Outsiders 16.3

A Hellborn and a Hard Place, Part 3

Kaleb did not have much in the way of bandages, and List had to slice her outer shirt into strips to make up the difference. She also made use of every belt and strap they'd been wearing and two of the sword spider's legs to fashion a sling for his arm and a splint for his leg.

She must have jostled his broken bones at least a dozen times in the process, but Kaleb didn't offer a single complaint, even once having the gall to suggest that she didn't need to be doing all of this. She'd hit him for that—gently, somewhere that wasn't already broken—and afterward, he simply let her work.

Drying them off had warmed them up some, but it only took a single breeze through the gorge to make List shiver, especially down a layer of clothing. They still had a long, cold night to get through. 

Exploring their small embankment, List found a shallow cave choked with spider webbing in the side of the cliff—no doubt the home of the sword spider that had tried to eviscerate her. She cleared out the webbing, and after half an hour of delicate maneuvering, swearing, and gritted teeth, she managed to drag Kaleb into it. 

Once he was nestled inside, she gathered up as much brush as she could with her dagger, and used a guttering spark of her power to light a small fire, far enough into the cave to hopefully be hidden from any elites at the top of the cliffs, but not so far in they would suffocate from the smoke. 

As soon as she was satisfied they weren't going to freeze to death, asphyxiate, or be hunted down and killed, List collapsed in a heap next to Kaleb. She had wrung out every last drop of strength her body had to offer, and then several more that it hadn't.

They both lay in the dirt, bleeding into improvised bandages, throbbing in pain. List's leg kept twitching without any input from her, and Kaleb's breaths were still painfully shallow. They were laying in opposite directions, though still face to face, each able to see the obvious pain on the other.

"Are you okay?" Kaleb asked.

"Still breathing," List said. "You're the one who jumped off a cliff to be a human cushion."

She could still recall the crack she'd heard on that first impact. The one he'd taken for her. The first and hardest of several landings he broken for them. 

"What the fuck were you thinking?" List asked.

"That the fall would kill you if I didn't break it."

"And you just didn't consider that you might break?"

"I figured I could take it. Probably."

If he hadn't just saved her life with his stupidity, she might have berated him. Instead, she sighed. "You have a habit of throwing yourself into danger, did you know that?"

Kaleb gave her a smile laced with a pain that went deeper than his current injuries. "Why do you think I started carrying the shield?"

"You're insane," she said without malice.

Kaleb gave a grunt of acknowledgement, and List found the noise strangely calming. It might have been the gruff, slightly husky quality to it that called to mind images of Kaleb half asleep in bed. It might also have been that she was just very tired, and drifting off to sleep with half as much blood as she was supposed to have.

"The cave is pretty warm," Kaleb noted. "Maybe we should put the fire out. Not risk getting spotted."

List gave a lazy nod. "Sure. Just give me . . . a minute . . . to rest."

They fell asleep.

It took longer than Valerie would have liked to make their way back to the campsite. She couldn’t see in the dark, and Xigbar didn’t know a thing about navigating and tracking in the wilderness. Even when she caved and lit a torch, there was the not insignificant matter of avoiding the forest fire, and of being vigilant for any more of the chosen's forces. By the time they reached their old campsite, it was nearly dawn. 

The area had been so thoroughly ransacked, Valerie almost didn't realize they'd reached it until she spotted the crumbled edge of the cliff. Their sleeping arrangements had been shredded, their belongs strew about and destroyed. They'd left a lot behind when they fled from Agnizzar, and the Axe of the Chosen had seen to it that little of it could be recovered.

Valerie and Xigbar stowed what little was still worth carrying in the lone backpack that had survived, then finally turned their attention to the cliff.

They approached the edge, wary of the crumbled rock, and looked down. Xigbar let out a low whistle, and Valerie felt her head spin. 

"I'm trying not to be an asshole right now, but . . . I don't think they made it," Xigbar said.

It was the most blatantly unsurvivable fall imaginable. A several hundred foot drop down a near-sheer cliffside into rocky river rapids. By normal expectations, Kaleb and List should have been nothing but a pair of smears somewhere at the bottom.

Valerie's heart sank even as her head fought to reign in the despair. 

"Kaleb jumped after List. He didn't fall, he jumped. He thought he could save her."

"Have you met Kaleb? He thinks a lot of things."

"If he thinks he can do something, I have to believe he can too. Even if I didn't, it doesn't change anything. I'm finding them." She almost said, "No matter what's left," but stopped herself. She didn't want to put that into the world, not when she could still cling to hope.

Kaleb could be reckless with his own safety, but he had a firm grasp of his capabilities. If he thought he could save List from that fall, he at least had a reason to. And she'd seen the kind of punishment he could take, to say nothing of what abilities he might have as an enziri.

Xigbar shook his head, but sighed. "Not in the dark you're not."

Valerie opened her mouth to protest, but he held out his hands. "I get it. You're looking for them, hells or high water. But if you're going to do this, at least do it right. You're blind, tired, and hurt. You could barely walk through the woods without tripping over your ankles in the brush, and you're no good to them if you slip off the cliff, or walk right past them in the dark. If we wait until the sun's up, you can at least see what you're doing. Maybe you can even get some rest so you don't pass out halfway through the climb down?"

"There could be any number of Chosen forces in these woods, not to mention monsters," Valerie said. 

"I'm guessing I'm a lot more used to sleepless nights than you," Xigbar said, and even flashed a fanged smile. "I'll keep a lookout."

"You mean you'll wait for me to fall asleep and you rob me blind?" Valerie accused. "Pass."

She glanced down the dark side of the cliff. It would be hours yet before there was enough light to actually be able to see properly, and the climb would be treacherous enough without adding dim light as a handicap.

Daylight would also make it easier to search and track, and she'd never forgive herself if she failed to find List and Kaleb just because she couldn't see them. Though it felt like tearing off her own arm, Valerie relented. Jose and Kiva might have to leave with Arden, but they'd cross that bridge when they came to it.

"We wait for the sun," Valerie said, sitting down. "I'm not sleeping."

"Good enough," Xigbar sighed, and sat down next to her.

Valerie folded her arms to wait, and tried to tell herself that if Kaleb and List had survived the fall, they would survive a few extra hours waiting for rescue.

That was her last thought before exhaustion took her.

Kaleb was the first thing List saw when she woke up. Pain was the first thing she felt. Every cut and slash on her body throbbed with pain beneath her bandages, most of which were soaked through with partially dried blood. Her body was stiff, and began barking complaints the second she tried to start moving.

She grimaced as she fought to straighten herself out and sit up. The sun was too bright outside the cave, and the fire she had neglected to put out had safely burned to ash. The smell of dead bug wafted in from the corpse of the sword spider outside.

"You know, when I fantasized about waking up next to a muscular man with my clothes shredded, I pictured it slightly differently," List muttered.

"Sorry to disappoint," came the reply from a bleary-eyed Kaleb.

Heat flushed List's face as she sputtered a string of nonsense syllables. She recovered quickly, and shot Kaleb a narrow-eyed glare.

"So, you're awake then."

Kaleb grunted. "I wish I wasn't."

List could imagine. She felt about the same, and she didn't have more broken bones than she could count and cracks in her flesh.

Speaking of their injuries.

"In that case, you're probably going to want something to bite down on," List said. "I need to change our bandages."

They didn't actually have any fresh bandages, so List used her powers to clean their old ones as best they could. As it turned out, cleaning dried blood that had soaked into cloth was much harder than removing the fresh stuff, and her pulses of red lightning frayed half of what they had to uselessness.

She distributed what remained to the worst of their injuries, leaving the worst to heal or reopen on their own. Because Arden had described chaos magic as, fundamentally, the magic of change, she'd tried exactly once to use it to heal one of her injuries. She succeeded only in tearing it open, deeper and more jagged than before.

Kaleb winced through the entire process, but didn't complain once. She wasn't sure if he was any better than last night, but at the very least, he didn't seem to have gotten any worse. Her eyes drifted across his body, exposed now except for the bandages. She'd had to take off his shirt, and his armored jacket was currently being used as a pillow to prop up his leg while he sat up against the cave wall.

While she did appreciate the chiseled lines of his chest, what drew her eye were the scars. Kaleb's chest bore a varied story of stabs, slashes, and at least one burn. Slightly tilted as she was, she could just see the edges of some of the scars on his back.

Those, she'd seen while bandaging him. Unlike the varied mess, the scars on his back were all thin, straight lines of raised skin, crosshatched across his back.

"You're a model patient," List said as she finished re-securing his broken arm in its belt-sling. 

Kaleb gave her another of those rueful, self-deprecating smiles. "I've had practice."

"Is that what the scars are from?" She surprised herself with how gentle her voice was.

Kaleb grimaced. "Some of them."

It occurred to List that for once, she was on the other side of a conversation she had had many times, and she gained a new sympathy for the curiosity so many had shown toward the marks on her body. Still, she knew what it was like to be examined, and it wasn't something she wanted to inflict on others.

"You don't have to talk about it," she whispered.

"It's not a secret," Kaleb said. He paused, fidgeting slightly to try and get more comfortable, and only succeeding in making himself wince. "My mother was killed when I was twelve. I was taken in by a sect of assassins called the Whispered Harvest, and they raised me. Trained me. The standards were high, and I didn't always meet them."

List thought back to every fight she'd seen Kaleb in, the precision and decisiveness with which he moved, the strength he carried. Only earlier today, he'd torn a landshark's head apart with his bare hands. How did that fail to meet anyone's standards?

Kaleb read the disbelief on her face. "There are certain principles we're supposed to live and act by. I've . . . struggled with them."

"So they whipped you?" 

"They actually used a steel cane," Kaleb said with a rueful smile. "Normal whips didn't work on me."

But mine does. List thought it before she could stop herself, and a fresh twinge of guilt spiked through her. "Spirits." 

"It's how we all learned." Kaleb paused a moment to consider. "Well, how most of us did."

"I take it you didn't?"

"I can pass combat and infiltration standards. But everything else . . ." He shook his head. "I was sent to Xykesh on a mission to prove I was worth something. But so far, I've failed. My mentor is probably dead, I've been captured and marked for dead, and my target is probably going to be the one that kills me."

"I think that was why I was excited about what Gidus said. About us being heroes," Kaleb admitted. It was just as embarrassing to say out loud as he'd expected. "I wasn't worth my father sticking around for. I couldn't meet Whispered Harvest's standards as an initiate. Al-Sakr barely trusted me as an apprentice. All I've ever known is not being good enough. It was just . . . nice to hear somebody think that I could be worth something."

"Kaleb . . ." List stared at him. It wasn't that she was at a loss for words. She had several words. Too many. They warred inside her throat, each fighting to come out first. 

"Fuck those Harvest assholes. What the fuck do they know? Their name is shit."

"I think your childhood was an extended cycle of abuse and brainwashing."

"I would be dead right now if it weren't for you. You're worth plenty to me."

What came out was, "Well, we're both going to be worth slightly less than that spider if we can't find our way out of this mess."

They were currently lost somewhere down river at the bottom of a canyon, so injured they could barely move, and last they had seen the others, they were getting their collective asses handed to them by a seven foot tall metal dragonblood with an axe that broke chunks off the cliffside. If anything like the sword spider found them, they would probably both die, and if nothing did, they could easily end up wandering the wilderness until they starved to death or died of exposure.

All told, things were not looking particularly bright.

Kaleb nodded his agreement. "Yeah. So, what do we do now?"

List's shoulders sagged, and she leaned against the opposite cave wall. "I have no bloody idea."