CHAPTER 33: INTO THE MAW [2]

SNAP!

Something inside the flytrap finally gave way.

The throat’s rhythm stuttered; the peristaltic wave that always pushed down became... uncertain. A loop of pale tissue bulged inside-out around the barb.

"Again!" Ethan shouted.

They synched by accident, the way panicked people sometimes do under one task. Jonas hauled like a man trying to drag a truck by its bumper; Ethan added ugly power with the gauntlet; Kara leaned the wedge deeper; Mira held the air steady with a sound like a sob in her throat.

Then, the Wheel ticked off a second beat.

DING!

~----~

[Retrieval Sequence: 6... 5... 4...]

~----~

"Three!" Jonas bellowed. "Two!"

A choking cough sounded from deep in the tube, unmistakably human!

Holt didn’t smile, but his eyes changed. He shifted a half step and drilled two feeders before they reached Ethan’s ribs.

"Now!" Ethan snarled.

They gave the pull a name and made it happen, willing it into existence.

The throat inverted around the barb like a sock being peeled off, and then a surge of bile and half-chewed grit vomited up around the lance.

Reid came with it, shoulders first, then head, eyes shut, face the color of boiled bone. His Rifle was gone, his chest convulsing.

"Back!" Kara snapped.

Jonas and Ethan staggered three long steps, dragging Reid clear of the teeth. The gauntlet drank the kick when a petal tried to clamp down through his forearm as black spines scraped along barbs and did not break.

Then, the plant panicked.

Tendrils exploded outward in a cloud. But at the ready, Holt’s fire went hard in controlled, accurate bursts.

Bam... bam... bam...

Three fell, then five.

Mira’s wind tore a curtain of them wide and flung gray resin in a fan. The maw tried to snap again but ready, Kara jammed the spear crosswise so savagely the shaft bowed and held.

"Breathe," Ethan rasped at Reid, even though it isn’t how breathing works. "Come on!" He urged, desperate.

Thankfully, he responded.

Reid’s body seized and barked bile. For a terrifying second nothing else happened, then his chest hitched. Rift Energy flickered under his skin like lightning looking for ground. He choked again, this time wet and awful, then he inhaled.

He was alive.

"Move him!" Holt barked. "It’ll go again!"

Jonas slung Reid up in a firefighter’s carry like he didn’t weigh anything at all. "Go where?"

"Behind me".

The Tracker stepped forward into spitting range.

He had watched this thing long enough to recognize its patterns; he knew its lies now and could separate them from the truth.

The mirage around its face wanted to hide the real seam. Holt ignored the lie, measured the rhythm, and waited for the breath between convulsions like a man who had never missed a heartbeat in his life.

The world narrowed to a coin-sized patch where meat met glass.

Holt aimed, then he pressed the trigger.

BAM!

Bullseye!

The shot entered the seam and buried there.

The plant tried to close around it, then decided it could not as a fracture ran through the petal like a crack racing across a windshield. Another shot split that crack like an axe in kindling.

The flytrap screamed as three petals collapsed.

The maw tore itself open in the wrong direction and slumped, throat sagging like a cut hose. Sap ran sweet and sour across the glass in stringy ropes.

Then...

DING!

Panels chimed in the team’s eyes, each of them focused on their own system notification.

~----~

[Threat Neutralized: Glass Maw Flytrap – E Rank]

[Critical Rescue: Reid Carter – F Rank]

[Rescue Successful!]

[Group Survival Credit: Moderate]

[You have been rewarded with +3 Improvisation Points]

[Current IP: 11]

~----~

The Wheel purred at Ethan’s edge of sight: 11 IP. He barely noticed, but his hands were shaking too hard.

"Down," Jonas said gently, lowering Reid to the glass. Mira knelt and shaped wind like cupped hands, coaxing the bile’s fumes away, easing breath in and out.

Reid coughed hard enough to hurt other people’s throats.

He rolled and spat something that didn’t deserve a name, then finally, color staggered back into his face a shade at a time. When his eyes opened, they were unfocused and furious in equal measure.

When he finally focused, he frantically looked around.

"Report," he croaked.

Kara huffed a breath that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t sounded so close to crying. "We’re idiots," she said. "But coordinated."

Travis dropped hard to sit, elbows on his knees, knife dangling.

He looked like he might puke or pray or both. "New rule," he panted. "Nobody gets eaten while I’m on watch. I can’t... my heart... I only get one".

The road found its hiss again. The moment held, then moved.

Holt didn’t lower his rifle. He was staring into the scrub beyond the shattered maw, mouth a flat line. "Look," he said.

At first it was just wind shifting plant matter. Then the movement resolved itself into regularity, a cadence.

Blisters under the ash-browned scrub pulsed in slow sync, each the size of a backpack. The sweet rot smell didn’t fade yet, rather, it multiplied.

Panels flickered.

~----~

[Environmental Scan...]

[Adjacent Growths Detected: Glass Maw Buds – E Rank]

[Current Status: Dormant]

[Count: 7... 9... 12]

~----~

Mira’s hand found Reid’s sleeve without her eyes leaving the scrub. "It’s a nest," she whispered.

Kara tightened her spear hand. "We don’t have the ammo, the wind, or the spine to clear a nursery".

Reid sat up on stubbornness and pain alone. He spat again, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the line of pulsing mounds. He was calculating; angles, time, and cost.

"Not this fight," he said, voice raw. "We go around."

"Remember the loops," Holt warned. "Ashroad will try to circle us back if it wants us to finish the job".

Ethan thumbed the empty haft where the harpoon had been and was already dissolving, the Wheel’s gift spent.

He could still feel Reid’s weight in his shoulders, still hear that awful human cough coming up through a tube that didn’t want to let it go.

"We’ll stitch our way around," Ethan said. "Nails, wind, whatever it takes."

Reid met his eyes. The look held gratitude and command and the bright edge of fear he’d never admit; he nodded once.

"Form up," he rasped. "Short leashes, no heroics."

They re-clipped the rope, new knots tying into old cord.

Jonas took the weight point, Kara the knife edge, Holt the eyes, Mira the breath, Travis the joke he didn’t make, Ethan the coin-flip hum at the corner of sight that had just saved a man.

The Ashroad pretended to be kind again. The buds pulsed, unbothered, for now. Heat laid its hand back on the world.

They moved, stitching a path through teeth that hadn’t closed yet, trying very hard not to look left or right at all the mouths waiting to bloom.