Chapter 14: Zero

I did not sleep, and in the morning I went to the quay to prove Tristram wrong.

The guards followed me at a short distance.

I stopped at the fish stairs, where the early boats were unloading.

A net-mender sat on an upturned crate, and a lamp-lighter was filling his oil can at the pump beside him.

I had never seen either of them before.

Between them floated a pale number.

Sixty-one.

They were talking about the tide, and the net-mender was laughing at something the lamp-lighter had said.

I was shaking.

I told myself it was only an experiment, the kind I used to do with a clipboard and a water sample.

Nobody would be hurt.

"Zero," I said, very quietly.

Nothing happened.

Then the number dimmed, and went out.

The net-mender stopped in the middle of a sentence.

The lamp-lighter looked at his oil can.

"Well," said the net-mender, and she stood up and brushed off her apron. "I'd best be getting on."

"Aye," said the lamp-lighter, and he did not look at her again.

They went in opposite directions.

Neither one looked back.

I stood on the stairs with my hand over my mouth.

It was not that they had quarrelled.

It was worse.

It was that nothing in either of them had been left to quarrel with.

Keep reading free with an account. Start After Transmigrating, My Husband Is an Octopus from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.