Chapter 10 — The Hunter's Ground

The village below the plateau was small and blue-cobblestoned and empty.

Not abandoned-empty, where nature has started reclaiming things and the signs of absence are everywhere. Evacuated-empty: the small wooden houses between the tall rocks had their shutters closed from the inside. The light-blue path through them was swept clean. A clay pot sat outside the nearest door with soil in it, and whatever had been growing in the soil was still green.

Someone had been here recently. Someone had left.

"Hello?" Sam's voice went the length of the path and came back unanswered.

"Not one soul," Mae said. She'd gone still in the way she went still when she was reading the air — not smell, something else, something she'd never explained to him satisfactorily and he'd stopped asking about. Her hand rose, pointing at a small house between two larger ones. "That one. Three of us. Everyone else on guard."

They pulled the door. Small kitchen, clay floor, a table with two chairs and a cup still on it. A large gray carpet in the center of the room. Chrys sneezed — the dust came up immediately, fine and gray, the kind of dust that had been accumulating in still air for weeks.

"Definitely abandoned," he said.

Mae grinned. She grabbed the carpet and pulled it. A trapdoor underneath, its handle folded flat into the wood. She opened it. A smell came up from below — disgustingly sweet, the kind of sweetness that arrives at the back of the throat and stays there, making you aware of every breath.

They looked at each other.

They went down.

The narrow hallway below was lined with gray fungi, small and dying, almost luminescent. Chrys tapped his sleeve and a dim beam lit the passage. At the end of it: a small farm enclosure, empty-looking. Old wood. Old smell. Something had been kept here that wasn't kept here anymore.

Something in the corner.

Dark. Very still. It sat with its limbs in a configuration that was efficient rather than comfortable, and it looked at them the way predators look at things when deciding how much trouble something would be. It grinned with everything it had.

"Friends?"

"Run," Chrys said.

They went up the ladder fast. Mae first, then Sam, then Chrys, and he could hear it moving behind him: the sound of something large rearranging itself in a space too small for it, that wrongness of too much creature for the available geometry.

The house made a sound.

Then it couldn't contain itself anymore and the walls went outward, the neighboring houses going with them in a chain of percussion, and outside, in the sudden open air and rain and fog, the creature was much larger than the house had suggested.

Insect-shaped. Many limbs. Three pairs of red eyes burning through the rain, each pair slightly off-center from the others in a way that shouldn't work but apparently did. It moved through the rocks with a speed that didn't match its size — the way of things that are much faster than they appear at rest — and every step registered in the ground beneath Chrys's feet before the sound arrived.

The sweet smell was stronger outside.

His stomach turned.

"I love hide and seek," it said, and its voice came from something inside its thorax, not its mouth, which was doing a different thing entirely. "I don't like seeking though. It's always easy."

"Now or never," Chrys said.

Sam looked at him. Then at the creature. She smiled — not the smile she wore when things were going well, the other one. "Let's shake the rain."

They ran.

The creature came after them unhurried, which was the worst quality it had. Its many limbs moved in a rolling pattern that looked wrong from every angle, covering ground at a pace that matched their running without appearing to try. Chrys ran and counted the exits and found two: the rock formation to the north, which was accessible, and the cliff edge to the west, which was not. He ran north.

They climbed. The rock surface was slick from the rain and his hands found holds by feel rather than sight and the shoulder objected and he ignored it and kept climbing. Above him Sam was already at the crown, reaching down for Mae's hand. Below him the creature's eyes found the rock face and it began to climb.

He stopped climbing.

He turned. Looked down at it. Eight meters below, the red eyes looking up.

Time slowed the way it did for Chrys when something mattered — not literally, the Tesseract not involved, just the subjective dilation of a moment when the calculation was life-or-death. He felt it clearly: the Hydrolysis Engine running hotter than it had in days, the weakness burning off somehow, the engine deciding that now was the time.

He jumped.

Not away from the creature. At it. Between the fangs that came up to meet him, inside the reach of the limbs, into the space that was technically inside the creature and therefore not where any rational person would go, and he reached for the purple stone he could see glowing at the center of its thorax, and a dark crimson shape appeared in his hand and took the stone the way water takes something dropped into it — completely, without ceremony.

The creature dispersed. He didn't see it happen because he was already falling.

He landed on grass with the rain already coming down on him, and lay there assessing. Ripped along lines he hadn't noticed being made, the creature's fangs finding him several times in the approach; the wounds were glowing crimson from the blood, which was a quality of his blood that he'd stopped finding interesting.

"Good night, bros," he said, and was gone before the sentence ended.

Two of the division lifted him and began ascending. Slowly. His head hung the way heads hang when someone has simply run out.

Below, Sam stood at the edge of what the creature had left: ash and rain and the smell of something cellular becoming something simpler.

"Five, maybe six orders," Mae said, crouching over the ash. "Worth celebrating." She turned toward Matthew in the black hazmat suit, the only one who'd worn appropriate protective gear. "The shift — it can't do that without being at least Order Two. Who knows what it would have become if it had eaten all of us."

She shuddered. The shudder was unusual on her. She was a person who had decided a long time ago that the world was a collection of problems, and that problems had solutions, and that the appropriate response to a problem was to find the solution. She shuddered.

"Matthew?" she said.

Something hit the ground that wasn't rain.

The boy was already on his knees. "They all fell," he said. "Peripheral members. Sam's still up–"

Cold. Not temperature cold — blood cold. The sensation Mae had had before, three times, in situations that had each cost her something. The heartbeat too slow, the breathing too shallow, iceberry hour arriving in the chest like something that had been planning to arrive for a while and had finally chosen its moment.

How long.

She hadn't been tracking the clock. She'd been tracking the fight.

"Hews," she said. "Get Sam back to Rad. Alert the other divisions." She turned toward Matthew. "Let's try our best."

"Okay," he said. His voice had the quality of a person assembling themselves for something. He put one hand on the ground and the other on her arm and held.

The comm clicked. Sam's voice, barely recognizable — the cadence right but the edges gone.

"Already done. Akio's on his way with everyone resistant."

A pause.

Mae went quiet.

The rain kept falling. Matthew kept holding. The ash of the creature dissolved in the water and was carried down the rocks toward the plateau below, where the shelter was, where the monitor beeped its steady rhythm, where Rad was at his console tracking numbers that were still, barely, in the survivable range.