Chapter 186: The Person Giving Orders

Eight hundred meters took them ninety-five minutes.

Bram carried most of Mira’s weight on his right side, with Jin under her left arm doing the smaller share and finding even that hard. She could put her right foot down and swing the left through and that was the entire extent of it.

Glitch went ahead in stages. Twenty meters, stop, flat to the ground, listen. Twenty more.

Ninety seconds of sense, then thirty off, Jin thought, watching him. He had made that rule in a Rift with a technician’s voice in his head and he was not breaking it here.

"Left of the gully," he said. "There’s something under the direct line."

"How far under?" Mira said.

"Eight meters, maybe less. It’s not coming up, but I’d rather not be standing on it if it decides to."

They went left of the gully.

Kellan nearly killed himself at the four-hundred-meter mark.

A Carrion Hound came out of the scrub on the right, wide, moving fast and at an angle, and Kellan’s whole body loaded to go.

"No."

He stopped. Barely. Jin could see him vibrating with the effort of it.

"It’s right there—"

"It’s angling. It’s not coming in, it’s pulling you out." Jin watched the hound run its arc, watched it check, watched it swing back around toward the gap between Bram and the scrub. "Wait for the lane. The lane’s between that rock and the bank."

"How do you know it’ll—"

"It has to. Everywhere else is broken ground and it’s not going to break stride." Jin kept his eyes on it. "Ready."

The hound committed.

It came into the gap between the rock and the bank at full speed with its head down, exactly the way Jin had said it would, and it had about eleven meters of straight line to cover.

"Now."

Kellan’s two seconds took it in the shoulder and put it into the bank hard enough that it did not get up.

He came back breathing like a bellows and sat down where he stood.

"That’s — okay," he said. "Okay. That’s the second time."

"Rest. Five minutes."

"I’m fine—"

"You’re not, and I need those two seconds again in about twenty minutes," said Jin. "Sit down."

Kellan sat down.

Somebody questioned an order at six hundred meters and it was not Kellan.

It was Mira’s scout beast, which balked at the route Jin picked, and Mira said, through her teeth, "That’s the long way. There’s a straight line right there and there’s nothing on the surface—"

"There’s something eleven meters under it."

"You keep saying that."

Bram spoke without turning around, which was the first time he had volunteered anything all day.

"He’s the only one who knows what’s moving under our feet," he said. "So we go the way he says."

That was the whole intervention. He did not elaborate and nobody asked him to.

Mira exhaled.

"Fine. Long way."

The Tunnelmaw came up at seven hundred and ten meters, and Glitch gave Jin less than a second of clear warning.

That was the part that stayed with him.

The vibrations had been moving beneath them for minutes. Then one line turned sharply upward, and the warning became immediate.

Jin understood it first. His mouth was already moving — "Breach, right, five meters, everyone left" — as the ground began to split.

Bram moved with Mira on his shoulder, which was a genuinely impressive thing to do at speed.

Kellan moved.

Nia moved.

Jin twisted left, planted his right foot, and the ground under that foot collapsed before he could push away.

The Tunnelmaw’s head came out of the soil about a meter from his hip. Blunt, plated, wider than his chest, with a grinding mouth on the front of it that was built to go through rock.

Glitch hit him.

It was not a rescue so much as a black, armoured impact. Glitch drove his shoulder into Jin’s thigh and threw him sideways. Jin landed hard beyond the crumbling edge while Glitch planted himself between Jin and the breach with Harden already covering his body.

The Tunnelmaw did not press. It had come up into noise and a hardened obsidian lizard and it went back down, because it was a Rank-1 burrower and not a predator, and its entire interest in the world was rock.

Jin lay in the dirt for a second with the wind knocked out of him.

"Up," Bram called from ahead, still holding Mira upright.

"Yeah."

He got up.

I knew first, he thought, and he could not stop thinking it for the next hundred meters. It still reached me.

He had built everything since Glitch hatched on being the person who saw danger first. Out here, information bought time, but his ordinary body could waste that time in one bad step.

Glitch can’t be everywhere. One warning won’t always be enough.

He filed it, hard, and kept walking.

Glitch was running down and Jin could feel it.

Ninety-second sense cycles for an hour and a half, six minutes of real fighting, two long charges, and Harden held four separate times. The bond had that fraying quality at the edges, and his responses were coming a beat slower than they had at noon.

He’s at the end of what a 4-Star body does in a day.

There was nothing to do about it except keep the checks short and stop asking for anything he did not need.

The station was a squat concrete block with a bent antenna mast and one wall half-collapsed, built on a foundation slab that Glitch reported, with enormous relief, as solid.

Bram held the doorway with his beast while the others got inside.

The outer barrier had jammed on a bent runner. Kellan burned his two seconds on it and moved it eleven centimeters. Jin and Nia leaned on it together and got it another twenty, and then Bram came in off the doorway and set his feet and shut it.

Four hounds had come in on the last two hundred meters. Kellan took one when Jin called the lane. Glitch and Bram’s beast turned the other three at the threshold, and Kellan did not chase them when they broke, which Jin noticed and did not mention because mentioning it would have ruined it.

The barrier closed at 1737.

The five of them stood in the dark inside a concrete box and listened to nothing happen for about a minute.

Then Nia said, "I need light. I have to look at her leg again," and everybody started moving.