CHAPTER 201: 201: THE FIRST SEMESTER XXIV

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Across the little cleared arc, Ray lifted a hand and shaped his fingers the way Master Venn had shown in class, thumb tucked, forefinger and middle finger split like a fork. A shard of flame budded there — it was tight, mean, barely the size of a candle flame at first, then roused by his breath into a sliver of orange glass. He sighted along it, jaw clenched, and then, very deliberately, lowered his wrist. The fire dimmed to an ember and slid back into his palm. He did not waste it.

A big Hisscat that had once hunted barn mice slunk out of the brush as if remembering a simpler biography. Its spine wrote punctuation in the air, each step a comma. Whiskers jittered. Its eyes were two hot pins fixed on the small bright coin of gravity that curved the world a handspan away from John’s palm. Hunger and the ugly courage of drugs rode its back. It did not pounce. It drifted, an animal dream sliding toward a drain.

Ray’s nostrils flared. He kept his shoulder square and his feet apart, the way the combat teacher had said a man should stand when he intends to still be one in a minute. He glanced once at John and read the calm there, the not-yet of the hand. He understood that sometimes the right shot is the one you do not take. The Hisscat’s whiskers reached the edge of the pull and shivered as if they had touched winter. Its forepaws followed. Its intentions caught in a place that did not have room for them. The void took its future the way a tide takes a toy, clean and without argument.

Rhea did not even pause her patrol. She traveled the perimeter in a precise figure-eight, the red ribbon in her hair tied tighter now, knife tilted so its spine lay along her forearm. She did not look back at the loss of the Hisscat because people who keep others alive do not look back unless something still needs doing there. She changed the angle of her blade by a hair —just enough to respect the next thing that might arrive— and that was the kind of compliment you only give to people who keep living.

They listened to the kind of silence that is not empty but deciding. The thumb-width flames on Ray’s marker stones steadied. Fizz hovered a little higher, whiskers twitching in micro circles, the tin thread of water humming above the camp like a string stretched across a story.

One more, John thought. He could feel the counter in him like a small wheel about to click.

The night gave it over with a tired shrug. A leader Bramblehorn came alone, the way trees sometimes drop a branch they have been pretending to like. It is separated from its herd not by speed but by a failure of faith, the kind of loneliness even beasts can invent when the world has been too loud for too long. It shouldered through a fern and wore pieces of the fern like confetti that refused to admit a party had ended. Its head was low. Its eyes were big and wet and full of the kind of fear that looks too much like courage from far away. One forehoof dragged, nicked somewhere in the stampede. Breath steamed around its muzzle and fell apart before it hit the ground, as if the air were done catching it.

John watched it choose him. He could have stepped aside and let it pass to be stupid elsewhere. He could have told himself a story about mercy and called it wisdom. He did not. Mercy in this moment was cruelty to tomorrow. A Bramblehorn that survives a drug-night does not learn. It brings what it learned to the next camp.

He lifted his palm and met it with quiet.

The void did not leap. It opened like an eyelid that had always been there and had simply decided to stop pretending. The Bramblehorn’s horntip entered first and made a tiny scream the ear could not hear but the bones could. The pull kissed the plate of its skull where bone becomes thought and asked a question that had only one answer. The beast’s knees tried to decide and were not offered time. Its weight, which had been bravado a breath ago, became an argument gravity won in one sentence. The black coin widened a finger, just enough respect for mass, and the Bramblehorn left the world without knocking anything over on the way out.

Respect given. Respect kept.

[System Notification: Frenzy Counter — 50/50. Mission complete.

Reward engaged: Circle advancement will happen soon.

Secondary: Egg nourishment benefited.]

The hum in John’s hand swelled —low, pleased, a bell struck in a different room— and then went away the way a bell tone does: reverberation turning to memory turning to something the body will carry without consent. The ache that lived in his wrist behind the knuckles unclenched a fraction. Deeper in, where the line in his chest lived, something softened like wax that had been shown fire at a polite distance.

He stood absolutely still for a count of eight fours. He had learned that number from Snake’s chalkboard once, and from the way fear counts faster than breath if you let it. He did not let it. On the thirty-second beat he lowered his hand and exhaled as if someone had kept him from the air politely and had finally remembered to stop.

Fizz drifted in front of his face again, whiskers sparkling with the last of a tiny thunderstorm he had been saving for emergencies. His smile tried to be smaller than it was and failed. "You look like a man who has just argued successfully with a mountain," he said softly. "And got the mountain to write you an apology note."

"Fifty," John said, answering a question only he had been asked all night. "I need the rest. But not tonight." He looked at his palm. He flexed his fingers. They were boys’ fingers again — nicked, blunt-nailed, honest. The void was not a mark. It never left one you could show.

Rhea stepped in, patrol complete, sheath clicking over steel with a sound that always meant safe even when it promised different work soon. Sweat made a thin shine along the line of her jaw; ash had printed a fingerprint on her cheek that did not belong to a hand. She looked at John long enough to confirm the number and blood and breath, then let her chin tick once, approval issued and filed. "We reset fully," she said. "We sleep with both eyes. Dawn is five hours. Ray, water. Fizz, stop vibrating at a pitch dogs can hear."

"I cannot," Fizz said, vibrating at a pitch dogs could hear. He twanged the water thread once with a paw and made it sing the note of a well-behaved mosquito. Then, gently, to John: "Sit. Drink. If you fall, I will glue you to the earth with the power of friendship and also actual glue if necessary."

Ray jogged up from the north watch, breathing hard but properly, no panic wasted in it. He had a canteen in his hand and the awkward gift of someone being useful on purpose. "Here," he said, as if the word had too many edges and he was sanding them off. John took the canteen. The water was metallic and warm and perfect. It told his throat a story about rivers and being fine. He nodded to Ray. Ray nodded back, small, simple, surprised to find the gesture cost him nothing.

They reset. They were good at it now. Habit had made a scaffold around fatigue.

Rhea walked the perimeter again, not hunting now but listening. She set a new heat line lower, thinner, the temperature of warning rather than burn. Steam hissed where dew thought it had a future and then decided to be polite another way. She nudged one ironwood root with her boot and the root moved, not because roots move, but because respect does when it has been paid enough times.

Ray replaced two of his thumb-lamps, pinching flame off his fingers as neatly as a clerk tears receipts. He set the stones down with exaggerated care. He was learning to be the kind of careful that does not argue with itself. He straightened, rolled his shoulders, and on instinct looked up through the ironwood canopy to the fat band of stars that had climbed while they were busy. He did not make a wish. He made a note.

Fizz ran the fence of air again, a bright smudge on the dark, placing little droplets like alarms wherever the wind might change its mind. He sang under his breath —something about crumbs with courage and heroes made of soap— and then, when he was satisfied the night would need to sign in before trying anything, he plopped down beside John with theatrical exhaustion and spread his tiny arms as if to cool the entire planet. He failed, but no one minded.