Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 82: Grey Sky

Reina was still outside when the shadow came down.

It didn’t fall. It arrived. One moment the snow was bright and the next it wasn’t, and the cold that came with it was nothing like the cold she had been playing in all afternoon. She looked up. Her mother’s voice stopped in the middle of her name.

When the snow settled, the yard was empty.

Reina stood between two lopsided snowmen and looked at the place her mother had been standing. The door was still open. The fireplace light still fell through it onto the steps, orange and unchanged, warm against the drifting snow, as if nothing had noticed yet that there was no one left to come inside.

She opened her mouth, ready to cry for her mother.

The second sky came down before she started.

The first length of The Eclipsing Boreal came over the train. Ash, Vivian and Sheila braced in the gap between two cars as the sky above them was covered.

The train continued moving despite the threat around them, each individual motor for the car doing its job and then some.

A segment slid across the grey sky, blue-black and plated, every scale ridged and tipped with a spine. The last of the visible clouds in the air were completely swallowed by the sheer mass of the Vein, their outlines vanishing into endless blue-black scales. As it crossed overhead, the train’s noise went with it. The motor, the rails, the wind against the cars all flattened to a pressure behind the ears.

The pressure of it all ripped open a section of a car’s ceiling above them. Ash internally was thankful they were no longer in a locked coffin. The cold that came down off the plating wasn’t the tundra’s own. The air bent at the seams, where the space couldn’t hold the shape of The Boreal.

A coil passed over him. The grey sky came back halfway, but so did the noise around them, the car’s motors working harder.

"We can’t fight it from down here." Vivian had already decided. With a jump, she had made it to the roof of the car. She brought her katana down, creating a makeshift ladder for Ash and Sheila to use.

Ash looked behind himself, seeing Sheila nod, then climbed the katana first.

The cold hit like a flat hand the moment his head was above the roofline, the train running flat through patches of white snow, the steel bucking and shivering under his palms. He got one foot onto the roof and the wind nearly sent him back into the car. Above him, the Boreal filled the whole top half of the world, coils upon coils, winding up past the clouds.

One part of him desperately wanted to crawl back into the car and hope that it would eventually pass over him. He swallowed that down, standing up the rest of the way, forcing his shaking legs to obey.

Sheila came up last, her hair flying sideways once she cleared the lip of the opening.

Ash used his Shade-sense across the Boreal to find its true shape, trying to figure out where it started and what could possibly be considered the end. What he found instead was a coil in a position half a breath ago instead of where it was bending to now. He reached to overclock the gap, but it came up empty once again. He set his feet on the running steel, taking a forward position. The only other choice was to stand still and freeze.

Sheila’s signature exploded around her, a flight response traveling across the tundra air and into the Boreal. It merely rolled off and across the nearest coil, finding no spine to run down, no nerve to lie to, no animal at the bottom of the Boreal to become prey. She felt it die against a wall. She stopped, and instead raised her fists up.

A head came crashing down at her before she had finished getting ready. It unhinged off a segment of the upper coils, the jaws splitting along a seam in the plating. The three got a close view of the teeth of the beast, clusters built on clusters of frost-teeth. It fell on them that this was the movement of a hunter that had never once needed to be fast.

Sheila stepped into it. She set her back foot, dropping her weight into the steel, driving a fist up under the lower jaw with everything her body could give. The bone-plate caved around her knuckles, the impact running back down her arm, down her heels, and through the roof. The car shuddered underneath them, a long ringing flex in the steel that Ash felt come up through the soles of his shoes. Her feet left the roof, kicking off the ground from the whiplash she received. The head snapped off its line, jaws clashing shut on bare air from her shoulder.

The crater pressed back out from the edges, new plate closing toward the center, smooth and methodical. By the time the head finished pulling away, the surface had nothing to show for the hit.

Vivian wasn’t waiting for an opening. She flung herself off the roof for the nearest coil, her katana already reversed in her grip. She drove it into the plating, the edge biting. The segment shuddered, the whole coil turning a fraction toward the cut like a meat flinching off a blade. The grin that broke across her face was wide and helpless. For only a second, she had her blade buried into the size of a mountain, and it had flinched from her.

She ripped the blade free, hunting the seam two inches down, the edge skating off the inner curve of the plate and throwing sparks back over her wrists.

The coil folded out of the world between the backswing and the cut, its movements running at a scale Vivian didn’t notice. Her blade finished its arc through empty white space, the momentum nearly carrying her off the edge of the roof. She caught herself flat on the steel, breathing hard, staring at a segment of the Eclipsing Boreal which was the size of a skyscraper.

He dropped a three times baseline gravity field over a passing coil above them, every measure of weight he could press into it. The plating groaned. A fraction of it sagged under its own multiplied mass. Then, the rest of the length of the Vein continued moving across the space. The gravity field ripped apart and emptied itself into the wind. Not once did it feel like he had so much as a leash around the Vein.

It now stood in the air where empty had been just a moment before. A frost-ringed spine, as long as Ash was tall, planted itself a foot from his face. The hair went up along his arms, his stomach turned over at a weapon that had arrived without moving. By the time he could react, it had already moved away.

A coil swept over the roof; he dropped his entire body onto his back to dodge underneath the incoming attack, the teeth biting at the air just above him. It didn’t leave anything in its trail. The cold around them was slowly beginning to fill the area it should have all this time.

Ash started to stand, but then a coil swept over the entire length of the car.

Before Ash could process what words were coming out of Vivian’s mouth, his body was flung down the entire length of the train. He hit another car’s roof, sliding down the entire length of it. His hoodie sleeves tore to threads up to his forearm, as the momentum carried him over the car’s edge. He flailed his arms in the empty air.

For a moment, they found nothing. Then one palm, falling down, caught the edge, four fingers being the only thing that kept him from falling off the train and being swallowed up by the Eclipsing Boreal. His other hand slapped onto the frozen lip, fingers clawing, shoes sparking against the car’s side as he fought to flatten himself. The steel underneath him was like a layer of ice, his hand already getting frost-burned trying to pull himself off the train. The train’s momentum dragged his legs behind him like a current.

His fingers were moving past the point of feeling at all. Above him, through the roar of the Vein, Vivian’s blade and Sheila’s fists had landed on a body that knew no such emotion as pain.

Down the line, a car folded flat over itself as a coil came down across it and lifted away, the blast only a small note, swallowed up by the wind.

Overhead, the Boreal climbed its own coils into the grey it had made, every blue-coal eye along its length lit and turned down on the train. Out on the roofs, Vivian and Sheila were still up, still swinging at a body that gave them no front to swing at.