Extraction: Infinite Hunger

By the third day in the cabin, everyone had settled into their own rhythm.

Dane would lecture in the mornings while Vivian trained outside in silence.

Sheila would come and go as she pleased between lectures, while Vivian trained outside in silence.

That left Ash to take over the day chores like cooking and cleaning, while Vivian trained outside in silence.

Lectures could happen spontaneously in the same manner as unregistered Gates. The morning’s lecture usually started over the four eating breakfast, though there wasn’t much food for any of them to have a complete meal.

Sheila came from her room wearing one of Ash’s hoodies which ran to her upper thigh and took a seat beside Ash. Vivian had already gone outside, also wearing one of them. The sound of her ’work’ punched through the cabin walls.

The sound of her came through the walls in intervals like something with a schedule. It made the inside of the cabin feel smaller than it was, the three of them compressed into the space between her sets.

Dane kept his hands locked around his mug of tea, his hood up, like the cold could travel through the sealed doors and windows.

"As you two know, a Hollow is what’s left," he began, "when a Shade consumes its host from the inside. Someone spends a long time not looking at what they carry. It can get hungry, and then, one morning, nobody sits at the table but the appetite."

Dane set what he carried onto the table. Starting with condiments. "Everyone has a Shade," he began, setting pepper next. "Most people suppress their Shades. That’s a good thing and a bad thing." He finally sat his now empty mug down and poured another cup. "Shades can calcify. The suppression lingers so long it fuses shut. And then—"

He didn’t say the word. His finger lingered in the gap between the cup and the spoon a second longer than it had stayed anywhere else in the row.

Ash kept his face down and tried to sip the tea. He spat it back into the mug and coughed into the sleeve of his hoodie.

"There’s that stretch before the end where there’s still a face," he said. "The posture matches your own, walks like how a person should walk, reaches for things the same way they used to. You can tell them apart in a lineup blindfolded." He reached for a spoon and stirred his tea. "That’s the part that’s hard to be close to. Not the finished thing that wants to rip off people’s heads. The almost."

He tapped the side of his mug twice. "You stop correcting them. After a while you stop saying the name wrong, stop laughing at the wrong thing. You learn to match. And then you look at yourself one day and realize how much of what you did was theirs."

He turned the spoon over and left it inside the mug.

"I have watched people get close to this work and thin out from it. Researchers who stayed near the edge of it for too long come back looking less like themselves every time. You can’t name what’s gone, only that the room feels different from how it was before." He picked the cup up and sipped. "Questions?"

Ash and Sheila looked at each other.

"We kind of already knew—"

Outside, a heavy sound reverberated throughout the lodge, stopping Ash’s remark.

"Right," Dane merely said and continued drinking his tea.

The monotonous sound from one of Dane’s instruments changed pitch after that.

Most days, it hummed as a perfect quiet metronome Ash could avoid thinking about. Now, it wanted to be heard, making its noise faster and louder. Dane rose to his feet before Ash had finished processing the new sound.

Dane pulled on gloves while he spoke. "A perfect nothing will still draw things in. Anything looking for something to be near comes here, because here is the only place of interest for hundreds of miles."

He opened the door, the cold hitting an unprepared Sheila less hard than it hit Ash.

A figure came for them forward and only forward. One shoulder hunched higher than the other, fixed in place. It didn’t look at any of them. It came for them because they stood in front of it.

Ash grabbed a knife from the table and sliced open his palm. The blood came up and settled into a half-clear dagger.

Ash stepped up to it, and with a single slice to the Hollow’s head, it came apart without any resistance. The Hollow’s eyes held on Ash until it collapsed into red dust over the snow and settled, rather than dissolving. The dust smoked faintly before the wind took it.

The dagger disintegrated with the Hollow and left something behind. Like the moment before pain when the body figures out what happened to it. His ribs felt like a fist had squeezed them. His vision went sideways, then flat, then came back in a single bright burst that left the snow looking too white. He pressed one hand into the ground. The blood from his palm had already frozen into the shape of the cut, a black seam in the snow.

The feeling of using two abilities at the same time sent Ash tumbling to his knees and planted face-first in the snow. He had caused more damage to himself internally than anything a pathetic low-rank Hollow ever could.

Dane came out with as much gear as he could carry in both arms. Sheila peered out from behind him. "The Hollow—where did the Hollow go?" he stammered. His eyes scanned the area, and with no sign of the Hollow in his eyesight, he placed his equipment down and furiously tapped everything he could.

"The mechanism is all that’s left when a person stops being able to hold it back," Ash responded, spitting snow out of his mouth.

It was what Lucia had told him for why a person turns into a Hollow. Now, he had just used it to explain why he executed a Hollow without any remains. He hadn’t planned to say it like that. It had come out polished, like a rehearsed line and fired the line at the first opportunity.

Dane reached for his notes, uncapping a pen with his teeth and writing down on his notepad. He capped the pen after, looking at what he had written, then back at Ash. "I’ve been out here for well over a year. The list of things I can’t account for only gets longer with each passing day. You’re on it now."

A second Hollow’s face appeared first before the rest of its body appeared through the snowstorm. Sheila had already jumped over Dane and Ash before either had reacted to the new spontaneous threat. In an instant, her fist caved in the Hollow’s head, punching through all the sinew, bones, and muscles that made up a Hollow.

Its head exploded. Dark fluid sprayed out from its neck, and like a Hollow should, began to dissolve. She checked her hands, clean and immaculate, only softly rigid from the snow and frost claiming a part of them. She shook them off as she stood over Ash, who still had his face in the snow.

"You go down every time you use that thing," she said.

"It’s new," he responded, feeling Sheila grab his hood and pick him back up to his feet.

"You should get faster at standing, then," she said, carrying him back into the cabin.

Vivian came around from the side of the lodge. She looked at the snow where the first one had settled, then at Sheila, then at Ash still dangling by his hood. She turned back around the corner without a word, and a moment later the sound of her training came back through the walls like it had never stopped.

Dane didn’t offer any explanation, but he did write another line in his notepad before returning himself.

Inside, the cold finally let go of them, the heat returning in stages, just as the sound of Vivian’s training deafened the lodge again.

"They don’t fight you," Dane said, picking up the lesson before it had been interrupted. "People expect a fight. You won’t find a fight in there. Whatever’s left runs on the one thing it kept, and that’s going forward. It comes at you because you’re in front of it, and that is the only word it knows."

He set his tea cup back down, checking through his records before returning to the table again.

"Most things have a size they stop at. Fruits, vegetables, people. Hollows don’t. Every Shade it folds in, it keeps, coming out the other side bigger and arranged differently. The old body still sits in there somewhere, holding up the new shape."

He pulled the row of objects on the table back toward himself one at a time and returned them to their original positions, as if resetting the day.