Chapter 48: One Circulation
Chapter 48: One Circulation
I found the place an hour after dark: a pump house at the end of a row of allotments, brick, one door, one high slit window, and a floor drain that told me there was nothing under it big enough to matter.
I did the whole routine before I did anything else. Checked the door frame, checked the sightlines, worked out which way I’d leave, ate, drank most of a bottle, refilled from a rainwater butt outside, drank more. Then I sat with my back to the wall and let my heart rate come down and waited until my hands were steady and my thinking had stopped feeling like it was arriving through fabric.
That took nearly three hours and I gave it all three, because the one thing I was certain of was that I should not attempt an unknown S-rank technique while my head still hurt from receiving it.
Around midnight, I put the walnut core in my palm and began.
The art told me what to do. It did not do it.
That was the whole difficulty. What I had been given was a structure — a sequence of positions for breath and attention, a route the energy takes, a set of principles about how a body accepts something it was not built to hold. The instructions were perfect. They had clearly been assembled by someone for whom every step was obvious.
I was not that person. I was a man in a pump house holding a rock.
The first attempt failed at the third step, when I lost the thread of where my attention was supposed to be sitting and everything simply stopped. So did the second. On the fourth I got the core to give something up — a thin cold pull out of the stone into my hand, so faint that I nearly convinced myself I’d imagined it — and then I got frightened and lost it.
The sixth attempt was the one that worked, and it was the worst hour of my life that did not involve a monster.
The energy came out of the core reluctantly and went into my arm like wire being drawn through a hole slightly too small for it. It burned. Not heat exactly; more the sensation of something abrasive being pulled along the inside of a limb that has no inside surface to be abraded. When it reached my shoulder my whole arm locked and I couldn’t open my hand.
Don’t stop. Stopping halfway is worse than not starting.
I have no idea whether that was true. It was in the transmitted structure somewhere and I clung to it.
It went down through my chest and I lost the sequence entirely because the pain took my concentration off it, and I had to hold the current where it was — which the art described as trivial and which is not trivial — while I found my place again. Twice more it slipped. Twice more I got it back.
By the time it reached the low turn my back had arched off the wall and my jaw was locked so hard my molars ached, and sweat had soaked through my shirt and was running off my chin onto the concrete. There was a point somewhere in the middle of that turn where I became entirely convinced that this was killing me and that I should let go — a completely calm, reasonable conviction, arriving in my own voice.
I didn’t let go, mostly out of spite.
Then the current came up the far side and completed, and settled, and the world came back.
I lay on my side on the floor of a pump house for a long while.
The core in my hand had gone from dull red to grey. There was nothing left in it worth the name; when I turned it over it was just a stone, and after a while I put it in my pocket rather than throw it away, because I have started keeping things.
And low down, somewhere behind my navel, there was something that had not been there before. A thread. Not warmth, not power — a thin, dense, quiet presence about the size of a grain of rice, and completely, unmistakably real.
One circulation. One weak core. Rice.
I laughed, which hurt.
Because it wasn’t nothing. I had spent eight days learning that nothing is what I usually get. My breathing came back down faster than it should have after that much strain — noticeably faster, ten or fifteen minutes instead of the half hour I’d have expected. That was the whole visible result.
I checked my status afterwards, lying there shaking with a fever coming on. Frail Body. Weak Constitution. Poor Coordination. All three exactly where they had always been, unmoved, unbothered.
Of course. She said gradual. She said painful. She said expensive.
She did not lie about any of it.
I slept a little over three hours and woke before dawn feeling like I’d been in a car accident. The new points were there—I could feel the added strength when I pushed myself upright—but cultivation had emptied something attributes could not replace. My thoughts dragged, my muscles trembled, and the grain of refined energy behind my navel remained offensively small.
By the time the first grey light reached the pump house window, I was moving again. It took me until I had packed my things to notice that I was already planning when to do it a second time.
The radio came from a house two streets over.
I’d gone in for the kitchen and found it in a bedroom, a small yellow battery thing with a hand crank on the side, sitting switched off on a nightstand next to a photograph.
I checked the rest of the room before touching it. Dust lay unbroken beneath the window. The wardrobe held clothes and nothing breathing. I searched the upstairs, then the ground floor, then watched both streets from behind the curtain for five full minutes. No movement. No fresh food, wet footprints, warm ash, or other evidence that the house belonged to someone who might return while I was inside it.
Only then did I wind the crank and turn the radio on.
The broadcast was a loop, three minutes long, a woman’s voice reading the same text over and over with a long tone between repetitions. Fenwick Junction. North-north-east along the old rail cut, then the reservoir road, then follow the marked poles. Water, walls, medical, work available. Open to all survivors. Come in daylight and approach the south gate.
I listened to it four times and wrote the route in the back of my notebook with the pencil stub.
Then I turned it off and returned it to the nightstand.
Water. Walls. Medical. Work available.
Eastbridge would have broadcast exactly that. Word for word. Eastbridge did broadcast exactly that, probably, to whoever they could reach, and I’d have walked in with my hands up and been grateful for the soup.
I wasn’t going to write it off, either. That’s the trap on the other side — deciding all camps are Eastbridge and then dying alone of something a medic could have fixed in ten minutes. What I decided was that I’d take the route, and I’d approach from the treeline, and I’d sit somewhere with a view of that south gate for three or four days before anyone there learned I existed.
Watch what comes out. Watch whether the people going in ever come back out. That’s the only question that matters, and it takes days to answer.
I thought about Eastbridge for a while after that. Not the administrators — the others. 0623, fifty-one years old, moving twice my weight in brick without comment. 0870 with three fingers, who’d started to warn me and stopped when a grey uniform paused at the end of the bench. Nine hundred bands and a hundred and forty uniforms and a ratio that only holds while nobody believes anybody else will move.
I have no idea what happened to them after a knight blew their gate off its hinges.
And I’m not going back. I made myself think it plainly, because I’ve noticed that the things I refuse to phrase are the things that get me killed. I’m Level 13 with a rifle I can barely hold steady and a grain of rice behind my navel. I am not liberating anything. Getting out at all was luck and someone else’s sword.
It sat badly. I let it sit badly. I’ve stopped expecting to feel clean about decisions.
It was a little after eight in the morning. I was maybe forty minutes into the rail cut, moving north-north-east with the route in my head, when the window opened without a sound in front of my eyes.
[Temporary Shelter manifested.]
[Capacity: 50 entrants.]
[Admission: first arrival. No fee.]
[Duration Remaining: 24:00:00]
[Coordinates issued to eligible survivors in this region.]
A map marker sat under the text. Roughly five kilometres south-west, back the way I’d come and then some.
I stood in a rail cutting with weeds up to my knees and stared at it.
A shelter. An actual shelter. They put those in the game — random spawn, twenty-four hours, capped entry, exchange terminals and a vending pool, and the whole point was that the cap made people insane.
Fifty slots. Broadcast to everyone in the region simultaneously.
Every part of me that had spent the last week alone in ruins wanted to keep walking north.
And do what? Trade with whom? I had a Level 15 core in my pack that I could not eat, could not spend, and could not explain to anyone, and the first place I’d be able to convert it into anything was a place with a machine in it. Medicine. Ammunition. Information. Whatever else fifty people between them decided to sell.
An independent survivor with no market is just a man slowly running out of everything he owns.
I turned around and started running south-west.