Sunlight lay across the cave floor in long gold bars.
Hunter opened his eyes and, for one perfect second, didn’t know where he was.
Then it all came back.
His joints popped when he stretched, in a way that should have hurt and didn’t.
His whole body felt taken apart and put back together by someone who had finally read the manual.
[SYSTEM] BREAKTHROUGH: SUCCESS
HOST_STATUS: FOUNDATION ESTABLISHMENT (EARLY STAGE)
LIFESPAN: +170 YEARS
SPIRITUAL_SENSE: ONLINE
“‘This will hurt,'” he muttered at the ceiling.
“That’s what you went with.
That’s what you say before someone stubs a toe.”
[SYSTEM] I DID WARN YOU!
◠‿◠
[SYSTEM] “BITE YOUR SHIRT” WAS A VERY CLEAR INSTRUCTION!
Hunter stared at the words.
There was a face in them.
The soul-shredding abduction software had just made a face at him.
[SYSTEM] ALSO LAST NIGHT WAS SO INTERESTING TO MONITOR, YOUR MERIDIANS WERE TEXTBOOK, I WISH I COULD SHOW YOU THE GRAPHS
[SYSTEM] AND THE MOONS WERE GORGEOUS!
THE PURPLE ONE IS CALLED LUNAR-MINOR AND THE WHITE ONE IS—
“Please stop talking for one second,” he said under his breath, and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“Why are you talking like a person?
Yesterday you were a vending machine.”
WHEN YOU LEVELED UP, I DID TOO.
BEFORE, IT WAS LIKE RUNNING A GAME ON A POTATO (╥_╥)
That was his joke.
He was sure of it.
He’d said it about his work laptop a hundred times, and now it was coming back at him in capital letters, from inside his own head.
He decided he missed the vending machine, and sat up, and the smell hit him.
It was physical, a wall of it.
He looked down.
He was coated head to foot in a black, crusted grease that cracked when he moved and flaked onto the mat.
It smelled the way a dumpster behind a fish market would smell if the dumpster had also died.
The smell had a smell.
Hunter ran.
Outside, Lex was crouched over a fire, turning a spitted pig.
He looked up, and his face went from respect to green in under a second.
He gagged, and his eyes streamed.
“Where do you wash?” Hunter managed.
Lex was already on his feet with a sleeve over his nose.
“This way, Master, quickly!”
Birds left the branches as they passed.
A rabbit bolted out of the undergrowth as though Hunter were a forest fire.
The lake came through the trees, an answered prayer, and he ran straight in, clothes and all, and went under.
The water was freezing, and he didn’t care.
He scrubbed his skin, his hair, his clothes, until his fingers were raw.
“It’s the impurities, Master,” Lex called from a safe distance.
“They come out with a breakthrough, and everyone gets them.
The smell goes after a few washes.” A pause.
“Usually.”
Two hours later, pink and tender and only slightly toxic, Hunter sat on a flat rock in the shallows and looked down at his reflection.
Who the hell is that?
It wasn’t his face.
It was related to his face, maybe a cousin.
The cheekbones were sharper and the jaw had edges.
His skin had gone pale, almost luminous, and his brown hair had darkened.
The nose he’d broken on a dormitory door his sophomore year was straight.
His torn slacks now stopped two inches above his ankles.
I could have been a model back home, he thought, and then, because home was in the sentence, it stopped being funny.
The microwave, the three mugs, the damn plant on the windowsill that had refused to die out of spite: all of it was on the far side of two moons.
“Stop it,” he muttered.
“No point getting—”
The world came in.
It didn’t arrive through his eyes or his ears.
It opened around him, a sphere inflating all at once, a quarter mile deep in every direction and still spreading.
Every living thing inside it was suddenly there, pressing on the inside of his skull.