Extraction: Infinite Hunger

The snow bowl had melted at the rim and frozen again. Sheila and Locke fought for breath at the bottom, lungs no longer working fully, a stride apart, neither with the wind left to close it first.

The bottom of the bowl had glazed over, melted by the fight and frozen hard again, slick over the churned ice underneath.

Sheila started anyway. She crossed the last of the distance, her lead foot skated out from under her on the glaze. The right hand she threw landed low and clumsy off the broken side instead of into it. Locke didn’t dodge so much as fall away from it, the air opening at her back and dropping her through. She emerged a stride off with her palm flat to the rib and a thread of pink vapor riding the breath between her teeth.

"You held the door for me?" Sheila’s voice came out thick, blood moving on her chin when she spoke. She pressed on again, slower, planting each foot now against the ice that wanted to take it out from under her. "You stood in that alley and the whole time you thought I’d walk through with you?"

"I thought we were the same." The words came wet. Locke breathed in with a whistle, snagging on a cracked bone that didn’t want to give the air back. She gave ground as she talked, a Gate opening at her shoulder, the next one at her hip, each exit a half-step shorter than the last. "You ran from the body. I walked—" her voice failed. She dragged it back in a thin wet pull "—toward the door. I thought it was one instinct pointed two ways."

Sheila read the next opening before it finished and put a fist through it. It caught Locke high on the cheek as she cleared the threshold, no power left in it to be clean, but it turned her head, splitting the skin and put her down onto a knee.

"So that’s what you meant."

"You always understood me." Locke got the wrist of her glove up and dragged it through the blood sheeting into her eye. The smile under it was small and red along the gum line. "Even when running the other direction."

Sheila went at her with what the fight had left, which was not much and not pretty. She slipped coming in and caught herself on the way down. The hook that she threw off it found the broken side more by luck than aim.

It went in. The rib that had already come apart inside her drove the rest of the way through what it had been resting against. Locke coughed up foam, pink and aerated, bubbling at her lips where the lung was emptying itself into places a lung doesn’t go. Her legs let go under her. The air took her out of the fall and set her down four steps off, swaying, both hands at her side now, done pretending she was choosing to stay.

Across the snow bowl, Ash stood at the edge of the cleared ground by the cabin, on his feet and not much past it, the cabin’s heat still bending the air over the roofline behind him. There was blood dried black into the cuff of his hoodie that wasn’t fully his and hadn’t come from anything he wanted to do. The cold reached the whole way into him now that he had nothing left to push it back with.

Locke felt a Shade approach before Ash did.

Out past the bowl a Shade flared across the tundra, burning brighter the nearer it drew. The figure containing it was tearing a line through the snowdrifts, throwing snow off both sides.

Vivian.

Locke’s hand dropped from the rib and hung at her side. Whatever had kept her face pleasant the whole fight wasn’t keeping it now.

Ash bit into the meat below his thumb and tore until it opened. The blood came up too fast and too much, more than the wound had any business giving, dragging out of him in a rope that hit the cold and seized. It froze as it left him, jagged where the freeze caught it mid-flow, the outside crusting black while the core still tried to run. By the time he got his shoulder squared the coagulating blood in his fist was longer than his forearm, an ugly uneven shard with the heat of him still trapped at the heart of it, the edge of it not quite willing to hold still.

Out past Locke, Ash could hear Vivian now, the hard quick crunch of her feet over the frozen ground, close enough to throw to. He turned his shoulder and threw. The throw took what left he had in him, making Ash fall face forward into the snow. He forced his head up against the snow to see where his spear flew.

The spear tore the air open as it went. It passed Locke’s ear, through the brown locks that hadn’t been dyed blue, close enough to stir them. She followed the motion with her eyes.

"You missed," she stated.

The spear should have buried itself in the snow forty strides on. It stopped a stride behind her instead.

Vivian had come up over the rim of the bowl at a dead run, bare-knuckled, the remains of Hollows she had fought on her way back still drying dark up both sleeves of Ash’s hoodie. Her spine was carrying her wrong where it had broken. She took the spear out of the air without breaking stride, the frozen crust of it rough enough to give her cold fingers somewhere to close.

Vivian launched off the ground with the spear hauled back as she rose.

"Wait! She can—"

Locke’s hand rose between them, fingers loose. "Some sacrifices are meant to be paid." She wore the same documentary smile she’d worn over Dane. "Not by me."

Clap

The air fractured inward around the sound. Where Locke had stood there was a man now, a stranger in a coat made for some other country, a ring of keys still hooked over one finger. "—no, she’d love it, you should get her the—" The cold reached him before the rest of it could. He had started to turn toward it when the swing descended.

The shadow of Vivian fully engulfed his face.

The spear caught him at the joint of the neck and shoulder and went through without slowing, through the collarbone, through the ribs, through the crowded heat of him, and out above the hip. The two halves leaned into each other, held up by nothing but the other’s weight, then came apart. The inside of him opened to the air, loops of him sliding free and steaming where they touched the snow.

One half slapped down against the permafrost, heavy and boneless, meat that had lost the shape that held it. The other thumped down across it. The blood that hit the ice hissed and went to a skin of frost. The stink of everything that had been closed inside him opened all at once into the cold, hot, sweet and foul. The keys landed somewhere apart from both.

"—swap places with people," Sheila finished, letting herself catch a breath in peace, bringing her hands onto her knees.

Vivian dropped out of the swing in a crouch, the spear buried to the grip in the permafrost, snow hissing off it where the cold met what was still warm on it. She rose looking for Locke. She found the two halves of someone she had never seen.

The spear pulled free of the permafrost when she pulled it and brought a thread of him up with it. She looked at that, at her own hands around the grip.

She turned a slow circle with the spear held low, looking for the rest of it, for what she could have put the point through instead. Nothing in the bowl moved but her.

The wet sounds had stopped, nothing came to replace it. The wind had dropped out of the bottom of the bowl. Snow let go of the rim in slow handfuls, the steam came up off the opened body and thinned into the cold.

Sheila had not lowered her arm. The rest of the warning was still in it.

Nobody moved to the body. There was nothing to do to it the cold wasn’t already doing.

Ash crossed the snow toward them, slow. The blood had run out ahead of the body, threading down the slope of the snow, his own in it as much as the stranger’s. He stopped where it reached his feet. He looked at the two halves of the man, and then at the spear in Vivian’s hand.

Behind them the cabin went on making heat for a room with no one in it.

The wind came up over the rim of the bowl and started the snow falling again, new snow, the kind that would fill the space where they all fought. The red of the strangers blood. The steps where he had taken his last breath.

The snow would cover it all before they woke up the next day.