Chapter 153: The Actual Next Thing
Glitch tried to start work at 0620 on the first morning.
Jin woke to the sound of claws testing the floor, a slow deliberate press-and-release near the head of the bunk, and he knew exactly what it was before he opened his eyes.
"No."
The pressing stopped.
"You’re not sneaking it. I can hear you doing it."
There was a pause, and then an impression came up the link that Jin had no trouble translating. It was the feeling of being perfectly fine, and it came with a demonstration, which involved Glitch standing up and walking a full circuit of the room with his head high to prove that his legs worked.
Your legs were never the problem, Jin thought, and pushed the sense of it across.
Glitch sat down in the middle of the floor and looked at him.
"Four to six days," Jin said. "Then two minutes at a time. That isn’t me. That’s a technician with a slate."
Glitch’s tail moved once against the floor, which meant that technicians with slates had not been in the tunnel.
"No, they weren’t." Jin sat up and rubbed his face. "I was, and you sat down in it, and I’d rather not do that again."
That took the argument out of him faster than Jin expected. Glitch lay down with his chin across Jin’s foot and radiated a kind of aggrieved patience, and Jin lay there for a while and thought about how easy it would have been to allow one small test.
Ten seconds. A quiet room. No load on him at all.
And then twenty tomorrow, and a minute the day after, because he’ll be fine both times, and by Thursday I’ll have talked myself back to exactly where I started.
He got up and went to class.
Fifth Class did not care that he had been in a Rift, which turned out to be the most useful thing about the week.
Beast Nutrition Fundamentals ran at 0800 in a hall with two hundred students in it, and the instructor spent fifty minutes on protein conversion ratios in reptilian metabolisms, and nobody looked at Jin at all.
Basic Field Conditioning at 1100 was worse and involved running.
His Incoming Supply shift ran Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Bellek greeted him on Tuesday by handing over a manifest and saying, "You’re on pallets four through nine, and I hear you got merit on a deployment, and that’s very nice, and these pallets are still here."
"Understood."
"Four through nine."
Jin moved crates for four hours and found it restful.
Ren Colby caught him outside the dormitory block on the second evening, still visibly working out how to be a person who had done that.
"They gave Anvil a commendation," he said. "An actual one. On his file."
"He earned it."
"He stood on a rock."
"He stood on a rock for nineteen minutes with a burrowing beast underneath him," Jin said. "Most beasts wouldn’t have."
Ren looked at his hands.
"I keep waking up on the slab," he said.
"Yeah."
"Does that stop?"
"I don’t know," Jin said. "Ask Wren. She’s done two of these now."
The formal notice arrived on the third day, and it was more specific than the one at the debrief.
[MERIDIAN ACADEMY — CLASS REVIEW NOTIFICATION]
[Astor, J. — Fifth Class]
[Status: Accelerated review recommended. Case advanced to next scheduled formal review cycle.]
[Combat evaluation: SATISFIED — bracket tournament record.]
[Field judgment evaluation: SATISFIED — controlled Rift deployment, exceptional merit.]
[Outstanding requirements, to be assessed at review:]
[— Academic standing, current term]
[— Beast care record, continuous]
[— Contract stability, continuous]
[— Command performance, sustained]
[Adherence to the issued veterinary recovery plan for registered beast "Glitch" is recorded as part of the beast care assessment.]
[NOTE: Accelerated review indicates earlier consideration. It does not indicate approval. No additional assessment is scheduled. No Fourth-Class facility access is granted at this time.]
Jin read it twice on the walk back from Nutrition, then sat on a low wall outside the hall and read it a third time.
The line that mattered was the one about the recovery plan.
Somebody had put Glitch’s rest schedule into his promotion file. Whether Jin followed a technician’s instructions for six days was now a category a committee would look at, alongside his grades and his mission record. Depending on which way he turned his head, that was either the most reasonable thing Meridian had ever done or a leash.
They want boring until the review. They want to see somebody who does the same correct thing over and over until it stops being interesting.
And in his pocket was a phone containing a quarry, a colony, an intelligent thing guarding a doorway, and a lower passage nobody had ever walked down.
The timing was almost funny. Meridian was asking for consistency at exactly the moment the Engine was offering him a mystery, and the fastest way to lose the review was to produce another unexplained improvement or another exhausted beast in a medical bay.
He put the slate away.
Boring, then. I can do boring. I’ve been doing boring my entire life on purpose.
On the sixth day Pell cleared Glitch by message, and Jin ran the first exercise in an unused study room with a poured floor and the door shut.
One vibration source. A ration tin and three marked spots on the floor, the closest four meters away.
Two minutes on the timer.
"Ready?"
Glitch put his chin on the floor and closed his eyes. Jin watched the tension come into his shoulders as the sense opened, and watched for the thing he had learned to watch for in a tunnel.
It did not appear. Glitch’s breathing stayed even. Jin scraped the tin across the poured floor to the first mark, waited, then lifted it and set it down at the second. Glitch tracked both movements, called the direction correctly with a flick of his tail each time, and got the distance wrong by half a meter in the same direction he always did.
The timer hit two minutes.
"Off."
Glitch did not turn it off. He sent Jin a bright, eager pulse that was as close to I can keep going as a lizard could manage without vocabulary, and lifted his head as though the exercise had barely started.
"I know you can. Off."
The reluctance came through in full. Jin sat there and did not argue with it and did not extend the timer, and after four or five seconds the sense closed.
"Good. Now you do nothing for the rest of the day."
Glitch produced an emotion aimed squarely at the concept of timers.
Jin fed him, which resolved most of it.
Same as it was, he noted afterward, in the private ledger he kept in his own head. Not stronger for six days off, not weaker either. Flat.
That was the whole result, and flat was the result he had wanted.
He waited until Glitch was asleep before opening the Engine.
That mattered to him now in a way it had not two weeks ago. The real Glitch lay on the floor beside the bunk with his sides moving slowly, six days rested, restricted to two-minute intervals, and nothing that happened in the next few hours was going to touch him.
Jin brought up the dungeon list.
[Shattered Iron Quarry — Sector 4C]
[Status: Incomplete]
[Sub-Level Structure: Unmapped]
[Deploy digital avatar? Y/N]
The avatar goes down. He stays here.
He pressed Y.
The load took three seconds. The avatar resolved at the surface entrance with full condition and a skill it had earned across nine days of dying.
Jin gave it a moment to settle, then opened Tremor Sense.
The quarry came up through the stone, and the first thing in it, ahead of the water and the settling rubble and the wind through the upper cuts, was a rhythm coming from a long way down.
Heavy. Measured. Three beats and a pause.
It had not moved from the descent.
Hello again, Jin thought, and started walking.