Chapter 79: Levels to this game

Corwin’s crew took the front of the car and spread out across a whole row of seats. Rain, Peter, and Abby took the back.

For the first two stops, Peter just stared at Abby.

"You can talk," Abby said finally. "I don’t bite."

"You’re..." Peter lowered his voice to almost nothing. "You’re Red Dragon. You’re Class A. What are you doing on a train to the Western Arch dressed like my cousin?"

"Your cousin has good taste."

"He really doesn’t."

Abby laughed into her sleeve. Up front, Dax turned his head, looked back at them, and turned away again.

"She wanted to see how the other half lives," Rain said.

"The other half is terrified," Peter said. "Just so you know. That’s how we live."

"Noted."

The train rattled through a tunnel. Peter fidgeted with the zip on his jacket, then stopped, then started again.

"What’s it like?" Rain asked. "Class A."

Abby leaned her head back against the window. "Honestly?"

"Honestly."

"Quieter than you’d think. Nobody shouts in class. Nobody has to. Everybody already knows where they stand." She thought about it. "The instructors are better. A lot better. Half of them are retired guild captains. And there are guild scouts at practicals. Not every week, but enough that you always feel watched."

"That sounds good."

"It sounds good." She turned her head to look at him. "Everybody’s parents are in a guild, or own one. Everybody already has a contract, or a promise of one. So nobody’s fighting to get noticed. They’re fighting to not lose what they’ve already got." She shrugged. "It makes people careful. And it makes them mean in small ways. Nobody does anything stupid, because nobody can afford to."

"You’re doing something stupid right now," Rain pointed out.

"I know." She smiled at the ceiling. "Isn’t it great?"

Peter stared at her.

"What happens when somebody gets promoted?" Rain asked. "From B. Or C."

Abby looked at him for a second longer than she needed to.

"It’s rare," she said. "Once a year, maybe. Usually from B. The class doesn’t make it easy. They test you on everything again, from the beginning, as if the last term didn’t happen. And the guild kids..." She paused. "They’re polite. To your face. They’ll want to know who backs you."

"And if nobody does?"

"Then they’ll want to know why you’re there."

Rain nodded slowly. "Good to know for when I get there."

"When," Peter said. "He said when."

"I heard," Abby said.

"I’m going to be in Class C until they bury me in it," Peter said. "Just so everyone knows. That’s my plan."

"That’s a terrible plan," Abby said.

"It’s realistic."

"It’s lazy," she said, not unkindly. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and looked at Peter properly. "Do you know what a carrier is in a real guild party? On a B-rank run?"

"A guy who carries things."

"The one who keeps everyone alive at hour six, when the potions have to be where someone can reach them and the cores have to be sorted before they bleed out. Good guild carriers get paid more than half the fighters." She sat back. "Nobody tells you that in Class C."

Peter opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked at his hands.

"Huh," he said.

Up front, Corwin stood up as the train slowed. "Last stop. Move."

---

The cold-storage plant sat on the riverbank behind a rusted fence with a hole cut through it. It was a long, low concrete block with no windows. Through the loading bay doors, which hung half off their tracks, a faint blue light spilled out across the gravel, and the air near it was colder than the night.

The clearing crew was waiting outside.

Odell was a stocky man in his thirties, with a short grey beard and a patched armor vest. He looked at his watch, then at Corwin, and nodded as if he’d been expecting worse. Sasha was wiry, with half her head shaved and a pair of short hooked blades on her belt. The third, Toller, was enormous and silent, holding a hammer whose head was the size of a brick. He didn’t look at anyone.

"You’re the C-ranks," Odell said to Corwin. "Reeve said three of you at the rate we discussed."

"That’s us."

"Good. I’ve never complained about cheap C-ranks." Odell’s eyes passed over the carriers. "Three carriers?"

"The skinny one, the big one, and the girl."

"Big one’s an F-rank," Sasha said, looking at Rain. "Right? The one from the video?"

"That’s him," Corwin said, with a small smile. "He carries good."

Sasha shrugged. "As long as he keeps up."

Odell pointed at a stack of grey plastic crates by the bay doors, six of them with metal latches. "Carriers take two each. Cores go in as we clear. Small ones loose in any crate. The big ones go in that one." He tapped the crate on the end.

Rain looked at the latch. A thin white notch was scratched into the edge. Easy to miss, if you didn’t know it was there.

Corwin was looking at it too. Then he looked at Rain.

Rain nodded once.

He picked up the notched crate and one other. Peter took two. Abby took the last two, one in each hand, and walked toward the bay doors as if they were empty.

The gate sat in the middle of the loading bay. It was a tall, ragged oval of blue light hanging in the air, about a foot off the concrete. Frost had spread out from it across the floor in a wide feathered circle, and the cold coming off it made Rain’s eyes water.

Odell stepped through first. The others followed.

Rain stepped through last, with the crates.

---

There was no building on the other side.

He came out onto ice under a black sky with no stars. The ice stretched in every direction, flat and grey and endless. It wasn’t solid. It was broken into floes, some the size of a room and some the size of a field, separated by black seams of open water. Faint blue light glowed up through the ice from somewhere far below, so the ground shone dimly under his boots while the sky stayed completely dark.

The wind came straight across the lake with nothing to stop it. Rain pulled his hood up.

"Frozen lake," Odell said. He crouched and laid a gloved hand flat on the ice. "Rift survey said so. Don’t stand on the edge of a floe. Don’t jump seams if you can walk around them. And watch the light."

"The light?" Peter asked.

"If it goes dark under you," Sasha said, "move."

The first time it happened, Rain saw what she meant.

They’d crossed three floes, following Odell, when the glow under a patch of ice twenty meters ahead went black. A spot the size of a dining table, dark as if something had swum underneath it.

Then the ice exploded upward, and a Shellback came out of it.

It was the size of a big dog, armored in overlapping grey plates that clicked when they moved. It had too many legs and no face Rain could find, only a wedge of shell at the front that split open when it lunged. Three more came up behind it through the same hole, water streaming off their backs and freezing in the air.

Odell’s crew moved. Toller stepped forward and brought his hammer down on the first one so hard the shell split straight across. Sasha slid low between the next two, her hooked blades hunting for the gaps between the plates.

Then Corwin’s crew moved, and Rain forgot about Odell’s crew entirely.

Corwin flicked his wrist. Something cracked in the air like a whip, and a Shellback lunging at Sasha’s back flipped over, its legs scrabbling at the sky. Corwin flicked again, and the next one’s front legs went out from under it. It nosed straight into the ice.

Dax walked up to the flipped one and punched it in the belly.

Rain heard the shell break. Dax pulled his fist back out of it and shook the frost off his knuckles.

The fourth Shellback went for Petrov. Petrov threw out a hand, and a flat pane of pale light, like a sheet of glass, snapped into place between them. The Shellback hit it face first and bounced. Then Petrov did something Rain hadn’t seen before. He dropped his hand toward the ice, and a second pane slammed down horizontally over the hole the Shellbacks had come up through. It sealed the hole like a lid.

Something hit the pane from underneath. Thud. Then again. It held.

Toller finished the last one with his hammer.

The whole fight took less than thirty seconds.

Odell straightened up, breathing hard, and looked at Corwin’s crew with his eyebrows raised. "Reeve said you were good."

"Reeve undersold us," Corwin said.

Rain stood there with his crates and didn’t move for a second.

’That was C-rank.’

The night in the alley, he’d been on the ground the whole time. He’d felt Dax hit him, but he’d never seen it. He’d thought of these three as cowards who picked on people smaller than them. They were cowards. They were also fast and strong and coordinated in a way he hadn’t expected at all. Petrov had covered a hole nobody else had even noticed.

’If they’d taken that alley seriously,’ Rain thought, ’I wouldn’t have walked out of it.’

"Carriers," Odell said.

Rain set his crates down beside the nearest Shellback and knelt. The core sat in a ridge under the front plate, a hard lump of blue-grey crystal about the size of a walnut. He worked it loose with his fingers, which stung with the cold, and dropped it into the open crate.

He worked the next one loose and kept it in his palm, low behind the shell, out of sight.

He thought it into storage.

[Item Stored: Shellback Core (Rank D)]

It was gone from his hand as if it had never been there.

He put the third one into the crate where anyone could see.

A few meters away, Peter was struggling with a core frozen into its ridge. Abby knelt beside him, pried it out of the shell with two fingers, and handed it to him. Peter stared at her. She winked.

---

The floes went on and on. Odell led them in a slow line across the ice, testing seams with his boot before stepping over, and every few hundred meters the light went dark somewhere nearby and the Shellbacks came up.

Rain counted. He kept his hands busy, and every second or third core went into storage. He never took more than one from the same kill, and he never took one when Corwin or Dax was looking his way. Petrov he didn’t worry about as much. Petrov spent every fight looking at the ice.

On the sixth fight, a pair of Shellbacks came up right under Toller, and the big man went down on one knee with the floe tilting under him. Dax caught him by the back of his vest and hauled him onto solid ice with one arm. Then he turned around and drove his fist down through the floe itself, through half a meter of ice, grabbed a Shellback by the leg underneath, and dragged it up into the air.

Even Sasha stopped to stare.

"Show-off," Corwin said.

Dax grinned and threw the Shellback at Toller’s hammer.