Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 83: A New One

Vivian’s katana skidded off a plate and threw sparks across her face. She rode the deflection down into the seam beneath it without losing the swing. The joint material was dense, fibrous, closer to cartilage than metal, and the blade had to find the right angle before it would bite. Every motion after that hunted the lines where one plate of the Boreal overlapped the next. She opened three of them in the time it took the coil to pull one of its thousand eyes her way.

The roof buckled under her at every rail joint, the train driving unchanged through the snow as it had since the platform. The wasteland around them had turned to grey smear and ice. The wind hit her the moment she came off a brace.

A length of the Vein folded low across the roof.

Sheila went at it head-on.

She closed the distance in two strides and drove her fist into the underside of the coil with her full bodyweight stacked behind it. The steel under her heels cratered before the blow landed. The car roof punched inward in a ring around her feet, rivets shearing, the panel bowing down four inches and holding.

The punch connected.

Only the coil took it the way a glacier takes a thrown pebble.

The force came back out through the strike and down through her heels and into the car beneath her. Sheila felt the whole chassis ring like a bell.

Her knuckles stayed whole. Her white blouse stayed clean.

She loaded the second hit before the first had finished returning through her bones. Same spot. The coil’s plating dimpled this time into a shallow crater, dark fluid beading at the edges of the joints around it. Not a wound. A bruise, maybe, if the Boreal had a metabolism that registered bruises. The crater was already pressing back out.

Sheila hit it a third time and the car roof gave entirely, the panel beneath her buckling into a V and dropping her six inches before the framing caught it.

She set her feet in the wreckage of the train and hit it again.

Vivian was cutting her way down the other side of the same coil. Not trying to sever it. She had read the scale fast enough to stop trying that, but hunting the sensory clusters, the knots of tissue packed behind the eye-rows where the plate density dropped off. Her blade went in three inches, four, found a part of the Vein that resisted differently.

She torqued the cut sideways. Dark fluid welled up around the blade and ran down the plate in a thin sheet, freezing before it reached the seam. The eye cluster above the cut went dark. A dozen blue-coal lights went out one row at a time.

The coil didn’t react. The surrounding segments didn’t slow. The body above them continued its passage overhead.

Vivian pulled the blade free and moved to the next cluster.

A head broke off the upper coils toward her, jaws open, frost-teeth clicking in sequence from the hinge forward like a zipper closing. She dropped under the bite and felt the cold comb the top of her hair, the frost-teeth close enough that one caught a strand and snapped it.

She rose through the gap under the swing and drove the blade toward the soft joint material behind the jaw hinge. It was the one place on a head this size where the plating couldn’t fully close without locking the jaw itself.

The blade went in at the angle she had mapped from the last exchange. The head wrenched away and tore its own seam wider as it pulled, black fluid sheeting down across the car, freezing on contact with the roof in a long dark scar. A second jaw unhinged off the segment below and came at her.

She met the jaw with the flat of the blade, the impact hammering up through her arms and shoving her backwards across the frost-slick steel.

Two steps. Three. Each one tumbling her further across the car’s roof until her heels hit the back lip. She turned the stumble into a jump, clearing a full stride of open air over the coupling, coming down hard on the next roof with the wind nearly folding her over the far side. She rose and wiped a scratch of blood from her cheek.

Vivian raised her katana into a segment moving above her. The steel shrieked through plate and the softer tissue underneath. In the same instant, Sheila’s fists caved the underside in from below, bone-crushing in a crater the width of her shoulders, the whole car flexing under her.

It was the right play and they both knew it: Vivian opening from above, Sheila driving upward from below, the two forces closing on each other through the body of the coil until they met in the middle with a sound like a soaked rope parting.

The segment dropped. The two halves were held by a thinning bridge of tissue for a long second before it gave. The lower mass came down smoking onto the roof, the car compressing two feet under the impact, windows blowing out down the length of it. The car detached at both couplings and fell away, taking the segment with it, both of them swallowed into the dark behind the train.

Vivian watched it go.

A piece of it had gone still. She looked at the gap where the segment had been. The clean absence in the body of the Boreal, its edges already glistening with new fluid. Her chest heaved. Her katana dripped black-blue blood and sludge onto the roof. Sheila stepped back from the crater she had made. Vivian caught her eye and gave a short nod.

The gap closed.

The loose matter along the sever crawled over itself and knit. A ridge of new spines shoved up through the joint, frost beading along them as they rose, each spine pushing out a centimeter at a time. The severed length of what had been severed and what should have been severed stood on a front of its own. It was already moving on its own accord. It put a fresh cluster of blue-coal eyes on the two of them.

The Boreal hadn’t lost a piece. It had just made a new one.

The new body oriented. The original mass continued overhead, indifferent, eating the horizon.

"Vivian, what happened?" Sheila’s voice came through the wind.

"Tch. Why are you asking me? I’m not an ecologist."

Vivian took a step toward it before she stopped herself. Her blade had risen halfway before stopping entirely. She didn’t shy at seeing another enemy appear in front of her. She only got colder.

Every wound she had made in the last four minutes was a blueprint.

The original mass swung a section toward her from the right. The new body was already moving on her from the left, both converging on the same point on the train’s roof. Vivian turned on the smaller body approaching her.

Its breath hit her before she reached it, a pressure front of cold, dense enough to feel against her skin through the fabric of her clothes. She raised her blade and drove it through the base of the new head at the angle she knew. The cut opened. And out of the cut, immediately, a ridge of new spines rose, the wound sealing itself as it was made, the tissue regenerating before the blade had cleared the exit.

She had one move left. She had used it on the wrong segment.

The far coil came down.

She got the katana up across her chest with the edge out. The plating hit the edge of the blade like a falling wall. The steel drove back into her sternum and the bone gave. A flat wet crunch she felt in her teeth, in her back molars, in the roots of them. Everything in her lungs left at once, mixed with blood, came through her mouth, and was blown immediately by the wind.

The coil swept on, crushing her against its flank. The plating’s cold bit through her back. She felt the train roof skim under her feet, then nothing. At the car’s end, the coil’s arc shifted while she kept going.

She hit the next roof shoulder-first. Pain shot from the joint to her fingertips and her hand opened without her deciding to open it. She bounced, came down across her hip, and skidded down the canting panel into the seam at the coupling. Her arm swung out over the gap. The rail screamed a foot beneath her open hand.

Blood ran from her mouth. The wind took it, pulled it back in a thin red thread, and dropped it somewhere in the snow a hundred meters behind the train.

That left Sheila on the steel with the largest creature any of them had ever seen filling the sky above her from edge to edge.