Chapter 121: Unquantifiable

The pounding existed before I did, sitting in the middle of my skull, slow and enormous, each beat arriving up through the bone while the rest of me reported in as one solid block of hurt, my joints rusted shut, my spine fused into the concrete under my cheek, my whole body lying there with the weight of wet sand poured into a man-shaped mold.

Air came in through my mouth alone, thin and rationed, since my nose had clogged solid with dried blood somewhere along the way, and every breath dragged the taste of copper back across my tongue.

My eyelids weighed more than the rest of me combined.

Sleep sat right there, warm and patient and one exhale away, and I was already sliding back down toward it, already letting go of whatever thin thread had pulled me this far up, when small teeth closed in my hair and pulled.

"...mea!"

The sound came out cracked.

Thin and torn and scraped raw at the edges, a ruin of the voice I have known for two lifetimes, arriving against my ear from a throat that had clearly been calling for hours, and something about how wrong it sounded reached further into me than the pulling did.

The teeth set again and pulled again.

"...meh-a!"

And my mind began to churn, slow and grinding, gears turning through mud, dragging up the reason there was concrete under my face at all, the reason for the fires I could smell, the reason, the reason, the whole reason I was out here in the first place.

[...Nia.]

The name arrived, and so did everything behind it.

[System... Nia...]

-Ding!

{

Infection progression: 78%.

Irreversibility threshold: 80%.

}

My eyes snapped open, and tore.

The lids ripped against dried blood that had glued them shut, lashes pulling free one by one, and I got a thumb up and broke the crust off the left one while the right came loose on its own, and the world arrived, all of it plunged into darkness.

Moonlight, thin and blue and cold, lying across a field of shattered concrete, across the black gash of the chasm two meters from my boots, across a district with no lights left in it anywhere, while somewhere far off a few fires still chewed at buildings I no longer remembered ruining.

[...Dark... Late-night dark...]

I had gone down in the morning.

And underneath everything, where the dial tone of my counter had run since dawn, there was silence now, total and old, the sound of a machine that had finished its work hours ago and stopped waiting for me.

[...up. Get up.]

My body answered how heavy furniture answers when you try to lift it.

I sent the order down, but nothing moved, arms dead, legs dead, everything locked as though someone had pulled the wiring out of me overnight, so I sent it again, harder, and got one hand flat against the concrete, then the other, and began the slow ugly work of prying myself off the ground one joint at a time.

Everything hurt.

Everything, all of it, all at once, the bill from an entire morning arriving in a single delivery, my ribs grinding, my shoulders tearing along old lines, my breath going ragged from nothing more than getting my knees under me, while my ears gave me the world muffled and far away and my eyes throbbed in their sockets with every heartbeat.

I made it upright, swaying, and looked out at all that darkness.

And out of pure instinct, the way you reach for a light switch in your own home, I spread my Awareness.

Then the world detonated.

White filled everything, a spike of pain driving straight down through the crown of my skull and out between my eyes, enormous, absolute, blinding, and my legs quit as one knee hit the concrete while one hand clawed at my own head and the other barely caught the ground before my face did.

"Mea! Meah!!"

Tikki pressed himself against my leg, wound around it, shoved his whole small body into my shin over and over while the white slowly broke apart into swimming grey and the spike banked itself down into a live coal sitting exactly where my third eye lives.

I blinked, hard, again, again, until shapes came back before finally managing to get a hand down, running it once along his spine, feeling him trembling under the fur.

[No time...] I pushed myself back up onto my feet with my breath sawing. [Wh-What happened...? System?]

-Ding!

{

Telekinesis was stretched beyond operational parameters.

Consequence: Loss of ability.

Time before recovery: Unquantifiable.

}

I stood there in the moonlight and read it three times.

Loss of ability. Unquantifiable.

[...what the...]

No Awareness. No Barrier. No TK. Nothing at all in the one place I had built everything on, just a coal of pain where a sense used to live, and a word with no number in it sitting where the number should be.

[...Forget it. No time...]

There was exactly one figure in the world that mattered right now, and it had a percent sign on it.

[How many credits do I have?]

-Ding!

{

Balance: 152,300,000 Credits.

}

The east had kept paying while I slept.

And every muscle in my body let go at once, so completely and so suddenly that the ground swung up toward me and I had to catch myself on my own knees, head hanging, breath shuddering, while the number sat there in the corner of my eye and glowed.

One hundred and fifty-two million.

[...That’s all that matters. Bring the Ghostbird...] I dragged my head back up. [...and buy me that suppressant.]

-Ding!

{

Orders acknowledged.

Ghostbird: En route. ETA 100 seconds.

Anti-Infection Suppressant: Purchased.

-150,000,000 Credits.

Item stored in the Inventory.

}

Somewhere south of me, faint and far away, turbines began winding up out of the dark.

And the arithmetic arrived, the only arithmetic my ruined head could still run, the one sum left in the whole world.

Seventy-eight percent. Eighty is forever.

I had just two percent worth of time.

I had no idea how fast it climbed, how long she’d been climbing while I lay out here sleeping in my own blood like a discarded thing, or how much of that two percent the night had already eaten.

"Booger..." My voice came out in pieces. "We’re leaving."

"...meh."

He climbed my jacket on claws that shook, slid into the ruined pocket at my shoulder, and pressed himself flat against my neck, while the rotors grew out of the southern dark and I turned toward them and made my trembling legs start walking.