Chapter 60: Extra Bread

POV: Phoenix Kade

The afternoon ends not with ceremony but with Mad Max's single flat syllable dismissal, and the mercenaries disperse back to whatever they do when they're not using me for target practice, and I stand in the training area and assess the current state of my body.

The assessment takes a while because the list is long.

My face has done things that faces shouldn't do. At least two places that will be spectacular bruising by morning, one cut above the left eye that stopped bleeding an hour ago and has crusted into something uncomfortable, my jaw producing a specific complaint from the last of Cook's knee strikes that suggests the bone registered the conversation even if it didn't break. My ribs on the left side. My right shoulder from the third mercenary, the one who liked to lead with it. My legs from the one who preferred kicks.

All of it healing faster than it should.

I've been aware of it throughout the afternoon, the way impacts that should accumulate don't quite accumulate the way I'd expect, the way the ringing clears faster and the vision steadies faster and the muscles that should be giving out are giving out slower than the math suggests they should. The jewel's work, or the work of what the jewel did to me in the tunnel, the first stage regeneration that Slyfox identified and something beyond it that he didn't.

I kept my face neutral every time I noticed. Kept getting hit the same way, absorbing at the same apparent level, performing the expected degradation of a body at its limit while the body quietly continued doing something slightly above its limit.

Slyfox finds me collecting my bread ration at the supply station.

He looks at my face with the specific attention of someone appraising workmanship, taking in the bruising and the cut and the overall canvas of the afternoon, and what spreads across his broad face is something that takes me a moment to identify as genuine satisfaction.

"Not bad, kid." He claps me on the shoulder with the force of someone who doesn't calibrate contact for smaller bodies. "You didn't disappoint me after all. Your body is pretty tough. Here."

He produces an extra half-piece of bread and holds it out.

I look at it.

The thing that happens in my chest happens fast and I have approximately one second to manage it before it reaches my face, and I'm a fraction of a second slow, and I see Slyfox's eyes register something in mine before I get the lid on it. Not anger. Something colder and more specific, the calculation that runs underneath everything since the tunnels, the thing that has been keeping the filing system at the front.

He sees it close off. His mouth curves slightly.

"That look in your eyes," he says pleasantly, taking a drag of his cigarette. "Suggests you are quite unhappy."

I take the bread.

"Listen, young man." He puts on an air I've seen him wear before, the worldly philosopher version of Slyfox, deployed when he wants to say something that requires a frame. "Learning how to take a punch is training. All metas have to continuously improve and grow stronger. Strength metas train strength. Agility metas train agility. Control metas train control. And recovery metas?" He gestures at me with the cigar. "Recovery metas train recovery. Me having them beat the piss out of you is my way of showing how much I care."

He pauses for the effect he's clearly practiced.

"This torture you are going through is just training. Value this opportunity. When the time comes, I promise I'll take you out on a mission with us."

I look at him.

The last mission he took me on sent dozens of people into a tunnel to die so he could locate a camp. The last mission ended with me in a sweeper chamber holding a floating jewel while he fired guns somewhere in the tunnel system and collected bodies for a contract. The last mission resulted in me being the only scavenger who came back, which Slyfox himself described as impressive luck rather than any investment he made in my survival.

I take the bread and I turn and I walk away without a word.

Behind me, Slyfox's laugh follows me across the training area.

"Kid's got a bit of an attitude after all. Ahahaha!"

I grip the bread and I keep walking and I let the laugh get smaller behind me and I think about what the old man said about being underestimated and I think about what Cook's right shoulder does before the heavy hits and I think about three walls of organ jars and what Mantis has been learning from them for however many years that collection represents.

When the time comes.

Sure. When the time comes.

Night descends and brings with it everything the day left unfinished.

The vehicle maintenance takes two hours, Slyfox walking me through the components of the patchwork machine with the particular teaching style of someone who knows the material thoroughly and has no patience for questions, which means I ask none and observe everything and store what I can. The weapons inventory takes another hour, cleaning and checking and cataloguing, the specific intimate knowledge of each piece that tells you what it can do and what it's likely to do when you need it most.

Woola is last.

Feeding Woola involves approaching Woola, which involves the specific focused terror of standing within three meters of something that views me as a preferred menu item and is currently restrained by a rope that I have not personally tested the load capacity of. I put the food down at the closest point I'm willing to reach and I back away with the deliberate non-threatening movement of someone who has thought carefully about every choice their body makes in the vicinity of this creature.

Woola eats without looking away from me.

By the time I make it back to my room I am covered in machine oil and one new claw mark from when Woola got closer than the rope should have allowed before the rope reminded it of the limit. The claw mark is already closing. I can feel the tissue doing its work, the mild sting of it already fading as the jewel's gift applies itself to the damage with the quiet efficiency that has been operating in me since the tunnels.

I push my door open and the smell of the room hits me and I stand in the doorway for a moment.

The blood is still there.

I knew it would be. I had no time to clean it and no particular desire to revisit it when I wasn't required to, and now I'm required to because it's where I sleep and the congealed blood on the floor fills the air with something that has worked its way into every surface of the small space. I'm too tired to care properly. I note it the way I note the straw poking through the mattress and the draft through the door gap and the three walls of an unfamiliar room that have become, over the course of one day, the walls of my life.

I fall onto the bed.

My body is comprehensive in its complaints and I let it complain because addressing the complaints requires energy I don't have and the healing will handle most of it by morning regardless. I lie on my back and I stare at the ceiling I can't see in the dark and I let the day move through me the way I've been letting things move through me since the old man died.

The jewel is warm against my chest.

That's the thing I keep returning to through the evening. Not the beatings themselves, not Cook's shoulder drop or the organ jars or Slyfox's laugh following me across the training area or any of the specific content of the day. The jewel, and what it did during the beatings.

I felt it.

Not the full activation, not what happened in the room last night with Skinner, but something underneath that, something that was present throughout the afternoon in a way it hasn't been before, that presence the old man might have called a sleeping thing in a stone, stirring at the edges of the room it inhabits, responding to the stimulation of repeated impact the way something responds to being woken by noise. Not awake. Not taking over. Just there, closer to the surface than before, pushing against the inside of whatever contains it with the patient pressure of something that has all the time available.

Each hit today woke it a little more.

I understand what that means and I lie in the dark with the understanding and I don't look away from it. The jewel is becoming more active the more violence I'm exposed to. Whatever ancient will lives in that stone, whatever its former owner imprinted in it, it responds to threat and damage the way a body responds to infection, by mobilizing, by preparing, by moving toward the surface.

Which means the beatings Slyfox calls training are also training something else entirely. Something that doesn't belong to Slyfox or Mad Max or any of the three captains of Tartarus. Something that is mine, or has chosen to be mine, or is using me the way a tool uses the hand that holds it.

I need to figure out which.

The mercenaries think I'm weak. They think they see the full inventory, the scrawny recovery meta from the ruins, the meat bag that gets up and takes more, the lowest rung of their hierarchy in a room two hundred meters from anyone who'd notice if something went wrong.

They don't see the jewel burning against my chest.

They don't see what it does, what it did to Skinner, what it's becoming as the days and the beatings and the stimulation of threat accumulate in it and in me simultaneously.

They don't see what I'm learning while they hit me, the pattern library building hit by hit, every tell catalogued, every weakness noted, every fighter in the compound mapped against the model I've been constructing since Cook's first elbow.

Let them think I'm weak. Let them keep hitting me. Every day I take their beatings I get stronger and so does what sleeps in this stone, and they'll keep thinking I'm nothing right up until the moment the calculation changes.

I close my eyes.

The jewel pulses once against my chest, slow and warm, the heartbeat rhythm it's been keeping since the sweeper camp.

This is my life now. Human punching bag by day. Mechanic and janitor and Woola-feeder by night. The lowest thing in the hierarchy of a place that is itself not the highest thing available.

But I'm climbing.

One beating at a time, with a secret burning against my chest and a pattern library growing in my head and the old man's voice in the back of everything reminding me that the best advantage is the one your enemies don't know you have.

Heaven for the strong. Hell for the weak.

I'm climbing out of hell, one beating at a time.