Chapter 144: No Edge to It
The shuttle was an ugly thing.
Jin had seen images of pre-collapse aircraft, the smooth ones built for air. This was built for being hit. Layered plate, stubby lift assemblies in armored housings, and viewports the size of a face set into forty centimeters of hull.
Twenty-four students. Six units. Two instructors, one of whom did all the talking.
"Marr," she said at the front, without a greeting. "Field instructor. If I say a word to you at any point during this deployment, you do the thing in the word before you think about it."
She was maybe fifty. She had the build of someone who walked a lot, and the left side of her face had an old, tidy scar that had been stitched by somebody competent, in a hurry.
Something large sat behind her with its head down and did not move for the entire flight. Jin never got a clear look at it. The second instructor remained by the rear hatch, checking unit tags and watching the cabin instead of joining the lesson.
The first fifteen minutes were fine.
They went out over the Inner Core and the students on the left side pointed at things. Meridian’s grounds looked absurd from above, all that space, the training complex spread across four blocks, the artificial sun array on its towers.
Then the districts got denser and dirtier, and the crowding shifted to the right side of the cabin, because the wall was coming up.
Jin had lived inside that wall his whole life in this world and had never once seen the outside of it.
It went past underneath them for a long time.
Gun emplacements in tiered rows, each one the size of a house, most of them tracking slowly as the shuttle crossed their arcs—barrier pylons. Then a second line behind the first, and a third, and between them a dead strip four hundred meters wide with nothing on it at all, not rubble, not vegetation, scraped down to bare grey and kept that way.
"Why’s it empty?" somebody asked.
"So we can see," said Marr.
The outer gate was less impressive than Jin expected until he understood the scale of the vehicles parked beside it.
Then they were through, and for about ninety seconds it was almost normal.
There were roads. Cracked, but roads. A maintained relay tower with a light on it—an old commercial district with the signage still up.
The students were loud. Somebody had a bet going about who would see a beast first.
Marr let them have it.
The change came in gradually enough that Jin could not name the moment.
The roads stopped being maintained and started being routes. An overpass had come down across one of them, and nobody had cleared it, and the ground had grown a path around the wreck the way water goes around a stone.
Mutated vegetation had gotten into everything. Not green. Grey-purple, thick, ropy, coming out of buildings through the windows and pulling the frames apart from inside. One tower block had a trunk growing up the stairwell, splitting it open along its entire height.
Then the buildings started showing marks.
Jin picked it up before most people did, and he thought about not saying anything, and then remembered a bare training hall.
"Those aren’t collapses," he said, loud enough to carry.
Marr looked at him.
"Say more."
"Third floor of that one. And the one behind it, same height." He nodded at the window. "The holes line up. Something walked through the row at that height."
The cabin went quieter.
"Kraskin herd," said Marr. "Eleven years ago. They browse at about that level, and they don’t go around things." She let that sit. "Nobody lives here now. Not because of the Kraskin. Because of what followed them in."
After that the questions changed shape.
The craters came next, a field of them, twenty or thirty, the oldest ones softened and the newest ones sharp. Then a defensive position on a ridge, sandbagged, still had its emplacement, nobody in it. Then bones.
The bones were the part that did it.
A ribcage came up over the horizon, and Jin’s first thought was that it was a structure, an arch, some built thing, because it had the wrong size to be a body. The shuttle passed it at maybe eighty meters, and it went by underneath them, and it was still there when he looked back.
Nobody in the cabin said anything at all.
That was the transition. Not the wall, not the vegetation. The moment where a student looked at a skeleton and had to adjust what animals could be.
Marr started teaching about forty minutes in, and she taught off the window.
"Track field, left side. Everybody look."
Impressions in the dust, a long line of them, each one a couple of meters across.
"That’s a week old, maybe less, and the edges are still sharp because it hasn’t rained. If you’re on the ground and you cross a track like that, the question isn’t what made it. The question is whether it’s coming back, and the answer is usually yes, because animals use routes." She paused. "Danger doesn’t start at the Rift entrance. There is no line out here where it starts. There’s just outside."
She pointed at a stand of the ropy grey vegetation.
"Anybody touch that?"
"No," said twenty-four students.
"You’d be surprised. Every year somebody picks up a mineral, a fruit, a piece of shell, a nice-looking bone. Don’t touch an unknown plant, corpse, mineral, or resource because it looks valuable. Out here, valuable and bait are the same word about a third of the time."
A girl near the front raised her hand.
"If we get separated, what’s the extraction radius?"
"If you get separated," Marr said, "you stop moving."
"Stop?"
"You have a beacon. It works. Moving blind through unmapped ground is more dangerous than being lost in a known spot, because we can search a known spot and we cannot search a line you wandered along in a panic." She looked around the cabin. "You will want to walk. Everybody wants to walk. Don’t."
Somebody else asked what to do if a beast ran away.
"Let it."
"But if it’s wounded and it —"
"Let it." Marr’s voice did not change. "Never pursue a fleeing wild beast. Ever. Nothing out here runs unless it wants to be somewhere else, and you do not know why it wants to be there. Half the students who die on their first deployment die chasing something."
A boy toward the back said, with real confusion: "But we’ve fought Iron-quality beasts in the terrain rooms. That’s the same rank."
Marr turned to look at him.
She did not make him feel stupid, which Jin noted, because she easily could have.
"In the rooms," she said, "the beast is contracted, it’s obeying restrictions, an instructor can stop it in half a second, and it does not want anything. It is doing a job."
She jerked a thumb at the window.
"Nothing out there is doing a job. A weak wild beast is not a weak academy opponent. It’s an animal that is going to eat today or not eat today, and it has been making that decision successfully its entire life."
"And this is a controlled deployment," the boy said, a little quieter.
"Controlled means we’ve limited the risks we know about." Marr sat down. "Write that sentence somewhere. The ones we know about."
Nobody was crowding the windows anymore.