He took a deep breath of air and coughed out more and more water until there was nothing left to cough out.
When he rolled over, Lief was staring down at him in fury.
“Okay. Now I’m gonna kill you,” Lief said. “What the hell do you think you are doing? Traipsing off after glitter farmers. Waltzing through a dead zone. And apparently trying out drowning as well, because why not. Well, congratulations, you’ve failed so badly, you even failed at killing yourself.”
Lief paused to draw a breath.
“Good to see you too,” Thorn said weakly.
“Yeah, yeah,” Lief replied with a sigh, the wind going out of his sails. “It is what it is, I guess.”
Thorn tried moving his arms and legs, and discovered new levels of pain in the attempt. His entire body was bruised, his nerves were on fire, he had a splitting headache, and he wasn’t sure if his fingers and toes actually worked.
He tried to get up and only managed to spasm.
“So, uh, you got any caf in that pack?” Lief asked.
“No caf,” Thorn replied. Even rolling his eyes hurt. “Left it in the truck.”
“I’d tell you to go back and get it, but it doesn’t seem like you can get up off the ground, much less make it through a dead zone again,” Lief said.
Thorn continued to struggle, and with help from Lief, finally managed to sit up.
They were on the shore of a large underground lake, about a kilometer long and half a kilometer wide. The top of the cavern above him faded into darkness. He could make out a harsh glow, like a spotlight, coming from the far end of the lake. It was bright enough that the dim reflection illuminated the rest of the cavern.
He struggled out of his poncho and let his water-logged pack fall to the ground.
“Where are we?” Thorn asked Lief. He turned to look at his friend and then stared.
Lief was missing most of his left leg and his left arm. Dried and bloody bandages capped the end of his stumps. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and a bloody scab, like a giant bite mark, ran across his back and ribs. Most of his hair was gone, and there were dark splotches on his scalp. His face was lined and gaunt with new wrinkles, as if he had aged ten years in a few days.
“...Are you okay?”
“No,” Lief said with a grunt. “Did you lose your eyesight as well? Or just your other brain cell?”
“Sorry,” Thorn replied.
“You should be,” Lief said. “If you were going to do something so monumentally stupid, you should have at least brought me some caf. Do you know how hard it was to pull your drowned ass out of the water and beat on it until you started breathing again? With just one arm and leg?”
The pair settled into an awkward silence. When feeling began returning to his fingers, Thorn pulled open his pack and rustled out a few Q-Stix. He handed one to Lief.
“Thanks,” Lief said, taking the food and munching on it.
Thorn chewed on one himself, and as the processed meat product hit his stomach, he began to feel the tiniest bit better. A few swigs of water helped wash it down.
“Now don’t take this the wrong way,” Lief started. “I appreciate you coming out here and trying to find me, but I took you more for the mercenary sort. Did you not get my drone and my message?”
“I got it,” Thorn replied. “Used the drone to trace you back to this ravine, after I got some help at the Crows Guild to hack it. Even got it modified so I could use it to scout myself. Kind of. But Gammon and I couldn’t figure out what you meant by ‘Amaranth.’”
“Smart,” Lief said, then shook his head. “Resourceful. And dumber than bricks. But I guess that’s my own fault, as I never told you I’d added you as a second to my account at the Wayfarers Guild. If you’d have gone there, given them a blood sample, System handshake, and provided the passcode, you could have had a new token issued.”
Thorn’s immediate reaction was to laugh at that, and he immediately regretted it. His lungs still ached fiercely from almost drowning.
“You said you went to the Crows, so I’m surprised Gammon didn’t figure it out. She should know about those sorts of things. And if you were hell bent on a rescue mission, then why didn’t she come as well? The Crows should know what was going on here.”
“I don’t know,” Thorn replied. “She seemed stuck on ‘Amaranth’ referring to your ex-wife. Or one of them? Apparently you’ve had a few. They thought she’d run off and come back to murder you or something stupid like that.”
“Amaranth was the one that got away,” Lief said wistfully.
“… and for what it’s worth, Gammon also seemed distracted; apparently everyone in the outpost is on some kind of lockdown, and not allowed to venture out too far. She mentioned a contract looking out for dead zones, but was pretty confident that there weren’t any… Well, that information was wrong, obviously. Or else she couldn’t tell me and lied. In the end, I figured my best option was heading here to look for you.
“It’s not like I could stay in town, getting daily beatings from that Grif character until I could pay up… or not pay up, since you had all my cores, and be forced to sign some sort of indenture contract.”
“You could have cut and run,” Lief said. “Especially if you’d gotten the daggone cores out of the lockbox like I was expecting you to.”
“Maybe I should have just moved on,” Thorn replied glumly, not sure how to respond. His System, that paragon of cold-blooded logic, had just as much suggested he do so. Now, it had wanted him to run back to the CES thugs, but he could have gone somewhere else. There were more cities up north, closer to the sea. He could have started over.
“But I didn’t, and here we are.”
He’d almost died, and probably was dead, if he was honest with himself. Why was he in this position? He replayed each decision, each moment where his path had led him into this dark underground cavern to die. And at each point, despite knowing how it would end, he struggled to feel like he’d had much of a choice.
He cursed his powerlessness, his lack of a real System, but that was an old, tired tune. He’d been dealing with that for years and had still managed to scrape by.
For a while he’d been ruthless; taking every advantage he could. But then he’d found a mentor, and a friend. And he’d seen what they could do. Amazing things that they could do with their Systems! So why not him too? Why couldn’t he be like them?
He’d tried to do more than he could, more than what his abilities and System could do, and now he was paying the price. Maybe he should have cut his losses instead of trying to be a hero.
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“I, uh…I’m sorry,” Lief said. He paused, then started again. “I’m bad at this. I didn’t expect to be alive after this happened, and I still don’t expect to survive. When I saw your body floating down the stream… I…”
He stopped again, staring at the lake. “I felt bad about being stuck here, but I thought that maybe you’d at least benefit, ya know, from my little nest egg. And now I’ve roped you into this too, so now I expect I’ve killed you too. So I’m feeling pretty guilty about it. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t thank you for trying to find me.
“So. I guess what I’m trying to say is…thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Thorn felt a bit better. He was still alive; Lief was still alive. Those were good things. “So… what happened, exactly?”
“Well, I started out looking for the tracks of beasts, as you might have guessed, then found the ravine, probably the same as you did. Hopped down here, followed the stream into this cavern. It was eerie. No humans, just beasts.”
“Did you see the worms?” Thorn asked. “Foot-long blood suckers hiding in the sand on the bottom of the ravine.”
“Nope, gotta say I’m sad I missed those. Hope you had fun with them. Anyways, when I got here, this whole place was already sacked, destroyed from the inside out. Over that way,” Lief said, gesturing to the light at the end of the lake, “are massive tunnels full of imperial plums. Or were. From what I could see, beasts have eaten all the fruit and most of the leaves. The farmers had some kind of fiberoptic grow lamps, nothing I’d seen before, and I’m certain quite expensive. But unlike the tech for grow lamps, they probably aren’t watched closely by the powers that be. A bunch of the cables are busted, but not all, so we still got some light down here. The farmers got water from the lake. Dirt and soil carried in from somewhere else.
“The job I took was to scout the place and report back. Quick in and out, but the whole thing went south really fast.”
“Oh. You had a job? Who gave you the job?” Thorn asked.
“See that’s why I’m not sure what’s going on with Gammon. Because I got this mission from the Crows, and from a pretty important bigwig, even. Some guy named Colonel Smithson.”
Gammon had mentioned a colonel, and that he was the one calling the shots at the outpost. Lief also wasn’t a Crow; what was he doing taking missions from a Crow Colonel? Wouldn’t he use Crows, and not an ex-AG independent contractor? There were quite a few things not adding up.
“Is he down here?” Thorn asked hopefully. Someone that high up in the organization was certain to be extremely powerful.
“Nope. I came in by myself, which at the time, seemed to make sense, but in hindsight, feels a bit like being used as bait.”
Thorn looked at the bite marks on Lief’s ribs, and the remains of his ripped shirt and jacket bandaging the stumps on his arm and leg.
“Looks like you caught something too big to reel in.”
“Awakened fincroc.” Lief shuddered. “The thing came out of the water. Wasn’t showing up on any of my sensors. I tried to run, but it got part of me. Blew two of my drones and cut off half its face, but only managed to drive it off.”
“How are you even alive?”
“I continue to exist purely out of spite for my ex-wives.” Lief’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t quite smile. “I got into that tussle after I got trapped in here, inside of the dead zone. It popped somewhere beyond that light at the end of the lake and spread too quickly. I had no warning.”
Thorn had been wondering about the whole dead zone thing. They were a bit of a legend; they weren’t quite a myth, since everyone agreed they actually existed. But the number of people who had actually experienced one and lived to tell the tale? And a credible tale at that? Close to zero. So Thorn wasn’t sure what to make of the dead zone he had gone through. Everything had happened so fast, and his memory was fuzzy.
“Shouldn’t the inside of a dead zone be, well, a dead zone too?” Thorn asked. While appreciative of the fact that he was alive, the fact that he wasn’t dead had been bothering him.
“Not necessarily. Do you remember much of your primary school geometry?”
“Like triangles and crap?”
“Just stick to what you’re good at: making caf,” Lief said, shaking his head. “I don’t know a lot of the math myself, but what I do know is that dead zones can take on different geometries depending on how they are formed. Usually some kind of four-dimensional polytope. In this case, we’re lucky because it seems like we are stuck inside of a spherical cylinder: the propagation of a spherical hole in the four-dimensional fabric of the background quintessence wave function.”
Thorn wasn’t sure if the string of words Lief had just spouted had any actual meaning. “So… like a black hole?” he guessed.
“No,” Lief said. “Unless you’re implying the effect from quantum gravity on the materialization of quintessence…”
Thorn had never realized Lief had an advanced degree in quantum quintessence mumbo jumbo. “Then a bubble?” Thorn tried again.
“Closer, but still not quite there,” Lief said. “Imagine a hard-boiled egg. The dead zone, the part without quintessence, is the egg white, and inside of it, the yolk, is a concentrated pocket of quintessence. That’s where we are.”
“Okay, Professor Lief. So how do we make like a tree and… leaf on out of here?”
Lief stared at him for a second, then decided to ignore the old joke. “We can’t. We might if we had massive amounts of quintessence to bleed into the nether as we trucked it through the void as fast as possible. But I was level thirteen, chock full of quints, and the dead zone was smaller, and I still couldn’t make it out. Granted, I was moving slowly and only had the one leg… but it was all I could do to get my last drone out.”
“You said smaller? So the part that doesn’t have any quintessence… the dead zone part…. it’s getting bigger?”
“Yeah, it seems that way. Well, actually, there’s two ways it could go. The spot in the middle where we’re at is going to either get smaller, and then pop into nothingness, or swell along with the dead zone portion. Keeping with the metaphor, if the yolk can grow to overtake the egg white, then the dead zone will evaporate. That’s the less likely of the two scenarios, from what I know and from what my System can calculate.”
“Great.”
“And don’t forget that fincroc. And the other awakened beasts running around inside of here, high on glitter and out of their minds.”
Thorn thought for a moment.
“I should have stayed drowned. Throw me back in.”
“But then who would I enjoy a last cup of caf with?”
“I don’t have any caf, Lief.”
“Not with that attitude, you don’t. It’s a dying man’s last request. Go on now. Fetch.”
…
Lief was not actually dying, at least not right away, and Thorn did not, in fact, go get Lief his cup of caf. He did help carry Lief a short distance down the edge of the lake, to a spot nestled between several large rocks. It wasn’t completely out of the way, but it was more defensible than the shore. He and Lief set up camp, pooling their scant provisions.
Thorn hobbled up and down the shore, even wading out a short distance into the water, but couldn’t find his rifle. He did find Lief’s old drone, however, even if the special glove he’d worn to control it had slipped off and been lost.
He’d also figured out the mystery of the eye hooks, or at least part of the mystery. The cavern wall next to the lake also had eye hooks, but threaded through them were thick cables. Broken coils and pieces of glass glimmered alongside the wall next to the stream where he had floated down into the lake. The thick steel bars that had been placed over the opening where the stream fed the lake were bent and broken.
After salvaging what he could, Thorn rebandaged Lief’s wounds, applying an ointment from his pack. The good news was he wasn’t likely to die of infection, or hunger, at least not before the beasts found them or the bubble they were trapped inside collapsed entirely.
He pulled his portable shield device out and began to set it up, before realizing that it was also drained of quintessence. What a waste. Lief was happy to see his drone, but he couldn’t use it, since it was out of power and he didn’t have the quints to spare either.
Lief had more bad news to share. He’d been de-leveled; he’d lost a bunch of his bound quintessence when he’d tried to escape through the dead zone and ended up only getting his drone out. He’d lost a number of his power levels, and his System had locked him out of several of his more potent abilities because of that.
Thorn sent a mental nudge to his own System. He’d expected to get some sort of snarky reminder after finding Lief, but it had been blessedly silent.
That was new. He’d never seen his System say that before.
Central repository? Offline mode? At least he had heard of architects; they were some of the most powerful System users in the galaxy. If they were real. He‘d only seen them as characters in holodramas.
Thorn’s brain froze. He couldn’t quite process what he was reading… Almost all of his quints were gone, but so were all his contracts; that must have happened when his System “rebooted from factory settings.” Besides that, one thing stood out more than anything else: