CHAPTER 200: 200: THE FIRST SEMESTER XXIII

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Rhea’s heat-line kissed its ankle as it stomped forward, and Ray’s tight, mean flame wrote a small concentrate of sun under its chin. John let the void kiss its wrist and the hand that had meant to be a hammer became something lighter that belonged to no one. The ape died with its mouth full of spite.

[System Notification: Frenzy Counter — 19/50]

The wave faltered and then remembered the little gray jar had convinced it not to. Twenty more bodies tore through brush, eyes wide, mouths open for a song their throats could not sing. John adjusted the ball’s spin, a tiny twist of wrist that set the event horizon into a slow, dignified rotation, and then he stepped forward.

He named the step in his head because sometimes you have to tell yourself what you are. Gravestep: heel, toe, gravity agrees. The void rolled with him, a planetoid’s shadow married to a boy’s palm, and the next three beasts that thought they were faster than geometry discovered that black curves can be cruel.

He cut left, lens again, thin as a coin, slicing at knee-height while the pull pulled soft. Bramblehorns stumbled as if the ground had remembered it liked them less than it pretended. He raised, rounded, and ate. Twenty-five.

"Status," Rhea called it, because she was someone who made lists even when dying and tried to be fashionable.

"Upright," John said.

Fizz persuaded a Snaptail into biting its own tail and then congratulated it on joining a very exclusive club. He zapped a Ridge-back’s eye with a spark that existed to be irritating and then whispered to Ray, "Left foot lighter, stop trying to climb inside your own flame, it is full already." Ray obeyed and found his footwork. His next cut hit. His next burn stayed tight. Rhea gave him a nod that you could live a week on.

The shadow hireling watched from where shadows do when they think they are owed. He saw the little camp become a small impossibility. He saw beasts —stupid, drugged, honest— disappear into a bite of the night itself. He did not understand. He had been told to deliver chaos and an accident. He saw intent and a lesson.

He slipped back. Fartray did not like hearing the word No. The hireling liked delivering it even less. But it is a word that keeps men alive to take the next coin.

Waves have an ending. Even drugged ones run out of body.

By the time the jungle remembered that quiet is not a kindness, the camp and its circle and the ground beyond looked like the memory of a war told by someone who didn’t enjoy adjectives. Bits of brush lay in the wrong direction. The ironwood roots had a new dust in them that wasn’t dirt. The air had the thin tin taste of heat scrapped off by cold.

John stood in the center with his right arm shaking and his left hand spread to keep the ball honest. He closed his fingers slowly, carefully, and the void went from moon to melon to apple to fist to gone with all the grace of a door closing on a room that is going to stay dark a while longer. He did not fall down. He did adjust where his soul sat in his chest.

[System Notification: Frenzy Counter — 34/50]

He finally looked. Rhea had a long scrape on her shoulder that refused to make a speech. Ray had a pair of claw-tracks in his coat that had decided not to be the last thing he wore. Fizz had dust marks around his ears like a saint with unfortunate taste in halos and a grin that could have sold three wars and a cookbook.

"How many," Rhea asked, wiping the flat of her knife clean for the hundredth time like it had offended table etiquette.

"John ate a small village," Fizz said. "I made thirty things that made me regret. Ray lit ten on purposeful fire. I counted. Twice."

Ray bristled and then realized Fizz gave the numbers fairly. He nodded once, something like respect struggling up through old noise. "Team Lord Fizz," he said, as if trying on a shirt he thought wouldn’t fit and finding it did.

John flexed his fingers. They hurt. He considered the hurt and decided to keep it.

[System Notification: Threshold approaching. Void channels have accrued strain: 72 percent. Recommendation: deliberate cycling to prevent micro-fissures.

Mission progress: 40/50.

Reward friction: decreasing.]

John breathed. The line in his chest steadied.

"One more wave?" Ray asked, and there was real worry in it. He was learning how to name tired as something separate from cowardice.

"No," Rhea said, head tilted in that listening way. "The drug runs thin, the blood goes old, the stupid get bored. It’s over for tonight."

Fizz drifted in front of John’s eyes, read the way the boy was failing to blink, and softened his voice. "We can stop," he said. "Living is an interesting project. We should continue it."

John shook his head slowly. "The system..." He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. He lifted his palm and spread his fingers. The night made a small, private sound.

"I’m close," he said. "I can feel it. The next step is near. If we wait for another day, the world will take a tax I don’t want to pay."

Rhea looked from his face to his hand to the ground that had learned to tolerate them, and she inserted her command gently instead of like a nail. "Then we reset the perimeter," she said. "We keep a cage for you to work in, not the other way around. Ray and I take the flanks. Fizz nags the night."

"Nagging is my art," Fizz said, and the fierce pride in it made Ray snort a laugh he didn’t expect to have saved.

They moved like a team that had learned a new kind of walking.

Rhea laid a narrow braid of heat a yard out from the edge of camp — too low to catch a branch, too high to roast a foot, just enough to tell anything dumb enough to try again that this ground was speaking and it had no wish to be interrupted. Ray set little thumbprints of flame on four stones at compass points — tiny, disciplined candles that would blow the instant a large fast thing disturbed the air near them. Fizz hung a humming thread of water above the entry line — one drop thick, stretched to a silver guitar string. Anything passing through would sing a note they would all hear.

John rolled his wrist once, twice, limbered the joint, and then turned his attention to the jungle beyond the little braids and thumb-lamps and proud, thin water song.

He didn’t have to wait long. Blood is rude. It does not care about schedules. Four stragglers wandered in with the clumsy gait of hunger drunk: two Hisscats, a Bramblehorn late to everything, and a Stonecoil who had lost the memo.

John lifted his palm.

He did not throw the void at them like a brick. He did not open it like a mouth and shout. He did the small thing he had discovered that matters more than big ones: he put the black center exactly where their next steps already were, and he let their own bad momentum finish the sentence. Four bodies, four mistakes, four lessons met and corrected. Forty-four.

[System Notification: Frenzy Counter — 44/50. Void coherence is stable. Egg intake sync active: +30 efficiency.]

He could feel the egg sip, deep inside, patient and grateful in the way only stones and children are. He could feel fatigue stacking neat, mean blocks along his ulna. He could feel the next layer of whatever circle meant begin to turn in its sleep.

"Six," Ray called from the north watch, because sometimes numbers are the encouragement that works.

"Four to go," Rhea said, and made it sound like Sunday chores.

Fizz floated close to John’s ear and whispered, "If you fall down, I will catch you with my entire body. Please plan accordingly."

"Plan is," John said, and left the sentence open.

The jungle obliged with a last apology.

They came in a line that wanted to be a wedge — three Ridge-backs with a Stonecoil underfoot, an insult train without a conductor. The thumb-lamps on Ray’s stones flicked out one after another: east, north, west, each a tiny breath of warning. The silver water thread thrummed one pure note that made the ironwood leaves tremble like they had been told a secret. Rhea’s heat braid dared them and they dared back.

John stepped into the note.

He didn’t widen the void this time. He narrowed it to a black coin with a mean little heart and spun it slowly. He slashed it at shin height, not to cut, not to suck, simply to remind legs that gravity is a gentleman who occasionally removes the chair. The first Ridge-back buckled. The second climbed the first without consent. The Stonecoil under them tried to roll away and found that friction is an opinion and tonight it had been outvoted. John lifted the coin, rounded it, deepened, and took all three in with care not to scrape Rhea’s braid of heat. The coil came last and left a hiss like a word that didn’t exist and was never going to.

[System Notification: Frenzy Counter — 48/50]