The three red eyes found me, dim as dying coals, and I lay on the wet green-lit stone and ran the maths one final time.
I couldn't run. There was nowhere to run that the river hadn't already tried to kill me in, and nothing in my legs to run with.
I couldn't fight it either. I'd emptied the whole of myself into the tide it had eaten in three bites, and what I had left wouldn't light a candle.
Every honest number I ran came back the same, and the number said I was going to die on this shelf of rock with two fingers gone and my well scraped dry, a long way from Wren, in the dark, for nothing.
"…No... This is not for nothing. I don't do things for nothing."
I don't know that I believed it. But saying it kept me from lying down, and not lying down was the only move I had left, so I made it and went looking for the next one.
Death Sense gave me the next one.
