Chapter 150: Short Checks
They went backward, which was the correct decision and felt terrible.
Anvil planted in the narrow section with the wall against his left side and Ren jammed in behind him, and the boar’s bristles came up along his spine, and the first crawler hit him and came off him and got up and hit him again.
"Reyes," said Wren. "Controlled. If you cook this passage we’re all under it."
"I *know.*"
Jin heard the strain in it. Ash could have filled that corridor with fire. Ash could have ended the entire encounter in about two seconds and dropped forty tons of rock on Unit 12-C while doing it.
Dolan kept the lynx on claws.
He kept it on claws for six minutes, in a corridor, against things that came at him from three heights, and Jin revised his opinion of Dolan Reyes upward twice during those six minutes.
Tally worked the side cracks.
That was the fight, really. The crawlers kept trying to get around Anvil through the fissures in the walls, and every single time, the fennec’s ears found the scrape before it emerged, and Wren shifted somebody two meters, and the thing came out into a lynx that was already looking at it.
Glitch handled the dark.
The passage behind them went black past eleven meters and the crawlers used it, and Glitch told Jin every time one of them started up the back route, and Jin said it out loud in three words or fewer, and Wren turned it into an order.
"Behind, low, left."
"Ash, left."
"Two behind, one high."
"Colby, hold. Reyes, take the high one first."
They killed six of them and drove the rest back into the cracks, and it took nine minutes, and nobody had a dramatic moment in it. Ren held the choke and did not move. Dolan never once let his beast off the leash. Tally called every flank.
Jin stood in the middle of it and did not fight at all, and by the end his hands were shaking, and he could not entirely say why.
---
When Jin finally looked down at Glitch, he understood what his shaking hands had been trying to tell him for the last twenty minutes.
Glitch’s head was low. Not the sleepy low. His eyes were open and unfocused and his jaw had come loose slightly, and when Jin put a hand on him he flinched at the contact, which he had never done in his life.
The impression that came up the link was not a picture or an emotion. It was pressure. A flat, grinding, everywhere pressure, with Jin’s own voice in it somewhere, arriving from a direction Glitch could not locate.
Jin crouched down fast.
"Hey."
Nothing.
"Hey. Turn it off."
Glitch did not turn it off. Not because he refused. Because the instruction had to get through the noise to reach him, and the noise was what Jin was trying to talk about.
Jin put both hands flat on either side of the blunt obsidian head and pressed, hard, one physical thing in a world that had become all vibration.
He drove one compressed intent through the bond: silence, release, now.
It went off.
Glitch sat down. He actually sat, back legs folding, like something that had run out.
"What’s wrong with him?" Ren said.
"He’s fried."
"Is he hurt?"
"No." Jin heard his own voice come out wrong and fixed it. "No. He’s been reopening the sense throughout the last four hours without enough recovery, and he’s only had it for three days."
Wren came over.
"Three days."
"Yeah."
"You’ve had a sensory skill for *three days* and you’ve been running it since we entered the Rift."
"Yeah."
She did not shout at him. She looked at Glitch, and then at Jin, and something in her face changed to something more tired.
"Can he still do it?"
"I don’t know. Give me a minute."
Jin sat down on the floor of an unmapped tunnel with his back against the wall and his beast’s head in his lap, and did the arithmetic he should have done at hour one.
The avatar had spent nine days in the quarry earning Tremor Sense fragments. The transferred experience gave Glitch a foundation, but it had not taught his real body to endure hours of repeated use.
The avatar had also died repeatedly there. Each time, Jin had studied the two-hour respawn timer and planned what to do differently; the failure had cost only time.
Too many decisions followed that structure: spend the beast, learn the room, spend it again. An avatar always returned.
He had brought that habit into a hole in the ground with the real beast.
Glitch was not going to respawn. Glitch was going to sit down in a tunnel and stop being able to hear, and then stop being able to think, and Jin genuinely did not know what came after that because he had never taken the real one past this point.
He had been running the outside world like it was optimizable.
*Sorry,* he thought, and did not send it, because it was not information and Glitch did not need to carry it.
What he sent instead was simpler: the skill closed, Glitch resting, and Jin’s hand deciding when it would open again.
The relief that came back was so complete that it made Jin’s chest hurt.
He looked up.
"New arrangement," he said. "Tally navigates. All of it. Everything that isn’t underground movement, she does, and we go at her pace."
"And Glitch?"
"Short checks. Ten seconds. When you ask, or when I ask, and not otherwise." Jin met Wren’s eyes. "That means I’m going to miss things. I’m telling you that now instead of after."
"How much will you miss?"
"Between checks? Everything." He said it plainly. "If something walks up behind us thirty seconds after a check, I will not know about it. That’s the trade. I could force continuous coverage for a few more minutes, and then he’s done for the day. I don’t know what *done* means yet, and I’d rather not find out."
Dolan, unexpectedly: "Then we do short checks."
Wren nodded once.
"Short checks," she said. "Colby, you and Anvil take rear watch with your eyes, since we’ve just lost most of our early warning. Reyes, front with Tally. Astor, you’re on Glitch and nothing else."
"Understood."
"And Astor." She was already walking. "Next time you’re operating something for the first time, that goes in the pre-mission briefing."
"Yeah," said Jin. "It should have."
---
The abandoned crystal bought them about ninety minutes.
Jin’s ten-second checks tracked it in a way that would have been satisfying if it had been happening to somebody else. The heavy thing had turned toward the dead branch, gone there, and then stayed in one place for a long time, and the pulses coming off it during that stretch were short and repetitive and awful in a way that took Jin a while to identify.
It was chewing.
Then, at some point between two checks, it stopped, and by the check after that it had resumed the long northward wander it had been on before anybody cut anything, because the fragment had been one mouthful and the vein was a vein.
"It’s moving again," Jin said. "Ahead of us and left. Same direction it was going before, roughly."
"Toward or away?"
"Across." He waited out the last seconds of the check. "It’s not aimed at us. It’s just going to be in front of us."
Wren looked at Tally, who was pointing straight ahead into the direction of the airflow, ears rigid, absolutely certain.
"Of course it is," Wren said.