Camp

Despite taking Ramshackle’s key structures, neither Nai nor Tasser relaxed.

Nai had taken the direct route through the tents. Despite the scale of the fiery tornadoes, she actually hadn’t destroyed much of the camp.

But that meant there would be plenty of Vorak left behind in the scramble to evacuate.

Nai sent,

Nai agreed.

he replied.

I mused.

Tasser bragged.

I pointed out.

he said, injecting smugness into the mental connection better than Nai or I could.

I told him.

·····

Nemuleki was the one to wind up picking us up.

She took two spare soldiers and drove three of our vehicles into the hills where my chaperones had been keeping Itun at gunpoint.

Nai had been correct. He was a cooperative prisoner.

The soldiers split up between the two other cars and I hopped in the front seat next to Nemuleki.

She was dead quiet while we waited on the other cars to get ready and throw Itun in the trunk. Her hands seemed like they were trying to wring the last drop of moisture out of the vehicle’s steering joystick.

“You know, if you’re trying to choke the car, you might have better luck if you plugged the tailpipe first,” I said.

“What are you dira saying?” she asked.

“You look like you’re trying to strangle the joystick there,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”

“Leave it,” she dismissed. “It’s nothing.”

“…Okay,” I told her. “But I do have a unique perspective on…well, everything.”

“I’m frustrated, all right?” she snapped. “I was supposed to be leading my half of the attack, and I faltered.”

“You lost me,” I told her.

“…The plan was to use Nai’s fires to cover our approach to the structure right? I choked up when she brought up the flames. I forgot to hold my breath, and I almost passed out. The only reason no one died is because Tasser was ready and took over.”

Ah. That made sense. Nai’s fiery tornadoes would not have left much air inside to breathe.

“Are you upset with him?”

“I’m upset with me,” she said.

“Oh, where have I heard that before?”

“It’s not the same,” Nemuleki said. “You never asked for any of this. You were never responsible for Letrin’s safety. But I signed up. I enlisted. I accepted the responsibility.”

“…[Nah.] Sorry, I’m not letting you get away with that,” I said, “Less than a day ago you were stinging my ears that I can’t blame myself for Letrin’s death. You made a mistake. [Suck it up, buttercup.] ‘You shoot guns’, remember?”

“I was in command,” she spat. “Only, I wasn’t. And I should have been.”

“Nemuleki, I can confidently tell you, no one alive isn’t afraid of Nai’s fire. That stuff is terrifying.”

“I was the only one who froze,” she complained.

“I doubt it,” I told her. “I was a mile away and I still got shivers watching her summon that much vorpal fire.”

“…It scared me the first time I saw it too,” she admitted. “It was just her and she brought down that whole tunnel all on her own. I thought I was over it by now.”

“I tried to shoot her the first time I saw her,” I admitted back.

Nemuleki snorted reluctantly.

“How’d that work out for you?”

“Pretty well, actually,” I said easily. “I’ll admit, I had to take some chances, but I wound up in some good company.”

“She didn’t just kill you?”

“Obviously not,” I snorted. “You were there for the second half. I ran into Tasser, gave up the gun, and that got Nai to at least hold off.”

“You’re trying to distract me.”

“I am. I get it, and you know I do.”

She gave a click for ‘yes’, and at least seemed a little less on edge as we drove into Ramshackle.

“Alright, get up to the roof,” Nemuleki told me. “Nai’s waiting on you.”

I gave her a thumbs up before she drove off to reunite with the Casti who would be sweeping the tents alongside Nai.

The concrete building Nai wanted me in loomed, and I was tempted to climb straight up the wall, just for fun. But given that there might be the odd Vorak still lurking, it probably wasn’t a good idea to be visibly exposed like that.

·····

From the moment Daniel had shown me how to get under its hood, the psionic radar and its range had demanded a number of questions.

Even before that, I’d figured I could deform its shape. Instead of sensing in every direction equally, I could bias the focus. It let me stretch the radar further in one direction at the expense of being blind in every other direction.

Configurations for the radar went well beyond just shaping the sensory area. But there were so many variables, it was incredibly difficult to figure out just how different configurations affected different elements of the radar.

But I was confirming more and more that twisting the radar into an irregular shape came at the cost of clarity.

To get the radar to expand far enough to reach the edge of Ramshackle’s tent city, I’d made the sensory area a very long and narrow ellipse. That confirmed something else too, the accuracy was further hampered if I wasn’t at the center of it.

But for our purposes today, low accuracy would be enough. I didn’t need to detect minds’ locations down to the inch, to point out where Nai should look.

Eight Vorak were too slow to evacuate. The Prowlers’ documents had listed ninety-one soldiers and engineers temporarily stationed here. Last month there had been twice that number, but they’d been moved elsewhere in the region.

The unfortunate eight did a better job defending Ramshackle than everyone else combined too.

One of them stole into the throngs of tents with a radio jammer. If Nai and I hadn’t cracked telepathy, we would have been in real trouble.

But we could afford to take our time sweeping my deformed radar field across the base.

Nai even had an inspiration to repurpose her mirror.

Nai told me.

If the radar picked up on the proverbial passive infrared glow of minds, and our psionic telepathy worked on a bit more active emission of signals, then what Nai was trying now was akin to a psionic x-ray, from much further up the spectrum.

I aimed one of the radar’s sub constructs at her own mental mirror. The signal scattered away in the direction she aimed it.

None of the return scatter reached me, but I watched Nai’s eyes widen a bit.

I asked.

<…>

she said, snapping out of it.

Tasser said.

Thankfully there were no gunshots. The Vorak came quietly.

I asked.

she reassured.

I admitted.

I told her.

·····

A few hours later, I wasn’t really needed.

Tasser and Nemuleki were busy taking inventory of the many things the Vorak had left behind. Generators, vehicles, communications equipment, rockets, and apparently an ‘unrestricted’ fabricator, which was apparently a huge deal.

But I was surprised where they’d assigned me a bunk.

Instead of putting me inside the extremely fortified concrete building, I was in one of the tents.

Admittedly, it was an elegant hiding spot. Instead of using the tent’s entrance, I’d taken a tunnel that branched out from the basement of Ramshackle’s launch control building. It led to a ladder that delivered me into a tent that, until very recently, had been reserved as an access point to the maze of small tunnels and power conduits that were buried around Ramshackle.

I was busy trying to devise a way to copy and disassemble my radar for sharing. It was a gargantuan problem, but I was taking it one bite at a time.

An interruption came in the form of a collapsible cot springing up from the ladder in the ground only to fall awkwardly and tumble partially back into the hole. Another toss, not quite forceful enough to clear the hole.

“A little help?” Nai asked. “I don’t want to throw it through the roof.”

I took a breath, ducking outside of the air bubble I’d set up by my own cot, and took hold of Nai’s cargo while she climbed the ladder.

“What brings you here?” I asked. “I thought Tasser and I were the only ones crashing here.”

There was a vehicle waiting in the adjacent tent in case I needed to be elsewhere in a hurry.

“I just want to breathe tonight,” Nai said. “And yours is the only intact air bubble in the whole camp.”

“Really?”

“…One of the tents I torched had some of the atmospheric equipment. And it would take too long to fabricate my own.”

“[Ouch,]” I said, trying not to laugh.

“I just don’t want to sleep with a mask on,” she said. “It’s been a long day, and if you and Tasser are sleeping here, can’t I too?”

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

I moved the air bubble generator to a spot that would envelop both head-ends of the cots. The sphere it produced could go as large as two meters, it was more than enough for two heads.

“Your berth was next to mine in our room at the Green Complex,” I recalled. “Was that on purpose?”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” she lied, lying down.

“It’s a bit early to turn in isn’t it?” I asked. It was only late afternoon.

“Soldiers never miss a chance to rest when they need it,” she responded sagely.

I had been taking advantage of the solitude to do further psionic experiments to share more complex constructs. But Nai napping a few feet away made me self-conscious about how motionless I was, wrapped up in my own head.

Self-conscious perhaps, but not actually uncomfortable. Tasser and I had spent endless hours fighting off silence, but there had been just as many hours where we hadn’t said a thing. I was surprised I’d almost forgotten, but there’s nothing wrong with a little quiet.

Nai was right. It definitely beat getting shot at.

She made me frown though. It seemed like she’d fallen asleep in seconds, but unless I mistook my extra senses…

I touched a foot to the floor of the tent and cascaded the ground. Nai’s cascade conspicuously lacked its usual blatantness, but even as quiet as it was, the cascade was still spreading in every direction.

“Is that on purpose?” I asked.

“Mmm,” she grunted. “A little. Old habit.”

“You are so stock still it looks like you’re asleep, or maybe dead.”

“It was…a busy day,” she breathed, doing her best to hide the exhaustion at the edge of her voice.

It occurred to me that I might be one of the few people to have truly seen the Warlock spent. This is only a hint of the weariness she’d shown immediately after Korbanok.

“Why keep the cascade up then?”

“I’m not trying to sleep, Caleb,” she sighed. “Just resting. Cascading is easy. Relaxing, even.”

“Can I pick your brain then?”

“…Sure. What about?”

“I’ve just been thinking a lot about Adeptry, and seeing you today…and now like this? There’s a price to your power after all.” I guessed. “The last time I saw you like this we were on the run.”

she said, apparently too tired to move her mouth.

I asked, noting her phrasing. She hadn’t said ‘mass’ limit.

<…Time,> she admitted.

I guessed.

she confirmed.

I realized.

she confirmed.

she nodded.

I recalled.

she pouted.

I asked bewildered.

she said.

she said.

she complained.

I asked.

she replied.

she said.

I said.

She eyed me for a moment, and it seemed like some of her old suspicions were playing out between her ears.

But after a few moments she said nothing. Instead, making a dark grey orb about the side of a baseball, only to form a thick layer of glass overtop it.

she said, and the dark grey core to the orb decomposed under the glass.

A vacuum, I realized. Adept materials didn’t decompose into gasses or any other matter. They just stopped existing. I hadn’t even thought of displacing air that way. There probably weren’t even a billion atoms inside her vacuum sphere.

A droplet of navy liquid wobbled into existence inside the empty clear sphere.

“What is that?”

she answered.

I said.

<…because you created it,> I recalled,

she said. She materialized a short thin rod like a chopstick.

Hesitantly, I did so. The stick passed right through the surface of the glass like it was just a suggestion. The tip of the stick brushed against the quivering bubble of dark liquid and teal sparks spat out, caught by the glass sphere.

I pressed more of the stick into the liquid, a proper teal flame bursting out of the dark liquid as it erased the portion of the stick that dipped into it.

Whatever touched the liquid was just gone.

I could even take the stick and brush the side of it against the sinister droplet a few times. After the teal sparks subsided, there were perfect semicircular divots burnt into the stick like bites out of a cob of corn.

I asked.

she nodded.

I said, dumbfounded. She was talking about nuclear fission, but not for the unstable heavy metals it usually dealt with. I was scraping the limits of my AP physics class here, but I was pretty sure that elements lighter than iron didn’t really do fission. Their nuclei were too stable.

she said.

she teased.

<[Omigosh,] stop,> I pleaded.

I pouted.

<…You kept coming to me for help with Adeptry,> she said.

<—we reached an understanding—> I suggested.

she agreed.

I said. It wasn’t a question.

<…But not hopeful,> she whispered, landing on my idea a heartbeat too quickly to be coincidence.

To both.

she said.

I nodded.

I said.

she asked.

I gave her a blank stare. For every Adept power I’d seen, there seemed to be another that could completely trump it. It wasn’t a transitive game.

she asked.

I said. I said, but Nai shook her head.

She looked me in the eye.

“Great Adeptry comes from creativity, of course.”

“That feels like a cheap answer…” I said.

She shrugged, lying back down and dissolving her example.

I pointed out.

No one batted a thousand.

I asked.

she said.

<[Jack of all trades],> I said,

“…Thanks,” I said. “I tried making Nemuleki feel better earlier. Seems like it was your turn now. I wonder if Tasser is going to give you a pep talk later…”

she accused. Tasser used that phrase, a bit like saying ‘smart-ass’.

I mused.

she chided.

“Say what out loud?” she asked innocently.

Hah.

·····

A knock on the frame of my tent stirred me awake. It was late. But I could hear a bustle out in the camp. I saw Nai and Tasser were both gone from their cots.

“You awake, human?”

I knew that voice.

“Dyn,” I blurted out. “What are you doing here?”

“Ase Serralinitus brought me. You’re going off-world,” he said. “Someone had to make sure all your effects and belongings made it off the planet with you. It would have been a waste to leave all of it sitting in your supply closet back at Demon’s Pit.”

“Yeah? Do I get an itemized list? I left some pretty important stuff with you,” I said.

“I’ll say,” the Farnata said, tossing me a phone.

I caught it, and my eyes widened.

Pushing my cascade into anything I was touching had quickly become a habit, and I’d done so the moment it touched my hand. Right now I could feel the internal workings of the phone—namely its battery.

And it was charged.