Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Ash had not gone back to sleep.

Despite his best attempts to fall asleep, one issue kept piling on another. He squirmed in the seat he called his bed that night, just hoping for anything to happen to give him an excuse to get up from it.

From well beyond where he would venture alone, he could feel Vivian’s Shade signature rise and fall each second. He thought she was doing some hardcore training and was about to use this as an excuse to finally leave the cabin.

The air changed close to the cabin.

Ash shot to his feet despite not knowing what had hit. The pressure descended in the same way he felt the Boreal arrive on the autonomous train. Instantly, a harsh drop that punched behind his eyes.

Except the Boreal was singular.

This felt like the whole horizon fell over on him at once. He went to the window. Across the snow, a ring of Gates replaced the dark, circling the cabin.

The sound of Dane opening his door and stumbling out with various equipment made Ash look away from the encroaching disaster in front of him. "That’s not one Gate," he said. "That isn’t how they open."

The smaller tears gave out first. Hollows between C and D ranks spilled out of them, doing the only instinct Hollows knew in their new life. Forward. All driven by zero higher logic, anchored entirely by the pull of the single structure in thousands of miles of absolute zero.

The Hollows came at the cabin from every angle, all at once without any further thought.

And at the center of the largest tear, where the dark folded back on itself, a young girl sat on the lip of it, her legs swinging back and forth like a swing set.

She had long, flowing hair that shifted from light brown at the roots to a striking, luminous blue, with twin braids framing either side of her face. Her eyes were an electric blue and her smile said she was pleased by the mayhem around her.

She wore a sleek, form-fitting black high-collared dress, its ragged edges dissolving at the hem. The dress left her toned legs exposed before ending in blue knee-high boots.

The girl watched the Hollows advance with detached boredom like she watched rain outside a window.

The hunger turned toward her on its own and then stopped, baffled.

Ash thought he had read every kind of Shade by now. The ones that ignored him. The ones his hunger ignored. Then there were the ones that were like a freshly baked pie, whose signatures made him and his hunger gravitate toward their presence like a moth to a light.

This Shade bore no resemblance to any of those. He could feel the Shade’s architecture. It resembled a grand library, vast and well built. But when he tried to actually read it, her Shade read like a foreign language he didn’t know. The hunger tried to poke at it, went around it twice after finding no seam to get into, and went quiet.

Sheila’s footsteps came up behind Ash. She came wearing one of his hoodies; the sleeves went well past her hands. She started rolling them up when she noticed the girl swinging her legs in the mouth of the Gate.

"Locke," Sheila said.

Locke raised her arm in a fist. At once, all the Hollows around them halted.

"You stayed," she said. Her tone was mild and deliberate. Her eyes went over Sheila once, noticing a similar-looking hoodie to the boy next to her. "And you’re in someone else’s clothes. That’s new."

"Yeah," Sheila admitted. "Looks like you turned into an emo bitch after you left the academy. I wonder where you got that idea with your hair."

Her mouth almost curved into a smile, then retracted. "I did ask you to come with me," she said. "You told me you weren’t finished here. I assumed you intended to finish out your time in Aegis."

"Don’t," Sheila said.

"I’m not doing anything," Locke said. She lowered her arm and the Hollows advanced once more. "Oops, I guess now I am."

Ash dropped a gravity field where Locke sat swinging, detonating straight down onto the lip of the tear.

He didn’t expect it to land. He wanted to see what she would do.

Locke let herself fall into the Gate, then came out two steps to the left of where she had been.

Ash’s gravity field cratered the empty edge of where she had sat, shattering the permafrost into a smoking hemisphere. Locke settled into her new location, gracefully crossing her ankles, and let her heels resume their unbothered swing.

A Hollow appeared at his blind side. He dropped a gravity field on it without turning, crashing six times its own physical weight straight through the crown of its skull. The cranium went flat to the snow with a wet crack, the pressurized black ichor fanned outward and froze instantly where it spread. He stepped off the corpse.

Sheila tested no boundaries.

She took the first Hollow standing between her and the Gate by the jaw and folded it backward over her knee until the spine cracked like a log, the ribs splaying as the creature dropped. She drove her fist completely through the chest cavity of the second, her knuckles bursting out its back in a spray of black sludge off the broken sternum. She shook her arm dry.

Then her eyes snapped to Locke.

For a single worthless second, Locke fell a half-step behind a threat she had categorized too low. Sheila’s fist tore through the frozen air in a flat arc, packing the entire uncapped weight into her knuckles. Locke casually raised a slender forearm into the strike path. The crack of bone striking bone echoed like a rifle shot across the snowfield. Locke’s entire frame physically slid backward from the punch, her heels carving two neat, parallel trenches into the ice.

Her regal composure held still; she calculated the weight transfer in an instant and didn’t look concerned about the result.

"Kidding!" she said cheerfully. "You didn’t think I would let you win like all those other times we fought."

Locke opened a Gate on the ground and came out through another one fifteen feet in the air, returning to her delicate posture, swinging her legs.

Dane had not run or called for emergency help.

He stood flush against the cabin wall with a reader gripped tightly in both hands, acting as a support unit. "There are two Hollows coming wide on your right, Ash. The central tear is completely stable." His voice climbed an octave and thinned out. He recorded the nightmare meticulously, even now, his eyes cutting frantically from the shaking instrument in his left hand to the girl sitting on the Gate and back.

The absolute awe and sheer terror radiated off him at the same time.

Locke finally cast her gaze on Ash for the first time.

"You don’t read; your poor academic scores reflect that. I wondered whether you would. You give the appetite behind your eyes nothing to hold, and it doesn’t care for that." Her head went the other way. "Nor do I. But you’ve already shown me the part I came to look at. You can go now."

Locke had already physically looked away from Ash by the time she had finished her sentence, her gaze instead peering through the cabin toward the meticulous instruments and research notes inside.

The Hollows continued pouring in while Locke casually watched them exhaust the defenders. Ash dropped two with crushing fields; Sheila drove her fist through a half-Hollow’s jaw and slammed another into the permafrost, bones splintering. The mindless cadence bled them dry.

Ash’s knees attempted to lock together to maintain his vertical posture. A long, desperate drag was required before each breath found its way back into his burning lungs. Sheila stood a few paces away with her chest heaving hard, the borrowed hoodie stained black up to the cuffs, her hands resting open at her sides because closing them into fists demanded more energy than she currently retained.

"You’re going to pay to have that cleaned. It was one of my favorites," Ash said through heavy breaths.

"How about I get us through this alive first, and then we can discuss how you’re going to treat me once we get back to Aegis Academy?" Sheila said.

Locke had not shifted from the exact center of the storm. She had waited patiently for exactly this physiological state.

She stepped gracefully off the lip of the Gate and walked toward the cabin, her heels resting lightly in the snow, two fingers pinching her skirt up out of the wet permafrost.

Ash threw himself into her path, but his legs gave up. Sheila lunged and came up just as short. Locke walked through the gap between them without breaking stride.

She bypassed them completely, arriving at the cabin wall, directly in front of Dane.

"You wrote a massive volume of theory concerning this," she said, her tone gently accommodating, her eyes resting on the reader still violently shaking in his hands. "I reviewed a portion of it. It represents exceptionally sound academic work."

"Please, don’t do this," Dane whispered.

She laid her bare hand directly onto his shoulder.

When a blue light sparkled beneath her palm, his facial expression did not bother fighting the inevitable. He had understood the shape of this nightmare longer than any of them.

"Fascinating," Locke murmured, her tone genuinely academic as she watched the old gray mark on the side of his neck violently expand. "I always wanted to document how the biological collapse felt from the host’s side of the equation."