When he dragged himself back up, the sky over the lake had gone from black to the thin gray that comes before dawn.
The three of them had fallen asleep where they’d sat watching him.
Out cold around the dead stone, sprawled like the last guests at a very bad party.
The second thing he noticed was the headache.
Not an ordinary one.
The kind you’d get if someone had installed software directly into your skull without asking.
The third thing was that he knew how to do something he’d never done.
It sat in him the way his own phone number did.
He didn’t have to look it up.
It was simply there.
He pulled it up anyway, carefully.
The System laid it out for him in a window, like it had been waiting to be asked.
[SYSTEM] SHADOW STEP
L1 SHADOW ENHANCEMENT: AMBIENT SHADOW → SPEED, EVASION (UNLOCKED)
L2 SHADOW SWAP: TRADE PLACES WITH A SHADOW WITHIN 20 FT (UNLOCKED)
L3 SHADOW DECOY: ILLUSORY COPIES (LOCKED)
L4 SHADOW CLONES: SOUL-FRAGMENTS, ~HALF HOST STRENGTH, MAX 5 AT FOUNDATION (LOCKED)
L4 TIER: BEYOND FOUNDATION / HOST ACCESS: [UNREADABLE]
He read it twice, the way he read every contract.
Two levels he could use now, and two more locked.
The last line was the same word the System had given him in the cave.
The night it tried to read what his body was and gave up.
It was starting to feel less an error than a door somebody didn’t want him looking through.
There was a second kind of knowing underneath the window, older and in a different handwriting.
It came from the manual itself, from whoever had written it down in the first place, and it knew what it was worth.
He didn’t know the scale.
He was fairly sure, though, that people didn’t leave Earth-grade anything lying around in murder forests.
He got up, stiffly, and went around the three of them.
He rolled Tao off his face and out of the worst of the gray puddle.
He found a blanket in the Clearwater sacks and put it over Xuan, who was shivering in his sleep.
“Don’t get used to this,” he told him quietly.
“It’s a one-time benefit.
There’s no pension.” It was somebody’s good blanket, with a border stitched in red.
He tried not to think about whose.
[LUNA] YOU’RE NOT A BAD PERSON, YOU KNOW.
YOU GAVE ME A NAME
He didn’t answer that.
He wasn’t sure it was true, and he wasn’t sure it wasn’t.
The sun was just coming up over the trees when the ground moved.
It was only slight, the kind of shiver you’d feel through the floor of an apartment when a truck went by below.
There were no trucks here, and no roads for them.
He straightened, and it came again, harder.
A flock of something went up off the far side of the lake in one clattering sheet.
Tao groaned without waking.
“Nobody panic,” Hunter told the sleeping men, which was easy for them.
And something touched the edge of him.
It wasn’t in his sense, not properly.
Whatever it was lay far beyond his mile.
It was enormous.
What is that?
[LUNA] CHECKING… THAT’S CORE FORMATION
[LUNA] TEN MILES?
FIFTEEN?
SOUTH OF HERE, KILLING SOMETHING BIG
His mouth went dry.
Is it coming this way?
[LUNA] IT’S FIGHTING, NOT TRAVELING.
PROBABLY NOT YOUR PROBLEM
The ground shook three more times, each one making him flinch.
Each time the heat at the edge of him flared and settled.
He stood there in the first sunlight and thought about a thing that could shake the ground from fifteen miles away, doing whatever it wanted to whatever it met.
Then he thought about his mile, which had felt so enormous only two days ago.
Then, between one tremor and where the next should have been, the heat was simply gone.
It didn’t fade or move off.
It went out like a shuttered lamp.
[LUNA] SEE?
QUIET.
ALL DONE
“Where did it go?”
There was a pause, a fraction too long.
[LUNA] LIFE’S FULL OF SURPRISES.
SOMETIMES CORE FORMATION CULTIVATORS JUST SHOW UP ♥
Hunter stared south through the trees, where the new sun lay across the treetops and nothing at all was shaking any more.
Why, he thought, very slowly, “would you say that?”