“I seem to recallmebeing the one that did it, and you’re taking credit for it. Should I be offended?” He tilts his head, regarding me.
I sputter in outrage. “That’s not what I meant?—”
Oblivious to the filthy floor, Kalos moves to the side of the bed and leans over me. “Listen, my sunshine-belching martyr, bad things are going to happen on this journey. People are going to die. You shouldn’t care unless the people dying are us.”
“That’s the problem,” I point out, keeping a smile on my face despite the annoyance I feel. “You never care, Kalos. That’s why you’re down here.”
He throws his arms wide. “So I should care about everyone? Cuddle them all and reassure them that the god of disease loves them very much?”
I scowl. “You’re being frustrating.”
The god waves an idle hand at me. “And like I said, you’rebeing a martyr.”
After that, I give up on arguing with him. I get dressed while on the bed and go through the items in my pack, trying to determine how much we have left and if it’ll get us where we need to go, or if we need to rob the dead man blind. Kalos is silent through all of this, and it makes me suspicious.
I glance up over at him, noting he’s seated by the cold fireplace, staring at the wall. “You’re quiet. Don’t you want to call me a martyr a few more times before we head out?”
No answer.
Okay, that’s…weird. I put my beat-up sandals on and move over to him, watching his posture. He doesn’t move, doesn’t blink. It’s like he’s not mentally there at all.
“Kalos?” I ask and wave a hand in front of his staring face.
Nothing. Nothing at all. No response. Not even a blink.
Is this his Apathy catching up with him? Was he too active, and now this is some sort of Apathy-hangover? Poor guy. I brush a lock of hair off his brow and settle his hands on his legs, moving him like I would a mannequin. When there’s still no response, I move back to the bed and settle in.
However long this takes, I guess we’re here for the interim.
Kalos returnsto himself sometime after dark. One moment he’s a zombie, the next he’s getting to his feet and peering out the window, as if half the day hasn’t passed.
I jump to my feet, too. “Hey! Are you all right, Kalos? What happened?”
He scowls at me, his expression one of pure disdain. “What do you think happened?”
Okay, he clearly is not in the mood to talk about it. I put ahand up, backing off. I can take a hint. “I can pack and be ready to go in a few minutes, if you’re capable of heading out.”
“I’m clearly more ready than you are,” he replies, tone withering.
Fun times. We head out an hour or so later, in the dead of night. Kalos isn’t talking, and all is eerily quiet. I look over my shoulder the entire time, half expecting someone to turn on a light or for a door to open. For someone to call out that we’ve been caught sneaking away. Yet all remains silent.
Well, all is silent except for Dingle. It’s difficult to travel with a goat. It’s near impossible to travel quietly with a goat. Once I realize this, I pull out the corn cakes and keep giving him tiny nibbles as we head through the town to keep him from bleating. By the time we make it out of the village, I’m down to only one cake and I polish it off myself.
Traveling here is so odd. The skies are bright with stars, but everything else is so, so dark. There are no streetlights, no electricity, nothing. Just unrelenting black night. It feels dangerous and a little bleak to head away from the comfort of houses and into the brush. I figure that even though it’s probably not safe to cut through the woods, it’s safer than staying on the roads. If we were going to be felled by something as simple as a bear, we would have already been killed in the swamp by an alligator.
At least my bug bites have healed quickly and are no longer plaguing me.
We sleep in the woods without a fire. Or rather, I sleep and Kalos just sits nearby, staring at me until I wake up. It’s unnerving to realize that he’s not sleeping, but he’s also not eating, not drinking, and certainly not handling any other bodily functions. He’s not human at all. It’s like he’s a bad copy of what a person should be, or a really convincing hologram.Sometimes I have to stop myself from reaching over and pinching him.
“You there?” I ask at one point.
His brows go down and he scowls at me. Yup, he’s there.
It’s two days before we find the outskirts of a city tucked in a valley near the woods. It’s close enough to the coast that I pull out the map again and study it, frowning.
“This doesn’t look like Balsingra,” I comment to Kalos as I peer at the map and at the city on the horizon. “You said it had walls, right? The one on the map has walls, too. But that city has no walls that I can see.”
It sits atop a hill and spreads over it like an ant pile, with clusters of small, whitewashed homes and thatched roofs, but no walls.
