On the other side of the wall, I spot the figure of a woman hunched on the ground. She looks like she’s trying to move something heavy, but I can’t tell what with her back to me. She cries out in pain again when she fails.
“Please!” the woman yells louder than before, sounding more desperate. She sniffles. “I—I’m bleeding. I don’t want them to smell it, and…”
I should leave.
I learned long ago that it is never safe to follow a strangers’ cries for help and therefore there is no reason for me to stay. Either she is a fraud who will turn on me the moment that I find mercy in my heart to aid her, or she’s right, and the noctis will soon be swarming these streets, and neither she, nor I, will stand a chance against them if the scent of blood is in the air.
But the crack in her voice sounds so much like the pleas I heard in Hulbeck, the cries for mercy from my friends and neighbors, that I can’t help but think what could’ve come of our town if there had just been someone there to rescue us. Or what could’ve happened if monsters never existed.
Abandoning someone in need is a monstruous act… I know this.
Guilt tightening my chest, I dare another peek through the window to get a better look.
Against Gravenburg’s backdrop of slate grey and obsidian black, the woman’s red hair stands out like a bloodstain on white. From this distance, I still can’t see the thing she’s fumbling with at her feet, but I can make an educated guess all the same, considering how she winces every time she tugs on her ankle.
A trap. One of a different making than the nefarious intent I’d originally expected from her.
Worst of all, I think it might be one of mine. Rowland stopped having his people set traps in the city awhile ago. He has farmers and hunters to provide food for them now. But I, on the other hand, couldn’t pass up the opportunity to capture any of the critters that come lurking this way—on occasion, I’ve seen deer, even boars wandering these parts—and I couldn’t risk them fidgeting their way out of a basic snare either.
The trap I set out here is one of sharp, metal fangs.
She won’t be able to walk for weeks, and that’s onlyifshe takes care. If she has to run from a horde of noctis? Well, she wouldn’t live long enough to heal anyway.
I try shaking away the guilt. This isn’t my fault. I might’ve set the damn thing, but I didn’t shove her into it. She should’ve been watching where she was stepping, everyone who’s survived this long knows that.
In another effort to pry the metal jaws away from her ankle, her grip slips. Her hands smack to the wet ground with a splash. Defeated and becoming more frantic, the red-haired woman brings her hands up, dragging them over her face as she sobs into them.
It’s only then that I notice the reason she hasn’t been able to free herself from such a simple contraption yet.
The hand closest to me, the one I can see from this angle, it seems to be missing fingers.
Fuck me.
I’m not sure she can muster the strength to pry open one of my traps if the other hand is in any kind of similar position. If I leave her now, I can almost say with certainty that she will remain here until someone far worse than me finds her.
She’s not my problem! I don’t even know who she is, and I wouldn’t even be out this way if Rowland hadn’t—
That sentence has too many endings for me to think any of them through coherently.
I have to focus on what’s here before me. My task is to search for Elison, or signs of her. But…
As much as I’d like to turn a blind eye and keep a safe distance, I can’t very well search for Elison out here with this woman screaming, beckoning forth every vile creature in the area.
If a ghoul finds her shackled, they’ll just eat her and be done with it. But if it’s a noctis to come, they’ll see the trap, and just like Gregor and Boris, they’ll know to come searching for me or anyone else.
Too much attention has been drawn toBarret Towntoday already.
I don’t have to take her under my wing, or anything, but at the very least, I have no choice but to free her.
Before I can convince myself out of it, I’m catapulting through the window and charging toward her. I keep my senses about me as I approach, of course, my eyes darting to the darkest corners of the streets, assessing whether the monsters have found her yet.
I detect nothing.
“Oh,” the woman says when she sees me. “Someone actually came…”
She sounds neither relieved nor grateful, causing me some alarm. Then again, she might just be in shock, both from the metal jaws clamped around her ankle and at someone coming to her aid in a world that’s shown us nothing but cruelty.
I set my crossbow down as I take a knee beside her.
