It wasn’t pain, exactly.
Pain he understood by now.
This was information, and there was far too much of it.
It came in all at once.
Somebody had taken a fire hose of knowledge and pointed it, not at his brain, but somewhere behind it, at whatever he was when nobody was looking.
Images arrived faster than he could see them.
There were shapes of movement, breaths held for exact counts, qi turning in knotted patterns that felt like doors.
Shadows lay on the ground in the images.
In every one of them there was a way to step into them, as though they were water and he had only ever been told they were floors.
He tried to scream and found that his jaw had locked.
His whole body had gone rigid on the rock.
[LUNA] SURPRISE!
YOU’RE LEARNING!
I hate you, he thought, with everything he had left.
I hate you so much.
[LUNA] YOU’LL THANK ME LATER
The knowledge kept coming.
His dantian had sat quiet and warm in his belly since the cave.
Now it began to turn on its own, following a route nobody had shown him.
He suddenly, completely knew it, the way you know the stairs in your own house in the dark.
His muscles twitched through movements they had never made.
For a second he could feel every shadow in the hollow.
Under the rock.
Under each of the three men lying in the gray mess of their breakthroughs.
And the long black shadow of the tree Tao had rolled into, like a hand held out.
He fell off the rock and hit the ground, and twitched there.
Through the sense he felt the three of them scramble up, still gray and reeking from their own breakthroughs.
Their hearts had gone fast and thin.
Xuan was closest, on his knees beside him, hands hovering, not daring to touch.
It was the kid he’d turned back for on the hillside, and now the kid was looking down at him.
“Master?” Lex’s voice cracked.
“Master, what do we do?”
Hunter couldn’t answer.
His jaw wouldn’t open.
Through the sense, which was apparently still working while the rest of him melted, he felt something watching him from a branch at the edge of the camp.
It was one of the gray, cat-sized ones from the stream, with its red eyes and teeth.
It wasn’t hungry, and it wasn’t afraid.
It just sat very still, with its tail curled.
It watched the twitching man and the three frightened ones around him like it was taking notes.
Hunter had never in his life been so thoroughly judged by an animal.
I’m going to delete you, he told Luna.
[LUNA] CAN’T.
I’M IN YOUR SOUL
[LUNA] THAT’S CALLED DYING
It went on for what felt like hours and was probably minutes.
When it began to slow, it didn’t stop so much as sink.
The flood soaked in.
The knowledge went down out of sight into places he couldn’t reach yet but could feel filling up like cellars.
He lay on his back.
The two moons swam overhead, then doubled, then turned into four, which was too many moons even for this planet.
“Did it leak?” His voice came out in pieces.
“Somebody check.
I can’t feel my face.”
“Leak what, Master?” Lex whispered.
“Everything,” Hunter said.
“Never mind.”
Somewhere to his left, Tao had sat down heavily in the grass.
To his right, Xuan hadn’t moved from his knees.
Behind him, Lex was muttering something about a retirement plan, the way other men prayed.
The squirrel on the branch turned and went away through the leaves without a sound.
Hunter’s eyes closed on their own.
The dark that came up wasn’t sleep.
He sank into it.
Far down under it, in the places the flood had filled, he could feel his body quietly taking itself apart and putting itself back together again, bone by bone, a little differently.
Like someone had found the instructions at last and was following them to the letter.