Chapter 4: Cataloging the Dead (2)
"Name," Kael said. His voice carried no particular emphasis, but Lien had heard that tone before. It was the sound a craftsman made when examining a tool to determine if it was worth keeping.
"Lien Carvel, sir." He let his voice shake. Let his eyes drop after one second of contact. Played the part of a frightened child who understood that instructor attention usually preceded pain.
"Look at me, Carvel."
Lien raised his eyes. Kael's face showed no expression, but something moved behind his gaze—recognition, maybe. Or confirmation.
"Old eyes for a child," Kael said softly. Then he moved on.
Lien's hands trembled. Not from fear. From the effort of keeping them still.
Kael had never spoken to him on day one in any previous loop. Never acknowledged his existence until week three at the earliest. The attention was wrong. The timing was wrong. The specific words were wrong.
Old eyes for a child.
As if Kael knew.
Lien forced himself to breathe normally while his mind raced through implications. If Kael retained memories across loops, that changed everything. If the Emperor had planted observers with cross-iteration awareness, then Lien's advantage—his knowledge of what came next—was compromised from the start.
He scanned the formation again, this time searching for Torin. The boy who should be here. The boy who survived the first week in every previous loop before dying to exposure in week two. Lien had his face memorized: dark hair, gap between his front teeth, scar on his left cheek from a fire.
Torin wasn't here.
The instructors had processed exactly one thousand orphans during intake. Lien had counted them personally. But Torin, who should occupy position forty-seven in the third row, was absent. Someone else stood in that space—a girl Lien didn't recognize from any previous iteration.
Timeline variance before his regression point. Or active manipulation during the loop itself.
Either way, it meant the Emperor was watching. Closer than Lien had assumed.
A junior instructor's whistle cut across the field. The formation shifted as instructors began separating children into march columns. Ahead, the treeline loomed dark against the white landscape—the frozen forest where one thousand would become eight hundred forty-seven by nightfall.
Lien fell into step, deliberately positioning himself near Elara's column but not close enough to suggest association. He tracked Vrix moving with his cluster of followers. He noted Sia being pulled to her feet by an instructor who showed neither patience nor cruelty, just the blank efficiency of a man moving an object from one location to another.
The Black Cradle's iron gates closed behind them with a sound like a coffin sealing. Lien had heard that sound six times before. It never got easier.
As they marched toward the forest, Lien thought of the Emperor sitting in his throne room in distant Aethelgard. Perhaps watching through Kael's journal. Perhaps through methods Lien didn't yet understand. Perhaps laughing at the small boy who thought seven lifetimes gave him an advantage in a game where the rules changed between moves.
Lien promised himself that this time, he would reach that throne room. This time, he would stand before the Emperor not as a weapon to be used but as a blade aimed at the hand that wielded it.
This time, the blood would flow in the right direction.
The forest swallowed them, and one thousand children scattered into the white silence. Lien could already see the ghosts of the one hundred fifty-three who would be dead by evening—children who didn't know they were corpses yet, still breathing, still hoping, still believing that survival was something they controlled.
As the trees closed around him and the temperature dropped another five degrees, Lien felt the weight of seven lifetimes pressing against his child's ribs. The cold bit through his inadequate coat. His stomach was empty. His hands were small.
But his mind held one hundred seventy-five years of accumulated death, and he knew exactly where each body would fall, and whose blood would paint the snow first, and when he would need to decide whether Elara's life was worth compromising his position.
He knew all of it.
And knowing changed nothing, because muscle memory was a traitor that answered to no one's will, and somewhere in the part of him that had survived six deaths, he could already feel himself preparing to move when she screamed.
**