Chapter 183: The Place He Couldn’t Stay

Jin checked the Engine before he left, in the corridor, with his back to the wall.

[Flicker — Recovery Trend: STABLE]

[Underlying developmental condition: RESOLVED]

[Avatar: accumulating baseline progress]

[Sync progress: accumulating]

He looked at the last line for a while.

Earlier, that panel would have been the entire point. Sync, watch a number rise.

And she is currently inside a machine that records her breathing, heat, pulse and nutrition continuously, and a specialist is standing four meters away wondering why she recovered at all.

If her vitality jumps overnight while she’s on a monitor, he doesn’t get curious. He gets certain.

He closed the panel without touching it.

Patience. She gets better slowly, on paper, like a normal weak hatchling, and I collect the progress and sit on it.

He hated that too, and it was obviously correct.

Getting Glitch out of the room took four minutes.

He would not move. Jin said his name twice and he did not so much as turn his head, and the bond came back with an immovable weight that had nothing arguable in it.

Eventually Jin stopped pulling and let him do it his own way.

Glitch stepped up to the incubator, put his snout against the transparent panel, and stayed there.

Inside, the small grey shape shifted. Her head came around maybe a centimeter, and her beak opened, and a sound came out that was too thin to carry through the panel.

The contract carried it instead — a faint, tired, entirely uncomplicated acknowledgment.

Glitch held there another three seconds.

Then he backed up, turned, and walked to the door without being asked, and did not look back once, which Jin understood perfectly and did not comment on.

The assessment had been scheduled before Flicker hatched. At 0600 the next morning, the staging area had eleven teams in it and Instructor Marr was not running this one, which Jin noticed and had an opinion about.

The instructor running it was a heavy-shouldered man called Odgar who delivered the briefing in four minutes flat.

"Assigned routes. Inspect every marked sensor unit, restore what you can, log what you can’t. Record beast movement. Report anything where the map and the ground disagree. Extraction at the marked point tomorrow at 14:00."

He held up a tag.

"Tracking tag on everyone, body camera on everyone, one communication pack per team. The tags and cameras send one way. The pack is how you talk to us."

He put it down.

"We do not intervene because you are in danger. You will be in danger, that is the assessment. We do not intervene for injuries you can walk away from. We come in for three things only: a student approaching death, a contracted beast at risk of irreversible death, or a confirmed threat above the Rank-1 ceiling."

Somebody asked what counted as approaching death.

"You’ll know," said Odgar.

Jin’s team assembled at marker gate four and sorted itself out inside about ninety seconds, which told him most of what he needed.

Mira Halden went first to the route board and checked their assigned line against her own copy, twice, and then a third time against the terrain notes.

"Seven markers," she said. "Twenty-two kilometers over the day, overnight at the ridge waypoint, extraction the following afternoon. Any objections to the order?"

Nobody objected.

"Rook, you’re rear and heavy. Voss, you’re front-left and you do not go forward of Halden’s scout, and I’m saying that once now so I don’t have to say it later."

Kellan Voss looked briefly wounded and said, "Understood."

"Pell, medical pack, middle. Astor, you’re sensors."

"Yes."

Mira looked at him a moment longer. "You handled the route discrepancies during the Rift exercise."

"I did."

"Good." She turned back to the board. "Then you know what a route that doesn’t match its map looks like."

Bram Rook said nothing at all and shouldered a pack that Jin would not have been able to lift.

Their beasts matched them almost too neatly. Mira’s lean, dust-coloured scout kept testing the wind and the edges of the marked path. Bram’s broad plated beast moved like a piece of mobile cover. Kellan’s rangy hound strained toward every interesting sound, while Nia’s moss-green sensory lizard stayed close enough to touch her boot.

Nothing rare. Nothing dramatic. Four ordinary beasts trained for four useful jobs.

They worked well for eleven kilometers, which Jin logged mentally and did not mention.

Marker one was undamaged and Jin cleared it in four minutes.

Marker two had a corroded contact plate and a logging fault, and Jin found the fault by comparing the recorded movement entries against the timestamps and seeing that four hours were duplicated.

[Data Appraisal — Unit 2/7]

[Contact plate: corroded]

[Movement log: 04:00–08:00 duplicated across three days]

[Assessment: logging loop, not beast activity]

"So it’s been reporting the same four hours over and over," Mira said.

"For at least three days. Anything that went past in the other twenty hours isn’t in there."

"Can you fix it?"

"I can clear the loop. I can’t recover what it missed."

He cleared the loop. Bram held the housing open while he worked, because the mount had partially failed and the plate weighed forty kilograms, and Jin watched him do it.

Bram set his feet, and something in his posture changed — settled, in a way that had nothing to do with muscle — and he took the entire weight of the housing on one arm without visible strain for the ninety seconds it took.

[Soul Talent — Impact Brace]

"That’s a defensive talent," Jin said.

"It’s an anchoring talent," said Bram. That was all he said.

Mira’s talent was the one that made Jin genuinely reconsider his opinion of the whole class of them.

At kilometer nine she stopped, crouched, and spent about forty seconds looking at ground that Jin would have walked straight over.

"Six of them. Grazers, heavy, four adults and two smaller. They went through here about eleven hours ago heading northeast, and they were moving, not browsing."

"How do you get moving?"

"Depth and spacing. Browsing animals wander and the impressions overlap." She pointed at nothing Jin could see. "That’s a straight line at pace, and the vegetation’s broken forward instead of sideways."

That’s genuinely good, Jin thought. That’s better than anything my talent does.

Kellan cleared a rockfall off the path at kilometer eleven, and did it by taking a two-second burst that moved a slab Jin estimated at three hundred kilograms, and then had to sit down for four minutes afterward.

"Short," he said, when he caught Jin looking. "It’s all short. Two seconds and then I’m useless for five minutes. It’s why I’m still Fifth Class."

"It moved the rock."

"Yeah, well." Kellan shrugged. "Rocks don’t move back."

Nia Pell checked the medical pack four times before noon and spent most of the walk looking at the tree line rather than the path, and at kilometer fourteen she said, "Halden. Your scout’s favouring the left hind."

Mira stopped and checked, and it was.

[Soul Talent — Vital Trace]

"How long?" Mira asked.

"Twenty minutes, maybe. It’s not lame, it’s just loading it wrong. If it goes another two hours like that it’ll be lame."

They rested for eleven minutes and the scout came right.