forgive me if I don’t feel like peeling your corpse off some back alley street.”

  No one had ever spoken to Jeremiah that way about his quitting necromancy. His jaw worked as his retorts stumbled over themselves. Finally, he settled on the truth. “Bruno, I have to do this. I can’t let Delilah—can’t let all of you lose everything because of what I did. I have to make it right, and this is the only way I can do that. So you can either help me, or get out of my way.”

  Bruno glared at him for a long time, and Jeremiah glared right back. The silence between them was the heaviest Jeremiah had ever heard, but he refused to back down.

  Finally, Bruno spoke. “You’ll be on your own out there. We’re always here to support you, but on the ground it’ll just be you.”

  “I know,” said Jeremiah.

  “Allison’s right, these missions can get real messed up. You’re going to have to do stuff you don’t like, stuff that’ll stick with you. There will be no going back.”

  “I know.” Had he really won?

  Bruno looked him square in the eye. “You promise me, right here, right now, that you’ll take care of yourself, first and foremost? That you’ll come home if you need to? That I won’t have to go out there and recover the body of some poor kid who got in over his head?”

  Jeremiah nodded once. “I promise.”

  “Then let’s go.”