Extraction: Infinite Hunger

The cabin appeared through the snowstorm that had picked up on the walk back, lights on, smoke still climbing off the chimney.

The wet, rotten, sweet smell hit them as they cleared the bowl. What was left of Dane lay beside the cabin door under a thin crust of new snow. The rest of the professor had come apart in the snow the way Ash had left him, reduced to fine red-grey dust that the wind had already taken.

What stayed behind was the part that had stopped being him. Calcified grey bone shouldered up through the split jacket, ribs fused into one ridged plate, the seam where the Hollow had eaten out from his neck leaking a black fluid that froze in a fan across the step.

Vivian stopped a few feet from the body. She did not ask.

Sheila pushed the door open and the heat rolled over their frozen skin. Four tea cups were placed on the table, the kettle by the stove still full of boiling water.

Sheila sat down hard at the table and put her face in her hands. When she lifted it, her eyes were dry.

She reached for one of the cups and her fingers wouldn’t close on it. The cold had gotten down into the joints somewhere out in the bowl and stayed there. She tried twice, watched her own hand miss, and laid it flat on the wood instead.

"I taught her to throw a punch," she said. "First year. She kept breaking her thumb because she tucked it wrong inside her fist." She laughed to herself. "She was better than me in a week. Better than everyone at everything in a week. That was always the problem."

Ash sat down across from her.

"Do you ever regret it? Not going with her."

"At first," Sheila said. "Then never, then every time I think of her." She turned one of Dane’s cups upright on the table. "She asked me to leave with her like she was asking me to walk to the corner. Like the people we’d leave behind weighed nothing." She put the cup down. "I do wonder what it would have been like that day. If I had gone the other way."

Ash stood and went down the stairs.

He threw the door to his room shut behind him, the latch stopping just short of engaging. He took his hoodie off. It had gone stiff where his blood and Dane’s had dried into it.

A platinum card slid loose from the sleeve, striking the floorboards with a sharp metallic clack. It skated a foot across the grain before it stopped. Ash bent down and picked it up. It threw the lamplight back at angles that did not match the room.

The card was still turning in his fingers when the stench of tobacco filled the room. Yzyr sat cross-legged on the end of the bed, smoke leaving his breath.

"You held onto that a while," Yzyr said. He had the same bright shirt on. His brown hair looked slightly wet. "I was starting to think you’d thrown it away."

"I forgot I had it."

"That’s worse, somehow." His eyes went over Ash, slowly, and came back to the cigarette without comment. "You look like you walked a long way. Sit down before you fall down."

Ash’s knees gave the moment he let them. He sat at the edge of the bed with his elbows on his thighs.

"Tell me what happened out there."

"It was a day like every other," Ash began. "Then a ring of Gates appeared outside the cabin. I only ever saw one Gate ever opened at a time. This girl was creating dozens of them at a time with ease."

"Sounds rough." Yzyr drew on the cigarette. The smoke came back out slow.

"Hollows came through the Gates all at once, surrounding us. More than the two of us could hold. Sheila and I spent everything we had and it wasn’t enough." Ash kept his eyes on the floorboards. He smiled, shaking his head horizontally. "And through it all—" Ash’s voice cracked. "Dane never stopped recording it. He was talking the whole time, writing down everything he was seeing. Right up until she walked over to him."

"Until?"

"She put her hand on the back of his neck. There was an old mark there from a previous Hollow wound. She pressed on it and the grey went out from her fingers. What stood back up wasn’t him." Ash turned his hands over and looked at the dried blood in the creases. "I’m the one who finished it. In the snow. After."

Through the wall the sounds of the cabin kept moving. Water ran in the basin and shut off. Footsteps went from one door to the other and came back. Somewhere in the cabin a frozen hoodie was peeled off and hit the floorboards. It landed with the dead, heavy boom of a dropped barbell, too stiff to fold.

Yzyr drew on the cigarette. The cherry flared brightly in the dim room.

"Tell me about the person that came through the Gates," he said.

"She had brown hair," Ash began.

The bed shifted behind him. When Ash looked over, Yzyr was lying flat on his back, both hands on his chest.

"They were light around the roots, the tips were dyed blue." His eyes drifted toward the window. "When she arrived, she was sitting in the mouth of a Gate, swinging her legs like a kid on a swing set."

"Was she safe?"

"That’s what you want to know?" Ash looked at him. "I don’t know. If you ask me about that guy we split in two I’d give you a better answer."

The smoke went up off Yzyr in a thin line and broke against the ceiling.

"The man you split in two," he said. "The guy with a brown coat and a pair of keys on him?"

Ash turned and looked at him. He had not said a word about any keys.

"He looked after my daughter when she was small. He walked her to her first day of school then cried in the parking lot where he thought nobody could see." Yzyr said it to the ceiling, easy. "He kept butterscotch in that coat. She went through his pockets for it before she could say his name right. She knew exactly where he was standing in the world when she put her hands together. She always knew where her people were. She never had to learn that one."

Yzyr stopped drawing on the cigarette. It burned down on its own between his fingers.

Ash had nothing to put into that, so he lay back on the bed, and Yzyr sat up and folded his legs to give him the room.

"He talked too much," Ash said to the ceiling. "Dane. He made bad tea. He knew everything there was to know about Gates and none of it did him any good when it mattered." His hands stayed shut on his chest. "I turned off the part of me that didn’t want to do it."

His right thumb found the split meat of his left palm, pressing into the jagged scab where the spear had torn its way out. The skin there was still freezing to the touch, the cold trapped deep in the vein. He pushed his thumbnail into the wound until it spiked, making sure he was still in there to feel it. "Then I did it. I made it clean. I don’t know if clean makes it better or worse."

"You’ll carry that one a long time," Yzyr said. "The first one you cared about, you always do. I’m not going to insult you by telling you you’re wrong or weak."

The door swung open. Ash had never closed it.

Vivian stood in the door frame. "Who were you speaking to?" she asked.

Ash looked over at his bed. There was only the indentation where a body had lain down on the blanket. He opened his mouth, looked at the empty air where Yzyr had been sitting, and closed it.

"Train me," he said instead.

Vivian came the rest of the way in. She looked him over, slowly.

She had stripped to a single long thin shirt, her blonde hair wrapped tight in a towel to keep it from freezing. She wasn’t shivering the way he and Sheila were, and no fog came off her breath. But the few stray strands slipping out from beneath the terry cloth had already hardened into white, jagged frost under the light.

"You almost died out there," she said. "It’s not the first time you’ve been in a fight and nearly died."

"There was this one time, my neck still hurts from it."

"And you want more of it."

"I want to be the reason it goes the other way next time." Ash held her eyes.

Vivian smiled patiently, nothing like the grin she wore in a fight.

"Get some sleep," she said. "We start when you can stand up without having to think about it."