Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 66: You’re Not Busy

What stood in front of Ash at the center of the store had been a person moments ago.

Now their shape was wrong and distorted in every direction.

Its shoulder had risen higher than any shoulder should, the neck gaining in thickness and height. Its face, if it could be called one, pointed only forward. The eyes looked at Ash but didn’t seem to track anything.

Forward was all it had left.

Ash ran his hunger at full reach, enveloping the Hollow’s Shade, only to feel the absence of humanity. Whatever the person had been carrying, it was finished.

What remained was a machine running without a person left to run it.

He reached into the Hollow’s biological system, finding its fight-or-flight reflexes vacant.

The Hollow did not blink. It did not retreat.

Ash moved to his next option before the Hollow could take a step.

He inverted gravity at its position.

The floor cracked in a clean radius around the Hollow’s feet. The chrome racks that were closest to it shattered into pieces, the frozen clothing they once held was dragged with it toward the floor tiles. The Hollow’s form compressed under the field, its posture twisted, the wrongly-set shoulder dropping even further, knees bowing under the intense weight. The frost on the tile webbed outward from the point of pressure.

The Hollow moved regardless.

It didn’t have a register for what weight was supposed to mean. It only knew one constant.

Forward.

When Ash shifted to reposition, the Hollow moved over the clothing obstacles undeterred.

Ash burned his processing to triple rate.

The neon lights above the merchandise wall stretched outward, the buzz turning into a low, sustained drone. The frequency dropped as the sound’s wavelength pulled apart under the accelerated read Ash had. The frost from the cracked fixtures hung suspended between the floor and racks, each crystal motionless where it had fallen. The ambient mall noise beyond the store’s entrance flattened into a pressure without sound.

The Hollow continued moving. Its shadow moved with it. Everything else in the room did not.

Not through the frozen world Ash was experiencing.

Inside it.

At triple processing rate, the Hollow should have been fully legible. Each step should have slowed to a fraction Ash could read and navigate. Instead, the Hollow advanced in gaps. It didn’t move between frames; it simply arrived further ahead each time Ash’s perception caught up. The faster Ash processed, the more distance it skipped. This wasn’t speed. It was something wrong with the space it occupied.

Ash dropped back to single-time processing. A gray vignette colored the edges of his vision for a breath, then cleared. He repositioned as the Hollow’s next step landed where he had just been, then redirected his focus past the Hollow entirely.

Ash reached for the space surrounding the Hollow rather than the figure itself. For the floor the Hollow stood on, a rack still miraculously standing throughout the carnage. He pulled at the positional relationship between the Hollow and everything it touched, feeling the spatial logic of the environment begin to come apart.

The spatial glitch caused the Hollow to drift off-center.

The Hollow moved to the merchandise wall, but found it further than it should have been. It took another step, arriving past where it had expected to land. The reflex to keep it standing did not come; there wasn’t any system inside the Hollow left to produce it. It stood just off-center from the floor, its forward motion disrupted not by force or pain, but by the ground refusing to be where it expected.

Ash looked at his forearm.

The wound from his fight with Seth had left the skin split. He drove his thumb into the old break; the tissue gave without resistance. Blood welled at the pressure, dripping down toward his elbow.

His blood began to coagulate where it pooled. Mass began to form, and with it, Ash drew the moisture out of the composite as it formed, the wet sheen leaving the surface as fast as it arrived. He wasn’t making it into a spear like last time. The store was too narrow and small for him to use a weapon like that. He drew it short instead, forming a double-edged blade the length of his forearm.

The Hollow was beginning to reach where Ash had been standing.

Ash pushed off the displaced air behind the Hollow’s forward arm, coming in on the angle his spatial distortion had left open. His back foot planted on a clear tile, his hip torquing in response. The blade drove into the shoulder joint from the right rear angle with all of Ash’s weight behind it. The floor cracked at his pivot point, a single dark line running outward from where his heel had landed.

When the blade gashed into the Hollow, blood didn’t come out of the entrance wound. There was no give of living tissue. The blade entered compressed density alone, years of an accumulated Shade in a form that had stopped being a body and started being a vessel. The dry iron of Ash’s blade pushed through it.

Ash’s arm shook from the resistance, tendons pulling tight along his forearm. He twisted the blade a quarter turn, driving deeper, knuckles whitening around the hilt. Sweat cut a line down his temple. His back foot slid an inch on the frost, catching before it gave, grinding grit into the cracked tile.

The Hollow stopped moving. The forward momentum stopped all at once, like a signal finally cut. What was previously a person stood motionless in the center of the dark store, the frost on the floor perfectly still, the neon lights above returning to their two-tone hum in the background.

Then, the Hollow dissolved.

It started outward, the accumulated density releasing, the form shedding its previous architecture. The cold withdrew with it, the frost that had accumulated over chrome fixtures cracking off and falling onto the ground as mist.

Ash stood at the center of the store alone, seeing the damage in front of him. Band tees on the floor, broken clothing racks, and a palm-print of frost that was still returning to the tile.

There was no sign of the person who had been in the store before it turned into a Hollow. Only a single shoe, sitting upright near the register, pointing nowhere.

The sound of Lucia’s heels pulled him back into reality. She stood in the entrance of the store wearing the burgundy slip dress and a structured blazer, her previous clothes folded and wrapped in a neat paper bag.

"Oh good," Lucia said. "You’re not busy."

She held up the bag containing her old clothes, expecting Ash to take it from her.

"Lucia," Ash muttered, his breath finally coming at its normal temperature.

He dropped his head forward as he walked back to the store entrance, taking the bag of clothes waiting for him.

Lucia led them to a café that was on the top floor of the mall. One table had already been cleared for them, with a single cup prepared before they arrived. The barista who made the cup stood anxiously, waiting for Lucia to take a sip of their work.

Ash took the seat across from her. No drink had been prepared for him.

"Donovan," she said.

Ash didn’t look up from the table. "Who?"

"The person you just fought." She set the cup down with a small, precise sound. "His name was Donovan."

His eyes finally looked back up from the table. "You knew."

Lucia didn’t answer it immediately. The ambient noise of the café filtered through their conversation, a nearby table laughing over a shared story, the espresso machine cycling through functions, the air conditioning turning on.

"Every year he suppressed more of what he wanted," she said. "The space had narrowed until everything was too small. Everything except for the mechanism."

Ash went quiet. Lucia held his gaze without blinking, but her thumb traced the rim of her cup once.

"The mechanism is all that’s left when a person stops being able to hold it back."

Lucia returned to her coffee, casting a brief, downward glance toward the waiting barista. Her head tilted by a fraction of a degree with a silent nod of passing approval. The barista finally let out a long, visible exhale, stepping back toward the counter where his coworkers were waiting to see if he survived the interaction.

Once her cup was empty, Lucia decided their time at the mall was finished. They returned to the academy grounds in the same idling luxury car, the driver showing no reaction to the hours he’d spent waiting at the curb.

In the campus courtyard, Lucia stared down at the bag containing her clothes, still in Ash’s hands.

"You can have those," she said. "I have several of the same outfit in my wardrobe."

She didn’t explain further. She simply turned toward her dorm, leaving Ash alone with the sound of her heels clicking away into the academy’s corridors.