Extraction: Infinite Hunger

After three weeks in the tundra, eleven cars arrived neatly where a single car had dropped them off.

Vivian boarded first. She took the bench, propped herself into the corner of it, and started on a stack of dehydrated food packs, skipping the hydration part entirely and swallowing food dust whole.

Sheila claimed the seating arrangement that looked like it was made for a group of six with a table in between three seats facing each other and took the window seat.

Ash sat across from her. His right hand kept closing on nothing; the cold had broken down the splits across his knuckles. They pulled tight every time the fingers curled. A line of scuffs ran along his jaw that he had stopped feeling somewhere back in the white.

The autonomous train back to Aegis Academy departed.

An hour into the trip, the light shifted outside the window. Vivian’s head came up from her food. A shape stood off the eastern line, pale, bigger than the flat land had any room for. The low sun threw its shadow the wrong way, out toward the light instead of away from it. Sheila’s hand settled on the table edge. Ash leaned toward the glass.

The track bent, changing the angle, and the shape resolved into a grain silo with a caved-in roof, alone in a field nobody had worked at in years, its shadow pooled dark and ordinary on the side away from the sun. Then it was already behind them. Vivian went back to her food. Sheila took her hand off the table.

Outside, the snow thinned. It broke into patches, then bare rock. The rocks threw long bars of shadow that slid across the table and over the backs of Ash’s hands as the train cut past, gone before they could land. The rock ran out at the first stunted trees, then a fence line, then a road with a delivery truck stopped at the crossing. The light through the glass went from the hard blue of the ice to the grey of an ordinary overcast morning.

Ash flexed the hand again.

"Stop touching it," Vivian barked, not looking up from the pack. "You’ll split your hand and the train doesn’t have anything to patch you up again."

"It’s the cold, not the hand."

"It’s the hand." She balled the empty wrapper and started another.

"Whatever you say."

"By the way Ash, you should probably know the academy—" Sheila began.

Ash’s attention was pulled away to his phone that chirped the moment they came back inside cell reception. He mumbled "Yeah" and "Okay," not really listening to what Sheila was saying.

[ Phoebe: hey when are you getting back? ]

[ Ash: intercom says we’re an hour out ]

Ash felt the academy before the window showed it to him. Three weeks of tundra had read as nothing in every direction, a clean dead quiet he’d stopped noticing he was leaning on. Now the Shade-sense came back all at once as the train slowed into the yards, a thousand small signatures pressing in from the dormitories and the halls and the streets past the wall, the warmth of a place where people lived stacked on top of people. It was too much after the white.

Ash gripped the table edge and breathed through his teeth. The hunger felt none of what he felt. Every signature in the crowd lit his Shade-sense, each one reading in a new way he hadn’t felt since he left for the tundra. His mouth had gone wet under the tongue before he caught it. The hunger was already sorting them. Already picking which it wanted.

The doors opened. The platform was empty end to end except for a thin man in a grey coat with a folder stuffed under one arm.

"I’ve been waiting for this," Cavel said.

"Three weeks out there, and we come back to you," Sheila said.

"Have you seen Phoebe?" Ash asked.

His face scowled. "She will be waiting for you three in my office." He turned and walked, and the three of them followed him off the platform.

"Hmm, whatever," Vivian said, throwing the last food wrapper cleanly into a garbage bin across the platform.

The academy halls were exactly as they’d left them, which, after the tundra, was the strange part.

True to Cavel’s word, Phoebe was already waiting outside his office. Her eyes glanced over Ash as he entered the room ahead of her. She pulled a chair beside him, setting it so the armrests were touching one another.

Cavel did not wait for them standing in his office, he was already seated with a folder open and read from it without looking up.

"You three visited the tundra," he said. "The Aegis Express reported only one car remained when it returned to its docking station from your away leg." He flipped a page over. "Then there is the matter of no contact from your instructor for over three weeks."

He closed the folder over, his palms resting on top of it.

"There was a person that—" Ash began. He stopped when Sheila kicked his shin. He looked over. Vivian was already staring at him too. Phoebe’s hand was pressing tightly into his thigh.

"People don’t create Gates, Ash," Sheila said politely, nodding to Cavel.

"Was this another one of those ’bipedal with intellect’ figures you saw?" Cavel asked.

Ash coughed into his hands. "No—No—No absolutely not," he raised his hands in defense. "Like I was trying to say, a spontaneous Gate opened on its own nearby. That person, the person that I was about to mention was Professor Dane. He put himself between it and us. The Half-Hollow that came through it—" Ash swallowed his words, then looked down at his lap.

"Director Cavel," Sheila began. "Ash is still a little traumatized from what happened out there, but his story is correct. A spontaneous Gate opened up while the three of us were sleeping. We woke to the aftermath and a Half-Hollow going through his tea leaf cabinets like a wild bear."

Cavel glanced over to Vivian, who only nodded in response.

"I see," Cavel said, marking a box on one of the forms inside the folder. He wrote several lines next to it, then put it back in. "Your instructor died defending his students from a spontaneous incursion. I will make sure his next of kin is taken care of, and his legacy is honored so long as I remain in this academy."

Phoebe’s knee softly tapped Ash’s knee three times afterwards.

"Now, for the next order of business," he said, opening the folder one more time and slide a single sheet of paper across the desk.

A column of figures ran most of the way down it. The total ran for four entire lines in a thin, small font. By the time Ash had counted all of the zeros in the number, Cavel had already moved the sheet to show it to Vivian, then Sheila. She didn’t pick it up or give any indication she was going to read the bill.

"I’ll pay for it," Sheila said.

"You misunderstand the bill." Cavel drew it back before she could decide to touch it. "The academy can replace a train. It cannot as easily replace the story that gets told when three students come back from a field trip with their instructor in a box." He squared the folder against the desk. "You’re suspended. All three."

"How long?" Phoebe asked loudly, nearly standing up from her chair.

"A month."

"That’s nothing." Sheila tipped her chair back on two legs and let it drop.

Vivian exhaled loudly, closing her amber eyes shut.

"You’ll spend it on community service that puts the academy’s name somewhere brighter than it sits right now. Where you do that is your own affair." Cavel looked up, and for the first time he looked at Ash’s hands. "When you come back, each of you will take a rank evaluation. I’d like to know what came out of that tundra."

Ash put his hands in his lap.

"That’s all," Cavel said, and reached for the next folder on the stack. "See yourselves out."

Vivian was up first, rolling her shoulder until the joint popped, and was through the door before the rest of them had stood.

In the corridor Phoebe caught Ash’s hand and turned it over, her thumb moving across the new splits in the knuckles. She read them like she’d read the bandage on his neck through the whole final.

"Half the academy heard you three wrecked a train," she said. "Nobody’s heard how." Her eyes looked down at the injuries running through his body. "And these didn’t come from a Gate or only one Half-Hollow."

"No."

She pressed her mouth to the worst of the split on his knuckle instead, quickly, before Ash could pull his hand away. It stung where her lip touched it. He turned his hand under hers until their palms met and let that be the answer.

"I don’t want to know. Instead, I want to know that you’ll bring that back in one piece."

"I will," Ash said.

Phoebe nodded, then scurried back to her own dorm. Ash picked up his bag on the floor, walking past a noticeboard with club signups for a year he wasn’t going to be there for. Seth was waiting past the admin wing with both hands in his pockets and a tan he hadn’t left with. He looked Ash over from the shoes up.

"You look different," he said.

"I got suspended."

"That’s not what I meant." Seth fell in beside him and they walked. "What are you going to do with yourself?"

"Community service. They didn’t say where." Ash gave a half shrug, his ribs still caught whenever he breathed a certain way. "I think I’m going to go home."

Seth stopped walking. One eyebrow went up. "Home?"

"I haven’t been back since I got here. I want to see what it looks like now."

"Huh." Seth started again. They were almost at the dorm steps when he said it. "Call me this time. When you go."

"I will," Ash said.

Seth held his glance, weighing it for the truth, then let him take the steps alone.