The spot between his shoulder blades that Thorn associated with his System implant began to burn at the transfer of that much free quintessence. There was a burning sensation in his eyes as well, and he angrily rubbed at them.
“Hey,” Lief said. “It’s been a good run. Here, take this too.”
Lief handed over a familiar-looking thumb ring, and Thorn put it woodenly on his hand.
“Tell the folks back in Aba–”
“Shut up,” Thorn interrupted. “You’re not dead yet.”
“Not for lack of trying,” Lief quipped with a laugh. “Man, I wish I could get one last cup of caf…”
Thorn was angry. He knew that ditching Lief and running was what he needed to do. He just didn’t want to do it. The fact that he was so angry he couldn’t properly give Lief the final moments he deserved made him even angrier.
He was starting to spiral, and he knew it. He shook himself and focused that anger inside. He banked it, then let it cool. He’d come back to it, after all of this, after he could circle back to all the different ways he’d screwed up.
He entered Meditate on a one-minute timer. He’d calm down, then say his good-byes and sprint out of the dead zone, carrying the crow and hoping it had enough quints to survive. Maybe Lief’s sacrifice could save another life as well.
Inside of his Skill, his conscious mind was muted as he observed it from the outside. His perceptions were solely on the quintessence around him, pulling what he could inside and observing the rest.
It was close now, the dead zone. Using Meditate might even be accelerating the collapse of the remaining field. The threads were splitting, then spinning in place before looping backwards in tight circles. It would be beautiful, if it wasn’t the hallmark of encroaching death.
When Thorn exited Meditate, he was much calmer. His emotions were now in check, and that was why the thoughts that had been percolating at the back of his consciousness finally emerged.
When the threads unraveled, they didn’t just disappear as if they were being erased from existence. Each thread wasn’t actually a thread; it was a stitch. It was a circle, a thread joined to itself.
Thorn had joined threads before, but they had just exploded, quite literally. But the natural threads of the quintessence field were different than the ones that Thorn drew. Their geometry was different.
“A quick question, Lief,” Thorn asked. “A geometry question for the professor.”
“Not what I was hoping for in my last moments,” Lief said. “But okay.”
“Why are naturally occuring quintessence threads circles, but with like a twist in them?” Thorn asked.
“No idea,” Lief said. “You know I’m going to haunt you after I die for that.”
“I have an idea,” Thorn said, then activated Concentrate. “Something to do with whatever one-sided non-orientable surfaces are.”
“Yeah, sure, we used to make those in school. You’re really taking me back… We used to cut strips of paper, twist them once, then tape them together,” Lief said. “You know, you are really harshing my vibe here. I’m trying to think of things like all the good times I had with Amaranth and Lucile and–”
“Hang on, I’m trying to concentrate here,” Thorn said as he stood up and traced a single thread that encompassed both him and Lief.
The trick was the twist, but he thought he had that figured out. He brought it back to where he’d started, twisted it a bit, then connected them together and let go of the skill.
Nothing. No explosion or release of energy.
Thorn did it again a few more times, then sat and activated his Meditation skill on a fifteen second timer.
The edge of the zone was close, much closer than before. But he wasn’t concerned with that; he wanted to get a picture inside of his Meditation skill for what the threads he’d drawn looked like.
He could see the loops he’d made. They were thicker than the natural quintessence fabric, but they were stable.
What if…
His System interrupted his Meditation. He had one more thing to test out. He ran out in the direction of the encroaching dead zone and stopped when he felt the cold of the dead zone encroaching and his System flashed a warning at him.
“Well, bye then…” he heard Lief say as he ran away. The crow squawked but stayed with Lief.
He quickly traced a loop, making sure to add the twist in the end. Nothing happened, so he did it again. And a third time. On the fourth and fifth loop, desperation began to rise in his throat. Just when he was about to give up and run for the exit, leaving Lief behind, his System sent him a notification.
He ran back to a very confused Lief.
“What are you doing? Get out of here,” Lief said gruffly.
“Geometry,” Thorn said. “Too much to explain, but we’re all walking out of here. Hopefully.”
“Head like a soft-boiled egg,” Lief muttered. “I’d kill you if you weren’t killing yourself.”
“Shut up and hang on tight,” Thorn replied, pulling him onto his shoulders. They were almost out of time.
The crow squawked a mournful “crrrkkk” and flew in a tight circle around Thorn as he began inscribing lines of quintessence into the ground.
It was easier to draw lines in the dirt, because then he would know where he had begun, and where he needed to connect the lines after twisting them into a stable configuration.
He immediately discovered an issue: if he just drew concentric circles in the dirt, then sure, he could Concentrate essence into enough stable patterns to protect them from the void, at least for a small amount of time. He was under no delusions that whatever quintessence structures he was making would hold up indefinitely; his threads were thicker, but they would dissolve and break apart eventually. He supposed they would find out how quickly soon enough.
The issue was how would they leave. He didn’t want to turtle up; that was just prolonging death. He needed to create a path out of the cavern.
Thorn almost stumbled forward as the weight on his back suddenly shifted. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lief’s arm drop down, his machete flying forward and depositing itself in the body of a beast streaking up behind them.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The owl-like beast, with the feathers of bark, fell to the ground with a shriek. It was quickly overcome by the last remaining beasts on the ground, pushed out of hiding and desperately fleeing towards anything with quintessence that could rescue them from the impending dead zone.
“Don’t worry about any beasts,” Lief said. “Crow and I will watch your back.”
Thorn began pushing as many quints as he could into the rings he was making, and instead of just horizontal circles in the dirt, he began making vertical ones as well. He still started on the ground in front of him, but reached up and behind them before twisting the thread and reconnecting it.
Lief’s breath sucked in sharply when he noticed that the dead zone should have killed them, but hadn’t. “I thought you’d gone mad. Whatever it is you’re doing, keep it up.”
Thorn’s hands were a blur. He created interlocking loops, horizontal, vertical, diagonal, each of their intersections a point a few centimeters forward from the last.
When his palms and wrists began to burn from the continuous flow of quintessence exiting from his body, he decided to risk a small look. He entered Meditation and fifteen seconds later exited to a warning from his System.
The warning confirmed what he had sensed. They were in a field of darkness; a bright star on his shoulder (that would be the crow), and a dim light on his back (Lief). Concentric rings, looped and connected and stretching back the way they had come. Irregularly shaped rings, with dips and bobbles and imperfections, were collapsing first, but all of the rings were slowly dispersing under the weight of the void around them.
He doubled down on his speed, but it didn’t help. No matter how fast he made new loops, they remained at an extremely low density.
“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” Lief reminded him quietly, his voice strangely loud in the silence around them.
He was panicking, and panic would kill them. Thorn grabbed his fear and threw it away; it wasn’t going to be helpful here.
He slowed his movements, concentrating on making each loop as perfect a circle as possible. He focused on making exact, one-hundred-eighty degree twists in the threads. He wasn’t perfect, but each one was better than the last.
His passive skill, Assess, kicked in more and more as he paid closer and closer attention to his environment, the movements of his body, and the details of his Concentrate skill.
Smooth. Precise. One after the other in an exacting chain of stable quintessence threads, forming the barest of shields around them.
Thorn felt, rather than saw, additional System messages enter his HUD, but he paid them no attention. His focus was solely on making the threads, inching forward one step at a time. He entered a fugue state eerily similar to Meditate, even though he wasn’t using the skill. Everything else faded from his attention.
He stopped digging down into the ground in front of him. It was uneven and led to imprecision. Assess let him know where he’d started, and where he’d stopped, as long as he paid attention to the detail.
He stopped using just one hand. He could use Concentrate with both, doubling his output at the same rate.
He stopped thinking about what he was doing, and just did it.
There was a stinging sensation on the side of head, and a voice in his ear. He ignored them, as he had ignored everything else for what felt like an eternity.
The pain grew sharper. Multiple stings on his neck and head.
“…over,” the voice was saying. “It’s over, kid, we’re out.”
The sounds came to him first. A cricket chirping; the rustle of branches in the wind; leaves of grass rubbing together. The sounds of life.
He stumbled and fell to his knees. Lief fell off his back, and the crow stopping pecking him on the head.
His palms and back were burning. He couldn’t close his fists, and there was something wrong with his vision. He blinked and rubbed his hands over his face.
Pain, and light, finally entered his eyes. He blinked the tears away to see the forest rising up around them.
Massive conifers formed a canopy hundreds of meters above him. Smaller copses of new growth dotted the rolling hills, cut through with sharp ravines. His senses were full of the chatter of birds flitting above, the smell of the loam below, the cool breeze on his skin.
He lay down on the ground and stared upwards for a long time.
He was still staring up at the canopy when he heard the dull roar of turbines. It grew louder and louder, drowning out the natural sounds of the forest around them, until it was almost on top of them.
The canopy parted and multiple figures descended out of the sky. The first was a mobile tech armor, twenty meters tall and humanoid in shape, circular turbines extended from its shoulder blades. As it landed at the far end of the clearing, a set of missiles or fast moving drones exploded off of its arms and shot into the tunnel behind them.
The second to land, just a few meters away, was a large, broad-chested man with a full beard and bald head. Flames roared from machine tech integrations in his feet, or his boots; Thorn couldn’t tell.
The third he recognized, belatedly. It was Gammon.
Thorn decided he should stand up. He did, and gave a weak wave in Gammon’s direction. She nodded grimly but didn’t say a word.
Lief was sitting on the ground next to him. The crow was gone, nowhere to be seen.
The bearded man was in the front and appeared to be in charge. He looked briefly at Lief, and then turned his gaze on Thorn. He pulled out a cigar from a pocket on his vest and lit it with a brief rub of his fingers.
Thorn met his gaze and held it while the man drew on his cigar.
“Who the hell are you?” the man asked. White ash from the cigar fell to the ground.
Before Thorn could reply, Lief spoke up.
“Colonel Smithson, I can answer your questions–” Lief began.
“Shhh,” Smithson said, taking another puff of his cigar. “I didn’t ask you, did I? Mr. Lief Warden, independent scout for hire.”
Smithson enunciated each word carefully, like he was tasting them.
“Looks like trusting you was a mistake,” he said, then pointedly looked at Lief’s arm and leg stumps. “You might have bit off a bit more than you could chew.”
Silence reclaimed the small forest clearing, before Thorn cleared his throat.
“Thorn Farmer, sir.”
Smithson nodded, then smiled around the cigar in his mouth.
“Thank you. Did you come out of there?” he asked, pointing behind Thorn to the small cave opening in the hill behind him.
“Yes, sir.”
“Through the dead zone?”
“Yes.”
Smithson twirled the cigar in his fingers for a few seconds. He glanced over at Gammon once, and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Thorn realized they were probably talking via System comm.
“Affiliations? Guild?” he asked, turning back to Thorn.
“None.”
“System?”
Thorn hesitated, and looked over at Gammon. That was a fairly intrusive question, and one he didn’t really want to answer.
She nodded once. She looked more worried than he had ever seen her before, and that, more than the armored machine, more than the clear firepower this colonel could wield, scared him. He decided to be honest and straightforward with the colonel.
“1.37-099, ‘Integrator.’”
“So you’re with the Church,” Smithson said lightly.
“No,” Thorn shook his head vehemently. “Never. I got the System from them, but I’ll never join them.”
“I see your System is offline.”
“Yeah? It went offline when I was inside the dead zone,” Thorn said. He wasn’t sure why that mattered.
Smithson’s loose, affable manner disappeared. “Now see here, kid,” he said with a growl. “I want to believe that you’re some ‘aw shucks’ farm boy who someway, somehow survived a dead zone and someway, somehow is using a Church system without being their pawn.”
Thorn didn’t know what to say.
“Let’s do this a different way. How did you get out of the dead zone?”
Thorn took a breath. This Colonel Smithson was some bigshot with the Crows, but he was starting to make Thorn angry.
“I have a Skill, it lets me use quintessence–”
Smithson interrupted him. “Actually, I don’t want to know the how. What was in the dead zone, and what did you bring out?”
Thorn stared at the man, pushing down his growing irritation.
Something was wrong here, and Thorn didn’t know what was going on. He’d just escaped from the dead zone and now was being interrogated by the Crows Guild. Shouldn’t they be happy he was alive? Shouldn’t they be helping him? Helping Lief?
They hadn’t made a move to help Lief (not even Gammon, who was supposedly his friend), even though he was sitting on the ground, bandages wrapped around two missing limbs. And if Thorn was putting two and two together, this Smithson guy had even hired Lief to scout out the glitter farm.
The Crows Guild was supposed to prevent dead zones from happening on the planet, or at least from spreading. They had a big contract from the Agrarian’s Guild to do that. So if they thought that the glitter farm might create a dead zone, why had they hired Lief instead of using one of their own people?
“When I ask a question, I expect a prompt, unhesitating reply,” Smithson said. “Otherwise I assume you’re scheming with your System on what lies you can get away with. And if you’re lying, well, then that makes my job here very easy.
“I just kill you all.”