Chapter 145: Nothing Has an Exit
Jin sat with his shoulder against the hull and looked out at a world with no edge on it.
He had seen danger. He had been in the entrance examination. He had watched Glitch die in a quarry more times than he had bothered counting, and he had felt every one of those deaths come up the link secondhand, muffled and awful and survivable.
This was not that.
A screen had a frame around it. Behind him was a shelter with three walls and a scraped strip and guns in tiers, and everything past it went on and on until it stopped being visible. No version of it had a barrier at the edge.
Confirmed, he thought. Going outside is a scam.
The joke did not land in his own head the way it usually did.
Glitch pressed his side against Jin’s leg and stayed there.
The shuttle set down at 1120, and the ramp came open onto nothing.
Flat cracked ground. Dry drainage channels cutting across it. A ridge line maybe two kilometers north. Some rubble. No Rift, no staging post, no fortified camp, no fence.
Twenty-four students looked at it, and nobody moved.
"Out," said Marr.
"Instructor, is this —" Wren, near the front, not confused so much as recalculating. "The staging post is marked at grid four. This is grid nine."
"Correct."
"That’s about five kilometers."
"Five and a bit." Marr walked down the ramp. "You’re walking it."
The noise that went through the cabin was not quite protest.
"You’ve all been assessed in rooms," she said, from the ground, not raising her voice and not needing to. "Rooms have doors. I’m assessing formation discipline, awareness, stamina management, reporting, and what you do when nothing has an exit. Five kilometers. Out."
They came out.
The second instructor waited until the last unit cleared the ramp, then took the rear of the wider formation without a word. Whatever beast belonged to them stayed out of sight. Between that unseen protection and the large creature moving somewhere behind Marr, the academy had safeguards. It simply had no intention of letting the students lean on them.
Jin watched the wider group sort itself in the first three minutes and learned more about Meridian in those three minutes than he had in all his classes so far.
One unit bunched so tight their beasts kept fouling each other. One boy issued a command to his beast roughly every eight seconds, none of them necessary, none of them the same. Two students walked with their heads on a permanent slow swivel toward the horizon. A tall girl laughed too loudly at everything, twice, and then stopped.
Wren organized 12-C in about forty seconds and did it without raising her voice.
"Tally, twenty out. Colby, Anvil on my left, and if I say plant, plant, don’t ask why. Reyes, back and wide, Ash stays cold until I say. Astor, middle, and I want a report every two minutes whether or not you have anything."
"Even if it’s nothing?"
"Especially if it’s nothing." She started walking. "If you go quiet, I have to assume the worst thing, and I’d rather hear you say nothing forty times."
They walked.
Glitch could not hold the sense open continuously. Jin had known that from the dormitory, and he found the real limit inside the first kilometer: about two minutes of open ground before the noise stacked. Glitch had to drop it and shake his head like a wet animal.
So they cycled—ninety seconds on, thirty off. Jin reported every two minutes.
"Nothing."
"Nothing."
"Something northwest, low confidence, probably wind on the loose stuff."
"Nothing."
Ren Colby fell into step beside him around the second kilometer, sweating, his checklist folded in a pocket he kept touching.
"Does it actually work?"
"Sometimes."
"That’s not — okay." Ren laughed, once, badly. "That’s honest, at least."
"It works on things that touch the ground and move," Jin said. "It doesn’t tell me what they are. It doesn’t tell me how many. If something’s standing still, I get nothing at all."
"Huh." Ren thought about that. "So a thing that’s waiting for us —"
"Is invisible. Yeah."
"I hate that."
"Everybody does."
At 3.4 kilometers, Glitch stopped walking.
It came up the link as pressure and direction and nothing else. Something with weight, moving low and fast in a line, somewhere ahead and right, and then the drainage channel took it and the signal smeared out across broken ground.
Five seconds ago Jin would have waited to confirm.
"Wren. Movement, front-right, forty to sixty meters, moving. Low confidence on distance. Something big enough to matter and it’s in the channels."
Wren’s hand went up before he finished the sentence.
"Hold. Tally, forward right, ten meters only."
The fennec’s ears rotated. It went four meters, stopped, dropped its nose to the dirt, and its whole body changed.
"Tracks," Wren said. "Fresh —"
The Scarp Hound came out of the channel at fifteen meters, and it was not where the vibration had said it was.
That was the first real lesson. The signal had gone into broken drainage and come out somewhere else. Jin had been eighteen meters wrong, and eighteen meters was the difference between a warning and a surprise.
It was maybe waist-high at the shoulder, long, dust-colored, built entirely out of running. Iron-quality, Rank 1, nothing exotic. The reason it was frightening was that it had come out of a hole in the ground at full speed with its mouth already open, and it had picked the smallest student in the nearest unit.
Somebody screamed.
Then everybody was shouting, and that was worse.
Jin heard four commands overlap in two seconds. A boy shouted back and forth to the same beast. Two beasts turned into each other. A girl from another unit started walking backward away from the group with her eyes on the hound. She was not running, which was somehow the most alarming thing in the field, because she did not seem to know she was doing it.
The formation was about to open.
Jin looked left, once, and found Marr.
She was standing exactly where she had been. Not running and not shouting. Her weight was on her back foot, and her hand was down at her side, open. The large thing that had ridden in the shuttle was somewhere behind the group in a position Jin could not see but could infer from where she was not looking.
She was going to let this happen.