The Last Act

The blade is not the axe in his fist. It is a longer blade, dark along the edge, and it hangs with its point toward the ground. The shape that holds it is past the lower lamp, closer than it has ever been, a weight and not a man. It has come all the way in. It does not move to him. It is watching him, and the room is quiet around it.

Lu Di does not run.

It would be three steps to the door, and it has never once moved to stop him in a week of chances, and that is what keeps him. It does not want to see him run. It wants the standing.

He stands. He is over the bound one, the axe in his fist, the blood dark along the edge. He finds the worn haft with his thumb and settles it. He does not hunch. He does not hide his hands. The standing is a thing he does on purpose now, so the light lands on him and he takes the stage. It is the last stage, and the audience is one. The lamp does not flicker. The space between them is one room wide.

The shape holds out the blade.

It does not lift it. The flat is toward the floor, the point down, the handle out where his hand can reach. There is blood on it, gone dark, the same as his. No force in the offer and no hurry. A craftsman sets a tool where a man can pick it up. It is not raised. The room waits, and the waiting is the question.

He reads it. The shape is not going to take him. It never meant to take him. It came through a week of dead people to set him here, and it did all of it for this — to watch him close his hand around the blade, or to watch him leave it. It has done what it wanted. The rest is his, and it is the only thing left in the camp.

He looks at the finished thing at his feet, and the camp comes back through him. The arm that does not move. Dana’s voice, the one that said he could not stand not being looked at. She was right, and she knew it before he did. Caleb, who taught him the shot, the breath first, the exactness, and never once raised his voice, even when the arrow went wide. Whitfield, the man whose quarters he took, the adult who was not in charge. The camp is a building full of people who are not there.

What is in him is patient. It wants the one thing it has always wanted: to be the one the attention comes back to. The shape is looking at him.

He reaches for the blade.

His hand closes on the handle. The wood is warm. The edge is dark with the week’s work, and the weight is already his. He settles the grip. The taking, the closing, the holding — the performer and the performance are the same thing now.

He looks up. The shape stays where it was, past the lamp, the audience that never looked away.

The blade was pointed at the ground, not at him, and the wait was the question — and the thing he wanted, under the fear, was the same thing the thing in the treeline wanted.