Zhang was furious. She was still keeping her distance beyond my attack range and shouting something about maniacs, idiots, and never again, under no circumstances, ever. I heard her as if through water. The adrenaline was wearing off, but the painkillers had kicked in, and my hand never fred with the sharp pain it probably should have. The pain was dull and heavy instead, as if someone had tied a hot stone to my palm. Blood was dripping onto the floor no longer in a stream, but in a ragged rhythm, in time with my heartbeat. The entire world swayed to that same rhythm. After interrupting Thousand Sparks, it began to freeze up, like an old PC trying to run a new game. I literally felt thick as a pnk.

  Still, I had enough sense left to cmp my right wrist with my left hand. Four fingers of that hand had a cut running under the knuckles. It was bleeding, so judging the extent of the injury was impossible, but the fingers weren’t falling off and they still worked — that was something.

  Then there was Mendoza.

  My interface fred with an incoming call. I mechanically raised my restrained right hand to press the accept button… and didn’t immediately realise that the finger I was poking the holographic button with was missing.

  Still, that didn’t stop it from activating. Either way, the real action wasn’t happening in the physical world, but inside my slowed-down brain.

  “Status!” Mendoza’s voice was sharp and angry, but controlled.

  “Uh-m-m…”

  “How many of them?!” Mendoza barked the crifying question.

  For some reason, I thought about my fingers, still lying on the floor.

  “Five…”

  “Fuck! Where did that many come from? Stages?”

  “Uh-m-m…”

  “Are you injured?”

  “Yes… Stages?”

  “The stages of the ones who attacked you!”

  “Oh! None. No one attacked me. I got injured during training. Bde.”

  “You said five! Are you being forced to say something else?” she became wary. “Hold on for a few minutes.”

  “No, it’s just… five fingers. I cut off five of my fingers. I’m slow because I’m on painkillers and I’ve just shut down Thousand Sparks and FlowScan.”

  “Are you serious? But you’re not in Wilson’s hall.”

  “Yeah, my instructor and I had a slight disagreement. I wanted to try something that worked for me yesterday in the heat of the moment. He was against it.”

  “Sounds like he was right,” Mendoza said.

  “I disagree. It did work. Almost.”

  The doors at the end of the corridor slid apart with a characteristic hiss, and two women in white coats practically flew inside. One had a rge boxy backpack on her back, the other held a scanner. Their jet boards remained outside the doors.

  They assessed the situation briskly. The one with the backpack dropped it to the floor, pulled out an aerosol can, and tossed it to the other.

  I automatically turned towards them, holding my hands together as they still were.

  The medic swept the scanner over them, then sprayed the wounds with foam from the can. The white mass mixed with the blood, taking on an uneven pink hue, and began to thicken before my eyes.

  Then, for some reason, she decided to scan my head, while her partner pulled a container from the backpack and began collecting the fingers.

  “Do you want to stay conscious while they patch you up?” the medic with the scanner asked matter-of-factly. “The injuries aren’t very serious, and I can see you’ve already taken painkillers.”

  “Is it going to take long?” I asked, then immediately reconsidered. “No. Better to wake up when they’re back in pce.”

  “Smart choice,” the medic approved, turning towards the boards.

  One of them floated over, transforming on the move into a transport stretcher. I’d ridden those more than once, so I already knew the drill — I y down on my own. Then came a cold injection into the neck, and darkness.

  The world calmed down and went to rest.

  I woke up from pain. In my left hand. An insistent pulsing ran from the fingers all the way to the shoulder. It tore me out of sleep and wouldn’t let me sink back into it. My first instinct was to clench my fingers, to check whether they were even still mine.

  They clenched, but the next pulse of pain reached all the way to my left temple.

  I slowly opened my eyes and spent a few seconds just staring at the ceiling, processing that fact. The left hand worked. It hurt, but it obeyed. I raised it a little higher and saw that each finger was tightly covered with a separate thin pster.

  Good. That was a strange kind of relief. But then other things began to sink in.

  First, I was in the infirmary.

  I didn’t realise it straight away. At first, my brain simply registered the sterile smell, the even white light, and a quiet hum somewhere in the walls. Then understanding followed: this wasn’t a pod. There was no gss above my head, no gel surface under my back. There was an ordinary sheet, a pillow under my head, and a bnket over my body.

  I was lying on a regur bed.

  I blinked a few times, checking whether this was a hallucination. Then I slowly turned my head to the side.

  Yes. A bed. A bedside table next to it. A gss of water on top. A little further away, a chair with a neatly folded yellow jumpsuit.

  I hadn’t even known the academy had beds in the infirmary. Theoretically, why not, but I usually woke up in pods.

  I tried to sit up and immediately felt something off.

  There was ‘a pod’ after all. My right arm, from the elbow down, was enclosed in a personal pod — narrow, cylindrical, like a technical pipe made of a matte material.

  The capsule started at the elbow and went down, but the arm refused to function already from the shoulder. As if there were a dead rope hanging there.

  My heart gave an unpleasant lurch, but I immediately calmed myself with the thought that this was probably part of the procedure.

  I poked my right shoulder with the index finger of my left hand. My finger hurt. The shoulder didn’t respond, but the interface came to life and showed an incoming call from an unknown contact with a tag nonetheless: doctor.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “I’ve already checked your readings while you were asleep, so you’re free to go,” he said. “Come back in four days, we’ll remove the regenerator.”

  The service here is worse than at the Bck Lotus.

  “Right…”

  So this tube on my arm was for four days? Training with it would be problematic. It wouldn’t fit into armour. I could probably come up with something using the left…

  “Can I use the left?” I crified. “For training, I mean.”

  “Yes, once it stops hurting,” the doctor said, and I strongly suspected that would happen in those same four days.

  “Understood.” Another dey. And right when I’d made progress in several directions at once.

  The less-than-great news dampened my mood a little, and I’d already started thinking about what useful things I could occupy my time with. First and foremost, I had recordings of the qi flow in my body. I could probably come up with something there, but putting on a jumpsuit with one hand and the pain in my fingers slowed me down and kept pulling my thoughts away from anything concrete.

  In the end, I didn’t have to come up with anything, because right after the doctor left, Patel poked his head into the room and informed me that for the next half hour he was my babysitter. That was about how long it would take me to get home. And until my hands fully healed, I was to stay in my own room without leaving.

  I hadn’t just shown the demons my trump cards, I’d lost part of them. A non-functional arm, locked inside a tissue regenerator, no longer allowed me to defend myself effectively, or even put on armour. On top of that, I wore my shield amulet on the right.

  The shield amulet!

  I’d put it into the spatial pocket, and the pendant with the pocket… was with Patel. Ensuring the pendant’s safety was one of his main responsibilities.

  I exhaled in relief. The fear of losing the pendant was probably twice as strong as what I’d felt when I’d seen my fingers scatter across the floor.

  I bme Kate for this! It was because of her and her behaviour after losing her arm, that I’d developed such a careless attitude towards injuries involving the loss of limbs.

  Patel walked me to the dormitory. We stepped out onto my floor, turned into the same corridor that led to my door, and stopped at the exact same spot where I’d frozen st time, when I’d seen Zhou Xiangyun and Tao Dao.

  This time, there were different characters there — three solidly built men. Two of them carried swords of a shape I already recognised. All three were fourth stage.

  The one without a sword, T. D. Rambler, stepped forward and greeted Patel with a deep bow.

  “Rajdesh.”

  “Tom…”

  They were clearly acquainted.

  “Cadet Sullivan,” he bowed deeper. “The Master has brought me up to speed… It’s hard to believe,” he sighed. “But I dare assure you, we’re not here to cause trouble.”

  “There are three of you,” Patel hinted.

  “That’s so we can keep an eye on each other,” Rambler smiled sourly. “In case one of us acts... like an idiot…” He left the sentence unfinished and gnced aside.

  It would have been interesting to hear exactly what he meant, because fourth stage supposedly ruled out the possibility that they were demons.

  The corridor was empty, so Rambler continued.

  “Master Chen is requesting a meeting with you, cadet. On your terms. It can be in the presence of your master, or Master Mendoza. It can be in an array.”

  “We’ll think about it,” Patel replied for me, a little tense.

  That was enough for Rambler. He bowed to me and gave Patel a parting nod. Then all three of them left.

  Patel rexed.

  “That went much easier than one might have expected,” he said.

  “But it will have consequences,” I said. “I think he already knows it was me who finished her off. And now what? What are his intentions?”

  “Ask something simpler,” Patel sighed. “I think the Master will be forced to arrange that meeting for you.”

  Did I even need it?

  That was a genuinely serious question, because desire wasn’t part of it. I didn’t want to meet the old monster. But desires and emotions weren’t supposed to dictate my actions.

  The rational question was what would benefit me more — the meeting, or avoiding it.

  What annoyed me was that Mendoza would be the one making the decision for me. Since the massacre in the carriage, I’d become completely dependent on her.

  Patel wasn’t interested in answers to my questions, so he simply waited until I closed the door behind me and passed under the protection of the security AI. Though I didn’t think that turret could handle three Fourth Stage opponents. Not a chance, in my opinion.

  I went to the fridge to mix myself a light alcoholic cocktail and ran straight into the problems of having only one usable hand, namely, unscrewing bottle caps.

  That was exactly what I was doing when the Great One caught me.

  Incoming call: V. Novak

  Accept / Decline

  Well, damn.

  “Listening, sir.”

  “Hi, Jake. I hear you’re having fun over there,” he teased.

  “Not exactly,” I replied. “Master Chen has just invited me for tea. No pressure, but…”

  I didn’t know how much he already knew, and I had no intention of trusting that kind of information to a call, no matter how much they talked about the unique security of local lines.

  “I was expecting something like that,” Novak said. “You should definitely go.”

  Everything was happening so synchronously that it gave the impression the recent events had been pnned in advance.

  MaksymPachesiuk