Extraction: Infinite Hunger

The autonomous moving train car was still moving north.

Ash looked out the window to count the cars still coupled to theirs. None. Eleven had pulled out of the platform that morning.

The intercom chirped.

"Your destination is forty minutes away." The robotic voice came apart as it spoke, the volume swinging up and cutting out. Every word was smeared and distorted at the edges before the next one started.

After fighting the Boreal, the train hadn’t been delayed a minute.

Vivian stood where the wall used to be, working her dead shoulder, watching the north that the Chimera had walked into. The wind off the tundra pulled her loose hair flat and she didn’t seem to feel it.

The car went over a break in the rail. Ash’s chest lit up white, and he breathed around it in halves until the track went smooth enough to let him stop.

Across from him, Sheila had her sleeves pushed back. She turned one forearm over, then the other, watching the dark come up under the skin where she’d caught the column. The blood that had gone into her blouse had dried stiff and brown down the side of it.

"You’re worse off than I am," she said.

"I noticed."

A sensation brushed against Ash’s lower leg. He looked down to see one of the Boreal’s blue-coal eyeballs had gotten into the train car with them. Up close, it was nearly up to his knee, sitting down. His attention turned to the remaining car they rode in. Walls were stained in a mixture of black fluids from the Boreal with their own red blood acting as highlights when the light hit the surface just right.

More importantly, it was the car he had entered. His packed travel bag was just to the left of where the three of them sat. His hoodies were safe. He didn’t want to ask what the two of them would do for clothes, but he already had an idea.

He leaned back against the seat and reached down.

"Pervert," Sheila said.

Ash ignored her and took out the artbook he had tucked in his pants waistband.

"You were fighting with a handicap this entire time?" Vivian yelled. She brought both hands to Ash’s neck and choked him.

"If I was going to die. I wanted it on me," he let out.

Vivian released her grip and let him breathe.

Outside, the tundra had stopped having anything in it entirely. The car began to slow down.

Once the car stopped and the doors peeled open, the cold came in. A pressure so intense it felt like Ash had placed a gravity field on top of him without realizing it. His breath came, but it didn’t travel very far. He grabbed his bag and stepped off. The snow was dense and hard to move through. It swallowed him up to his waist. Vivian and Sheila weren’t much better, the snow going all the way to their mid chest.

One structure was the only thing visible through the vast emptiness of the snow-white tundra. A cabin, built atop the piled-up snow, but its architecture looked like it extended deep underground. Smoke was billowing from the chimney.

The door opened ajar, and a figure made their presence known, slightly covered by steam escaping from within the cabin. Their fur-lined hood was kept up and their hand was gesturing for the three of them to get in quickly.

Vivian trekked in front of them, paving a path for Ash and Sheila to follow.

Up close, he looked to be in his forties, but stuck in his twenties. His eyes met the three students approaching, giving each of them a nod and nothing more.

Ash whispered to Sheila, "Are field trips normally like this?"

She gave a shrug as they entered the cabin, the door sealing shut behind them. Inside, tea sat steaming on a table in front of them.

"You three are right on time, just as the schedule said you would be, although the academy email didn’t say anything about the condition the students would arrive in." The man’s nose picked up a whiff of the three of them, then took one step back to where he already had a cup of tea poured for himself, letting the smell of that dominate his senses.

After stabilizing, he poured the rest of them a cup each.

Vivian glanced around the cabin; Ash followed her head. There was a stairwell going down, and several doors placed throughout the cabin.

"Right, where are my manners? All of the bedrooms are going to be on the lower floors. The upstairs rooms are for my lab equipment and personal quarters."

Vivian didn’t ask for sleeping assignments. She went down the stairwell, opened the first door she saw, and slammed it shut, deafening the subtle hum from the man’s equipment.

Ash gave Sheila a small nod. She carefully went down herself and entered the same room as Vivian. Ash could hear them beginning to speak, but couldn’t quite make out their conversation.

Ash was the only one remaining, so the man simply set a cup for himself and gestured Ash to take a seat wherever.

Ash remained standing.

"You’ll want to know why anyone’s stationed out here," the man said, turning his cup a quarter-turn on the table. "The Spontaneous Gates. The ones standard equipment can’t pick up. Here where there is absolutely nothing, it’s a lot easier to pick up signals like that before they happen. So far in the fourteen months I’ve been here, I’ve been able to detect three of them before they appeared. There really isn’t any pattern you can get from when or where they spawn. They just do, which explains why they’re called spontaneous—"

"Who are you?" Ash asked, stopping his impromptu lecture.

He caught himself and stopped. "Sorry. I get sidetracked talking about this. I’m Dane." He turned the cup the rest of the way around. "We’re in the field, so you can drop the formalities. Just Dane is preferable. I’ll be your and your friends’ supervisor for the next month.

Downstairs, the sound of Vivian and Sheila’s conversation died down, the door opening again and then closing shut. Another door opened and closed, followed by the sound of running water.

"How long have you been out here?" Ash asked.

"Four months in this stretch. You three are the first faces since the last supply drop. I’d make you something better than what the train carries, but the train carries what it carries." He tried again, lighter. "Did they brief you on the work before they sent you out, or did they put three names on the worst line and wave you through?"

"The second one," Ash said.

Dane nodded, like he’d expected that answer. "You’ll get used to the place. Most days are instruments and waiting. The waiting is the job and reward. People hear ’Gate research’ and picture the moment one opens, but the moment is maybe a minute a year. The rest is learning the quiet well enough that when it changes, you feel it before the equipment does." He looked between them. "That part I can teach you."

Below them, a door opened. Vivian’s blood-soaked face peeked out from the stairwell. "How many Hollows and Half-Hollows come through this area?"

Dane seemed to like that answer, a grin appearing on his face. "Very often."

"Then that’s the part I care about." She went back down to her room, now another wave of running water drowning out the ambient sounds of the cabin.

Dane watched her retreat back downstairs, returning to his cup of tea. "Pick whatever room you like down there and clean up like the others. There’s plenty of space for everyone here despite the look of things from the outside."

Ash took a sip of the tea. It didn’t taste good. He was already starting to miss the way Phoebe ordered coffee for them.

Later, while chopping vegetables for dinner that night, the knife sliced through his finger.

His blood was already coagulating into a blade of its own, but there was something different about it this time. It wasn’t fully setting correctly. He did his back-up move and began to take the water out of it entirely.

The blade hadn’t gone grey.

Abilities Evolved!

Silca Rot and Hemoglobin Drag → Vitreous Hematite

What hardened in his hand came out the color of arterial glass. Half-clear, taking the stove-light into it instead of throwing it back. It was heavier than blood and lighter than the iron it should have been. The edge of it would not sit still.

He placed the ordinary knife down and used the new bladed weapon on the vegetables in front of him.

It didn’t cut. There was nothing in it to cut against. Where the edge met the exterior surface of them, the entire vegetable dissolved into red dust. The blade continued down to the cutting board. The dust fanned and settled on the work surface in front of him.

The blade dulled to something ordinary in his grip. He turned it over once.

He hadn’t taken this one off anyone.

He had made it on his own.