Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 77: I’ll Be There

Daro’s hands pressed against the sides of Ash’s neck, digging relentlessly into the muscle, indifferent to the involuntary shrieks and jolts his patient couldn’t suppress.

Ash tried to keep his eyes on the south courtyard and away from what Daro was doing to him.

Workers were pulling down the sponsor banners along the outer walls, folding the fabric into clean flat rectangles and placing them on their carts. One of the temporary buildings had already been torn apart from the inside, its skeleton frame now leaning against one of the academy’s buildings for someone to finish the job. He counted the workers around him. Four on the banners, two on the frame, one pushing a loaded cart toward a specified loading area.

There were seven. Then eight once another worker came around to manage them all.

"Did you learn your lesson?" Daro asked.

Ash groaned in response.

"I’ll take that as a maybe."

"If there was a lesson to learn," Ash said, "I don’t think I learned it."

Daro didn’t seem surprised. He worked alone in the silence, adjusting the angle of his hands pressing a point at the base of the neck that made Ash’s shoulder recoil.

"Relax," Daro said.

Ash let the shoulder drop, but it wasn’t by choice.

"Why are we even outside? It’s a little—"

Ash didn’t finish the thought, but he was starting to figure out what Daro was teaching him by that point.

"There are still a few more treatments left before I can consider you a biweekly patient again. Try not to fight anyone until the academy field trip."

"The field trip?" Ash asked.

Daro moved to his tablet and began tapping away at forms and regulations he was required to fill out after every student treatment.

Once a year, since the academy’s founding, the top students were given their choice of where to spend the next month. Ash had known about it in theory, seeing Seth leave once a year and come back without so much as a postcard or souvenir for him.

Ash had never been given that option before. He hadn’t even been sure he would be. His only goal for participating in the tournament was to stay in the academy.

Daro smiled lightly. "Maybe I spoke out of turn," he said, closing the tablet and packing his equipment. "But you’ve earned it." He clicked his case shut and stood. "Congratulations on not being expelled." He looked down at his belongings, making sure everything was locked. "Though you didn’t hear that from me."

He left the courtyard, rounding the eastern archway without looking back.

Ash took a deep breath still recovering from Daro’s treatment.

Congratulations on not being expelled wasn’t a sentence anyone had ever needed to say to him. Up until this year, he was perfectly content with the C’s and occasional B that would appear on his grades.

He kept his neck upright and watched the workers finish loading the last of the banners. The count had gone back to seven. Their presumable manager leaving to go to other parts of the academy.

Despite how long the tournament had run for, the campus was already starting to forget it. The noise that filled corridors after dinner from visiting parents had mostly cleared out.

What remained was the sound of Aegis Academy on an afternoon day.

Students moving between buildings, talking with one another in the afternoon light. The south courtyard was beginning to look like itself again, except for the remaining skeleton frame still waiting for the workers to take it down.

He was still reading spaces a half second too late, the world resolving only after he had stared at it long enough.

Ash blamed his neck. There was nothing else he knew to blame.

A man appeared at the edge of his vision and moved toward the bench without any apparent hurry.

"Do you mind if I sit here?"

Ash turned his eyes only to look at him.

Early thirties, maybe younger. Chocolate brown hair unevenly spilled just above his eyes. It looked like he had spent either a long time making it look that way, or that was his natural hair. He wore a loose short-sleeved shirt with bright tropical flowers hanging open over a pair of cargo shorts. He looked like someone who had taken a wrong turn on the way to somewhere else and ended up at a school.

"Go ahead," Ash said.

His Shade-sense reached across before he consciously decided to let it.

It found the man’s Shade, but it didn’t give anything for his hunger to orient towards itself. It was like a worn-smooth stone that your hands glided across. He had never read a Shade that gave him so little. Not guarded. Just absent, like the signal was there but had learned not to broadcast.

Ash watched him settle onto the bench. The man moved like he’d already been sitting there for an hour and was just now letting the world catch up.

The man reached into the pocket of his cargo shorts and produced a pack of cigarettes.

Aegis Academy had a strict no-smoking policy anywhere on campus grounds.

He lit a cigarette anyway.

Ash watched his hands through the whole motion and couldn’t locate a lighter. No click. No friction. No brief orange catch of flame. The ember simply appeared, and that was the end of the process.

"My daughter used to go here," he said, exhaling the first pull sideways.

"I’m not a therapist," Ash said. "If you have issues, you should take it up with one of them."

"My issue," he said through the next mouthful of smoke, "is with you, Ash."

He exhaled a full cloud.

Ash’s eyes went to his own neck. "I can’t fight you, if that’s what you’re after."

"And why would I want to fight you," the man said, laughing at the end of it. "We’re on the same side after all."

"Side?" Ash said. "I’m not on anyone’s side, team, or affiliation. Whatever you’re getting at, just say it."

"Zelthra."

The name was familiar in a way that made it impossible to forget. Kasz had said it while leaving Ash bleeding out in another courtyard, dropped without context. At the time, Ash hadn’t even been certain it was a person.

"Okay," Ash said. "I’m still not following."

By then the man had finished his first cigarette and was reaching for the pack again. A second appeared. Ash watched his hands carefully this time and still couldn’t find the lighter.

"Zelthra is who I work for. But I suppose that includes you and a few other people these days."

His free hand moved into the pocket of his cargo shorts and produced a card. It was platinum-colored, the surface catching and bending light in a way no business card should do under an overcast sky.It held a bright edge that he offered no explanation for.

"Professor Olley," Ash said. "His research partner’s notes wrote about people who were consumed from the inside. By a person or a thing."

"Then you’re aware of what you and others are."

"And the person that came through a Gate?" Ash asked.

The man’s eyebrows rose. He gestured with the card still in his hand. Ash reluctantly took it. It was heavier than it looked. He played around with it, watching it reflect light like a beacon.

"Hold it for ten seconds and I’ll be there."

Ash turned it over once more. A name was etched in the upper right corner, simple and clean.

Yzyr.

"Your daughter," Ash said. "Is she the one who left the academy recently?"

Yzyr’s expression landed somewhere between personal satisfaction and a parent watching their child do something difficult without needing to be told.

"I wish she had stayed longer. But she chose to go her own way." He took the last pull of the second cigarette and held the smoke a second before releasing it. "Parent problems. I hope you’ll understand eventually."

"Hey, Ash—"

A voice from the doorway into the main building. Ash turned to the source.

Seth was in the entrance, one arm raised in a wave. The other was still held close in its brace. Ash hadn’t apologized for injuring him yet, but Seth gave no indication that he needed one. He too was finally beginning to see the afternoon light after days of agonizing medical sessions.

Ash looked back to his right.

The bench was empty. The pack of cigarettes was gone with it. He hadn’t heard Yzyr leave at all. It was just the open space where he had been and the faint trace of tobacco still drifting above the bench, slow and going nowhere. The smoke curled once around itself, then dispersed as if it had never been.

The workers continued what they were doing, as if they hadn’t heard a conversation that should have been audible from where they stood.

"You know smoking isn’t allowed," Seth said, crossing toward him.

"I’m not—" Ash shook his head. "Seth."

"Hmm?"

"What are the academy field trips like?"