Chapter 80 Choosing

Chapter 80 Choosing
Derek drove the last stretch back to base. I couldn't. My right hand was swollen to twice its normal size, the bones sitting wrong in a way that made gripping the wheel impossible. I had managed the bypass route one-handed until the pain from the ribs made every breath shallow and effortful and Ava had moved me to the passenger seat without asking. I didn't argue. Kira was in the back. She had her eyes closed, not sleeping — managing. Her left arm was in a sling Nathan had improvised from a jacket. The shoulder I had reset on the road. The ribs were older damage. All of it was layered on top of each other now, one injury compressing into the next. Ryan was in the second truck. He hadn't said much since he got in. The ribs on his left side were doing their work, the slow, grinding reminder of the tail strike that had sent him into the vehicle panel. He would be functional. He just needed time to move through it. The base came up on the left. Derek pulled in and stopped the truck. The group was already outside before the engines cut. --- Sophie was the first one down the steps. She saw me get out of the passenger side — saw the right hand, the way I was holding my ribs with my left arm, the blood that had dried on the collar of my jacket — and her face did something complicated before she pulled it back under control. "What happened?" she asked. "Hunters," I said. "Level twenty class. Two of them." The word landed across the group the way bad words did. I watched it move through them — the new girls especially, who had been building a working model of the world's danger levels and had just had a significant revision forced on them. Zhang Li was looking at Ryan being helped out of the second truck. At Nathan moving carefully, favoring nothing but holding himself like someone who had been in real contact and was still calibrating. At Kira. Her eyes came to me. "How bad is it?" "Manageable," I said. She looked at my hand. "Manageable," I said again. --- Elena was there before I finished the sentence. She had been waiting — she always waited when vehicles came back, positioned near the entrance with her kit, reading the situation through the windshield before anyone got out. That habit of preparation was one of the reasons I had specifically wanted her with the group. She looked at my hand first. Turned it carefully. I let her. "Three metacarpals," she said. "Maybe four. I can splint it but without imaging I can't tell you the exact configuration." "Will it heal?" "Slower without the system's help," she said. "Faster with it. Your Vitality allocation is already doing work — I can see the swelling receding at the edges. A few days of rest and you'll have partial grip. A week, full grip." "I have a few hours," I said. She looked at me. "Then a few hours of rest and partial function," she said. "That's the honest answer." "Good," I said. "Splint it." She worked fast. She always worked fast. She had Ryan on the ground beside me within minutes, checking his ribs with the same efficient hands, telling him the same things — three to four weeks for full function, shorter if the system kept accelerating the repair process, don't try to do anything that requires full torso rotation for the first week. Ryan sat through it without complaint. He looked at the sky while Elena worked on him and didn't say anything. --- Jade went to Kira. She didn't ask. She just sat beside her on the truck's running board and put her hands to Kira's left shoulder and the ability pulsed — soft, white, the warmth of it visible even in the afternoon light. Kira let her. That was how I knew how much pain she was in. Kira accepted help when the alternative was compromising her ability to function and not before. Sophie brought water. Not saying anything, just moving between people and putting bottles in hands. She had transitioned from the frozen person who stopped the bus to someone who knew what to do in an aftermath and did it. That was growth. Real growth, earned the hard way. --- "Tell us," Zhang Li said. She was standing in front of me with her arms folded, the posture she used when she was prepared to hear something difficult. Around her, the others had gathered — the dormitory girls, Mia, Yuan Ying, Derek with the atlas still under his arm. I told them. The bridge. The gate structure at the commercial district entrance — the dimensional anchor point, the portal boundary. The four Hunters. The engagement, the casualties, the cost. I told them about the acceleration. That what we had seen at eleven days was consistent with a six-week timeline in the original pattern. That the Hive was moving faster than any previous data I had. I didn't explain the previous data. I said faster than expected and let the group absorb the rest. The silence that followed was the specific silence of people updating their threat model and finding the new version significantly worse than the old one.