Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Around Sheila and Locke, a snow bowl had formed around them, gathering to the height of their chests. The ambient heat from their fight slowly melted it, condensing it tight.

Beyond lay the dead stretch of tundra where nothing stood except a small warm cabin.

The snow began to settle.

Locke’s hands came up, her left shoulder pressed forward, her right elbow kept close to her side. She anchored her weight on the left foot. She hadn’t bothered with a guard until now.

Sheila came forward, her shoulders down and weight low. She was moving like a train, stopping for nothing in front of her, and would hit it straight on without apology.

Locke’s encroaching jab found Sheila high on her brow. Sheila turned into it and drove her right hand into Locke’s sternum. She moved back two inches off the permafrost. Locke threw a right cross in the same motion, landing at the hinge of Sheila’s jaw. Sheila’s head moved with the impact to absorb it.

Locke folded herself into a gate from behind her, appearing the next moment from Sheila’s left side. Her palm already extended in a strike toward Sheila’s heart. Sheila pivoted and dropped down, the strike catching her shoulder instead. She raised her elbow back into Locke’s collarbone on the follow-through, a wet gasp burst from her lips, spit flecking the snow.

Locke created a Gate; Sheila already tracked where she would appear.

Each Gate left a residue behind, smelling like burnt crystals that compounded with the atmosphere around her. Now, a low vibration settled in the back of her jaw, a low vibration that didn’t quite clear between exits, grinding against her teeth like pressure building up in the ears at great depth.

A new Gate formed ahead to Sheila’s right. She already swung at whatever came through. Her fist caught Locke’s shoulder the instant her body cleared the threshold. Locke’s trailing leg still hung inside the Gate when it collapsed around it. The opposing forces wrenched her shoulder back and inward.

The Gate shattered.

Pulverized permafrost blew outward from the exit point. Locke came through facing the opposite direction, her right arm hanging for a half-second before it climbed back up into a guard. Sheila’s follow-up caught Locke’s temple. Skin split. Blood ran down Locke’s lashes and froze almost instantly.

Locke stepped through a Gate, emerged blotting her brow with a handkerchief, and let the wind take it.

Sheila’s left hook drove into Locke’s right side with the whole turn of Sheila’s hips behind it. The cracked rib gave all at once, a wet crack that went flat across the bowl. The broken edge folded inward and tore through the lining of the lung. No breath came out of Locke. It forced itself between her teeth as a fine pink mist that froze the instant it left the heat of her, and her right knee buckled to the permafrost.

She let herself fall into a gate and came back low, almost kneeling. Sheila saw it coming and threw her entire forearm at Locke. Her right fist drove into Locke’s jaw. The blood in her mouth went from seeping to running, iron and salt coating the back of the throat. She spat blood into the snow. It melted a small, red-rimmed hollow where it landed.

Locke’s breath rattled wet. A sucking pull where an exhale should have been. Pink mist with every breath, freezing before it could fall.

Locke opened up three Gates around them.

One in the space in front of Sheila, another behind her right shoulder, and finally one she embedded in the permafrost at her feet.

Six Hollows spilled through the Gates. C-ranks. Thin gray skin, knee joints bent wrong. They lurched into a sprint, all of them locked on the same target.

Forward.

Their joints clicked with every stride. Sheila felt the sound in her chest before she heard it. The nearest one to Sheila had already reached her before she finished her pivot, close enough that the smell of wet rot with something sweet underneath it radiated from its skin.

The Hollow stopped mid-step. Then took one step behind it. Then another. Another.

It tangled itself with another Hollow behind it, becoming a mess of wrongly angled limbs. Each one clawed at the ice, trying to get further from Sheila, neither of them managing it. The two Hollow farthest from her on the left turned on each other in an instant. Their fists collided with one another; the impact sending them skidding across the permafrost on their backs.

The final two ran through the Gate still opened, not slowing down until their dislocated forms passed fully through the threshold of the Gate still open.

One of the tangled-up Hollows cleared itself from the other, turned from Sheila entirely, and moved towards Locke.

She planted her feet, both hands up as if expecting this.

Her heel pressed hard into the permafrost, creating a Gate directly in front of her and the Hollow’s path. The Hollow walked through, and she sealed the Gate shut behind, wiping her hands clean. The two that had been fighting each other staggered upright and crawled through another Gate she made around them.

The snow bowl had gone quiet. Where the Hollow had fallen, black-green ichor had pooled into the cracks in the ice, spreading slowly at the edges. The sweet-rot scent of Hollows lifted into the cold air.

Locke breathed through the right side in short sips. They had drifted apart in the lull, close enough still that the rattling in her ribs carried across the gap between them without her lifting her voice.

"I wasn’t running away from the academy that day." Locke’s hands stilled at the midpoint. "When I left, I saw a... new direction." The breath from the right came in tight pulls. "I knew everything about Gates the academy taught us. I knew nothing about the Gate that came in front of us."

Sheila spat a large blob of saliva into the snow by her heels.

Locke faintly smiled. "I held the door open for you." The tundra background was blurring around Sheila. "I thought it was a gift. I thought you were the same person as me. It’s why we were friends for so long. I thought you would stop long enough to see what I found."

"I guess there are still things in this world you don’t know everything about."

"You’re right." Her voice dropped low. "I now know you’d rather believe the academy’s curriculum on Gates and Hollows than the truth in front of you." She pressed her fist into her right side until the emptiness of the tundra came back.

Sheila closed the gap between them in two strides, driving her fist into Locke’s sternum.

Sheila dropped her hips, driving a left hook from below. Locke sacrificed her already broken ribs, instead of her liver, the broken edges grinding again from the impact. She folded through a Gate, came back even lower, rising with her knee leading.

Sheila drove through the block. Her forehead drove up into Locke’s chin and snapped her head back. Locke’s feet shuffled.

Sheila buried both hands into the collar of Locke’s dress and twisted the fabric tight across her throat. Locke’s knee-high boots carved twin tracks across the permafrost.

Sheila planted her left heel and drove her right knee up into Locke’s stomach. Blood and spit sprayed from Locke’s teeth onto the snow between them. Sheila changed her grip, grabbing Locke and throwing her into the snow wall. Six feet of packed snow collapsed over Locke’s shoulders and head, burying her to the waist, until it suddenly collapsed further.

A Gate tore open behind Sheila. She already turned; Locke’s incoming strike caught her upper arm instead of her jaw. Sheila gripped her arm; her punch striking Locke’s right side. Her diaphragm cramped shut where nothing moved in. A Gate swallowed her whole.

She came back standing, her breath rattling on both ends now, wet and horrifically audible. Every exhale pushed a faint layer of pink into the snow. Her earlier wound to the temple had split back open, fresh blood emerging through the crust and smearing across her chin. Her right hand held the guard, trembling with the effort of keeping the arm up.

Locke stood back up, throwing a desperate knee to Sheila’s midsection. Sheila caught it on her forearm and shoved it wide. A short right hand found Locke’s jaw. Her knee drove into Locke’s midsection as the momentum carried her forward. Locke bent over, her left hand curling into a fist aiming for Sheila’s ribs before Sheila’s elbow caught her across the split brow. The frozen crust broke with a sound like cracked ceramic. The wound opened clean, blood ran directly into her right eye.

She took two steps back, Sheila followed. Locke threw a knee to create space. Sheila took it on her shin, and kept moving forward. She drove her shoulder into Locke’s chest and pushed her back into the snow-bowl wall.

Locke folded through another Gate in the wall, emerging at the center. Her right-side fingers had stopped feeling the cold entirely. She swallowed again. The blood pooled warmer each time.

The percussion ringing through the permafrost stopped.

It had been running before the fight started, constant enough that their feet had stopped registering it as separate from the cold. The absence landed first through their feet, neither looking away from each other.

Sheila drove a right cross at Locke’s jaw. Her left hand cut under the extension and rotated Sheila off-axis. Sheila’s guard had opened up for a full second. Locke stepped back, her right hand pressing flat against her side and held it.

Sheila stopped. Her eyes locked on Locke’s right side, tracking the fingers Locke kept pressing there between exchanges. The blood along Locke’s brow had frozen in layers, the old crust had darkened and cracked, the new blood tracking through the ridges and freezing in turn. Her right eye worked through the smear of red in her vision.

The blood from her right palm had worked between her knuckles and frozen in the creases. Her right hand left a faint dark print on the dress each time she pressed it to her side.

Across the tundra, the thin dark line of the cabin sat against the horizon. Heat still rose from it in a faint shimmer above the roofline, the stove still running for a room with no one in it.